THE TRAGIC RETURN OF THE EMPIRE: TRUMP AND HIS FOREIGN POLICY

 

U.S. foreign policy is currently undergoing a disturbing regression. Far from speeches about a “liberal international order,” Donald Trump’s administration has reinstated a logic of power that recalls less the diplomacy of the 21st century and more the imperial impulses of the late 19th century. This is not merely an echo of the Cold War, with its obsession over spheres of influence and strategic anticommunism, but a still deeper and more archaic return: a personalist reinterpretation of the Monroe Doctrine, tinged with authoritarianism, voluntarism, and contempt for the sovereignty of peripheral states.

As warned by international politics expert Aroop Mukharji in an article published in Foreign Affairs on January 9, 2026, the U.S. intervention in Venezuela should not be read through the usual frameworks of the 20th century, but as a reactivation of the logic inaugurated in 1898, when the United States emerged as an imperial power after the war with Spain. At that foundational moment, Washington not only expanded its territory but redefined its conception of power, security, and civilization. That worldview—based on wealth, geography, and a moral hierarchy of peoples—is what reappears today, distorted but recognizable, in Trump’s foreign policy.

The historical parallel is unsettling. Just as William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt viewed Latin America and the Caribbean as a “natural” space for U.S. tutelage, Trump has revived the idea that the Western Hemisphere is a zone of almost domestic administration. The capture of Nicolás Maduro and the explicit declaration, assertively stating that the United States “will govern” Venezuela during a transition to “democracy or another regime without Maduro,” not only violate basic principles of international law but reveal a deeper conviction: certain countries are not capable of self-government and require external civilizational authority. In the case of Venezuela, they need the United States.

Here emerges the most dangerous core of this regression in foreign policy: the reappearance of a “civilizational theory of power.” Mukharji helps us reflect clearly on how, at the end of the 19th century, U.S. elites conceived the world as a hierarchy of societies, where civilization—defined by racial, cultural, and moral parameters—legitimized intervention and domination. Trump and his circle have resurrected that logic, now wrapped in the language of order, security, and “Western identity.” It is no coincidence that this vision combines with aggressive immigration policies, internal cultural controls, and a narrative of civilizational threat, both within and outside the United States.

Unlike the Cold War, where interventionism was justified in the name of a universal ideology (the containment of communism), Donald Trump lacks a coherent normative framework. His foreign policy is deeply personalist, dependent on the president’s impulses, grudges, and obsessions. The result is an erratic but no less dangerous type of diplomacy, blending imperial nostalgia, rigorous mercantilism, and capricious decisions over territories, resources, and entire peoples. This is what leads Trump to declare that he will take Greenland by fair means or foul. The idea of “recovering” the Panama Canal, administering Venezuela, or hinting at territorial annexations does not respond to a rational global strategy, but to a drive for symbolic and material domination.

The greatest risk of this imperial return is not merely moral, but structural. There is a historical lesson here: the more a power intervenes, the more it oversizes the strategic importance of the intervened territory, becoming trapped in a cycle of commitment, violence, and attrition. This is what happened with the Philippines, whose annexation generated a prolonged war, thousands of deaths, and a deep ethical wound in U.S. history. Governing Venezuela, or any other country under this logic, would not only be impracticable but almost impossible to abandon without escalating costs.

Consequently, Trump does not inaugurate a new era of U.S. power, but reactivates its darkest and most self-destructive side. The empire, as Hannah Arendt warned, not only corrupts the dominated but also the dominator. Trump’s foreign policy, by shedding institutional limits, multilateral principles, and strategic self-restraint, risks pushing the United States toward a violent isolation, trapped in conflicts it manufactures itself.

The return to the Monroe Doctrine, reinterpreted as a “right of intervention” and direct administration in the 21st century, is not a sign of strength but of imperial insecurity. It signals a power that, feeling threatened by relative decline, opts for the shortcut of force and territorial symbolism. The tragedy is that this regression not only jeopardizes Latin America’s future but also erodes the very possibility of a rules-based international order, leaving as a legacy a more unstable, cynical, and violence-prone world. From this perspective, Venezuela’s future is uncertain, likely more destructive and without the possibilities of independent democratic construction, turning all of Latin America into a theater of neo-imperialism without any guarantees.