A year into his second term, President Donald Trump is wasting little time scouring American history for precedents that he believes legitimize his global belligerence. The latest US National Security Strategy (NSS), released in early December, resurrects the Monroe Doctrine — what began in 1823 as a simple declaration that Europe’s colonial ambitions would no longer be tolerated in the Americas. The NSS also rejects the “globalist” illusions that have guided the United States’ foreign policy for decades, announces the “civilizational erasure” of Europe, and proclaims the need to increase the number of “strong, traditional families” with “healthy children.” The thirty-page document prompts two basic questions: Who the hell wrote this? And what on earth does it mean?

To help decipher this curious text, which at times reads like a postmodernist manifesto (“President Trump’s foreign policy is pragmatic without being ‘pragmatist,’ realistic without being ‘realist’”), at others sounds like a self-help book for single men (“The future belongs to makers”), and at still others, like an internal memo for car dealership employees (“American goods . . . are a far better buy in the long run”), Jacobin turned to Greg Grandin, a historian of Latin America at Yale University.

Grandin is the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of more than ten books, including Fordlandia (2010) and Kissinger’s Shadow (2015). In April, he published America, América: A New History of the New World. Sebastiaan Faber and Álvaro Guzmán Bastida spoke with Grandin in mid-January, asking him to respond and riff on eight passages in the new NSS. “Got it,” Grandin assented. “You guys are Bobby Weir, and I’m Jerry García.”