In the months before the U.S. military snatched Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, from their home, President Trump justified his buildup of forces in the Caribbean as an extension of his “America First” domestic agenda. He was ordering deadly missile strikes against boats in the region because they were smuggling drugs at Maduro’s behest and those drugs were killing Americans, he claimed. A similar, if not necessarily coordinated, attack on Americans’ safety was being perpetrated at home by undocumented immigrants, whom Trump accused, without evidence, of all being violent criminals.
But as soon as the raid was over, leaving at least 60 people dead and Venezuela’s economic resources in U.S. hands, Trump and his top aides pivoted to bald-faced imperialism, musing openly about other countries they could soon put under American control.
“Cuba is ready to fall,” the president said dryly as anti-Trump protesters flooded Havana. “Colombia is very sick, too, run by a sick man who likes making cocaine and sending it to the United States, and he’s not going to be doing it very long” — an unambiguous threat against President Gustavo Petro. “Something’s going to have to be done with Mexico,” he later said. Stephen Miller used the occasion to rattle officials in Denmark as well as the putative NATO allies of the U.S. by declaring Greenland as good as ours. “Nobody’s going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland,” he told CNN’s Jake Tapper. The administration is so eager to assert what it sees as its natural imperialist mandate that Trump has dubbed it the “Donroe Doctrine,” a winking play on President James Monroe’s 1823 declaration that foreign powers who tried to colonize the Western Hemisphere were effectively picking a fight with the U.S., the region’s sole and rightful plunderer.
The American looting of Venezuela already seems to be underway. “We are in the midst right now and in fact about to execute on a deal to take all the oil,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced on January 7. “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies … go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, and start making money” by “taking a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground,” Trump said. They were vague about logistics, and while at least some of the profits will purportedly “flow back into Venezuela to benefit the Venezuelan people,” the U.S. plans to keep some as “reimbursement,” a legal-sounding rebrand of what is essentially rich goons seizing a country’s resources at gunpoint.
Oil is not the only thing being stolen here. The U.S. government has also robbed the Venezuelan people of any semblance of self-determination. In spite of the compelling pro-democracy case for ousting Maduro, a brutal dictator who held onto power after losing his 2024 reelection bid in a landslide, Trump has blithely dismissed Maduro’s main political opponent, Nobel Peace Prize winner Carmen María Machado, as “a very nice woman” who lacks “support or respect within the country.” Instead, Trump and Rubio have propped up Maduro’s vice-president, Delcy Rodriguez, seemingly because they think she will be easier to bully than her predecessor. (“If she doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price,” Trump told The Atlantic.) Whether or not that holds true, she has ensured some autocratic continuity — police in Caracas have reportedly been interrogating residents at checkpoints and boarding buses to search people’s phones, trying to suss out anyone who celebrated Maduro’s removal.
The rest of the world has taken note. French president Emmanuel Macron used an annual foreign-policy address to accuse the U.S. of turning away from the “international rules that it used to promote” and abandoning allies. “Every day, people are wondering if Greenland will be invaded, or whether Canada will face the threat of becoming the 51st state,” he said. When Trump suggested that Mexico could be his next target, President Claudia Sheinbaum replied, “The history of Latin America is clear and compelling: intervention has never brought democracy, never generated well-being, nor lasting stability.”
Yet amid the international uproar, the pretense that Trump’s foreign policy reflects an “America First” posture was undercut most profoundly by a tragedy at home. On January 7, an ICE agent fired his gun multiple times into an SUV driven by Renee Nicole Good, killing the 37-year-old mother of three on a snow-lined street in residential Minneapolis. Trump had recently ordered a surge of federal agents to Minnesota, apparently to intimidate the local Somali American population, which he had disparaged as “garbage” the month before; faced instead with rationalizing the shooting death of a white woman, the administration rushed to smear Good as a “domestic terrorist,” arguing, again without evidence, that she had put the agent’s life in danger. Homeland Security director Kristi Noem was in New York the next day announcing the arrests of “illegal criminal aliens,” her rhetoric about keeping Americans safe rendered especially hollow after what amounted to a deadly mugging in broad daylight in Minneapolis, captured from multiple camera angles by bystanders.
This, on a grand scale, has become the defining feature of the current phase of American preeminence: robbery. It is happening overseas, as Trump seeks to remake Venezuela into a U.S. vassal state, and at home, where he is stripping state governors of their authority and residents of their basic civil liberties and, as of January 7, their lives. Asked by the New York Times if there were any limits on his global powers, Trump replied, “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” As Miller put it in his conversation with Jake Tapper, “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning.”
It’s true that, in spite of the shocking developments of the past few weeks, there’s a creeping sense that we are witnessing a tale as old as time. But there’s something going here on that supersedes any assertion of brute force or regional influence put forth when the U.S. was finding its footing as a global player. This isn’t the 19th century anymore; America is the world’s leading economic and military power. That its government is as disdainful of international sovereignty as it is of its own increasingly heavily policed residents makes it the world’s most powerful thief.
The scorn that Trump’s allies continue to heap on Good can be seen as an expression of the timeless authoritarian character of American policing. (George Floyd was choked to death less than a mile from where Good was shot.) But Venezuela feels like a turning point. State violence at home is justified at all costs, as are Trump’s decisions about which foreign nations to menace, and how. It’s not clear what the end result will be, but the effect is the firm establishment of a governing principle rooted in Trump’s declaration on Fox News soon after the raid: “Nobody can stop us.”
