America First is gone. Imperial America is here.
By snatching President Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela, Donald Trump has abandoned his previous plan to pull back from foreign wars while focusing on Americans’ concerns over taxes, jobs, inflation and immigration. The new Trump has his eyes on expanding U.S. power and territory. That is worrying, and not only for those in the western hemisphere, the self-professed U.S. sphere of influence since the Monroe Doctrine of 1823.
Today, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine finds justification. After all, Ukraine is in the Russian sphere of influence. And Taiwan quakes a little more. Perhaps now, in U.S. eyes, it’s a legitimate target for China, not an annexation that the U.S. would strongly resist. And for Trump himself where might be next, after Venezuela?
There are parallels that Trump would strongly deny between him and Hugo Chávez, the leader who led Venezuela into the abyss. Chávez first emerged with a failed coup attempt in February 1992. He went to jail but Venezuelans were forgiving and elected him to office in December 1998. Trump tried a bit of insurrection himself on January 6, 2021 after losing the 2020 election when he incited a mob to storm the Capitol. Yet many Americans ignored that crime and elected him to power again in 2024. Coup mongers with no regard for democracy make surprisingly appealing election candidates when people are unhappy – Robin Hood figures who promise bread and change.
But Robin Hood heroes don’t turn out to be good leaders. Between them Chávez and Maduro and chavista government have provoked seven million Venezuelans to flee the country. Trump has disrupted U.S. trade, threatened the independence of the Federal Reserve, further worsened the huge budget deficit and deployed the National Guard in Democrat jurisdictions. And now he is expanding his reckless disregard for the law internationally.
He likes improvisation. Provided he is in charge, all will be well. María Corina Machado, Venezuela’s opposition leader in exile, irked him by winning the Nobel Peace Prize last year. “She doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country,” he says, and won’t be involved in a transition. Nor, it seems, will Edmundo González Urrutia, who ran against Maduro in the election last July. Instead Trump says the U.S. will run the country but has left the chavista government in place, minus its leader. That isn’t even a sketch of a plan.
Yet it seems unlikely that Venezuela will be the last of Trump’s new imperialist adventures. He has threatened to take control of the Panama Canal, and that risk must now be higher. Cuba’s long-lived tyranny will also fear American intervention. Trump says he will act if the Iranian regime puts down protests. Greenland would take Trump’s imperialism to a new level. It is not a country run by a despot like Maduro, but entirely peaceful and stable.
A U.S. usurpation of Danish territory would explode NATO and the Western alliance and leave the world without any semblance of an international rule of law. President Putin would be further emboldened. How about taking the Baltics, or Moldova? If the imperial U.S. can intervene wherever it fancies, why not Russia or China?
A new age of empires is being born. The country that was once the leader of the free world is leading the way.
