The US president has been quite clear that Cuba, Mexico, Colombia and Greenland are in his sights. We must believe him… 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.
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…..
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