As Venezuela’s skyline lit up under US bombs, we were watching the morbid symptoms of a declining empire. That may sound counterintuitive. After all, the US has kidnapped a foreign leader, and Donald Trump has announced that he will “run” Venezuela. Surely this looks less like decay than intoxication: a superpower high on its own force.
But Trump’s great virtue, if it can be called that, is candour. Previous US presidents draped naked self-interest in the language of “democracy” and “human rights”. Trump dispenses with the costume. In 2023, he boasted: “When I left, Venezuela was ready to collapse. We would have taken it over, we would have gotten all that oil, it would have been right next door.” And this was no off-the-cuff remark. The logic of an oil grab, and much more besides, is laid out plainly in Trump’s recently published National Security Strategy.
The document accepts something long denied in Washington: that US global hegemony is over. “After the end of the Cold War, American foreign policy elites convinced themselves that permanent American domination of the entire world was in the best interests of our country,” it declares with barely concealed contempt. “The days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over.” These are the strategy’s unceremonious funeral rites for US superpower status.
What replaces it is a world of rival empires, each enforcing its own sphere of influence. And for the US, that sphere is the Americas. “After years of neglect,” the strategy pronounces, “the United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere.” The Monroe doctrine, formulated in the early 19th century, purported to block European colonialism. In practice, it laid the foundations for US domination over its Latin American back yard.
Violence in Latin America facilitated by Washington is hardly new. My parents took in refugees who had fled Chile’s rightwing dictatorship, installed after the socialist president Salvador Allende was overthrown in a CIA-backed coup. “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people,” declared the then US secretary of state Henry Kissinger. Similar logic underpinned US support for murderous regimes in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia, as well as across Central America and the Caribbean.
But in the last three decades, that domination has been challenged. The so-called “pink tide” of progressive governments, spearheaded by Brazil’s president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, sought to assert greater regional independence. And, crucially, China – the main US rival – has grown in power across the continent. The two-way goods trade between China and Latin America was 259 times larger in 2023 than it was in 1990. China is now the continent’s second largest trading partner, behind only the US. At the end of the cold war, it did not even make the top 10. Trump’s assault on Venezuela is just the opening move in an attempt to reverse all of this.
The experience of Trump’s first term has led too many to conclude that the strongman in the White House was all bluster. Then, he reached an accommodation with the traditional Republican elite. The unwritten bargain was simple: deliver tax cuts and deregulation, and he could vent endlessly on social media. Second-term Trump is a full-fat far-right regime.
When he menaces the democratically elected presidents of Colombia and Mexico – believe him. When he declares, with barely concealed relish, that “Cuba is ready to fall,” believe him. And when he states, “We do need Greenland, absolutely”, believe him. He really does intend to annex more than 2m sq km of European territory.
If – when – Greenland is swallowed by a Trumpian empire, what then? Trump will have noted the pitifully weak European response to his brazenly illegal assault on Venezuela. But a US seizure of Danish sovereign territory would surely spell the end of Nato, founded on the principle of collective defence. Denmark’s land would be stolen no less blatantly than Russia’s devouring of Ukraine. Whatever muted noises have emerged from London, Paris or Berlin, the western alliance would be finished.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, US elites convinced themselves they were militarily invincible and that their economic model marked the endpoint of human development. That hubris led directly to catastrophe in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, and the financial crash of 2008. US elites promised their people utopian dreams, and then dragged them from one disaster to another. Trumpism itself emerged from the resulting mass disillusionment. But the “America First” response to US decline is to abandon global dominance in favour of a hemispheric empire.
What does that leave the US itself? When the US defeated Spain at the end of the 19th century and seized the Philippines, leading dignitaries founded the American Anti-Imperialist League. “We hold that the policy known as imperialism is hostile to liberty and tends toward militarism,” they declared, “an evil from which it has been our glory to be free.”
“We assert that no nation can long endure half republic and half empire,” the Democratic party asserted in the 1900 presidential election, “and we warn the American people that imperialism abroad will lead quickly and inevitably to despotism at home.” In the end, informal empire replaced direct colonialism, and American democracy – always deeply flawed – endured.
Who would dismiss such warnings as exaggeration now? What happens abroad cannot be divorced from what happens at home. This is the imperial “boomerang”, as Martinican author Aimé Césaire defined it three quarters of a century ago, analysing how European colonialism returned to the continent in the form of fascism. We have already watched the “war on terror” boomerang in this way: its language and logic repurposed for domestic repression. “The Democrat party is not a political party,” Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, declared last summer. “It is a domestic extremist organisation.” National guard troops are dispatched into Democratic-run cities like occupying forces, echoing the “surges” once unleashed on Afghanistan or Iraq.
Seen this way, Trump’s indulgence of Russian ambitions in Ukraine is hardly mysterious. Back in 2019, Russia reportedly proposed offering increased US influence in Venezuela in exchange for the US retreating from Ukraine. Who knows if such a deal has been made. What is certainly true is that a new world order is being born. It is one where increasingly authoritarian powers use brute force to subjugate their neighbours and steal their resources. What once might have sounded like dystopian fantasy is being assembled in plain sight. The question is whether we have the means, willingness and ability to fight back.
Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist. His next book, The Fall of the West, will be published by Penguin Random House in autumn 2026
