"Hadn't They Heard We'd Won the War"

America relinquishing its hegemony makes the world a much more dangerous place

The title comes from a Billy Joel song, “Leningrad.” Joel was signing about World War II, and continued fighting between free and communist forces in Korea, Vietnam, and elsewhere.

Today, I ask that question about the Cold War and whether or not America remembers that we won it. And since the Trump Administration seems to have forgotten, the World is about to become a much more dangerous place.

It has been a little over 35 years since the Berlin Wall fell. It has been 33 years since the Soviet Union was toppled, ending the Cold War. In the time since then, the United States of America has been the dominant force for good in this world and in protecting the global order.

Thanks to the Trump Administration, we are now seeing American retrenchment and isolationism become the policy of the day.

Take a look just this week at what has happened on the front of the US-Russian relations

• Tulsi Gabbard, a close friend of the recently deposed Assad regime in Syria and a favorite of Vladimir Putin’s regime in Russia, was confirmed as the Director of National Intelligence

• President Trump announced that Russia was ready to begin negotiating a peaceful end to the War in Ukraine;

• A statement from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth at this weeks NATO conference in Munich stated “stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe.”

Combine that with Greenland, Canada, and Mexico and we are seeing a return not to the isolationism of the 1920s, but to the aggressive, expansionist America of the Jacksonian age. A time when Americans were aggressive in North America, but uninvolved in the affairs of the rest of the world.