Is Trump the greatest geo-political strategist of the last 100 years?
Trump’s many critics would say NO! They would argue that Trump is a dangerous buffoon leading the world into disaster. Current evidence exampling ‘Trump the Madman’ is that Trump’s bombardment of Iran is blowing up the world economy while creating war rather than peace
(High St Northcote, Melbourne. 21 March 2026)
The counter argument is that Trump’s buffoonery is integral to his strategy. Let’s put his current action against Iran in a broader geopolitical context.
Background
Assume that Trump has a clear vision of where he wants to end up. Many would argue that he is an idiot with no plan except creating chaos. This assessment is understandable because Trump’s pathway to his end game is entirely flexible and unpredictable. It’s confusing, particularly when implementing strategy. He does the unexpected. He talks in a way that sends lots of mixed signals. He plays by his own rules.
It is not possible to understand where he is going or leading the USA and the world, until he actually gets there. Therefore, the most reliable analysis of Trump is by looking backwards.
I’ve been looking ‘backwards’ at Trump presidency number two in a series of Substack articles. I’ve been taking backward looking snapshoots to try and understand his intentions.
He has turned the US and global tax systems upside down with his aggressive tariff war. He has a surprising and relatively benign approach to US Labour unions but then he has been trashing activist lawyers in the US. He has attacked the US university and broader education establishment directly. He’s smashed the illegal immigration system in the US and waged unprecedented war against the criminal narcotics trade and simultaneously attacked the entrenched US pharmaceutical business empires. He seems to take great delight in attacking his enemies but also his would-be or the USA’s ‘traditional’ friends.
All this has occurred while Trump has only been US President (in his second presidency) for 14 months.
Arguably, no US President has caused such a massive, domestic USA political earthquake as has Trump in such a short period. No wonder the Marxists love to hate Trump. He’s a Marxist/Left propogandist’s gift!
Looking globally, starting with Ukraine and the Europeans, Trump is massively criticised for not supporting Ukraine. The narrative even goes as far to assert that Trump is a Putin buddy and intentionally working against Ukraine. Evidence cited is that Trump has been actively negotiating a peace deal with Putin that would sell out Ukraine. I covered this in December last year in What Motivates Trump? Ukraine case study. Certainly the ‘peace’ deals Trump was promoting would have given Putin a huge military and political win. That has not happened, however. There’s no peace deal.
Trump has given his European NATO partners absolute hell, branding them a pack of freeloaders living a life of social welfare luxury on the assumption that the USA will pay for and defend Europe from attack. He’s blown that assumption out of the water and European countries are scrambling.
What is Trump doing? I’ll start with an analysis of the global battlefield.
Trump’s Global Picture?
Since the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the Western powers, have operated on an assumption that free trade and a ‘rules-based order’ (a very modern legal invention) would bring peace, prosperity and harmony to the world. That did seem to be developing for some time. China was bought into the ‘peace’ establishment, became the world factory; pushing down global inflation and initiating a period of unprecedented expanding global wealth, particularly in Asia.
Then things started to move in a different direction. The three biggest anti-western players Putin’s Russia, Xi Jing Ping’s China and the Ayatollah Regime of Iran formed an alliance to take over the world. Effectively, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the cold war only produced a temporary appearance of global non-conflict. Conflict morphed into a new form involving economic, trade, political and military.
The new military conflict style revealed itself with 9/11. The immediate response to 9/11 was the ‘war on terrorism’; a war that seemingly needed to be waged against non-nation state actors. At the nation-state level, Western leaders had an ambition to resolve conflict through diplomacy and the creation of the ‘rules-based order’ run by lawyers.
The reality is that terrorism has proven to be an instrument of war conducted by nation states under the mask of ‘deniability.’ The game of diplomacy has failed as nation states opposed to the West have played the West against itself. The ‘rules-based’ lawyer process has equally been used by the anti-West nations in a game of charades against the West. Mass illegal immigration has been used by the anti-West nations as a tool of war. By flooding the West with illegal immigrants who culturally and political don’t ‘fit’ the mould of the Western ethos, the anti-West nations have eroded the cultural and political glue under which Western nations operate.
If you find this encompassing overview of geopolitics of the last fifty years or so offensive or if you strongly disagree, don’t read any further, because I’m working on the assumption that this, in a broad sense, is Trump’s view. I’ve formed this view of Trump’s view by looking backwards over his actions.
What follows is my explanation of how Trump is responding to this. In essence, Trump has turned to the anti-West nations with an attitude of ‘if its war you want, its war you shall have.’
Taking Trump from this perspective his strategies can perhaps be comprehended. I’ll take this in a step-by-step approach.
Stabilising the USA
War is very much a logistics exercise. Before a nation can wage an external war, it must gear its own nation to the logistics of war. This involves aligning the political, cultural, financial economic, production and military institutions to the objective and operations of war.
Looking through this prism, this is what Trump has done.
In winning the presidency convincingly, he’s grasped the tools of power aggressively. With these political tools he’s conducted unrelenting political war against his domestic opponents whether in the Republican or Democrat parties or in the legal, economic, financial, educational, media or government institutions that oppose him. Most political commentators are surprised with the success he’s had in bending Congress to his will, passing laws and budgets thought not possible. In doing this, he has been labelled the destroyer of American democracy. Such labels bother him not.
Trump’s more than fulfilled his promise to shut down illegal immigration. The flow of illegals into the USA has pretty much stopped. He said he’d expel tens of thousands of illegals resident in the USA. He’s done and is doing this even with major violence occurring in the streets of some US cities.
Trump has pushed hard against the narcotics trade to the extent of blowing up vessels alleged to be shipping narcotics into the USA through international waters. Although criticised for doing this in defiance of international law, he doesn’t care.
Trans men and women have been expelled from the US military. This is seen as an attack against ‘woke’ but look at it this way. He’s sought to focus the US military exclusively, and narrowly on its military functions.
The issue that perhaps could have backfired on Trump the most is his tariff war. Free market economic thinking has it that tariffs are bad because they push up inflation, wrecking an economy. There was however a flip side to Trumps tariff policy. The tariff ‘war’ was implemented in conjunction with ‘drill baby drill.’
The greatest contributor to inflation is energy cost. Under the Net Zero agenda the USA had arguably strangled its electricity, oil, gas and other energy production potential. The USA land mass has consistently proven that it has some of the greatest natural resources on earth. If extracted, the USA is not only energy self-sufficient but an energy exporter. Trump’s appointed energy czar was the CEO of a large oil extraction company. This is the first time that a person of such practical energy extraction knowledge has had this role.
Currently, the USA inflation rate is 2.4% . The USA unemployment rate at 4.4% (Feb 2026) . So far, Trump’s tariff policies have not produced the predicted inflation surge or significantly impacted unemployment.
The Europeans – Once were Allies!
During the last century the USA ‘saved’ Europe by intervening in the first and second World Wars. The USA reluctantly intervened in both wars and with WWII, only became involved following the Pearl Harbour attack. At the end of WWII, the USA stepped in as the guarantor of European peace through the NATO alliance. Principally, this acted to dissuade the Soviet Union from any attack against Western Europe because to do so would involve the USA.
Trump’s approach to this has long been known to be one of significant annoyance even anger. He’s been clearly angry that the USA has born the financial cost of protecting Western Europe while the Europeans have become lazy in committing to their own defence. Trump says that it’s time for Europeans to take charge of their own affairs and organise and pay for their own defence. This came to a head with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Trump has long been attacked for selling out Ukraine and particularly for his alleged failure to provide sufficient weapons for Ukraine to enable Ukraine to counter attack. That’s a fair analysis from one perspective. I’ve argued however that Ukraine’s precision deep penetration drone and missile attacks against Russia’s oil infrastructure could not be possible without USA navigation assistance at minimum. That is, that the USA has been assisting Ukraine but not to the degree his critics say should occur.
Still, with Putin’s constant bombardment of Ukrainian cities and power infrastructure, it can be argued that Ukraine is a bloodied sacrificial lamb and the consequence of a dispute between Trump and the Western European powers.
While this is likely true, the war machine that Ukraine has managed to develop is impressive. Credible reports are that Ukraine is currently pushing Russia back and retaking territory. This defies the general expectations that dominated assessments since 2022. The belief has been that Russia’s overwhelming manpower and resources would ultimately overpower Ukraine. But Putin’s losses are astronomical. Russian causalities (dead and wounded) are calculated to be approaching 1.25 million, a staggering number. Military equipment losses indicate a massive depletion in Russian capability. Russia is not defeated. Neither is Ukraine.
What’s startling is that Ukraine has arguably become the, global leader in drone warfare even providing lessons to the USA and others on drone warfare. Currently, it could be assessed that Ukraine is developing the upper hand against Putin. Nothing is certain though.
Breaking the Anti-West Coalition.
Russia, China, Iran and Venezuela along with other ‘minor’ players of North Korea, Cuba, Brazil (perhaps?) and others have formed an alliance to usurp the USA’s dominant economic, financial and military power. Oil is at the core. Russia, Iran and Venezuela between them hold 33 percent of the world’s oil reserves. These reserves provide China with potential oil security as Xi Jinping advances his ambition of creating a new world order cantered around a global dominance by the Middle Kingdom.
This great anti-West alliance has moved with stealth, patience, persistence and violence mostly through terrorist surrogates they have funded. It could be said that the globe has been in a state of global conflict or war for some time. It’s just that it’s a war unlike what we think of as global war and played in different ways to what might be expected.
Look now at the more recent military developments orchestrated and directed by Trump.
A Peace deal has been achieved in Gaza (October 2025) with Hamas largely neutered as a fighting force. This has been achieved in a military alliance with Israel. That peace deal would have been thought impossible at the start of Trump’s Presidency in January 2025.
In June 2025 the US attacked three Iranian nuclear sites. The first Iran knew about the attack was when the bombs exploded at their sites. Iran’s air defence and warning systems proved useless against US military capacity.
In October 2025 Israel took out Iran’s air defence system. The Iranian defence systems were Russian and Chinese supplied.
On 3 January 2026 Trump launched a ‘military operation’ in Venezuela capturing President Maduro and his wife and bought them back to the USA to be placed on trial facing charges of narco-terrorism.
On 28 February 2026 Israel and US began the full scale bombing of Iran (Operation Epic Fury) now in its fourth week. Multiply layers of the Iranian leadership have been killed starting with the long reigning Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei. Trump’s stated ambition is to trigger a change in the Iranian regime. So far this has not occurred.
Running parallel but largely unmentioned in the media is Trump and his team asserting that the Cuban Marxist regime is on the edge of collapsing. The collapse is a stated direct objective of Trump pursued through aggressive, economic killer sanctions.
Looking at this recent sequence of Trump initiated ‘war events’, the following observations may be relevant:
Oil
In moving on Venezuela Trump effectively captured the world’s largest single oil reserves. The USA now controls the distribution of Venezuelan oil. It surely is no accident that Trump did this before moving against Iran, which, with the ensuring oil crisis has (speculatively) made the US at least more oil secure than it would have otherwise been.
On the other hand, the oil crisis with the massive price escalation is a revenue windfall for Putin who, until now under heavy sanctions, has been selling Russian oil at heavily discounted prices.
Russian/Chinese military technology
The capturing of Venezuelan president Madura was done with a lightning raid by specialist US forces where the Russian and Chinese supplied early warning and air defence systems were neutralised by the US immediately before the raid.
The same happened with the US and Israeli attacks against Iran. The Chinese and Russian early warning and air defence systems were neutralised by the US.
This must send scary signals to Russia and China that the US has a major technological advantage over the two on these military matters at least. A question being asked in Beijing at least, is does the US have a similar military technological superiority across the board.
This has enormous potential implications for Xi Jinping and the Chinese military in the ambition to take Taiwan by force. It surely must pause Xi Jinping to contemplate the risk-benefit analysis of invading Taiwan. Could Chinese forces invading Taiwan be wiped out before reaching Taiwan?
Trump is dangerous.
Trump has demonstrated that he will move with lightning speed, with timings of his own choosing at targets of his own choosing. He has demonstrated high capacity in military planning and execution. This makes him dangerous to the anti-West alliance.
He has clear objectives even though many would argue his objectives are confused. This is a result of Trump’s style of verbal message delivery which breaks from standard delivery expected by the political and diplomatic establishments. Trump’s actions indicate clarity of purpose.
Russia and China failed allies.
In Trump’s recent actions in both Venezuela and Iran, Russia and China have proven to be useless allies unable and or incapable of either protecting or assisting their ‘allies’ in Venezuela or Iran. The US and Israel have surgically decapitated multiple layers of the Iranian leadership and demonstrate a continuing capacity to do so. This is similar to the situation in Syria where the fall of the Russian backed Assad regime (8 December 2024) occurred just one month after Trump’s election to the presidency. Trump moved quickly to bring the new Syrian regime into the US sphere of influence.
Trump’s oil risk.
Trump will have a close eye on the November 2026 midterm elections. All 435 representatives in the US House of Representatives and 33 of the 100 US Senators are up for election. Trump will not want to lose control of the US Congress. Presumably if oil supply remains critically low and prices remain high or go higher for a long period, the global and US economy would likely fall into a recession. This would likely create a huge mid-term election problem for Trump. Last week the US Energy Secretary predicted that the Iranian war would end within a few weeks.
What will happen from here? I have no idea. As I’ve stated, it’s only possible to assess what Trump is up to by looking backward. Looking forward can only constitute wild speculation.
What we can observe is that Trump has taken a surgical knife to the anti-Western alliance of Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela and their terrorist surrogates. Xi Jinping must now feel alone and exposed as the alliance he has been carefully crafting for many years looks to be splintered, even in tatters.
The hangers-on nations of BRICS who were and are involved for economic purposes not military, must now be wondering about the value and future of BRICS as a supposed counterbalance to US economic dominance.
The break-up of the anti-Western alliance is a least one reasonably plausible reason for Trump’s actions of the last 5 months.
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