A military expert has warned President Trump's turnaround on American foreign policy risks revealing a "weak hand" for the global superpower.
In discussion with Neil Oliver, Colonel Douglas MacGregor, a defence and foreign policy analyst, picked apart US foreign policy during a crucial moment for the world order.
Setting the scene of his nation, the colonel told Neil: "We've debased our currency. We've done it to ourselves. We've hollowed out our manufacturing base.
"We are economically not irrelevant or insignificant, but we're very weak compared with where we were eight years ago. But we want to behave as though it's 80 years ago.
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"The rest of the world isn't willing to play, but the rest of the world, like most Americans who voted for Donald Trump, was really willing to wait and see what Trump did.
"People really believed what Trump said when he ran for office," Colonel MacGregor added, citing the times when Mr Trump declared he would end the "forever wars" and "imperial tendencies".
"He's done a 180 degree switch."
The colonel argued such a switch stemmed from the nature of his donors, many of whom are, as Mr MacGregor describes, financial capitalists.
The US President is said to have transferred his New York City 'gangster' attitude to Washington DC
|GB NEWS/GETTY
"Many of them are flat out vulture capitalists - they buy up industries, then sell the industries all in pieces and make more money than the industry was originally worth, destroying the livelihoods and standard of living for millions of Americans.
"Those are the people that sit around Trump and advise him.
"And then there's another feature of the Trump personality. He loves to talk in these sort of gangster terms.
"'Well, if they don't do what we want, we'll break their legs. I'll make them an offer they can't refuse.'"
The military expert chalked the attitude up to the US President's New York City background "where that kind of behaviour in real estate markets and in financial markets is pretty widespread".
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Neil Oliver and Colonel Douglas MacGregor discussed American foreign policy on GB News
|GB NEWS
"He's transferred that to Washington DC and if he can't get what he wants, he falls back onto this threat posture, which is now almost a permanent feature of his Government."
The analyst went on to address the issue of economic productivity in the US, impacting a high standard of living as well as the nation's "prosperity".
"When that collapses, and I don't see how with the collapse of the dollar, the debasement of the currency, how we avoid that.
"Because when you look at what's going on right now in the international environment, we're behaving very, very badly.
"We're playing, although we don't admit it publicly, a weak hand. Neil, we really are. We're playing a weak hand. We need to stop that. But I think it's too late now.
"And this recent event with the Russians. At least our bellicose statements about China are going to put us in a very vulnerable position in the near future.
"If you're China, you're Russia, you don't respond to us with military power. You don't need to. You just attack us economically.
"You attack us financially. We're very vulnerable in those areas."
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