Susan Kokinda argues that RFK Jr.’s CPAC remarks - praising Trump’s use of power and saying JFK and RFK would back Trump on Iran, Ukraine, and rebuilding the middle class - cut through media narratives and signal a break from post–WWII imperial management.
She says Britain and allied institutions are being sidelined, citing Chatham House’s warnings about UK limits and a “Not So Special Relationship” under Trump 2.0, while Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt convene in Islamabad to open U.S.-Iran dialogue without the UK, EU, or NATO.
Trump names Vice President JD Vance as the lead negotiator, presented as an anti–forever–war interlocutor who has challenged Netanyahu’s regime-change expectations.
Kokinda links this foreign-policy shift to a broader “American System” agenda:
Peter Navarro’s protectionist trade revolution and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s rejection of Bank of England–style Fed models, framing it as the American System versus the British System.
Chapters
00:00 The Monday Brief - Intro
02:33 NATO Locked Out: Four Sovereign Nations Take Over Iran Talks
04:51 Vance Breaks the Neocon Model: The First American Negotiator in 30 Years
07:28 Navarro names Hamilton, Bessent DESTROYS the Financial Times & Bank of England
Snapshots and Notes
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. made one of the most remarkable statements of the past week at the CPAC conference.
“I think Donald Trump understands the use of power better than probably any president that we’ve had, at least since Roosevelt and maybe in American history.
“I think my father and my uncle would support.
“I think that if they were around today, they would be making the same kind of choice that President Trump is about Iran, about Ukraine, about trying to raise up the middle class.”
He also pointed out that he was raised in a Democratic Party that was very opposed to NAFTA.
But the moment Trump came out against it, the Democrats flipped and supported free trade.
Those two statements tell you more about what is really going on in the world than endless hours of media coverage or doom scrolling.
The media is lost in the fog of war and politics.
Take The Economist…
link (paywall)
A note about missing archive links: many paywall sites are now blocking archiving tools from capturing their posts in full. Any excuse for such is just speculation, but we are noticing that the sites doing so have two things in common: their subscription base is half of what it was 10 years ago, and their political persuasion is usually Democrat. IF we can get an open page of the link in question, we will provide a downloadable PDF from our online library. We are seeking other means as well, while avoiding subscribing to every rag employing this technique - we do know the onus is on them to prove anything said about them or shared from their sites due to this form of online censorship.
They’re telling you that Iran has the advantage, and a month of bombing has accomplished nothing.
Or the mainstream press, which is telling you that the No Kings Day rallies featuring adults who dressed up as frogs, and featuring drag queens, represent the political mood of the nation.
RFK’s remarks cut through all of that.
The binary choices of left versus right, war versus anti-war, are being shattered as Donald Trump reasserts real American policies and liberates us from the strategic and economic straitjacket imposed since the end of World War II.
These aren’t new ideas.
They are the oldest American ideas, suppressed, and now coming back.
Kokinda remembers Kennedy’s uncle and father; she was on the ground in California campaigning for Robert F. Kennedy Sr. when he was shot.
And like his son, she has spent more than five decades fighting for the opportunity that Donald Trump has given us to bring those principles back to life.
Here’s what is being covered today...
NATO Locked Out: Four Sovereign Nations Take Over Iran Talks (02:33)
So, who is no longer in the room, and why does that change everything?
This week, the empire’s own institutions confirmed it.
Chatham House, the British foreign policy flagship think tank, published a piece with a headline that could have come from this channel.
link / PDF (opens in our library)
Britain’s handling of the Iran war shows the limits of UK power.
Chatham House also announced that the House of Lords International Relations and Defense Committee will come to Chatham House to discuss what they now call the not-so-special relationship and whether it can survive Trump 2.0.
The empire is writing its own autopsy, and the Conservative Treehouse gave it the headline it deserved.
Video from The Conservative Treehouse link above…
With those tools of the great game sidelined, watch what is actually happening.
Right now in Islamabad, the foreign ministers of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt are sitting together for the purpose of opening up a dialogue between the United States and Iran - not managing the conflict, ending it.
Britain is not in that room, nor is the EU or NATO.
And when Pakistan’s foreign minister announced that Iran had agreed to allow 20 more Pakistani-flagged ships through the Strait of Hormuz, he addressed his statement on X directly to J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio, and Steve Witkoff.
Not London.
Not Brussels.
To the Americans.
And President Trump himself reposted it within hours.
So you have a sovereign Islamic quartet with no colonial history in Iran, no Sykes-Picot baggage, and no 75 years of imperial management to answer for, trying to broker a sovereign resolution.
That’s a genuinely new thing, and it’s happening because the old managers are no longer in the room.
And it is important that you see that this is new.
The dominant media narratives are written to keep you angry and impotent.
Vance Breaks the Neocon Model: The First American Negotiator in 30 Years (04:51)
Now, the empire being out of the room only matters if someone else is in it, and acting like an American.
And that’s where Vice President J.D. Vance comes in.
President Trump confirmed that Vice President Vance will be the lead negotiator for the U.S., and the well-sourced Barack Ravid at Axios gave that background, says,
And Axios quotes another senior administration advisor saying,
“... if the Iranians can’t strike a deal with Vance, they won’t get a deal.”
And the article makes clear that Vance has directly challenged Netanyahu on Israel’s overly optimistic assessment of regime change and on its endgame goals, both of which diverge from the administration’s.
The neoconservative model that ran American Middle East policy for 30 years never did that.
American foreign policy was just a tool in the British toolkit alongside Israeli foreign policy and Muslim Brotherhood-fostered extremism.
The result: 30 years of managed conflict and no resolution.
Vance is doing something different, acting as an American official representing American interests, including our interests in not fighting a forever war.
Now Vance’s role is public, but it does echo something older.
It echoes the role that Robert F. Kennedy Sr. played in the Cuban Missile Crisis.
JFK sent his brother, the Attorney General, to conduct secret back-channel discussions with the Soviets because he knew that RFK shared his agenda, the American agenda, and that the Soviets would understand that.
This is what RFK Jr. is pointing at.
Not a specific tactic, but a disposition.
And that disposition has largely been absent since FDR last exercised American power during World War II.
The endgame of that war was to defeat fascism.
But Roosevelt’s stated intention, unfulfilled because he died before the war ended, was to free the world from British 18th century methods.
Unfortunately, those methods remained intact until now, as managed conflicts kept, especially the Middle East from economic development and peace.
Now, the same break you’re watching in Islamabad is happening simultaneously in trade and monetary policy.
Navarro names Hamilton, Bessent DESTROYS the Financial Times & Bank of England (07:28)
And this week, both Peter Navarro and Scott Bessent put a name to it.
In a Politico interview, Presidential Trade Advisor Navarro made clear that this administration is carrying out a revolution.
“Our trade policy is fundamentally revamping the entire world order in the other side's language.
“Donald Trump, going back in history, channeling Alexander Hamilton, channeling McKinley, channeling Henry Clay, is basically adopting an America First policy where the protection against unfair trade makes us stronger.”
So Navarro joins Trade Ambassador Jameson Greer, Treasury Secretary Bessent, and Vice President Vance in affirming that this administration’s policy is that of the champions of the American system.
And Navarro then made clear who represents the old order.
He was asked about Mark Carney, former governor of the Bank of England and now Canadian prime minister, who is currently organizing a WTO coalition to try to check the Americans’ trade policy.
Navarro was direct - he said, it’s typical Carney behavior, wee’ve got a problem in Great Britain and Canada with liberal Trump haters.
Now, let’s look at Carney’s former employer, the Bank of England, which was suddenly in the news this week in a story that was overshadowed by Iran coverage and the government shutdown.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Besant went to war with the Financial Times, the mouthpiece of the City of London, on the issue of the Bank of England.
The FT published a story claiming Bessent had praised the Bank of England as a model for restructuring the Federal Reserve.
link (paywall)
And before they published it, Bessent had given them an on-the-record denial, but they ran it anyway, citing anonymous sources.
So Bessent shot back with vehemence.
And here’s the punchline, he went on to say, …
What’s REALLY going on here?
The Bank of England model is the City of London’s preferred architecture for central banking.
Bessent is rejecting that.
He wants to narrow the Fed’s mandate and return to financial instruments and credit instruments that will serve productive economic activity.
When the FT tried to claim his reform agenda for their framework, he smacked it down forcefully.
The American system revival that Navarro was pursuing in trade, that Bessent is pursuing in monetary policy, that Vance is expressing in foreign policy, it’s all one thing.
So whether it’s the FT or Carney’s rules-based order or the Chatham House autopsy, it’s the same old imperial order responding to Trump’s new American agenda, which takes us back to where we started.
RFK Jr., at CPAC, said his father and uncle would support what Trump is doing in Iran and in the economy.
Kennedy is saying that an older tradition defines what American power is actually for.
Not managing conflict for imperial financial interests, not free trade frameworks that drain American manufacturing, not central banking architectures designed in the City of London, but policies that support sovereign national development, a productive economy, and policies that are actually for peace built through construction.
Hamilton named it,
FDR reasserted it,
JFK tried to revive it,
And Trump is the first president since then to bring it back to life.
That is what is invisible inside the binary choices that the old order provides you.
Pro-war or anti-war, free trade or socialism, Fed tightening or loosening, every one of those binaries is a cage, designed to make the American system unspeakable.
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