“My foreign policy will always put the interests of Ukrainian people and Ukrainian security above all else. That will be the foundation of every single decision I will make. ‘Ukraine first’ will be the major and overriding theme of my administration."

Imagine for a moment that these words were spoken by one of the Empire's puppets in Kiev, installed after the February 2014 coup. Though official Washington lavishes praise on its Ukrainian stooges no matter how appalling their behavior, the outpouring of support for this kind of a statement would be deafening.

Except it wasn't a Poroshenko, Avakov, Saakashvili or "Yahtzee" who said it, but one Donald J. Trump - using "America" and "American," of course, in the quote I altered above. And because of that, the entire Washington establishment had a point-and-shriek episode.

Establishment figures left and right snarked about the speech being terrible, inconsistent, and awful. None other than Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Sith Lord of the Democratic foreign policy cult, called it a political suicide. This, mind you, is the same man who came up with thebrilliant idea of using "riled-up Moslems" as a weapon against the Soviet Union in the 1970s, unleashing the modern-day jihad on the world, and remains unrepentant about it. It may have delivered his beloved Poland into NATO vassalage, but it sure hasn't helped the average citizen of the United States any.

Others guffawed at Trump's pronunciation of "Tanzania," or claimed that advocating unpredictability and consistent principles was somehow absurd. If there is an inconsistency in Trump's speech, though, it's in his simultaneous denunciation of Iran and ISIS - even though Iran is one of the few countries actually opposing the firestorm of jihad in the Middle East, sparked by Zbigniew and fanned by Bush the Lesser's 2003 invasion of Iraq and Obama's fumbling "regime change" policy in Syria (both of which Trump is on the record for opposing).

I'm neither a registered Republican, nor a Trump supporter. I did not vote for him in my state's primary, either. But as I listened to his speech today - having spent the better part of 15 years poring over US foreign policy and writing hundreds of articles about it at Antiwar.com, here and elsewhere - it struck me that Trump has just made an argument that the Trans-Atlantic Empire has eaten the American Republic alive, and that if there is any hope of saving the latter, the former must be relegated to the dustbin of history.

Hillary Clinton sneers that one can't "make America great again" because it's already great. Easy for her to say, when she's basically running not for a chief executive of a constitutional republic, but the Kaiserin of the Greater Atlantic Reich. Meanwhile, the current Kaiser thinks it perfectly acceptable to visit London and lecture the British on how sovereignty shouldn't really be a thing.

Back in 2012, Ron Paul made the argument against the Empire. He was muzzled by the media, and his supporters were shouted down at the GOP convention, with the establishment creating a special rule to favor its preferred front-runner. Who, by the by, ended up gettingdestroyed by Obama that November. The establishment has tried every trick in their playbook to do the same with Trump - and failed every step of the way.

Trump has already turned several of the establishment's sacred cows - open borders, free trade, and Muslims come to mind - into so much kebab. Today he challenged the Empire itself, and promised the chattering classes who spill other people's blood and money with reckless abandon that he will throw them out with the dishwater come November. Their snark and smug posturing is hiding what must be panic at the prospect that he may actually win the election six months from now, and put into practice what he just preached.

I don't know if he's genuine, if he'll be able to resist the lure of power and the insidious whispers of the dark side to join the Empire and rule the world - or at least pretend that's the case, as the current lot does - but I've spent enough time gazing into the abyss of trans-Atlantic (and -Pacific) imperialism to know that Trump's speech today made a powerful point. I don't know if that will be enough to save the American Republic, to be honest. But it will be interesting to watch him try, and the imperialists squirm.