🦅 Monroe’s Map, McKinley’s Tariff and Teddy’s Stick

It is not hard to understand why President Donald Trump likes Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

Erdoğan wants to make the Ottoman Empire great again.

Trump, when he talks about the Western Hemisphere, reaches for older American ghosts: James Monroe, William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt.

Monroe supplied the warning to outside powers. McKinley made tariffs and industry instruments of national strategy. Teddy Roosevelt added the corollary that America could police disorder, debt and foreign influence in its own neighborhood.

Trump has taken that inheritance and given it a 2026 vocabulary: tariffs, cartel strikes, migration pressure, bilateral trade deals, supply-chain discipline and direct opposition to Chinese and Russian influence in Latin America.

The January capture of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela gave the policy its first hard-power example. The proposed 25% duties on Brazilian goods show how quickly tariffs can become political instruments inside the hemisphere.

The NATO summit that began this morning in Ankara matters mostly because it shows what weight Trump wants the United States to stop carrying. Love ‘em, or hate ‘em, he’s not wrong about the imperial burden the Empire of Debt has taken on since the end of World War II.

As it turns out, Turns out “free security” was never actually free. President Trump has made one message clear heading into the NATO summit: America expects its allies to carry more of the burden. After decades of relying heavily on U.S. military power, European nations are being pushed toward a historic increase in defense spending. (Source: AP)

If Trump could bluster his way into a deal over the next few days, it would look something like this: Europe would spend more on “defense”, weapons and energy infrastructure and quit its climate fear addiction. Turkey would stop coddling Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah and expand its offensive capacity in the Middle East.

The United States would keep the nuclear umbrella, beefed-up defense contracts and the ability to decide where its attention goes next.

The Ankara summit’s formal language will sound familiar enough. Russia remains a long-term threat. Collective defense still applies. The alliance stands together. Leaders will pose, shake hands and speak in that durable dialect of summit diplomacy in which every sentence appears to have been translated from English into Bureaucrat and then back into English by a committee that distrusts verbs.

Formally, Trump wants NATO members to spend 5% of gross domestic product (GDP) on defense by 2035. Last year, Europeans thought Secretary General Mark Rutte’s 3.5% compromise might buy them time. The Trump administration returned with the larger number and a clever accounting trick: 3.5% for military investment, plus another 1.5% for security-related spending such as airport runways, bridges, tunnels, meteorological services and cybersecurity.

In the administration’s 2026 National Security Strategy, the Western Hemisphere moves to the top of the priority list, followed by Asia.

Europe and the Middle East occupy lower tiers, which is a polite way of saying that America’s old commitments now have to compete for attention with drug cartels, migration, Chinese infrastructure contracts, Panama, Venezuela, Taiwan, tariffs, rare earths, AI hardware and whatever Trump decides to say between breakfast and the motorcade.

The NATO slogan since its inception has been “burden-sharing.” Trump, growing tired of these endless meetings, wants the new phrase to be “burden-shifting.”

🪖 Europe Gets the Bill

Europe has enjoyed American protection for decades while underinvesting in its own defense, building generous welfare states and lecturing Washington on manners from beneath the U.S. nuclear umbrella.

Trump’s view is less sentimental. If Russia is Europe’s long-term threat, then Europe should pay more to deter Russia. If European leaders want American troops, weapons, intelligence and logistics close at hand, they should buy more American hardware and stop treating NATO as a subscription service, giving out its password to family and friends.

The next chapter of European defense will not be written only by generals and politicians. It will be shaped by the companies supplying the steel, energy, technology and resources needed for a massive military modernization effort. As Europe ramps up spending to counter Russia, investors shouldn’t ignore the industrial backbone supporting this shift. (Source: Statista)

In Trump’s view, European countries need to take the lead in defending European territory. America would remain the backstop, the arsenal and the final guarantor – the “gun shop” to the world, as Anduril’s Palmer Luckey puts it. Europeans need to buck up and supply more infantry, armor, air defense, logistics, drones, artillery shells and political will than they have been since the Cold War ended.

The process is slow and bureaucratic, bordering on sclerotic. Ahead of today’s summit, European officials told The New York Times that reduced U.S. support will weaken NATO for years, even if smaller countries step up quickly. Europe can spend more, borrow more, buy more and coordinate more, but replacing the practical weight of American logistics, intelligence, command systems, airlift, surveillance, missile defense and nuclear protection is not a weekend project.

Trump will not mind the discomfort. Anxiety is part of the method. A nervous ally spends money. Perversely, European leaders expect to lean more heavily on Ukraine’s growing defense industry and its drone expertise, because Ukraine has spent the last several years learning lessons in the field that NATO planners once preferred to model on PowerPoint.

🧾 “America First” With A Wornout Passport

Trump’s foreign policy has become confusing for voters who heard “America First” as a promise to stay out of foreign affairs. As one of our writers put it yesterday (before the dust-up with FIFA and the U.S. men’s team loss to NATO host Belgium in the World Cup), for many voters, MAGA… has become MAG…Huh?!?

For the better part of 2025, Trump was talking about rebalancing trade, making corporations pay for offshoring jobs, reshoring critical supply chains and using tariffs as a global cudgel to usher America into its Golden Age.

So far, so good for most of the team…

Then came Venezuela, Iran, Beijing and now NATO. Sure, he squeezed Freedom 250 in there last weekend. But in 2026, the parade of high-profile overseas summits, military confrontations, tariff disputes and personal diplomacy with leaders do not fit neatly into midterm campaign-trail slogans.

The war with Iran, the NATO spending fight and the courtship of Erdoğan all give the antiwar wing of MAGA an easy complaint: this looks like foreign entanglement under a different label.

Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan and other MAGA-aligned voices have criticized the Iran escalation as a betrayal of Trump’s promise to avoid another round of open-ended wars. Some donors and activists say they feel duped by what appears to them to be a familiar interventionist program wearing an America First hat.

A larger share of Trump’s supporters appears to accept a different definition.

America First, in that view, does not mean America absent. It means the rest of the world has to adjust to American trade terms, American security demands and American regional priorities.

Venezuela fits because it lies inside the hemisphere. Tariffs fit because supply chains should serve American power. NATO pressure fits because Europe should pay for Europe. Iran remains harder to explain, which is why the administration keeps framing it through energy routes, Israel, Gulf stability and the need to prevent Iranian hardliners from getting a nuclear weapon and setting their own terms.

The midterm risk is that Trump’s voters may support forceful American power in theory while punishing disorder, rising energy prices or visible foreign-policy drift in practice. The White House, therefore, has an incentive to make the Western Hemisphere the cleanest example of the doctrine before November: closer to home, easier to explain and more compatible with the old promise that America should look after its own front yard first.

🕌 Erdoğan Gets Courted

Turkey gives Trump a useful partner in a difficult place.

Erdoğan’s Turkey sits inside NATO but refuses to behave like a mere appendage of Brussels or Washington. Ankara has its own ambitions in the Middle East, the Black Sea, the Caucasus and the eastern Mediterranean. It has complicated relations with Russia, Syria, Iran, Israel and Europe. It also has a growing defense industry and a leader who understands transactional diplomacy as a native language.

Trump signaled willingness to sell F-35 fighter jets to Turkey, reversing the previous ban imposed after Ankara bought Russian missile systems. That move alarms some members of Congress and parts of the MAGA coalition, especially those worried about U.S. technology and Israel’s security.

It also fits Trump’s method. If Turkey can be useful around Iran, Syria, Hormuz and the wider Middle East, then advanced weapons become part of the bargain.

Ahead of the NATO meeting, Turkish authorities cracked down on dissent. More than 200 people were arrested in protest marches and anti-terror raids, including academics, lawyers and journalists.

A comedian who mocked Erdoğan was held at the airport. Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, a key opposition figure, was bundled through three legal hearings to face charges carrying up to 2,300 years in prison. An EU diplomat said there was no longer “even the appearance of a fair trial.”

Rutte has supported the right to demonstrate in principle. In practice, the alliance has little appetite for scolding Turkey on the eve of a summit in Ankara. Turkey has NATO’s second-largest army, a major defense industry, useful geography and an increasingly important role as the United States reduces its appetite for direct European security management.

The complex geopolitical puzzle leaves most people who just want the price of gas and beef to return to their old normal confused.

“Just give him a shot, fercrissakes,” a Grey Swan reader wrote to us after we pointed the midterms are arriving on a timetable the Iranians can afford to wait out.

Sure, we might agree… give him a shot. Meanwhile, young voters and the disaffected baby boomers with TDS are voting for Democratic Socialists in high-profile races.

🌎 Monroe’s Map, McKinley’s Tariff and Teddy’s Stick

The Western Hemisphere is the cleanest expression of Trump’s second-term foreign policy.

The administration wants to block immigration, deport cartel members, block Chinese and Russian influence, use tariffs to shape regional supply chains and restore the United States as the decisive power in the Americas. The old Monroe Doctrine warned outside powers against interference. Trump’s version adds tariffs, cartel strikes and industrial policy to the arsenal.

China is the main target.

From Panama to Chile, Chinese companies have built ports, roads, energy projects, telecom networks and mining relationships. Beijing’s influence in Latin America has grown through loans, construction, commodities, trade and technology. Trump’s strategy treats that footprint as a direct challenge to American preeminence in its own neighborhood.

This week, Brazil gave the policy a sharper focus.

The son of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro lobbied the United States to pause tariffs on Brazil until after October’s elections, the latest apparent effort by the family to draw Washington into Brazilian politics.

The Trump administration had proposed 25% duties on all Brazilian goods shortly after Flavio Bolsonaro met with U.S. officials. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva accused the Bolsonaro family of advocating foreign interference, while Eduardo Bolsonaro has already been convicted in absentia of seeking U.S. intervention in his father’s trial for plotting a coup.

Jair Bolsonaro is now serving a 27-year sentence, and Flávio is expected to run against Lula.

That is what hemispheric power looks like once it leaves the speech text. Tariffs become election variables. Family networks become diplomatic channels. Brazilian domestic politics have become a Washington problem because the administration has chosen to treat the hemisphere as its first theater, even if multiple trips on the Qatar-gifted Air Force One land elsewhere on the planet.

The trade tools matter as much as the military ones. Tariffs and bilateral deals are being used to keep regional supply chains aligned with U.S. interests and to keep them detached from Asian competitors.

The goal is a North-South commercial bloc strong enough to supply American industry, reduce migration pressure and keep China from turning Latin America into another layer of its global platform.

That is why NATO spending matters in the background.

Every American brigade, air-defense system, logistics unit or dollar tied down in Europe is a resource unavailable for the Americas or the Pacific. Trump is pushing Europe to assume more conventional defense responsibility because he wants the United States to be freer to police its own hemisphere and compete with China, where Beijing has become harder to dislodge.

🏗️ The Dam and the Doctrine

On July 7, 1930, work began on the future site of the Hoover Dam.

The first phase involved railroads, construction roads and a town to house workers. Construction on the dam itself began the following spring. Over the next five years, 21,000 men would work ceaselessly to build what became the largest dam of its time and one of the largest manmade structures in the world.

The project took five years to build and nearly 30 years to prepare. Arthur Powell Davis of the Bureau of Reclamation had written the guiding engineering report in 1902. Herbert Hoover, as secretary of commerce in 1921, devoted himself to making the high dam in Boulder Canyon a reality. The dam would control floods, protect downstream farms, expand irrigation in the desert and provide water for Los Angeles and southern California.

The Hoover Dam didn’t get built by waiting seven years for everyone to agree. It took political will, massive investment and a willingness to get things moving. Trump’s approach to geopolitics follows a similar playbook: secure the resources, build the infrastructure and don’t let bureaucracy decide the outcome. (Source: NPS)

The politics were harder than the concrete.

Water rights had divided western states with competing claims on the Colorado River. Hoover negotiated the Colorado River Compact, dividing the basin into two regions and allocating water between them. He introduced and reintroduced the dam bill before Congress finally approved it in 1928. As president, he signed the compact into law in 1929, calling it “the most extensive action ever taken by a group of states under the provisions of the Constitution permitting compacts between states.”

The Hoover Dam was a Western Hemisphere project in the plainest sense. It turned water, concrete, law, engineering and interstate negotiation into American capacity. It made the desert more usable, the river more predictable and the Southwest more governable.

Trump’s version of Monroe, McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt asks for a different kind of capacity.

Europe must carry more of its conventional defense. Turkey must be useful, no matter how uncomfortable its domestic politics become before a NATO summit. Saudi Arabia must stay close enough. Iran must not consume the calendar before November. Latin America must not become a Chinese platform. NATO must remain intact without absorbing the best American resources. China must be confronted in the Americas, managed in Asia and contained through supply chains, tariffs and technology policy.

That is a large structure to build from tariffs, summit declarations, weapons deals and presidential improvisation.

Hoover spent years negotiating water rights before the first permanent concrete could be poured. Trump wants the allies, the markets and the voters to accept a new map while the cement truck is already backing up.

Time is tickin’… 123 days left until the midterms.

~ Addison

P.S. The Ankara summit will tell us how much of NATO 3.0 is a real construction plan and how much is scaffolding around a geopolitical agenda. The Hoover Dam began with roads, rail lines and a town for workers. Trump’s Western Hemisphere policy begins with invoices, tariffs and allies being told to bring their own tools.

This week on the investment front, we’re focusing on the base layer of the AI industrial build-out. Most investors are focused on the companies building AI software and chips. But the next wave of opportunity could come from the companies supplying the resources that make AI possible.

Join us on Grey Swan Live! this Thursday at 2 p.m. ET as Shad Marquitz breaks down Jensen Huang’s “5-Layer Cake” strategy for the AI intelligence economy buildout and explains why energy, mining and industrial companies will become critical players in the next phase of the AI revolution.