川普如何發動一代以來最激進的地緣政治戰術——以及為何非如此不可
发表于 ： 周六 5月 02, 2026 2:29 pm
權力攻勢（Power Play）
作者：Christopher J. Little
2026年4月27日
川普如何發動一代以來最激進的地緣政治戰術——以及為何非如此不可
從1973年到1977年，國家冰球聯盟（NHL）宛如西部荒野，而鮑勃·「加瑟」·加索夫（Bob “Gasser” Gassoff）——一位身高5呎10吋、體重190磅、效力於聖路易藍調隊的衝撞型球員——是當時聯盟中最出色的「打手」之一。他的工作不是得分，而是保護那些能得分的隊友。只要有人對藍調隊的技術型球員進行高舉球桿、砍擊、撞板或粗暴對待，加瑟就會立刻脫下手套應戰，一次又一次，直到有人縮頭或裁判終於有膽量將比賽分開。他總是滿身是血、甚至連球衣都不見地滑進罰球區，然後露出標誌性的缺牙笑容，讓藍調球迷瘋狂，也讓場上所有對手怒火中燒。
加索夫熱愛打架，但他更熱愛勝利。他從不擔心別人是否喜歡他，他只關心贏不贏。這聽起來熟悉嗎？
快轉到2026年。美國正參與一場場規模龐大且風險極高的對抗，不是在冰場上，而是在全球舞台上。那個在過去將近七十年裡主導國際行為的自由主義規則秩序已經結束了——不是掙扎，不是邊緣崩解，而是結束。這個國家已經厭倦了維持世界秩序，卻換來債務與不知感恩。多數選民投票支持改變，而川普政府以一種令盟友與對手同樣震驚的強烈手段實現了這一點。
指導原則是「美國優先」：將美國利益——尤其是國家安全——置於那些削弱中產階級、將產業外移、並讓五角大廈依賴競爭對手供應鏈的全球主義承諾之上。2026年國防戰略說得很清楚：「摒棄烏托邦式理想主義，擁抱冷酷現實主義。」
看似混亂的一切——關稅、軍事打擊、最後通牒、對格陵蘭的威脅、對加拿大的挑釁——其實並不混亂。這是一場精心設計、具有歷史根基的權力攻勢，其核心戰略目標只有一個：在窗口永久關閉之前遏制中國的崛起。
規則手冊已被撕毀
Santiago Capital 的 Brent Johnson 提供了最清晰的總結：川普在12個月內對規則秩序的拆解程度，超過金磚國家在12年內所做的一切。他不只是彎曲規則，而是直接脫下手套對裁判出手。但 Johnson 同樣強調一點，多數觀察者忽略了：這個體系本來就已經在死亡。全球化的鐘擺已經擺動了數十年，而 COVID 疫情敲響了頂點的鐘聲。如今它正在劇烈回擺，而無論2024年誰當選，這種回擺都會發生。川普是這個時代所需要的鈍器——不是動盪的原因，而是其最強烈的表現。
Rabobank 全球策略師 Michael Every 描述了取代舊秩序的新框架：世界已從「經濟政策」轉向「經濟國策」。經濟政策關心的是：通膨是多少？赤字是多少？如何達到2%成長？而經濟國策問的是更根本的問題：GDP 是為了什麼？一旦開始回答這個問題，川普政府的每一項行動都變得清晰——不是隨機，而是服務於明確的國家利益。
胡佛研究所的 Victor Davis Hanson 將川普的做法稱為「傑克遜式預防性威懾」。這既不是孤立主義，也不是帝國擴張，而是一種在更大衝突爆發之前削弱敵人、強化盟友的策略——那場衝突沒有人希望發生，但所有人都在準備。歐巴馬與拜登政府展現出的軟弱付出了代價：四場重大區域衝突，從2014年的克里米亞，到2022年全面入侵烏克蘭，再到2024–25年的中東戰爭。虛弱的威懾會招致侵略。川普的策略就是讓試探美國的代價高到令人卻步。
先鎖住自家後院
在冰球中，發動強攻前，你必須先控制自己的防區。
委內瑞拉、古巴、巴拿馬運河、毒梟組織定性、遣返政策、對加拿大施壓成為「第51州」、格陵蘭行動，以及2026年1月在不到48小時內推翻尼古拉斯·馬杜羅政權——對多數觀察者而言，這些看起來像隨機挑釁。但它們既不隨機，也毫不相關。它們全部指向同一目標：中國。
當美國在2000年代沉迷於伊拉克與阿富汗時，北京正有系統地重寫與拉丁美洲的關係——透過基礎設施貸款、港口協議、石油換信貸等安排。到2024年，中國已成為南美最大經濟體的主要貿易夥伴，並與超過20個拉美國家簽署「一帶一路」協議。華盛頓從未提出認真對策。
Johnson 對委內瑞拉的看法很直接：美國不可能永遠允許中國控制西半球最大的石油儲備，問題只是何時出手。答案是2026年1月。這不是為了奪取石油，而是為了剝奪中國在美國後院的戰略資產。同樣的邏輯也適用於巴拿馬運河——由美國建造、在卡特時代象徵性移交，如今在中國企業試圖控制後被重新掌握。國安戰略將這一框架稱為「川普版門羅主義補充」。策略只有兩個詞：招募與擴張。
在芬太尼問題上，Hanson 毫不保留：每年有75,000名美國人死亡，其中大量毒品被故意摻入其他物質。前驅化學品來自中國，經由墨西哥販毒集團流入。將這些組織列為外國恐怖組織並以軍事手段打擊，並非殘酷，而是對大規模傷亡事件的緊急處置——同時也切斷中國在美洲的重要收入來源。
一切始終都是關於中國
Johnson 說得很直白：即使看起來不是關於中國，實際上仍然是。
有一個數字足以讓每個美國人警醒：2000年，中國製造全球6%的商品；按照目前趨勢，到2030年將達45%。再往後延伸，將出現中國幾乎生產一切的情況——屆時它可以為所欲為，因為世界無法離開它運作。美國阻止這一趨勢的時間窗口正在關閉。
Hanson 對過去兩黨的幻想進行了精準拆解。數十年來，美國政策建立在同一假設上：對中國投資越多，中國中產階級越富裕，就越會要求自由，最終走向自由化。這完全錯誤。這些貿易資金資助了現代史上最大規模的和平時期軍備擴張。美國消費者讓中國致富，而中國利用這些財富打造一支能在各方面挑戰美國的軍隊。國安戰略稱這種貿易關係為「自由但不公平」，而其後果已無法忽視。
Every 從經濟史角度分析戰略回應。他認為川普所做的不是激進偏離，而是回歸美國傳統。亞歷山大·漢密爾頓曾在關稅保護下建立美國工業。戰後的自由市場時代其實是例外，而非常態。當它不再服務美國利益——當它掏空工業基礎、將支撐美國軍力的供應鏈交給中國——這個模式就必須改變。關稅不只是經濟工具，而是一種武器：迫使盟友停止以支持中國軍工擴張的方式與其貿易。
為何攻擊盟友——以及為何有效
有時你會故意犯規。在冰球中，策略性犯規可以打亂對手節奏，值得付出代價。這正是川普對待盟友的邏輯——也是最令人困惑的一部分。
為何疏遠建立對抗中國聯盟所需的夥伴？因為川普利用他們可預測的反應。歐洲與加拿大精英階層習慣性反對他的一切提議。因此，他不是禮貌請求，而是挑釁，讓他們在自以為反抗時，實際上做出他想要的行動。
結果已經證明：
他第一任期時請求北約增加軍費，幾乎沒效果；
威脅退出北約後，德國達到GDP 2%，波蘭大規模擴軍，北約整體承諾達到5%。
他沒有說服他們，而是刺激他們。
Elbridge Colby 指出核心邏輯：
美國無法同時集中兵力於太平洋、又維持全球承諾。
唯一可行方式是盟友負責各自區域——歐洲對付俄羅斯、亞太盟友牽制中國，美國則在關鍵時刻集中力量。
權力攻勢：風險與回報
強攻經常失敗。
Johnson 指出最大短期風險：債券市場。如果利率飆升，使美國債務無法再融資，整個戰略將崩潰。無法同時支持軍事、工業與對中競爭。
Every 提出更深層風險——「戈巴契夫類比」。
川普試圖將美國從金融化與消費導向轉向生產與軍工能力。
戈巴契夫也試圖改革蘇聯，結果導致崩潰。
問題在於：系統無法局部重建，一旦動搖整體就會倒塌。
對外風險同樣存在：
台灣誤判、中東戰爭、聯盟破裂。
對內則是執行能力問題——大型戰略需要高水平執行。
但如果成功——即使部分成功——回報將是歷史性的：
能源霸權、AI競賽優勢、製造業回流、無需戰爭遏制中國、更強韌的聯盟。
Hanson 的總結：
這不是孤立的堡壘美國，而是更強大的美國。
https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/20 ... 79074.html
Power Play
By Christopher J. Little
April 27, 2026
How Trump Is Running the Most Aggressive Geopolitical Play in a Generation—and Why It Has to Be This Way
From 1973 to 1977 the National Hockey League was the wild west, and Bob “Gasser” Gassoff—a 5’10”, 190-pound wrecking ball who skated for the St. Louis Blues—was one of the best enforcers in the game. His job was not to score. It was to protect the players who did. High-stick, slash, board or manhandle a Blues skill player and Gasser would drop the gloves and answer the bell, over and over, until somebody turtled or a referee had the stones to break it up. He skated to the penalty box bloodied and sometimes missing his jersey, then flashed a trademark toothless grin that thrilled Blues fans and infuriated every opponent in the building.
Gassoff loved to fight. But he loved winning more. He never worried about being liked. He worried about winning. Sound familiar?
Fast forward to 2026. The United States is engaged in titanic—and very risky—battles of its own, not on a rink but across the global stage. The liberal rules-based order that governed international behavior for the better part of seven decades is over. Not struggling. Not fraying at the edges. Over. The country is tired of policing the world while receiving debt and ingratitude in return. The majority voted for change, and the Trump administration has delivered it with a ferocity that has stunned allies and adversaries alike.
The north star is America First: put American interests—especially national security—ahead of the globalist commitments that hollowed out the middle class, offshored the industrial base, and left the Pentagon dependent on a rival power for critical supply chains. The 2026 National Defense Strategy puts it plainly: “Out with utopian idealism; in with hardnosed realism."
What looks like chaos—the tariffs, the strikes, the ultimatums, the Greenland threats, the trolling of Canada—is not chaos. It is a deliberate, historically grounded power play aimed at a single strategic objective: containing China’s rise before the window to do so closes permanently.
The Rulebook Got Shredded
Brent Johnson of Santiago Capital offers the clearest summary: Trump has done more to dismantle the rules-based order in 12 months than the BRICS nations did in 12 years. He didn’t just bend the rules. He dropped his gloves and hit the referee. But Johnson is equally insistent on something most observers miss: the system was already dying. The pendulum had been swinging toward globalization for decades, and COVID rang the bell at the top. It is now swinging back hard and would have done so regardless of who won in 2024. Trump is a uniquely blunt instrument for an era that demands one—not the cause of the disruption but its most forceful expression.
Michael Every, global strategist at Rabobank, frames what has replaced the old order. The world has shifted from economic policy to economic statecraft. Economic policy asks: what is inflation, what is the deficit, how do we hit a 2% growth target? Economic statecraft asks a more fundamental question: what is GDP for? Once you start answering that, every move the Trump administration has made snaps into focus—not random, but in service of a clearly defined national interest.
Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institution calls Trump’s approach “Jacksonian preemptive deterrence." It is neither isolationism nor empire-building. It is a focused strategy to weaken adversaries and strengthen friends before a larger confrontation—one nobody wants but everyone is preparing for—has to be fought. The Obama and Biden administrations projected weakness and paid for it: four major theater conflicts, from Crimea in 2014 through the full invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the Middle East theater war of 2024–25. Anemic deterrence invites aggression. Trump’s approach is designed to make the cost of testing America so prohibitive that adversaries think twice.
Locking Down the Backyard First
In hockey, before you launch a power play you control your own zone. You don’t scramble to clear your crease while trying to set up a scoring chance at the other end. You lock it down at home first.
Venezuela. Cuba. The Panama Canal. The cartel designations. The deportations. The “51st state” pressure on Canada. The Greenland campaign. The January 2026 removal of Nicolás Maduro—accomplished in less than 48 hours. To most observers these look like random provocations. They are neither random nor unrelated. They are all aimed at the same target: China. While America spent the 2000s consumed by Iraq and Afghanistan, Beijing was methodically rewriting its relationship with Latin America—one infrastructure loan, one port deal, one oil-for-credit arrangement at a time. By 2024, China had become the dominant trading partner for South America’s largest economies and had signed Belt and Road agreements with more than twenty Latin American nations. Nobody in Washington had a serious plan to stop it.
Johnson is direct on Venezuela: it was never going to be allowed to keep its oil fields—the largest reserves in the Western Hemisphere—in Chinese hands indefinitely. The only question was when. The answer turned out to be January 2026. This was not about stealing oil. It was about denying China a strategic asset in America’s own backyard. The same logic governs the Panama Canal—built by America, given away for a dollar under Carter, and now strategically reclaimed after Chinese companies moved aggressively to control it. The NSS calls the framework the Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. The strategy is two words: Enlist and Expand.
Hanson does not mince words on the fentanyl front: 75,000 Americans die every year, much of it deliberately laced into other substances. The precursor chemicals come from China. They flow through Mexican cartels. Designating those cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and going after them with military tools is not cruelty. It is triage on a mass casualty event—and it simultaneously squeezes Chinese influence out of the Americas by severing a critical revenue stream.
It Was Always About China
Johnson states it plainly: even when it isn’t about China, it is still about China. The number that should stop every American cold: in 2000, China manufactured 6 percent of the world’s goods. On its current trajectory, by 2030 that share reaches 45 percent. Extended further, there is a point at which China makes effectively everything—at which point it can do whatever it wants, because the rest of the world cannot function without it. America has a closing window to reverse this trajectory.
Hanson dissects the old bipartisan fantasy with surgical precision. For decades, both Republican and Democratic administrations operated on the same assumption: the more American money invested in China, the more a prosperous Chinese middle class would demand freedom, and China would gradually liberalize. This was catastrophically wrong. Those trade dollars funded the largest peacetime military buildup in modern history. American consumers made China rich. China used that wealth to build a military capable of challenging American power on every front. The NSS calls the old trade relationship “free but not fair," and the results are now impossible to ignore.
Every frames the strategic response through economic history. What Trump is doing is not radical departure—it is a return to American roots. Alexander Hamilton built American industry behind tariff walls. The post-war era of open markets was the exception, not the rule. When it stopped serving American interests—when it hollowed out the industrial base and handed China the supply chains that underpin American military power—the model had to change. The tariffs are not primarily an economic instrument. They are a weapon: forcing American allies to stop trading with China on terms that sustain Beijing’s industrial and military expansion.
Why Trump Is Hitting the Allies—and Why It's Working
Sometimes you take a penalty on purpose. A strategic foul slows the other team’s momentum and accepts the two minutes because the disruption is worth the cost. This is the logic behind Trump’s treatment of allies—the part of the strategy that confuses even supporters and enrages critics.
Why alienate the very partners you need to build a coalition against China? Because Trump uses predictable opposition as a mechanism. European and Canadian elites have a reliable reaction function: they reflexively oppose anything he proposes. So rather than ask them politely—which has never worked—he provokes them into doing what he needs while they believe they are resisting him.
The proof is in the results. During his first term, Trump pleaded with European NATO members to increase defense spending. Defense budgets barely moved. Then he threatened to pull out of NATO entirely. The response was dramatic: Germany hit 2% of GDP for the first time in decades, Poland is building one of the largest armies in Europe, and NATO members collectively committed to 5% in total defense and security spending—a number that would have been considered fantasy five years ago. He did not persuade them. He provoked them.
Elbridge Colby, now Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, laid out the underlying logic in The Strategy of Denial. Preventing Chinese regional dominance in Asia is the non-negotiable core American interest. But the United States cannot concentrate forces in the Pacific while simultaneously babysitting Europe and maintaining commitments around the globe. The math only works if allies handle their own regions—Europe handles Russia, Asia-Pacific allies handle their piece of the Chinese containment line, and America pivots to the decisive theater when needed. Either allies step up or Trump creates conditions in which the cost of inaction exceeds the cost of action.
The Power Play: Risks and Rewards
Power plays fail. More often than people remember. The penalty killer breaks free, catches the defense napping, and buries a shorthanded goal. Everything described here could go wrong, and an honest assessment requires saying so.
Johnson identifies the most dangerous near-term threat: the bond market. The U.S. government will not stop spending—no administration ever does—but if interest rates spike hard enough to make refinancing America’s debt load unmanageable, the entire strategic apparatus collapses. You cannot fund a military renaissance, an industrial revival, and a campaign against China if Treasury yields are blowing out and borrowing costs are crushing the economy.
Every raises a more structural risk—what he calls the Gorbachev parallel. Trump is attempting a reverse transformation of the American economy: shifting it from financialization and consumption toward production, industry, and military capacity. Gorbachev attempted something analogous in the 1980s—introducing market mechanisms into the Soviet command economy to reform it from within. The result was catastrophic collapse. The system could not be reformed piecemeal. Pull one leg of the table and the whole thing falls over. Trump faces a version of the same problem: he needs enough state direction to rebuild American manufacturing without destroying the market dynamism that makes America innovative. The margin is narrow. The state directing capital in the name of necessity rarely gives that power back.
The risks abroad are equally real: a miscalculation over Taiwan; a hot war in the Middle East that draws in Russia; a fracturing of the allied coalition that leaves America genuinely isolated rather than strategically freed. And there is the domestic risk few want to say aloud: all of this requires competent execution. Big plays require big talent.
But if it works—even partially—the rewards are historic. American energy dominance becomes real and lasting, fueling the AI race that will define the 21st century’s commanding heights. Re-industrialization brings blue-collar jobs home and rebuilds the defense industrial base. China gets contained without a shooting war. The alliance that looked like it was fraying emerges more durable because everyone is finally pulling their share. Hanson’s bottom line: it’s not Fortress America in isolation. It’s Fortress America better equipped to help its friends, punish its enemies, and remain the dominant power in the world.
Conclusion
The thesis of this piece is not that Trump’s power play will succeed. It is that the play is real, coherent, and historically grounded in ways the daily news cycle obscures. Beneath the provocations and the bluster, there is a strategy—aimed at preventing China from achieving the kind of dominance that would make American power irrelevant for a generation. Whether it succeeds depends on factors no analyst can predict: the resilience of American institutions, the competence of execution, the choices of adversaries, and the tolerance of Americans for the short-term pain that any serious power play requires.
Bob Gassoff died in a motorcycle accident in 1977. He was 24. He never saw the Stanley Cup. He never got to find out whether all those fights, all that blood, and all those penalty minutes added up to the championship everyone in St. Louis was convinced he would help deliver. That is the nature of power plays. You commit to them fully or not at all. You put the extra man on the ice, you turn the game in your favor, and then you either bury it or you don’t. There is no halfway. No hedging. No playing it safe.
What we are watching in real time is the most consequential power play attempted by any nation in living memory. America—battered, indebted, politically fractured, and tired of subsidizing a world that kept taking and rarely gave back—has pulled the extra man off the bench and sent him onto the ice. Whether it ends with Gasser skating off bloodied and grinning with the game-winner on the board, or face-down on the ice after a shorthanded goal breaks the wrong way, we will know soon enough. The clock is running. The gloves are already off.
作者：Christopher J. Little
2026年4月27日
川普如何發動一代以來最激進的地緣政治戰術——以及為何非如此不可
從1973年到1977年，國家冰球聯盟（NHL）宛如西部荒野，而鮑勃·「加瑟」·加索夫（Bob “Gasser” Gassoff）——一位身高5呎10吋、體重190磅、效力於聖路易藍調隊的衝撞型球員——是當時聯盟中最出色的「打手」之一。他的工作不是得分，而是保護那些能得分的隊友。只要有人對藍調隊的技術型球員進行高舉球桿、砍擊、撞板或粗暴對待，加瑟就會立刻脫下手套應戰，一次又一次，直到有人縮頭或裁判終於有膽量將比賽分開。他總是滿身是血、甚至連球衣都不見地滑進罰球區，然後露出標誌性的缺牙笑容，讓藍調球迷瘋狂，也讓場上所有對手怒火中燒。
加索夫熱愛打架，但他更熱愛勝利。他從不擔心別人是否喜歡他，他只關心贏不贏。這聽起來熟悉嗎？
快轉到2026年。美國正參與一場場規模龐大且風險極高的對抗，不是在冰場上，而是在全球舞台上。那個在過去將近七十年裡主導國際行為的自由主義規則秩序已經結束了——不是掙扎，不是邊緣崩解，而是結束。這個國家已經厭倦了維持世界秩序，卻換來債務與不知感恩。多數選民投票支持改變，而川普政府以一種令盟友與對手同樣震驚的強烈手段實現了這一點。
指導原則是「美國優先」：將美國利益——尤其是國家安全——置於那些削弱中產階級、將產業外移、並讓五角大廈依賴競爭對手供應鏈的全球主義承諾之上。2026年國防戰略說得很清楚：「摒棄烏托邦式理想主義，擁抱冷酷現實主義。」
看似混亂的一切——關稅、軍事打擊、最後通牒、對格陵蘭的威脅、對加拿大的挑釁——其實並不混亂。這是一場精心設計、具有歷史根基的權力攻勢，其核心戰略目標只有一個：在窗口永久關閉之前遏制中國的崛起。
規則手冊已被撕毀
Santiago Capital 的 Brent Johnson 提供了最清晰的總結：川普在12個月內對規則秩序的拆解程度，超過金磚國家在12年內所做的一切。他不只是彎曲規則，而是直接脫下手套對裁判出手。但 Johnson 同樣強調一點，多數觀察者忽略了：這個體系本來就已經在死亡。全球化的鐘擺已經擺動了數十年，而 COVID 疫情敲響了頂點的鐘聲。如今它正在劇烈回擺，而無論2024年誰當選，這種回擺都會發生。川普是這個時代所需要的鈍器——不是動盪的原因，而是其最強烈的表現。
Rabobank 全球策略師 Michael Every 描述了取代舊秩序的新框架：世界已從「經濟政策」轉向「經濟國策」。經濟政策關心的是：通膨是多少？赤字是多少？如何達到2%成長？而經濟國策問的是更根本的問題：GDP 是為了什麼？一旦開始回答這個問題，川普政府的每一項行動都變得清晰——不是隨機，而是服務於明確的國家利益。
胡佛研究所的 Victor Davis Hanson 將川普的做法稱為「傑克遜式預防性威懾」。這既不是孤立主義，也不是帝國擴張，而是一種在更大衝突爆發之前削弱敵人、強化盟友的策略——那場衝突沒有人希望發生，但所有人都在準備。歐巴馬與拜登政府展現出的軟弱付出了代價：四場重大區域衝突，從2014年的克里米亞，到2022年全面入侵烏克蘭，再到2024–25年的中東戰爭。虛弱的威懾會招致侵略。川普的策略就是讓試探美國的代價高到令人卻步。
先鎖住自家後院
在冰球中，發動強攻前，你必須先控制自己的防區。
委內瑞拉、古巴、巴拿馬運河、毒梟組織定性、遣返政策、對加拿大施壓成為「第51州」、格陵蘭行動，以及2026年1月在不到48小時內推翻尼古拉斯·馬杜羅政權——對多數觀察者而言，這些看起來像隨機挑釁。但它們既不隨機，也毫不相關。它們全部指向同一目標：中國。
當美國在2000年代沉迷於伊拉克與阿富汗時，北京正有系統地重寫與拉丁美洲的關係——透過基礎設施貸款、港口協議、石油換信貸等安排。到2024年，中國已成為南美最大經濟體的主要貿易夥伴，並與超過20個拉美國家簽署「一帶一路」協議。華盛頓從未提出認真對策。
Johnson 對委內瑞拉的看法很直接：美國不可能永遠允許中國控制西半球最大的石油儲備，問題只是何時出手。答案是2026年1月。這不是為了奪取石油，而是為了剝奪中國在美國後院的戰略資產。同樣的邏輯也適用於巴拿馬運河——由美國建造、在卡特時代象徵性移交，如今在中國企業試圖控制後被重新掌握。國安戰略將這一框架稱為「川普版門羅主義補充」。策略只有兩個詞：招募與擴張。
在芬太尼問題上，Hanson 毫不保留：每年有75,000名美國人死亡，其中大量毒品被故意摻入其他物質。前驅化學品來自中國，經由墨西哥販毒集團流入。將這些組織列為外國恐怖組織並以軍事手段打擊，並非殘酷，而是對大規模傷亡事件的緊急處置——同時也切斷中國在美洲的重要收入來源。
一切始終都是關於中國
Johnson 說得很直白：即使看起來不是關於中國，實際上仍然是。
有一個數字足以讓每個美國人警醒：2000年，中國製造全球6%的商品；按照目前趨勢，到2030年將達45%。再往後延伸，將出現中國幾乎生產一切的情況——屆時它可以為所欲為，因為世界無法離開它運作。美國阻止這一趨勢的時間窗口正在關閉。
Hanson 對過去兩黨的幻想進行了精準拆解。數十年來，美國政策建立在同一假設上：對中國投資越多，中國中產階級越富裕，就越會要求自由，最終走向自由化。這完全錯誤。這些貿易資金資助了現代史上最大規模的和平時期軍備擴張。美國消費者讓中國致富，而中國利用這些財富打造一支能在各方面挑戰美國的軍隊。國安戰略稱這種貿易關係為「自由但不公平」，而其後果已無法忽視。
Every 從經濟史角度分析戰略回應。他認為川普所做的不是激進偏離，而是回歸美國傳統。亞歷山大·漢密爾頓曾在關稅保護下建立美國工業。戰後的自由市場時代其實是例外，而非常態。當它不再服務美國利益——當它掏空工業基礎、將支撐美國軍力的供應鏈交給中國——這個模式就必須改變。關稅不只是經濟工具，而是一種武器：迫使盟友停止以支持中國軍工擴張的方式與其貿易。
為何攻擊盟友——以及為何有效
有時你會故意犯規。在冰球中，策略性犯規可以打亂對手節奏，值得付出代價。這正是川普對待盟友的邏輯——也是最令人困惑的一部分。
為何疏遠建立對抗中國聯盟所需的夥伴？因為川普利用他們可預測的反應。歐洲與加拿大精英階層習慣性反對他的一切提議。因此，他不是禮貌請求，而是挑釁，讓他們在自以為反抗時，實際上做出他想要的行動。
結果已經證明：
他第一任期時請求北約增加軍費，幾乎沒效果；
威脅退出北約後，德國達到GDP 2%，波蘭大規模擴軍，北約整體承諾達到5%。
他沒有說服他們，而是刺激他們。
Elbridge Colby 指出核心邏輯：
美國無法同時集中兵力於太平洋、又維持全球承諾。
唯一可行方式是盟友負責各自區域——歐洲對付俄羅斯、亞太盟友牽制中國，美國則在關鍵時刻集中力量。
權力攻勢：風險與回報
強攻經常失敗。
Johnson 指出最大短期風險：債券市場。如果利率飆升，使美國債務無法再融資，整個戰略將崩潰。無法同時支持軍事、工業與對中競爭。
Every 提出更深層風險——「戈巴契夫類比」。
川普試圖將美國從金融化與消費導向轉向生產與軍工能力。
戈巴契夫也試圖改革蘇聯，結果導致崩潰。
問題在於：系統無法局部重建，一旦動搖整體就會倒塌。
對外風險同樣存在：
台灣誤判、中東戰爭、聯盟破裂。
對內則是執行能力問題——大型戰略需要高水平執行。
但如果成功——即使部分成功——回報將是歷史性的：
能源霸權、AI競賽優勢、製造業回流、無需戰爭遏制中國、更強韌的聯盟。
Hanson 的總結：
這不是孤立的堡壘美國，而是更強大的美國。
https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/20 ... 79074.html
Power Play
By Christopher J. Little
April 27, 2026
How Trump Is Running the Most Aggressive Geopolitical Play in a Generation—and Why It Has to Be This Way
From 1973 to 1977 the National Hockey League was the wild west, and Bob “Gasser” Gassoff—a 5’10”, 190-pound wrecking ball who skated for the St. Louis Blues—was one of the best enforcers in the game. His job was not to score. It was to protect the players who did. High-stick, slash, board or manhandle a Blues skill player and Gasser would drop the gloves and answer the bell, over and over, until somebody turtled or a referee had the stones to break it up. He skated to the penalty box bloodied and sometimes missing his jersey, then flashed a trademark toothless grin that thrilled Blues fans and infuriated every opponent in the building.
Gassoff loved to fight. But he loved winning more. He never worried about being liked. He worried about winning. Sound familiar?
Fast forward to 2026. The United States is engaged in titanic—and very risky—battles of its own, not on a rink but across the global stage. The liberal rules-based order that governed international behavior for the better part of seven decades is over. Not struggling. Not fraying at the edges. Over. The country is tired of policing the world while receiving debt and ingratitude in return. The majority voted for change, and the Trump administration has delivered it with a ferocity that has stunned allies and adversaries alike.
The north star is America First: put American interests—especially national security—ahead of the globalist commitments that hollowed out the middle class, offshored the industrial base, and left the Pentagon dependent on a rival power for critical supply chains. The 2026 National Defense Strategy puts it plainly: “Out with utopian idealism; in with hardnosed realism."
What looks like chaos—the tariffs, the strikes, the ultimatums, the Greenland threats, the trolling of Canada—is not chaos. It is a deliberate, historically grounded power play aimed at a single strategic objective: containing China’s rise before the window to do so closes permanently.
The Rulebook Got Shredded
Brent Johnson of Santiago Capital offers the clearest summary: Trump has done more to dismantle the rules-based order in 12 months than the BRICS nations did in 12 years. He didn’t just bend the rules. He dropped his gloves and hit the referee. But Johnson is equally insistent on something most observers miss: the system was already dying. The pendulum had been swinging toward globalization for decades, and COVID rang the bell at the top. It is now swinging back hard and would have done so regardless of who won in 2024. Trump is a uniquely blunt instrument for an era that demands one—not the cause of the disruption but its most forceful expression.
Michael Every, global strategist at Rabobank, frames what has replaced the old order. The world has shifted from economic policy to economic statecraft. Economic policy asks: what is inflation, what is the deficit, how do we hit a 2% growth target? Economic statecraft asks a more fundamental question: what is GDP for? Once you start answering that, every move the Trump administration has made snaps into focus—not random, but in service of a clearly defined national interest.
Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institution calls Trump’s approach “Jacksonian preemptive deterrence." It is neither isolationism nor empire-building. It is a focused strategy to weaken adversaries and strengthen friends before a larger confrontation—one nobody wants but everyone is preparing for—has to be fought. The Obama and Biden administrations projected weakness and paid for it: four major theater conflicts, from Crimea in 2014 through the full invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the Middle East theater war of 2024–25. Anemic deterrence invites aggression. Trump’s approach is designed to make the cost of testing America so prohibitive that adversaries think twice.
Locking Down the Backyard First
In hockey, before you launch a power play you control your own zone. You don’t scramble to clear your crease while trying to set up a scoring chance at the other end. You lock it down at home first.
Venezuela. Cuba. The Panama Canal. The cartel designations. The deportations. The “51st state” pressure on Canada. The Greenland campaign. The January 2026 removal of Nicolás Maduro—accomplished in less than 48 hours. To most observers these look like random provocations. They are neither random nor unrelated. They are all aimed at the same target: China. While America spent the 2000s consumed by Iraq and Afghanistan, Beijing was methodically rewriting its relationship with Latin America—one infrastructure loan, one port deal, one oil-for-credit arrangement at a time. By 2024, China had become the dominant trading partner for South America’s largest economies and had signed Belt and Road agreements with more than twenty Latin American nations. Nobody in Washington had a serious plan to stop it.
Johnson is direct on Venezuela: it was never going to be allowed to keep its oil fields—the largest reserves in the Western Hemisphere—in Chinese hands indefinitely. The only question was when. The answer turned out to be January 2026. This was not about stealing oil. It was about denying China a strategic asset in America’s own backyard. The same logic governs the Panama Canal—built by America, given away for a dollar under Carter, and now strategically reclaimed after Chinese companies moved aggressively to control it. The NSS calls the framework the Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. The strategy is two words: Enlist and Expand.
Hanson does not mince words on the fentanyl front: 75,000 Americans die every year, much of it deliberately laced into other substances. The precursor chemicals come from China. They flow through Mexican cartels. Designating those cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and going after them with military tools is not cruelty. It is triage on a mass casualty event—and it simultaneously squeezes Chinese influence out of the Americas by severing a critical revenue stream.
It Was Always About China
Johnson states it plainly: even when it isn’t about China, it is still about China. The number that should stop every American cold: in 2000, China manufactured 6 percent of the world’s goods. On its current trajectory, by 2030 that share reaches 45 percent. Extended further, there is a point at which China makes effectively everything—at which point it can do whatever it wants, because the rest of the world cannot function without it. America has a closing window to reverse this trajectory.
Hanson dissects the old bipartisan fantasy with surgical precision. For decades, both Republican and Democratic administrations operated on the same assumption: the more American money invested in China, the more a prosperous Chinese middle class would demand freedom, and China would gradually liberalize. This was catastrophically wrong. Those trade dollars funded the largest peacetime military buildup in modern history. American consumers made China rich. China used that wealth to build a military capable of challenging American power on every front. The NSS calls the old trade relationship “free but not fair," and the results are now impossible to ignore.
Every frames the strategic response through economic history. What Trump is doing is not radical departure—it is a return to American roots. Alexander Hamilton built American industry behind tariff walls. The post-war era of open markets was the exception, not the rule. When it stopped serving American interests—when it hollowed out the industrial base and handed China the supply chains that underpin American military power—the model had to change. The tariffs are not primarily an economic instrument. They are a weapon: forcing American allies to stop trading with China on terms that sustain Beijing’s industrial and military expansion.
Why Trump Is Hitting the Allies—and Why It's Working
Sometimes you take a penalty on purpose. A strategic foul slows the other team’s momentum and accepts the two minutes because the disruption is worth the cost. This is the logic behind Trump’s treatment of allies—the part of the strategy that confuses even supporters and enrages critics.
Why alienate the very partners you need to build a coalition against China? Because Trump uses predictable opposition as a mechanism. European and Canadian elites have a reliable reaction function: they reflexively oppose anything he proposes. So rather than ask them politely—which has never worked—he provokes them into doing what he needs while they believe they are resisting him.
The proof is in the results. During his first term, Trump pleaded with European NATO members to increase defense spending. Defense budgets barely moved. Then he threatened to pull out of NATO entirely. The response was dramatic: Germany hit 2% of GDP for the first time in decades, Poland is building one of the largest armies in Europe, and NATO members collectively committed to 5% in total defense and security spending—a number that would have been considered fantasy five years ago. He did not persuade them. He provoked them.
Elbridge Colby, now Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, laid out the underlying logic in The Strategy of Denial. Preventing Chinese regional dominance in Asia is the non-negotiable core American interest. But the United States cannot concentrate forces in the Pacific while simultaneously babysitting Europe and maintaining commitments around the globe. The math only works if allies handle their own regions—Europe handles Russia, Asia-Pacific allies handle their piece of the Chinese containment line, and America pivots to the decisive theater when needed. Either allies step up or Trump creates conditions in which the cost of inaction exceeds the cost of action.
The Power Play: Risks and Rewards
Power plays fail. More often than people remember. The penalty killer breaks free, catches the defense napping, and buries a shorthanded goal. Everything described here could go wrong, and an honest assessment requires saying so.
Johnson identifies the most dangerous near-term threat: the bond market. The U.S. government will not stop spending—no administration ever does—but if interest rates spike hard enough to make refinancing America’s debt load unmanageable, the entire strategic apparatus collapses. You cannot fund a military renaissance, an industrial revival, and a campaign against China if Treasury yields are blowing out and borrowing costs are crushing the economy.
Every raises a more structural risk—what he calls the Gorbachev parallel. Trump is attempting a reverse transformation of the American economy: shifting it from financialization and consumption toward production, industry, and military capacity. Gorbachev attempted something analogous in the 1980s—introducing market mechanisms into the Soviet command economy to reform it from within. The result was catastrophic collapse. The system could not be reformed piecemeal. Pull one leg of the table and the whole thing falls over. Trump faces a version of the same problem: he needs enough state direction to rebuild American manufacturing without destroying the market dynamism that makes America innovative. The margin is narrow. The state directing capital in the name of necessity rarely gives that power back.
The risks abroad are equally real: a miscalculation over Taiwan; a hot war in the Middle East that draws in Russia; a fracturing of the allied coalition that leaves America genuinely isolated rather than strategically freed. And there is the domestic risk few want to say aloud: all of this requires competent execution. Big plays require big talent.
But if it works—even partially—the rewards are historic. American energy dominance becomes real and lasting, fueling the AI race that will define the 21st century’s commanding heights. Re-industrialization brings blue-collar jobs home and rebuilds the defense industrial base. China gets contained without a shooting war. The alliance that looked like it was fraying emerges more durable because everyone is finally pulling their share. Hanson’s bottom line: it’s not Fortress America in isolation. It’s Fortress America better equipped to help its friends, punish its enemies, and remain the dominant power in the world.
Conclusion
The thesis of this piece is not that Trump’s power play will succeed. It is that the play is real, coherent, and historically grounded in ways the daily news cycle obscures. Beneath the provocations and the bluster, there is a strategy—aimed at preventing China from achieving the kind of dominance that would make American power irrelevant for a generation. Whether it succeeds depends on factors no analyst can predict: the resilience of American institutions, the competence of execution, the choices of adversaries, and the tolerance of Americans for the short-term pain that any serious power play requires.
Bob Gassoff died in a motorcycle accident in 1977. He was 24. He never saw the Stanley Cup. He never got to find out whether all those fights, all that blood, and all those penalty minutes added up to the championship everyone in St. Louis was convinced he would help deliver. That is the nature of power plays. You commit to them fully or not at all. You put the extra man on the ice, you turn the game in your favor, and then you either bury it or you don’t. There is no halfway. No hedging. No playing it safe.
What we are watching in real time is the most consequential power play attempted by any nation in living memory. America—battered, indebted, politically fractured, and tired of subsidizing a world that kept taking and rarely gave back—has pulled the extra man off the bench and sent him onto the ice. Whether it ends with Gasser skating off bloodied and grinning with the game-winner on the board, or face-down on the ice after a shorthanded goal breaks the wrong way, we will know soon enough. The clock is running. The gloves are already off.