The recent US bombardment of Caracas, culminating in the kidnapping of its leader, is not a sign of strength but a morbid symptom of a superpower in decline. President Donald Trump's announcement that he will "run" Venezuela might suggest intoxication with force, yet it reveals a more profound strategic shift outlined in his administration's own documents.
The End of Global Hegemony and a Return to Spheres of Influence
Trump's published National Security Strategy performs unceremonious funeral rites for the era of US global dominance. It scorns the post-Cold War belief in "permanent American domination" and declares the days of the US propping up the world order are over. What replaces it is a vision of rival empires, each commanding its own region.
For the United States, that sphere is explicitly the Americas. The strategy vows to "reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine" to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere. Originally framed in the 19th century to deter European colonialism, the doctrine has long served as a justification for US domination over Latin America.
This pattern of control is not new. From the CIA-backed coup against Chile's socialist president Salvador Allende – after which then-US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger infamously questioned why America should "stand by and watch a country go communist" – to support for brutal regimes across Brazil, Argentina and Central America, Washington's hand has been heavy.
The Pink Tide, Chinese Rivalry, and Trump's Counter-Offensive
Over the last three decades, this dominance has been challenged. The progressive "pink tide," led by figures like Brazil's former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, pushed for regional independence. More crucially, China's economic power on the continent has exploded. Two-way trade between China and Latin America was 259 times larger in 2023 than in 1990, making Beijing the region's second-largest trading partner, a position it didn't even hold at the end of the Cold War.
Trump's assault on Venezuela is the opening move in a campaign to reverse these gains. His candour about motive is stark: in 2023 he boasted that under his watch, Venezuela was "ready to collapse" and the US would have "gotten all that oil." The current attack is a practical application of that logic.
This is not the blustering Trump of the first term, constrained by a bargain with the Republican elite. A second-term Trump administration represents a "full-fat far-right regime" intent on acting on its threats. His menaces against the democratically elected leaders of Mexico and Colombia, his declaration that "Cuba is ready to fall," and his stated desire to annex Greenland must be taken at face value.
The Imperial Boomerang and the Cost at Home
The potential annexation of over two million square kilometres of Danish territory in Greenland would have seismic consequences. Europe's weak response to the illegal assault on Venezuela will have been noted, but a US seizure of sovereign European land would shatter NATO, founded on collective defence. The Western alliance could not survive such a blatant act of imperial theft.
This drive for a hemispheric empire also threatens American democracy itself. This is the concept of the imperial "boomerang," as described by Martinican author Aimé Césaire, where the tools and logic of foreign oppression return to enable domestic repression. We have seen it before: the language of the "war on terror" repurposed to label political opponents as extremists, and National Guard troops deployed in Democratic-run US cities like an occupying force.
Trump's indulgence of Russian ambitions in Ukraine fits this pattern. Reports in 2019 suggested a potential deal where Russia granted the US more influence in Venezuela in exchange for a US retreat from Ukraine. Whether such a bargain was struck is unknown, but it illustrates the emerging world order: one of authoritarian powers using brute force to subjugate neighbours and seize resources.
As the American Anti-Imperialist League warned in 1899, "no nation can long endure half republic and half empire." The Democratic party echoed this in the 1900 election, cautioning that "imperialism abroad will lead quickly and inevitably to despotism at home." A new world order is being assembled in plain sight. The pressing question is whether there remains the means, willingness and ability to fight back against it.
