Geez, I just took a short holiday break! And look what happens!
It is hard to fully comprehend the Trump Venezuela action and the extended larger threats made with respect to Greenland, currently held by NATO ally Denmark. What do his current Venezuela actions and his larger threats mean going forward for the thing that matters a lot – the global order?
Who knew that in the brief holiday period Trump would go ‘rogue’. The Trump actions of this ‘New Imperialism” is breathtaking – and perhaps in the near future – disastrous for the global order.
There appears to be little question that the framing of these immediate American actions are in close accord with Trump’s advisor, Stephen Miller. Who is Miller? According to Katie Rogers at the NYTimes:
“Stephen Miller has spent the bulk of his White House career furthering hard-right domestic policies that have resulted in mass deportations, family separations and the testing of the constitutional tenets that grant American citizenship.” …
“Mr. Miller is doing so, the president’s advisers say, in service of advancing Mr. Trump’s foreign policy ambitions, which so far resemble imperialistic designs to exploit less powerful, resource-rich countries and territories the world over and use those resources for America’s gain. According to Mr. Miller, using brute force is not only on the table but also the Trump administration’s preferred way to conduct itself on the world stage.”
“We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake [Tapper], that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” Mr. Miller told Jake Tapper of CNN on Monday, during a combative appearance in which he was pressed on Mr. Trump’s long-held desire to control Greenland.”
““These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time,” he said.”
So, suddenly, the rules-based international order (RBIO) is reduced to nothing more than “international niceties”. My, oh my, who taught this guy international relations. Such views do not just target Latin America but extend well beyond that, again according to Rogers writing about Miller and Trump:
“This aggressive posture toward Greenland — and in turn, the rest of the world — is a perfect encapsulation of the raw power that Mr. Trump wants to project, even against Denmark, the NATO ally that controls Greenland. The moment also illustrates how people like Mr. Miller have ascended to the inner circle of a leader who has no interest in having his impulses checked, and how they exert their influence once they arrive there.”
“The moment also shows just how differently Mr. Trump has operated in his second term from how he did in his first.”
Now Trump has claimed that Greenland is now surrounded by Chinese and Russian ships but that seems the usual Trump exaggeration. Again as Katie Rogers identifies:
“Russia and China are active in the Arctic Circle, but Greenland is not surrounded by their ships, and the United States has a military base on Greenland. Mr. Trump has also focused on Greenland because of its potential wealth of critical minerals.”
What of course is rather odd is that the US has drawn down the number of bases and forces in Greenland and today has just one base left on this Arctic island.
How does one describe this ‘New Imperialism’? Well for a start, as identified by Ravi Agrawal in the FP:
“The United States has never been a perfect figurehead of the rules-based international order. Yet even before Operation Absolute Resolve, it was clear that U.S. President Donald Trump represented a break from the past. He introduced an overtly transactional outlook. He blew up the international trading system with unilateral U.S. tariffs. He withdrew the United States from several international bodies. Under Trump, the United States declined to attend the annual U.N. climate summit, or COP30, in Brazil and the G-20 in South Africa. It was a far cry from the days, not so long ago, when the United States would lead the way in corralling and coaxing countries to reach lofty agreements at major global summits. Again, those were usually flawed plans, and they often failed—but at least there was a public attempt at multilateralism.”
With respect to the immediate Venezuela action, David Pierson of the NYTimes describes it in the following way :
“The White House has framed the Maduro operation as part of an updated Monroe Doctrine, or as President Trump describes it, the “Donroe Doctrine.” A globe carved into spheres of influence — with the United States dominating the Western Hemisphere and China asserting primacy across the Asia-Pacific — and where might makes right, regardless of shared rules, could benefit Beijing in a number of ways.”
Now Pierson generally reports on China for the NYTimes and his examination of Trump actions underscores the view of many that Trump’s ‘New Imperialism’ is defined by a great power ‘spheres of influence’ logic and approach:
“The assault on Caracas “does further erode the norms against great power use of force that have steadily weakened in the last two decades, which works just fine for Beijing,” said Rush Doshi, a China expert at Georgetown University and the Council on Foreign Relations. “More important, if it distracts the United States by tying us up in Venezuela, all the better for Beijing too.””
As Pierson points out, Chinese actions recently with Taiwan seem to underscore Chinese willingness to adopt a great power dominance in its region, especially with respect to Taiwan, if that ever was in question:
“In fact, China has not hesitated to use its massive economic power for coercion and its ample modern military to intimidate its neighbors.”
“Just last week, China fired more than two dozen long-range rockets into waters around Taiwan and surrounded the island with bombers, fighter jets and warships in a two-day show of force aimed at intimidating the island’s leadership. China has also punished Japan economically for showing support for Taiwan.”
Now David Sanger in the NYTimes spends some effort in elaborating on Trump and his new ‘Donroe Doctrine’:
““We’re in charge” of Venezuela, Trump claimed, as he described his plans to breathe new life into the Monroe Doctrine, the 1823 foundational statement of U.S. claims over the Western Hemisphere. “The Monroe Doctrine is a big deal,” said Trump, who keeps a pensive portrait of the fifth U.S. president near his desk in the Oval Office. “But we’ve superseded it by a lot, a real lot.””
“The Trump Corollary asserts an American right to “restore American pre-eminence in the Western Hemisphere,” and to deny “non-Hemispheric competitors” — namely, China — “the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets.””
Jake Sullivan and Jon Finer, both from the previous Biden Administration describe Trump’s recent actions this way, again in the NYTimes:
“This leads to the third point: History has shown that poorly scoped and poorly defined military missions can quickly expand in unpredictable ways that ultimately lead to failure.”
“The casual lawlessness of all this practically goes without saying, but remains shocking. The administration barely deigns to explain its legal rationale for the use of force to a Republican-controlled Congress that has all but abandoned meaningful constraint on presidential authority.”
“Possible territorial grabs in Greenland and Panama, which used to produce eye rolls from people like us, who considered it too absurd to take seriously, can no longer be easily dismissed.”
“Even if China and Russia pursue their interests as they see them, regardless of what the U.S. does, Mr. Trump’s actions undermine what’s left of America’s ability to marshal other countries on behalf of our core interests — whether countering aggression by Moscow and Beijing, pursuing terrorists who actually threaten us or preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons to hostile nations.”
All that is bad enough, but Trump’s apparent disdain for a quick democratic renewal in Venezuela is deeply troubling and likely to be ‘deadly’ for Venezuela. And the presumed aim of Trump’s actions – to get the oil flowing again may be a ‘pipe dream’ if democratic restoration is ignored. As Tom Friedman just recently described it in the NYTimes the failure to advance methodically a transition in Venezuela to democracy is not likely to encourage the oil investment Trump is so desperately eager to achieve:
“But for the people of Venezuela, here is what is certain: If you didn’t know before, now you know. Trump came to liberate your oil, not your people. Sorry to tell you, but last Saturday was “O-Day,” not “D-Day.””
“It is now clear that Trump’s priority in capturing President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela was not to make that country safe for the restoration of democracy but to make it safe for the restoration of American oil companies’ dominance over Venezuelan oil extraction. Trump probably hopes that if he can bring Venezuela’s massive, untapped oil reserves to market that he can drive the price of gasoline down at the pump toward $1 a gallon and win the midterms. But I don’t think that will be so easy. Here’s my prediction: Trump will soon discover that the only way to revive major American oil investments in Venezuela is to revive Venezuela’s democracy.”
Friedman concludes this way:
“If you were running a major U.S. oil company, would you invest billions upon billions of dollars in a foreign country being run by remote control from the White House under the threat of force by Trump, Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio and Stephen Miller? I wouldn’t invest in their lemonade stand.” …
“I am not saying that the oil companies are crusaders for democracy. These companies are obsessed with stability, not democracy. There is no way a country ruled by an illegitimate, Trump-directed cabal of mini-Maduros — who are allowed to keep their jobs and freedom as long as they do Trump’s bidding — would be a stable place.” …
“Trump and his deputy chief of staff for policy, Stephen Miller, think they know how the world really works — the strong do as they like and the weak bow as they must. I guess they missed the insurgencies against the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan by ragtag militias that drove us out of both places. Trump and Miller live their lives today surrounded by sycophants, and neither of them has ever lived abroad, so neither has any feel for how people can and will resist — sometimes openly, sometimes covertly — when they are humiliated by big tough foreigners telling them what to do.”
The trajectory of Trump foreign policy actions is ‘jaw dropping’. All the tragedies of past US actions in the Mideast appear to have no impact on the current wishful thinking of this second Trump administration.
Welcome to 2026.
Image Credit: CBC