It is of some sig­nif­i­cance that the de­clared US tar­iff war against the rest of the world has come to fruition. And while the tar­iff im­pacts will be im­me­di­ate­ly ob­serv­able and felt by con­sumers of the goods and ser­vices in the im­port and ex­port trade with the US, in its po­ten­tial ef­fect, Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump has ex­pressed a wider am­bi­tion.

Since com­ing to of­fice in Jan­u­ary, what the US Pres­i­dent has said, done and threat­ened to do amounts to Amer­i­ca be­com­ing great again through the re­cap­ture and to­tal con­trol of world poli­ty. It’s a con­trol which Pres­i­dent Trump says has been slip­ping over the decades post the pe­ri­od when Amer­i­ca be­came the world’s sin­gle su­per pow­er in the wake of the demise of the So­vi­et Union. “The rest of the world has lost the re­spect it once had for Amer­i­ca,” he has said, and con­tin­ues to make known his in­ten­tion to “Make Amer­i­ca great again.”

Strate­gi­cal­ly, his in­ten­tion, stat­ed very clear­ly, is to take hold of Green­land, Cana­da, the Pana­ma Canal, re­name the Gulf of Mex­i­co to the Gulf of Amer­i­ca, along with hav­ing a sub­servient Cen­tral Amer­i­ca in tow. The hope must be that such an as­sem­blage of ter­ri­to­ries un­der the US can amount to some­thing of a ge­o­graph­i­cal force to con­test against the be­he­moths of Rus­sia and Chi­na.

A threat of that na­ture can­not be tak­en as po­lit­i­cal rhetoric from a politi­cian, more so one who has proven over his first term and has al­ready dis­played in his sec­ond, the un­wa­ver­ing com­mit­ment to car­ry­ing out his in­ten­tions.

But it’s al­so clear that the Unit­ed States is not alone in play­ing that game. Rus­sia, with its in­va­sion of and war against Ukraine, has al­ready tak­en pos­ses­sion of large chunks of that ter­ri­to­ry with Pres­i­dent Vladimir Putin in­tent on ac­quir­ing even more land and re­sources of the Ukrain­ian na­tion.

In the re­al­i­ty of to­day’s world, it has be­come clear that the Unit­ed Na­tions frame­work for­mu­lat­ed af­ter World War II to avoid war, in­deed to elim­i­nate the prac­tice of in­va­sion and ac­qui­si­tion of sov­er­eign states, has be­come in­ca­pable of main­tain­ing that sta­tus quo.

To achieve the geo-po­lit­i­cal in­ten­tions of Amer­i­ca’s hege­mo­ny and to re­in­force re­spect for his coun­try by the rest of the world, Pres­i­dent Trump has in­voked a method of op­er­a­tion in which he is plac­ing ri­vals in a po­si­tion where they will be forced “to make a deal,” which in­evitably means that he gets his way.

The US Pres­i­dent has brought that ne­go­ti­at­ing process and log­ic to his sec­ond term in of­fice with a force which he be­lieves will be ir­re­sistible when de­ployed against the rest of the world.

On dis­play in the im­me­di­ate fu­ture will be the re­solve of coun­tries tar­get­ed by the tar­iffs and in­evitably by ter­ri­to­r­i­al ac­qui­si­tion, po­lit­i­cal and mil­i­tary dom­i­na­tion to re­sist the US of­fen­sive. It’s in­ter­est­ing that four Re­pub­li­cans in the Sen­ate vot­ed against the tar­iff which was im­posed on Cana­da.

It will, how­ev­er, take some­thing of a mir­a­cle for any­thing like a ma­jor­i­ty of con­gres­sion­al Re­pub­li­cans to be able to con­tin­ue stand­ing against the will of the US Pres­i­dent.