The attack on Venezuela and the seizure of its president was a shocking enough start to 2026, but it was only the next day, when the smoke had dispersed and Donald Trump was flying from Florida to Washington DC in triumph, that it became clear the world had entered a new era.
The US president was leaning on a bulkhead on Air Force One, in a charcoal suit and gold tie, regaling reporters with inside details of the abduction of Nicolás Maduro. He claimed his government was “in charge” of Venezuela and that US companies were poised to extract the country’s oil wealth.
Clearly giddy with the success of the operation, achieved without a single US fatality but several Venezuelan and Cuban ones, Trump then served notice on a string of other nations that could face the same fate. “Cuba is ready to fall,” he said. Colombia was run by a “sick man” who was selling cocaine to the US but who would not “be doing it for very long”.
Trump said he would postpone for 20 days to two months any discussions about his desired takeover of Greenland, the semi-autonomous territory of Denmark, a Nato ally, but made clear he was determined to seize it for the sake of US “national security”.
New imperialism
Lest there was any doubt about the scale of Trump’s territorial ambitions, his administration posted its message to the world in capital letters, some of them red, on social media.
“This is OUR hemisphere,” the state department declared on X above a black and white picture of Trump looking grimly determined.
The White House deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, went on CNN to provide the rationale for Trump’s new approach to foreign policy.
“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 of time,” he said.
Miller is one of the few aides to have served in high positions in both the first and second Trump tenures. He has emerged as chief ideologue, channelling the impulses of the president and packaging them as policy. In a social media post on Monday, Miller addressed the bigger picture and argued it was time for the west to stop apologising for its imperialist past.
“Not long after World War II the West dissolved its empires and colonies and began sending colossal sums of taxpayer-funded aid to these former territories (despite have [sic] already made them far wealthier and more successful),” Miller wrote.
“The neoliberal experiment, at its core, has been a long self-punishment of the places and peoples that built the modern world.”….
https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2026/jan/10/trump-territorial-ambition-imperialism
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After the truth-shower 