David E. Sanger

Would he be interfering in their elections?

He doesn't say, except in the trade arena where, of course, he's quite specific about his goals.

It's hard to tell because parts of it are contradictory.

But you emerge from reading the document thinking that the United States is carving out an exception for itself to step in and intervene in Europe to get to the kind of society that President Trump and his allies think they want and think that many Europeans want.

And yet, buried in this assertion of a right to interfere with Europe's internal politics, even directly engaging with European voters, there's this sort of strange undertone of retreat, a real sense that overall the U.S.

is turning away from Europe.

And so then the question becomes, if the U.S.

is retreating from our traditional European allies, where are we turning?

Well, for the past decade, the Europeans have been worried that the U.S.

is turning to Asia, that it's focusing on China and Japan and South Korea, the booming economies.

But what this document says is that the U.S.

is ready once again to turn its attention to our own region, to focus on our own backyard.

Well, let's start with the second question first, Natalie, because you're talking about a president who spent his life as a real estate mogul.

And the real estate he has in mind here is pretty big.

It goes from Canada over to Greenland.

It runs down through the newly named Gulf of America.

through the Panama Canal, which, of course, he said we never should have given away, all the way down to the tip of Argentina.

And the president's idea here is that the United States should have complete and total dominance of the Western Hemisphere.

And so the president advocates in this document that we return to and expand on the Monroe Doctrine.

Now, at the risk of making some of our listeners shake in fear as they try to recall 11th grade history.