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https://ericzuesse.substack.com/p/trumps-brain-is-100-neocon  

https://theduran.com/trumps-brain-is-100-neocon/  

Trump’s Brain Is 100% Neocon.

16 August 2026, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

Many Democratic Party commentators simply deride “Trump’s brain” as “stupid” or “mere mush.” (For example, see the Democratic Party’s “The Daily Beast” video “Why Even Trump Insiders Admit He’s 'An Idiot' | Inside Trump's Head”.) However, it’s far worse than that: it is 100% neocon — obsessed with the evil goal that the U.S. empire must continue expanding until it includes every country — the entire planet. After all, Democratic U.S. Presidents ever since Harry Truman in 1945 (except for JFK) have all been just as neoconservative as Republican ones have been; and, therefore, Democratic politicians cannot criticize Republican ones for being what Democratic ones also are (neocons). So, they instead criticize Trump for his stupidity. But the even more dangerous thing about Trump is his neoconservatism, which he shares with virtually ALL Democratic as well as Republican politicians.

For example, on 28 May 2014, the Nobel Peace Prize winning (what a fine testament to that organization’s hypocrisy this was) Democratic President Barack Obama gave a lecture on and endorsement of neoconservatism, when he instructed graduating West Point cadets that:

The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation. That has been true for the century passed and it will be true for the century to come. … Russia’s aggression toward former Soviet states unnerves capitals in Europe, while China’s economic rise and military reach worries its neighbors. From Brazil to India, rising middle classes compete with us, and governments seek a greater say in global forums. … It will be your generation’s task to respond to this new world.

He was telling his country’s future military leaders that all nations except America are “dispensable.” He also was saying that a key function of America’s military is to keep every other nation down, especially where “rising middle classes compete with us,” and these future generals are being tasked to wage war against those “competitors,” if necessary in order for such “dispensable” countries to REMAIN down. That was his clearest statement of his zero-sum-game view of international relations, which is at the core of neoconservatism. He was, essentially, saying, there, that he was an imperialist-fascist head-of-state, even a global-hegemonic one (seeking to control the whole world). And he ruled in that way. This is also what he taught. And he practiced it in places such as Libya, Syria, Ukraine, etc. He, just  like Trump, was an all-war-all-the-time President and liar who said that he wanted peace (while Obama invaded Libya and Syria and coup-replaced Ukraine’s neutralist Government by a rabidly anti-Russian government which government promptly started the war in Ukraine against Ukrainians who rejected it).

So, to Democrats, Trump is just a fool, instead. One neocon isn’t going to accuse another of BEING a neocon.

And Trump’s brain is a neocon, Elbridge Colby, whom few people even know of, and who is the grandson of the neoconservative William Colby (Nixon’s CIA Director) and the son of the Carlyle Group imperialist warmongers’ Jonathan Colby (to whom Elbridge dedicated his book).

On 8 January 2026, the neoconservative Australian fund manager Michael McNair headlined “The Bridge at the Center of the Pentagon” and wrote an admiring review of Elbridge Colby’s book, which had laid out the foreign policy (Elbridges’s foreign policy —  100% military) of the second Trump Administration. McNair opened:

The Architect of U.S. Defense Strategy

The man setting U.S. defense strategy has already told you exactly how he thinks. He published the playbook years before taking office. And surprisingly few analysts have actually read it.

Elbridge Colby, or “Bridge” to those who know him, now serves as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, the senior official responsible for running U.S. defense strategy.

Captain John Konrad, after spending a week inside the Pentagon, put it bluntly in his 13,000-word field report for gCaptain: “aside from Hegseth, the most powerful gravitational body in the building is Elbridge Colby.” He added that Colby’s “grand strategy remains exactly what he published in his books and interviews long before taking office. He is executing it now.”

Most officials don’t tell you how they think until they’re already in office, if ever. Colby did the opposite. He spent years laying out his framework in public. His 2021 book The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict reads less like an academic exercise and more like the playbook for how the United States is now approaching defense strategy.

For anyone doing serious macro or geopolitical analysis, this creates an unusual opportunity. The assumptions are visible. The logic is traceable. The framework is on the page. And yet most analysts I encounter haven’t read him and are consequently misreading American strategic moves in ways that lead to fundamentally flawed conclusions.

The Systems Thinker

I love when I read or hear someone talk and I can just tell this is a thinker who resonates with me. I can see their brilliance. And sometimes it’s a brilliance that others miss. That’s Colby.

What distinguishes Colby from most strategic thinkers is his recognition that strategy operates as a complex adaptive system. He doesn’t ask “what should we do about Taiwan?” in isolation. He asks “what is China’s optimal strategy, and how do we make that strategy fail?”

Like Obama, Colby (Trump’s brain) views foreign policy as aiming to win by harming everyone else — defeating them. Not win-win, but PURE win-lose, with “us” doing the “win”ing, and everyone else doing the losing.

And “us” is (like the super-rich and well-connected overwhelmingly are) ONLY people like Carlyle Group etc. are: they are insiders.

Elbridge’s book says near the start of its Preface:

… The unipolar moment is over.

Above all, this is because of the rise of China. Napoleon is supposed to have remarked that, when China rose, the world would quake. China has now arisen — and is continuing to rise. And the world is quaking. For the first time since the nineteenth century, the United States no longer boasts the world’s indisputably largest economy. As a result, we are witnessing a return to what is commonly referred to s “great power competition.” This is a euphemism for an almost physical reality: an object so large must have the greatest consequence for any system that must accommodate it. China’s enormous size and sophistication mean that its rise will be of the utmost significance. It is one thing to describe the phenomenon; it is another thing to understand how to react to it.

This book seeks to explain what this reality means for the defense of the United States. ...

He starts by saying that BECAUSE China is heading to become richer than the U.S., he — Trump’s policy-chief for the U.S. Department of War — has, as his top goal for the War Department, to do all it can to impoverish China and make it suffer (presumably until China itself becomes part of the U.S. empire).

As the admiring McNair put it: 

The Strategy of Denial

Colby’s core claim is that U.S. strategy in the 21st century should aim to prevent China from achieving hegemony over Asia. The rest of his framework follows from that point. …

The answer, in his terms, is a “denial defense.” The United States must lead an anti-hegemonic coalition that can deny China the ability to achieve its objectives by force. Taiwan [which the U.S. Government has formally agreed-to with China, “Taiwan is a part of China”] is the linchpin. If China can take Taiwan [which would be impossible since it’s already a “part of China”], the coalition fractures and the sequential strategy succeeds. If Taiwan holds [as being NOT part of China — which the U.S. Government itself says is false], the strategy fails. [Thus, Trump’s brain rejects what has been U.S. policy since 1972.]

That logic sets his priorities. …

In my work on the Venezuelan crisis and autonomous underwater vehicles, that framework turned out to be a useful guide. I noted that Colby, if he had his way, would station every carrier we have in the Western Pacific. So, when he signed off on diverting high-end naval assets to the Caribbean, I didn’t read it as random overreach or a political stunt. If a planner with that worldview is willing to divert capacity away from Asia, the threat assessment must have been serious enough to override his core strategic instinct to prioritize the China threat above all else. That is why I read the Venezuela buildup as a real maritime-denial problem and correctly predicted, months in advance, that the administration would not stop short of regime change.

From Theory to Execution

If you want to see Colby’s framework translated into policy, read the White House National Security Strategy released in late 2025. His fingerprints are all over it.

The document opens with a critique that could have come straight from his book. It argues that American strategies since the Cold War “have been laundry lists of wishes or desired end states” that “have not clearly defined what we want” and “have often misjudged what we should want.” A strategy, the NSS insists, “must evaluate, sort, and prioritize. Not every country, region, issue, or cause — however worthy — can be the focus of American strategy.”

That is Colby’s voice. Strategy is about painful choices, and trying to do everything means doing nothing well. …

Even the Western Hemisphere focus fits his framework. Securing the home base is not a retreat from Asia. It is a prerequisite for sustaining power projection into the Indo-Pacific. You cannot fight a war in the Western Pacific if hostile actors control your southern approaches.

He wrote the playbook. Now he is running it.

Against the Spheres-of-Influence Story

There is a theory that the United States has made a silent agreement with Russia and China to divide the world into spheres of influence. America gets the Western Hemisphere, Russia gets Europe, China gets Asia. Clean lines on a map.  …

His entire framework is built on the premise that preventing Chinese regional hegemony in Asia is the non-negotiable core interest of U.S. strategy. Ceding Asia to China is not burden-sharing. It is strategic suicide. You do not hand over the most economically consequential region on earth to your principal competitor. …

The Western Hemisphere focus is not America retreating to its corner either. It is securing the base of operations. You cannot project power into the Indo-Pacific if hostile actors control the Gulf shipping lanes, your canal access, or critical supply chains in your own hemisphere. The Monroe Doctrine reassertion enables the Asia strategy. It does not replace it.

On Taiwan, the NSS is explicit that the United States “does not support any unilateral change to the status quo in the Taiwan Strait.” That is not ceding Asia, its drawing a hard line at the most strategically critical node.

The spheres-of-influence story is popular because it is simple: three great powers, three regions, neat boundaries. …

For anyone doing macro or geopolitical analysis, ignoring his work is a mistake. The Strategy of Denial is not light reading, but it is a central framework shaping American defense policy. If you want to understand why the administration is making the moves it is making, this is where you start. …

There is something very stupid about such a view. For China to be the dominant power  in its region is unacceptable to the neocons, but they DEMAND that America be the dominant power in the Western Hemisphere. There is an underlying assumption in that thinking: that ONLY America — no OTHER major power — has a RIGHT to dominate its region. They are such psychopaths that they don’t address — much less justify — this inequality-of-rights. Similarly, the neocon Obama was too stupid and too psychopathic to even NOTICE that his dictum that ONLY his own nation, the U.S., is “indispensable” — all OTHERS are “dispensable” — is both evil and stupid. This is the arrogance of all self-styled “elite”s. It is the way they ‘justify’ their stupid psychopathic selves.

This is the reason why neocons are offended by a nation that is more successful than their nation is. But, of course, any nation that is as selfish, grasping, and stupid, as they themselves are, is heading for a fall. If they really want to fight against their nation’s enemies, they ought to simply commit suicide, because they are it.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.