Throughout history, the most powerful countries have often had a hard time finding friends. As a nation grows dominant, others tend to balance against it. Look at Russia’s neighbors in Eastern Europe; countries rushed into NATO the moment the world allowed it. Look at China’s neighborhood in Asia, where Japan, India, Australia, Vietnam and others have steadily tightened their security ties with the United States and each other in response to Beijing’s rise.
But then look at the U.S. — and the theory starts to wobble.
America is the world’s most powerful nation, yet many of the richest and most capable countries do not balance against it — they ally with it. They defer to it on core security questions. They host its forces. They integrate their militaries with its. That is not normal in the long sweep of modern history. It is, in fact, close to unique.
Why? Not because the U.S. is saintly, but because it has often behaved unlike a classic hegemon. For eight decades since World War II, it has usually tried to translate raw strength into something others can accept: rules, institutions and legitimacy. It built alliances rather than tributary systems, and it spoke the language of principle — collective security, self-determination, open commerce — even when it fell short.
Consider an episode often held up as the icon of American unilateralism: the Iraq War. I’m not defending the war’s wisdom. I’m making a larger point about America’s attitude toward the international system. The George W. Bush administration sought and obtained congressional authorization in 2002, and it went to the U.N., helping secure Security Council Resolution 1441. It also assembled a coalition of 49 countries supporting the effort. Washington felt compelled to make the case, to gather partners, to look for rationales that were broad and accepted by others.
That effort to translate power into legitimacy is the hidden pillar of American primacy. When the U.S. acts like a rulemaker rather than a shakedown artist, it buys something more valuable than fear: consent. Consent is what turns hegemony into leadership — and leadership into a system that other states find preferable to the alternatives. It is also what keeps the balancing impulse from igniting.
And it is precisely what the Venezuela episode now puts at risk. It’s not the raid on Nicolás Maduro itself but rather the utter disregard for law, norms, alliances and diplomacy that mark this break in American foreign policy.
In a CNN interview, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller declared, flatly, “The United States of America is running Venezuela,” and dismissed “international niceties,” insisting the world is governed by “strength … force … power,” the “iron laws” of history. President Donald Trump, for his part, said the U.S. would run Venezuela until a “transition” — and take its oil. This was a naked act of aggression to benefit America’s coffers.
If you are a Canadian, a German, a South Korean or a Mexican, Miller’s words will send a chill. Not because America is about to invade Ottawa or Berlin, but because the logic has changed. The argument is no longer that American power is used in service of broader principles others can embrace — democracy, collective security, a rules-based order. The argument is that power entitles: It rules because it can. That is exactly the kind of great-power behavior that produces nervous neighbors.
Trump has invoked the Monroe Doctrine to justify the operation. It’s worth remembering that the Monroe Doctrine was often seen after 1823 as anti-imperial — aimed at preventing colonial-style interventions by Europe in the Western Hemisphere. It was only later — especially with President Theodore Roosevelt’s corollary in 1904 — that the doctrine mutated into a license for U.S. intrusions across Latin America. That flourish of American imperialism did not last long and did not end well — for the region or for America’s reputation.
Over the last four decades, Republicans and Democrats forged a new bipartisan approach to the region. It encouraged Latin American countries’ moves away from juntas and toward democracy, it fostered trade, investment and support for institutional reform, and it worked with countries to deal with drugs and migration. Mexico is the emblem of that shift: A country once defined by deep suspicion of Washington became one of America’s closest economic partners, bound by dense supply chains and daily law enforcement cooperation. (And net migration of Mexicans into the U.S. has been close to zero for much of the 21st century.)
This strategic capital built over decades is now being squandered. And in the long run, an America that behaves like an utterly self-interested predator on the world stage will not grow stronger; it will grow lonelier. Allies will hedge. Partners will search for options. Neutrals will inch away. And the balancing that history predicted all along may finally arrive — not because America became weak, but because it forgot the real source of its strength.
The Trump administration’s aspiration seems to be to have America act like Putin’s Russia, an aggressive state that nakedly pursues its own interests. And Miller is right to note that that’s how the strong have acted through much of history. Except America. The U.S., fitfully and with many mistakes, followed a different path for the last eight decades and built a new world, one that is being recklessly dismantled.
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