I've been saying for years that [Trump's] schtick about being some kind of peacenik was a crock. First of all, it was obvious that he adopted that pose in order to position himself as the opposite of both Bush and Obama who were criticized for their foreign policy. He has almost no understanding of international affairs, even now, so his shorthand decision-making was simply to say that anything his predecessors did was stupid and made the world laugh at us as he promised to reverse their policies. Sometimes he even did it, as with the Iran Nuclear Deal, the Paris Climate Agreement and the Trans-Pacific Partnership. He simply tweaked NAFTA and pretended that it was genius. And he left Afghanistan a terrible mess for his successor which allowed him to condemn it all over again. But generally, beyond kvetching endlessly about NATO not "paying its dues" and crowing about his love affairs with all the world's worst despots, Trump really didn't have a foreign policy.

His central conceit all the way back to 2016 was that he's a man of peace who wanted to put America first. People misinterpreted it as a sort of pacifist isolationism. It was not. He wanted to spend massive sums to build up the U.S. military to make allies pay up for protection and he believed that tariffs should be used as economic weapons to dominate other countries. In other words, he believes that U.S. power should be used to bend the world to his will.

His recent comments about Mexico, Canada, Panama and Greenland show that this strategy has matured beyond just extorting money from other countries at the end of some very big guns, both military and economic, and has now become a full-fledged policy of territorial expansion.

In that typically crazy press conference on Tuesday, he made the startling announcement that he plans to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. His loyal hatchet woman, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, promptly announced legislation to do just that so that the government could get to work changing all the maps. The fact that the Gulf of Mexico has been called that since before there was a United States of America makes no difference. Trump wants it and he's going to make it so.