How Trump disrupts geopolitics while shouting 'America First'

US President Donald Trump speaks to reporters after signing executive orders in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC on September 5, 2025. Trump on Friday signed an order rebranding the Department of Defense as the Department of War, saying it sent a "message of victory" to the world.[AFP]

From 1986 when Ronald Reagan was in his second and final term as US president, a new law, the Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act, required that each president produce a new strategy document of how he intended to run the country and with what resources. Reagan intended to roll back the Soviet Union and force the Soviets to seek “negotiated surrender.”

He produced a National Security Strategy document in 1987 that was the first to outline regional policy. Reagan’s Secretary of State George Schultz had in 1984 called for use of the military in launching “active prevention, preemption and retaliation [and] must be willing to use military force…. We cannot allow ourselves to become the Hamlet of nations,” Schultz said and repeated it in May 2002, “worrying endlessly over whether and how to respond.”