Power Play

From 1973 to 1977 the National Hockey League was the wild west, and Bob “Gasser” Gassoff—a 5’10”, 190-pound wrecking ball who skated for the St. Louis Blues—was one of the best enforcers in the game. His job was not to score. It was to protect the players who did. High-stick, slash, board or manhandle a Blues skill player and Gasser would drop the gloves and answer the bell, over and over, until somebody turtled or a referee had the stones to break it up. He skated to the penalty box bloodied and sometimes missing his jersey, then flashed a trademark toothless grin that thrilled Blues fans and infuriated every opponent in the building.

Fast forward to 2026. The United States is engaged in titanic—and very risky—battles of its own, not on a rink but across the global stage. The liberal rules-based order that governed international behavior for the better part of seven decades is over. Not struggling. Not fraying at the edges. Over. The country is tired of policing the world while receiving debt and ingratitude in return. The majority voted for change, and the Trump administration has delivered it with a ferocity that has stunned allies and adversaries alike.

What looks like chaos—the tariffs, the strikes, the ultimatums, the Greenland threats, the trolling of Canada—is not chaos. It is a deliberate, historically grounded power play aimed at a single strategic objective: containing China’s rise before the window to do so closes permanently.

Brent Johnson of Santiago Capital offers the clearest summary: Trump has done more to dismantle the rules-based order in 12 months than the BRICS nations did in 12 years. He didn’t just bend the rules. He dropped his gloves and hit the referee. But Johnson is equally insistent on something most observers miss: the system was already dying. The pendulum had been swinging toward globalization for decades, and COVID rang the bell at the top. It is now swinging back hard and would have done so regardless of who won in 2024. Trump is a uniquely blunt instrument for an era that demands one—not the cause of the disruption but its most forceful expression.

Michael Every, global strategist at Rabobank, frames what has replaced the old order. The world has shifted from economic policy to economic statecraft. Economic policy asks: what is inflation, what is the deficit, how do we hit a 2% growth target? Economic statecraft asks a more fundamental question: what is GDP for? Once you start answering that, every move the Trump administration has made snaps into focus—not random, but in service of a clearly defined national interest.

Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institution calls Trump’s approach “Jacksonian preemptive deterrence." It is neither isolationism nor empire-building. It is a focused strategy to weaken adversaries and strengthen friends before a larger confrontation—one nobody wants but everyone is preparing for—has to be fought. The Obama and Biden administrations projected weakness and paid for it: four major theater conflicts, from Crimea in 2014 through the full invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the Middle East theater war of 2024–25. Anemic deterrence invites aggression. Trump’s approach is designed to make the cost of testing America so prohibitive that adversaries think twice.

In hockey, before you launch a power play you control your own zone. You don’t scramble to clear your crease while trying to set up a scoring chance at the other end. You lock it down at home first.

Venezuela. Cuba. The Panama Canal. The cartel designations. The deportations. The “51st state” pressure on Canada. The Greenland campaign. The January 2026 removal of Nicolás Maduro—accomplished in less than 48 hours. To most observers these look like random provocations. They are neither random nor unrelated. They are all aimed at the same target: China. While America spent the 2000s consumed by Iraq and Afghanistan, Beijing was methodically rewriting its relationship with Latin America—one infrastructure loan, one port deal, one oil-for-credit arrangement at a time. By 2024, China had become the dominant trading partner for South America’s largest economies and had signed Belt and Road agreements with more than twenty Latin American nations. Nobody in Washington had a serious plan to stop it.

Johnson is direct on Venezuela: it was never going to be allowed to keep its oil fields—the largest reserves in the Western Hemisphere—in Chinese hands indefinitely. The only question was when. The answer turned out to be January 2026. This was not about stealing oil. It was about denying China a strategic asset in America’s own backyard. The same logic governs the Panama Canal—built by America, given away for a dollar under Carter, and now strategically reclaimed after Chinese companies moved aggressively to control it. The NSS calls the framework the Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. The strategy is two words: Enlist and Expand.

Hanson does not mince words on the fentanyl front: 75,000 Americans die every year, much of it deliberately laced into other substances. The precursor chemicals come from China. They flow through Mexican cartels. Designating those cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and going after them with military tools is not cruelty. It is triage on a mass casualty event—and it simultaneously squeezes Chinese influence out of the Americas by severing a critical revenue stream.

Johnson states it plainly: even when it isn’t about China, it is still about China. The number that should stop every American cold: in 2000, China manufactured 6 percent of the world’s goods. On its current trajectory, by 2030 that share reaches 45 percent. Extended further, there is a point at which China makes effectively everything—at which point it can do whatever it wants, because the rest of the world cannot function without it. America has a closing window to reverse this trajectory.

Hanson dissects the old bipartisan fantasy with surgical precision. For decades, both Republican and Democratic administrations operated on the same assumption: the more American money invested in China, the more a prosperous Chinese middle class would demand freedom, and China would gradually liberalize. This was catastrophically wrong. Those trade dollars funded the largest peacetime military buildup in modern history. American consumers made China rich. China used that wealth to build a military capable of challenging American power on every front. The NSS calls the old trade relationship “free but not fair," and the results are now impossible to ignore.

Every frames the strategic response through economic history. What Trump is doing is not radical departure—it is a return to American roots. Alexander Hamilton built American industry behind tariff walls. The post-war era of open markets was the exception, not the rule. When it stopped serving American interests—when it hollowed out the industrial base and handed China the supply chains that underpin American military power—the model had to change. The tariffs are not primarily an economic instrument. They are a weapon: forcing American allies to stop trading with China on terms that sustain Beijing’s industrial and military expansion.

Sometimes you take a penalty on purpose. A strategic foul slows the other team’s momentum and accepts the two minutes because the disruption is worth the cost. This is the logic behind Trump’s treatment of allies—the part of the strategy that confuses even supporters and enrages critics.

Why alienate the very partners you need to build a coalition against China? Because Trump uses predictable opposition as a mechanism. European and Canadian elites have a reliable reaction function: they reflexively oppose anything he proposes. So rather than ask them politely—which has never worked—he provokes them into doing what he needs while they believe they are resisting him.

The proof is in the results. During his first term, Trump pleaded with European NATO members to increase defense spending. Defense budgets barely moved. Then he threatened to pull out of NATO entirely. The response was dramatic: Germany hit 2% of GDP for the first time in decades, Poland is building one of the largest armies in Europe, and NATO members collectively committed to 5% in total defense and security spending—a number that would have been considered fantasy five years ago. He did not persuade them. He provoked them.

Elbridge Colby, now Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, laid out the underlying logic in The Strategy of Denial. Preventing Chinese regional dominance in Asia is the non-negotiable core American interest. But the United States cannot concentrate forces in the Pacific while simultaneously babysitting Europe and maintaining commitments around the globe. The math only works if allies handle their own regions—Europe handles Russia, Asia-Pacific allies handle their piece of the Chinese containment line, and America pivots to the decisive theater when needed. Either allies step up or Trump creates conditions in which the cost of inaction exceeds the cost of action.

Power plays fail. More often than people remember. The penalty killer breaks free, catches the defense napping, and buries a shorthanded goal. Everything described here could go wrong, and an honest assessment requires saying so.

Johnson identifies the most dangerous near-term threat: the bond market. The U.S. government will not stop spending—no administration ever does—but if interest rates spike hard enough to make refinancing America’s debt load unmanageable, the entire strategic apparatus collapses. You cannot fund a military renaissance, an industrial revival, and a campaign against China if Treasury yields are blowing out and borrowing costs are crushing the economy.

Every raises a more structural risk—what he calls the Gorbachev parallel. Trump is attempting a reverse transformation of the American economy: shifting it from financialization and consumption toward production, industry, and military capacity. Gorbachev attempted something analogous in the 1980s—introducing market mechanisms into the Soviet command economy to reform it from within. The result was catastrophic collapse. The system could not be reformed piecemeal. Pull one leg of the table and the whole thing falls over. Trump faces a version of the same problem: he needs enough state direction to rebuild American manufacturing without destroying the market dynamism that makes America innovative. The margin is narrow. The state directing capital in the name of necessity rarely gives that power back.

The risks abroad are equally real: a miscalculation over Taiwan; a hot war in the Middle East that draws in Russia; a fracturing of the allied coalition that leaves America genuinely isolated rather than strategically freed. And there is the domestic risk few want to say aloud: all of this requires competent execution. Big plays require big talent.

But if it works—even partially—the rewards are historic. American energy dominance becomes real and lasting, fueling the AI race that will define the 21st century’s commanding heights. Re-industrialization brings blue-collar jobs home and rebuilds the defense industrial base. China gets contained without a shooting war. The alliance that looked like it was fraying emerges more durable because everyone is finally pulling their share. Hanson’s bottom line: it’s not Fortress America in isolation. It’s Fortress America better equipped to help its friends, punish its enemies, and remain the dominant power in the world.

The thesis of this piece is not that Trump’s power play will succeed. It is that the play is real, coherent, and historically grounded in ways the daily news cycle obscures. Beneath the provocations and the bluster, there is a strategy—aimed at preventing China from achieving the kind of dominance that would make American power irrelevant for a generation. Whether it succeeds depends on factors no analyst can predict: the resilience of American institutions, the competence of execution, the choices of adversaries, and the tolerance of Americans for the short-term pain that any serious power play requires.

Bob Gassoff died in a motorcycle accident in 1977. He was 24. He never saw the Stanley Cup. He never got to find out whether all those fights, all that blood, and all those penalty minutes added up to the championship everyone in St. Louis was convinced he would help deliver. That is the nature of power plays. You commit to them fully or not at all. You put the extra man on the ice, you turn the game in your favor, and then you either bury it or you don’t. There is no halfway. No hedging. No playing it safe.

What we are watching in real time is the most consequential power play attempted by any nation in living memory. America—battered, indebted, politically fractured, and tired of subsidizing a world that kept taking and rarely gave back—has pulled the extra man off the bench and sent him onto the ice. Whether it ends with Gasser skating off bloodied and grinning with the game-winner on the board, or face-down on the ice after a shorthanded goal breaks the wrong way, we will know soon enough. The clock is running. The gloves are already off.

Christopher J. Little is a writer and essayist based in St. Louis. “Power Play” is his first work of geopolitical analysis.