Trump threatens to return the world to the age of empires

Just a few hours after Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro was taken from his palace, his job and his country by US special forces, Donald Trump is still wondering what it feels like to monitor a live feed of the raid from his Mar-a-Lago mansion.

He shared his feelings on Fox News.

“When you see the speed, the violence, they call that … Amazing, amazing work by these people. Nobody else can do something like this.”

The US president wants and needs a quick win. Before he took office for the second time, he boasted that ending the Russia-Ukraine war would be a day’s work.

Venezuela, as presented in Trump’s statements, is the quick, decisive victory he dreams of.

Maduro is in a prison cell in Brooklyn, the US will “run” Venezuela – and he announced that the Chavista regime, which now has a new president, will turn over millions of barrels of oil and that he will control the way the revenue is spent. All, so far, that no American lives have been lost and no high-profile jobs have had such catastrophic consequences after the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

For now, at least, Trump and his advisers, publicly at least, are ignoring the complexities of Venezuela. It is a country bigger than Germany, which is still run by the regime of factions that have put corruption and repression in Venezuela’s politics.

Instead, Trump is enjoying a geopolitical sugar rush. Judging by their statements as they faced him at Mar-a-Lago, so did US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.

Since then, they’ve repeated that Trump is a president who does what he says he’s going to do.

He made it clear to Colombia, Mexico, Cuba, Greenland – and Denmark – that they should be nervous about where he will be taken according to his will.

Trump loves nicknames. He still calls his predecessor Sleepy Joe Biden.

Now he is trying a new name for the Monroe Doctrine, which has been the foundation of US policy in Latin America for two centuries.

Trump changed it, naturally, after himself – the Donroe doctrine.

James Monroe, the fifth president of the United States, unveiled the original in December 1823. It declared that the western part of the world was America’s area of ​​interest – and warned European powers not to interfere or establish new colonies.

The Donroe Doctrine puts Monroe’s 200-year-old message on steroids.

“The Monroe Doctrine was a great thing, but we replaced it with a lot,” Trump said at Mar-a-Lago as Maduro, blindfolded and shackled, headed to prison.

“Under our new national security strategy, America’s dominance in the western hemisphere will never again be questioned.”

Any adversary or potential threat, especially China, should stay away from Latin America. It is not clear where the huge investments that China has already made in the region leave.

Donroe also extended the large area the US called its “backyard” as far north as Greenland.

The 2026 copperplate equivalent of Monroe’s handwriting is a photo of a frowning-looking Trump posted by the US State Department on social media. The words along with it say, “this is OUR hemisphere – and President Trump will not allow our security to be threatened”.

That means using U.S. military and economic power to force countries and leaders out of line — and take away their resources if necessary. As Trump warned another possible target, the president of Colombia – they need to watch their ass.

Greenland is in America’s sights, not just because of its strategic importance in the Arctic – but because it has a lot of mineral resources that can be accessed as climate change melts the ice sheets. Rare earths from Greenland and heavy crude oil from Venezuela are both seen as strategic US assets.

Unlike other interventionist US presidents, Trump does not cloak his actions in the legitimacy, however false, of international law or the pursuit of democracy. The only legitimacy he needs comes from his belief in the force of his own will, backed by the raw power of the US.

From Monroe to Donroe, foreign policy doctrines have been important to US presidents. They shape their actions and their legacies.

In July, the US will celebrate its 250th birthday. In 1796, its first president, George Washington, announced that he would not seek a third term with a farewell address that is still ongoing today.

Washington issued a series of warnings about the US and the world.

Temporary wartime alliances may be necessary, but the US should avoid permanent alliances with foreign nations. That started the tradition of isolationism.

At home, he warned citizens to beware of extreme partisanship. Division, he said, was a danger to the young American republic.

The Senate holds an annual public re-reading of Washington’s farewell address, a ritual that doesn’t cut corners in overly partisan and polarized US politics.

Washington’s warning about the dangers of entangling alliances has been heeded for 150 years. After World War I, the US withdrew from Europe and returned to isolationism.

But World War II made the US a global power. And that’s where another doctrine comes in, more important for the way Europeans live – until Trump.

By 1947, the Cold War with the Soviet Union had turned cold. The UK, bankrupted by the war, told the US it could no longer fund the Greek government’s fight against the communists.

President Harry Truman’s response then was to commit the US to support, in his words, “free peoples who resist the attempted subjugation of armed minorities or external pressures”. He explained threats from the Soviet Union or local communists.

That was the Truman Doctrine. This led to the Marshall Plan, which rebuilt Europe, followed in 1949 by the creation of Nato. US Atlanticists, such as Harry Truman and George Kennan – the diplomat who created the idea of ​​containing the Soviet Union – believed that the commitments were in the interests of America.

There is a direct line from the Truman Doctrine to Joe Biden’s decision to fund the war effort in Ukraine.

In many ways, the Truman Doctrine created the relationship with Europe that Trump broke. It was a sharp break with the past. Truman ignored Washington’s warning about permanent alliances.

Now Trump is breaking Truman’s legacy. If he follows through on his threat of how to get Greenland, which is a sovereign territory of Denmark, he could destroy the rest of the transatlantic alliance.

Maga ideologue and powerful Trump adviser Stephen Miller summed it up earlier this week on CNN. The US, he said, operates in the real world “ruled by force, ruled by force, ruled by power… these are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time”.

No US president would deny the need for strength and power. But from Franklin D Roosevelt, through Truman and all their successors to Trump, the people in the Oval Office believe that the best way to be powerful is to lead an alliance, which means giving and receiving.

They supported the new United Nations and the push to create rules to regulate the behavior of states. The US, of course, has ignored and violated international law numerous times – doing much to destroy the idea of ​​a rules-based international order.

But Trump’s predecessors have not tried to eliminate the idea that the international system needs regulation, however flawed and incomplete.

That is because of the disastrous consequences of the first half of the 20th Century of the rule of the strongest – two world wars and millions of deaths.

But the combination of Trump’s “America First” ideology and his entrepreneurial, transactional instincts lead him to believe that America’s allies should pay for the privilege in his favor. Friendship seems like a very strong word. America’s interests, in the narrow sense outlined by the president, require remaining top dog by acting alone.

Trump always changes his mind. But one constant is his belief that the US can use its power with impunity. He says this is the way to make America great again.

The risk is that, if Trump stays on his course, he will push the world back to the way it was in the age of empires a century or more ago – a world where the great powers, with influence, seek to impose their will, and where powerful authoritarian nationalists lead their people to disaster.