The isolationism that President Donald Trump seemed to espouse in his first term has taken a backseat to an unbridled machismo on the world stage. Trump is still pulling back from non-military foreign engagement, as seen in this week’s withdrawal from dozens of international agencies, but in the aftermath of the seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, it is impossible to ignore the White House’s heightened aggression.
This is the work of an unabashed empire. Journalist Spencer Ackerman marveled after Maduro’s capture at how “rarely in the era of mass media has U.S. imperialism been as unsubtle or as blatant.” There’s been no need to hide behind claims of protecting human rights or safeguarding against threat to American lives. The pretense of needing to prevent the flow of drugs into America that justified the preceding attacks on drug boats swiftly melted away in favor of a naked grab for resources.
This is the work of an unabashed empire.
Trump might have convinced some of his supporters that he’s a “peace president,” but he plainly relishes the chance to put America’s military front and center, as in last year’s parade held on his birthday. And in a recent interview with The New York Times, he made clear that he sees the only one limit on America’s global power, and by proxy his own: “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
In the middle of his chat with the Times’ reporters, Trump also spoke on the phone with Colombia’s leftist president Gustavo Petro, who he has also threatened recently for not doing enough to stem the flow of drugs from his country. “Well, we are in danger,” Petro told the Times in a separate interview before taking the White House call. “Because the threat is real. It was made by Trump.”
Petro’s understandable fear underscores how much Maduro’s capture changed the gravity of Trump’s usual bluster. Likewise, Trump’s desire to take over Greenland, which reportedly first stemmed from seeing how big it looks on Mercator projection maps, has become a major focus of U.S. foreign policy. Reuters recently reported that the administration is considering sending Greenland’s residents tens of thousands of dollars each in exchange for backing a referendum to break away from Denmark.
And in the Times interview, Trump made clear that America owning Greenland is about more than simply having access to its territory:
Because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success. I think that ownership gives you a thing that you can’t do, whether you’re talking about a lease or a treaty. Ownership gives you things and elements that you can’t get from just signing a document.
“Ownership” appears to be the goal in Venezuela, even if what that means still isn’t apparent. But the U.S. still not fully clarifying how it plans to “run” Venezuela, as Trump put it, has done little to mollify the urge to expand America’s renewed domination of the Western hemisphere. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has reportedly viewed regime change in Venezuela as a step towards finally decapitating Cuba’s Communist government, a dream that goes back to the American sugar barons first expelled during the revolution.
The military operation snatching Maduro and his wife from Caracas at least has clear historical precedent. Besides the 1989 arrest of Panama’s Miguel Noriega, between the late 19th and 20th centuries America ran numerous (covert and overt) in Latin America’s internal politics. But there was little appetite in most of those scenarios for annexing or even openly administering the governments of many of the invaded countries.
Where the (absurdly branded) “Donroe Doctrine” most broadly diverges from the recent past is Trump’s insistence that America now has control over Venezuela’s oil. It’s fully in line with his previous admonitions for not taking Iraq’s oil after the 2003 invasion and yet also more purely colonial in nature than any recent American president has been comfortable declaring.
Executives from multiple major oil companies met at the White House on Friday to hear Trump’s pitch for investing in the newly conquered Venezuela. The administration seized another Venezuelan oil tanker the previous day, claiming it was avoiding American sanctions. Trump boasted on Truth Social that the oil from the tanker “will be sold through the GREAT Energy Deal, which we have created for such sales.” MS NOW reported last week that the oil industry is deeply skeptical of the scheme, but that hasn’t stopped the administration from suggesting that America will oversee Caracas’ oil fields for years to come.
Trump’s swing towards naked imperialism harkens back to a darker time in global history.
More concerning for the direction this shift is taking is White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller’s role in this crusade. In a post on X last week, Miller lamented that after winning World War II, the victorious Allies “dissolved its empires and colonies and began sending colossal sums of taxpayer-funded aid to these former territories.” The next day he told CNN’s Jake Tapper that “nobody is going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland.” (Thucydides would likely approve of Miller’s apparent belief that the world is now America’s Melos.)
All this has happened even as the U.S. cut off its nose to spite its face, diplomatically speaking, is it spurned so-called “soft power” in favor of obvious bullying. It’s been just under a year since the swift destruction of the U.S. Agency for International Development and the subsequent billions of dollars in cuts to foreign aid. Rubio announced last week that the U.S. will be withdrawing from dozens of international organizations, as well as the global climate treaty America first helped negotiate. There seems to be little concern from the administration about ceding those diplomatic spaces to China and Russia’s eager envoys in the process.
So far, Trump’s expansionism has been limited in duration and scope militarily, as with Maduro’s seizure and the bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities last year. That could change if Trump has his way, as he has recently suggested upping the military budget by an additional 50% to a mind-boggling $1.5 trillion. A military that bloated is less concerned with defense than it is with finding new targets.
Trump’s swing towards naked imperialism harkens back to a darker time in global history. But even the early 20th century’s conquerors insisted that their causes were moral, claiming their colonization was more about bringing “civilization” to the world than mass pillaging. There is little of that from Trump, who may be the most honest liar to ever occupy the White House.
Between Trump and Miller, we find ourselves a short step away from reviving “The White Man’s Burden” as the fig leaf covering the brutal extraction of resources from the Global South. Though the “America First” slogan still rings true to much of the president’s base, its meaning has become less recognizable over the last year. If anything, “America Over All” may have become a more fitting rallying cry for the days ahead, as Trump turns his eye towards making examples of any weaker country who would step out of line.
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