Trump's plan for a new world order.

This morning, Sunday, December 7th, on Russian state TV, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov praised the Trump Regime’s new National Security Strategy. “The adjustments that we see correspond in many ways to our vision,” he told reporter Pavel Zarubin, as reported by Reuters.

That should have been a warning siren. When America’s most hostile adversary praises our new direction, we should take it seriously. It means we’re shifting away from what this country is supposed to stand for. We’re slipping further down the same path that past fascist regimes took, ones that ruled by fear, silenced critics, and demanded total control.

And it’s not surprising. The 2025 National Security Strategy doesn’t mention human rights. It drops the older global mission of promoting democracy. It doesn’t even name North Korea, one of the most dangerous nuclear threats in the world. Instead, it reads like an open invitation to dictators around the globe. It wasn’t written to push back against authoritarianism. It was written to comfort it. It’s a signal that Trump wants to build a new world order, one where leaders like him all sit at the table together, where dissent is punished, and loyalty to the regime is the only thing that matters. The document makes it clear: The United States will no longer subordinate its interests to abstract global ideals. And the era of idealistic, value-based global leadership is over.

Late Thursday night, the Trump administration quietly released its 2025 National Security Strategy and uploaded it to the official White House website. A twenty-nine-page document that, on the surface, lays out foreign policy priorities but, in reality, reads more like an ideological blueprint. The message throughout it is clear: Trump wants to project control, extend power where it benefits him, and walk away from everything else. And before I get too deep into what it says, I want to pause for a moment, because I’ve been thinking about one thing since the second I saw it Thursday night.

Did Trump even have any real involvement in creating it?

Politico reported that during much of his first term, Trump was briefed by intelligence officials twice a week. And yet, between January and May of this year, after the start of his second term, he received just 12 intelligence briefings total, an astonishingly low number for a sitting president and far below what would normally be expected. That pattern aligns with what we keep seeing from him: confusion, detachment, and a concerning lack of engagement with major decisions.

One moment that still sticks with me: at a May 23, 2025, Oval Office signing for nuclear‑energy executive orders, business leader Joseph Dominguez, CEO of Constellation Energy, had to step forward and explain what the orders were about. When Dominguez described regulatory delays and permitting problems in the nuclear industry, Trump turned to him and asked, “Are we doing something about the regulatory in here?” to which Interior Secretary Doug Burgum responded, “You are, sir.” That exchange was captured on camera, a public, unfiltered moment suggesting the President might have signed the orders without having reviewed them beforehand or even understood them at all.

That’s not proof of negligence, but it is proof of how loosely some of these “executive decisions” are being handled under this administration. And it raises serious doubts about whether a 33‑page national security blueprint was personally reviewed, composed, or even understood by him at all.

And as I read through every section of this new strategy, I keep circling back to the same unsettling thought: no matter who actually wrote it, the intent is loud and clear. It reads like a blueprint for conquest. Not diplomacy or a shared vision by allies. But control. It feels like a quiet declaration that the United States plans to take what it wants by any means necessary, and to let other authoritarian regimes do the same. There’s a disturbing symmetry in what’s laid out and what’s left unsaid. The document singles out the Western Hemisphere as our core focus, reaffirming America’s dominance there, while leaving Europe to fend for itself.

And even gives nod to American support of the rise of fascist far-right political parties in Europe: “America encourages its political allies in Europe to promote this revival of spirit, and the growing influence of patriotic European parties indeed gives cause for great optimism.”

It omits North Korea entirely. And it does all this while elevating something the administration is calling the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine.

It declares: “After years of neglect, the United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere.” That isn’t diplomacy. That’s empire-building.

The original Monroe Doctrine, introduced in 1823 by President James Monroe, warned European powers to stay out of the Americas. It positioned the Western Hemisphere as the United States’ domain, under the guise of protecting newly independent nations. But in practice, it was often used to justify U.S. intervention and military occupation in Latin America, not to promote democracy, but to safeguard corporate interests and expand geopolitical power.

What Trump’s administration is doing now strips away even that thin pretense of protection. This is not about alliances or shared values. The “Trump Corollary” reclaims the Monroe Doctrine as a blunt instrument of control. It paints Latin America not as a partner, but as a territory to be dominated, politically, economically, and, if needed, militarily.

And that’s what makes this whole thing feel coordinated. As if there’s a silent understanding between global authoritarians to divide the map. Trump gets the Western Hemisphere. Putin takes Europe. North Korea goes unmentioned, free to consolidate power and expand influence. China is treated as inevitable, not adversarial. It’s a dark rearrangement of the global order, where freedom is no longer the goal, and power is no longer the means to an end. It’s the end itself.

And members of Congress aren’t mincing words. In a post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO-06), a combat veteran and member of the House Intelligence Committee, warned: “The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy would be catastrophic to America’s standing in the world, and would make us less safe. It’s full of disturbing ideas that would be an attack on freedom and individual liberty at home and abroad. They want America to be smaller, weaker, and vulnerable. I will resist.”

And it’s not just members of Congress who are expressing their concern. U.S. foreign policy experts from the Council on Foreign Relations are also sounding the alarm that this strategy is the clearest sign yet that Trump is abandoning America’s past recognized values.

As the Council on Foreign Relations put it, “The document’s principles — which emphasized non-interventionism and putting ‘America First’ — signal a sharp change from the previous 2022 NSS that outlined the United States’ role in strengthening democracy and preserving peace under the current world order.”

But maybe all we really need to remember is that when the Kremlin is the first to applaud it, we need to see this for what it really is: a deliberate realignment of America away from democracy and toward dictatorship. Trump is actively positioning America with a worldview that prioritizes fascist alignment, authoritarian control, and global positioning that benefits his personal power and financial interests.

And while this very public declaration of the Trump Regime’s international ambitions makes headlines, the erosion of our democracy here at home is happening in quieter but equally chilling ways.

Starting with something that may seem minor at first glance: Trump’s decision to remove MLK Day and Juneteenth from the National Park Service’s list of “patriotic fee-free days,” and replace them with his own birthday on June 14, the one hundred tenth anniversary of the NPS on August 25, Constitution Day on September 17, and President Teddy Roosevelt’s birthday on October 27. These changes will take effect starting January 1. According to NPR, non US residents will still be required to pay entrance fees on those dates under the new “America First Pricing” policy. At face value, it might look petty. It might even seem too ridiculous to matter. But it matters. Because this is not about park admission. It is about propaganda.

Authoritarian leaders throughout history have elevated their birthdays into national celebrations to reinforce loyalty to the regime. Stalin did it. Saddam Hussein did it. Kim Jong Un still does. The purpose is always the same. Make the state revolve around the leader. And in this case, it is also about erasure. Removing Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth, two federal holidays centered on Black liberation and civil rights, sends a message about whose history gets honored and whose gets erased.

And because Trump’s birthday falls on Flag Day, he has built-in plausible deniability. He can pretend this is just a patriotic move, not a self-serving one. But we know better. This is not about honoring America. It is about replacing America with himself.

And it does not stop with symbolic erasure. It is happening alongside the quiet but deliberate expansion of government surveillance, and not just against foreign threats, but against American citizens. Journalist Ken Klippenstein recently revealed a leaked memo showing the FBI is preparing to release a new “extremism” watchlist, with Pam Bondi pushing for a list of “domestic terrorism” groups that express what she calls “anti-American sentiment.” Klippenstein said it best in one line: “Millions of Americans like you and I could be the target.”

The “domestic terrorism threat” category in the memo includes organizations that use violence or the threat of violence to advance political goals, along with a list of nonviolent beliefs such as “opposition to law and immigration enforcement, extreme views in favor of mass migration and open borders, adherence to radical gender ideology, anti Americanism, anti capitalism, or anti Christianity, support for the overthrow of the United States Government, hostility towards traditional views on family, religion, and morality.”

And I would love to say this is just another one-off idea in Trump’s long pattern of political retaliation, but this could encompass almost anyone. They could use this to justify widespread imprisonment, mass surveillance, and data collection, and even to encourage neighbors to report on each other in the name of public safety or personal gain. There are few examples in modern history as frightening as watching a government begin to build the early structure of a watchlist that mirrors how Nazi Germany tracked, isolated, and ultimately targeted its political opponents.

And then there is the fear. Not the abstract fear of what might happen someday, but the real fear of people already being rounded up and deported under this administration. The United States just deported a second group of Iranian nationals back to Tehran, without knowing what they are walking into. As reported by CNN, one person who said they are expected to be on the deportation flight Sunday said their life will be at risk if they return. We know enough history to understand what this means for many on that flight. Because we have done this before.

We did it in 1939 with the St. Louis, a ship full of Jewish refugees we turned away, sending many to their deaths. And we did it again during World War II, right here on American soil, when we locked away more than one hundred twenty thousand Japanese Americans in internment camps, not because they posed a threat, but because of their ancestry.

I still remember sitting in school, reading Farewell to Manzanar, the memoir of a child imprisoned in one of those camps. I remember holding that book in my lap and feeling the shame, the disbelief. I thought, how could we have done this? And I believed what my teachers told me, that America had learned from its mistakes. That we would never do that again. But we are doing it again.

We are rounding people up. We are deporting them into danger. We are rewriting our public holidays to glorify a man. We are watching the slow, quiet normalization of authoritarianism disguised as patriotism. We told ourselves we were better than this. We promised it would never happen again. But promises mean nothing without vigilance. And history does not just repeat. It warns.

It is warning us now. And in these moments when it feels like we are facing something too big to stop, I remind myself of something Franklin D. Roosevelt once said: “Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.” And I know that we as Americans will remember who we are meant to be, and fight to become the country we always promised we would be.

I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather

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