Trump’s Foreign Policy Vision: Imperialism

Imperial conquests have generally proved most popular when the U.S. government is flush with cash. The United States went to war with Spain during the economic boom that followed the panic of 1893. Lyndon Johnson could pour money and troops into Vietnam because the postwar decades had created what John Kenneth Galbraith famously called the Affluent Society, a country with the funds to simultaneously battle communism in Southeast Asia and poverty in the United States. When Mr. Bush took office in 2001, the United States boasted a budget surplus