Niall Ferguson

I don't know who gives Trump this stuff, because for sure he's not sitting there reading biographies of Theodore Roosevelt.

Somebody thinks it's a good idea.

Maybe it's J.D.

I don't know.

Somebody thinks it's a good idea to make these allusions to an America before the New Deal, an America which was an America still...

on the rise as a power, not even really regarded as a great power by the rest of the world.

So this rhetoric has clearly some appeal to members of the administration, maybe to voters.

I don't know how many voters have heard of the Roosevelt Corollary.

Not many, I suspect.

But the reality remains that the United States is a global power with military capabilities throughout the world.

And the international trading system doesn't look remotely like spheres of influence.

If you look at Hyun Song Shin's work on the networks of trade, of supply chains and interlocking balance sheets, it's still a very, very extraordinarily complex global trading system.

And when President Trump uses a 19th century tool like tariffs, all that happens is that the supply chains get reconfigured and the Chinese goods get to America with two stops along the way rather than just the one of 2018.

So I think we need to just...

take Trump seriously, but not literally.

This was the key insight that Selena Zito had way back in the 2016 campaign when she pointed out that, you know, journalists took him literally, but not seriously, voters the other way.

So we don't, I think, need to take the national security strategy literally as a document.

We just need to look at what the U.S.

does.

And what it does is to maintain military superiority in all of the major zones of the