Trump’s new world order will only end in disaster

President Donald Trump’s vision for American foreign policy has been treated as something of an enigma since he entered the political fray in 2015. But over the weekend it became abundantly and surprisingly clear.

Assessments of Trump as an isolationist or an opponent of foreign entanglements ended abruptly with his midnight capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Trump’s assertion that the United States will now “run” the Latin American country, in a press conference that also paid much attention to Venezuela’s oil industry, gave observers even clearer perspective. Adding to that picture is the administration’s National Security Strategy published in December, which declares a “Trump Corollary” – or what Trump calls the “Donroe Doctrine” – to “reaffirm and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere.”

This vision, which is highlighted, is that of unbridled imperialism in pursuit of resource extraction and hemispheric domination. And it would return the world to the “spheres of influence” of the late 19th century, where the great powers, now led by the United States, divide the world for conquest and extraction.

The administration is very clear about this. In promoting the operation to capture Maduro, the administration posted images on social media proclaiming: “This is our hemisphere.”

By claiming that the Western Hemisphere is “ours,” Trump asserts the United States’ right to the resources of other sovereign countries. In the case of Venezuela, that means oil.

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“We’re going to have our big American oil companies, the biggest in the world, come in, spend billions of dollars, fix the severely damaged infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country,” Trump said during his Jan. 3 press conference after Maduro’s capture.

This is what the end of the international order, built since the end of World War II, looks like. That order was based on international institutions and laws that protected the sovereign right of nations to exist and govern themselves free from unprovoked aggression, respected by global actors in theory, if not always in practice.

That order, which dealt a lethal blow by the United States with the 2003 invasion of Iraq and became a laughingstock for Israel’s attacks on Gaza in recent years, was sometimes real and sometimes false. But it provided an alternative political structure to hopefully avoid the total disaster that befell the world following the spate of great power competition that began in the late 19th century, allowing independent countries to emerge in the wake of colonialism.

The international order of the 20th century is now being replaced not by a more just system that restricts the appetites of powerful nations – including the United States, which has flouted international law time and time again – but by the ancient barbarism of might makes right. It is full acceptance of what an anonymous architect of the Iraq War once said: “We are now an empire, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

That infamous quote had to be said in the background back then, but Trump administration officials state it clearly now.

“We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is ruled by force, that is ruled by force, that is ruled by power,” Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper on Monday. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

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This is not what the Monroe Doctrine, on which Trump bases his new vision, was intended. Proclaimed by President James Monroe in 1823, the Monroe Doctrine was a defensive statement of American opposition to European meddling in the Western Hemisphere.

Instead, Trump’s new vision dates back to the early 20th century, when President Theodore Roosevelt altered the Monroe Doctrine with his “Roosevelt Corollary.” This corollary transformed the doctrine into an “obligation” for the United States to intervene militarily in the Western Hemisphere to maintain American supremacy. This alteration of doctrine was accompanied by the mythology of Manifest Destiny, which maintained that the United States had a divine right to territorial expansion in pursuit of economic growth, and the racial ideologies of the time.

The “chronic evil actions” of America’s southern neighbors “would require the intervention of some civilized nation” to exercise “an international police power” to restore order and open economic opportunity, Roosevelt declared.

For decades, the United States routinely intervened to overthrow governments, prop up dictators and protect corporate interests in Latin America and the Caribbean.

While U.S. meddling in Latin America and the Caribbean never ceased, it focused largely, though not exclusively, on free trade agreements and narcotics interdiction after a series of Reagan-era abuses in the 1980s and the end of the Cold War. And rarely, but never, was it as egregious as the midnight capture of another world leader without any precipitating event. The Trump Corollary, as expressed in the domination of Venezuela, seeks to return to the old days of imperial control and domination.

International laws that protect the sovereign rights of other nations are mere “international niceties,” according to Miller. By rejecting the international order, with all its flaws, and declaring a sovereign right to domination, the Trump administration seeks a system in which the largest and most powerful countries have the right to exert their power over others where they have regional dominance.

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That includes seizing territory, as Miller threatened to take Greenland from Denmark by force, and using military force to exert control, as Trump is doing by threatening Venezuelan interim president Delcy Rodríguez with “a situation worse than Maduro” if she doesn’t do what he says.

In fact, in recent days, Trump has already threatened to seize Greenland, overthrow Colombian President Gustavo Petro, and “do something” in Mexico, all while speaking with reporters on Air Force One.

“Sounds good to me,” Trump said when asked about overthrowing Colombia’s democratically elected government.

The White House confirmed Trump’s threats to Denmark seeking to acquire Greenland, including “the use of the U.S. military,” according to a statement from press secretary Karoline Leavitt.

This followed Miller’s assertion of the administration’s doctrine that only the United States has a right to the North American island.

“By what right does Denmark claim to control Greenland?” Miller said on CNN. “What is the basis of their territorial claim? What is the basis of having Greenland as a colony of Denmark? The United States is the power of NATO.”

In the past five years other regional powers, Russia and Israel, have asserted a similar right to dominance with brutal results. But the United States, once and often with blatant hypocrisy, had at least promoted an international order that aspired to curb the brutality that visited the world in the first half of the 20th century, nothing more.

Trump and Miller would prefer to return to their vision of the state of nature that existed before the world learned a bloody lesson. Another era of naked imperialism can only end in calamity.