Until recently, President Donald Trump had a reputation as a quasi-isolationist. In his first inaugural address, he complained, “We’ve … spent trillions of dollars overseas while America’s infrastructure has fallen into disrepair and decay.” In his second inaugural address, he vowed to “measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end — and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.”
And yet, following his attack on Venezuela and his threats against Greenland, the president is looking more like an imperialist than an isolationist. The world should have seen it coming. Trump may have been the only person on the planet who criticized the 2003 invasion of Iraq because it wasn’t a “war for oil.” Citing the ancient maximum “to the victor belong the spoils,” Trump insisted that the U.S. should “take the oil” from Iraq.
He never explained how he could seize oil without a costly occupation, but, now in Venezuela, he thinks he has figured it out. Following the salutary arrest of the odious Nicolás Maduro, Trump says he wants to run Venezuela — possibly for years, he told the New York Times. But he isn’t sending troops, and he hasn’t said anything about nurturing democracy (although he did apply welcome pressure to free some political prisoners).
Instead, Trump has gone into business with the remnants of the Maduro regime, telling them to hand over oil if they want to see a lifting of the crippling U.S. oil blockade — and avoid a fate even worse than Maduro’s.
Trump claimed in a social media post that Venezuela will be turning over up to 50 million barrels of oil for sale by the United States, “and that money will be controlled by me.” Under what legal authority does the president take ownership of another country’s oil — and then, as CNN reports he is contemplating, deposit the proceeds in offshore bank accounts that circumvent Congress’s power of the purse? Who knows? Trump told the Times: “I don’t need international law.”
Trump’s imperial ambitions aren’t confined to Venezuela. Shortly after capturing Maduro, he renewed his threats to seize Greenland from NATO ally Denmark — “the easy way” or “the hard way.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told members of Congress that Trump prefers to buy it if he can, but that’s hardly a comfort, since Rubio also told Congress before Maduro’s arrest that Trump wasn’t pursuing regime change in Venezuela.
Denmark has made clear that Greenland isn’t for sale. If Trump does annex it, it will be at a 21st century version of the 1898 Treaty of Paris in which Trump’s latest favorite president, William McKinley, paid a nominal fee of $20 million to acquire the Philippines (Guam and Puerto Rico were obtained for free) after the U.S. victory over Spain in what Secretary of State John Hay termed “a splendid little war.” Elsewhere around the world, from Ukraine to Democratic Republic of Congo, Trump has also been throwing U.S. weight around in the hope of acquiring mineral rights or other valuable baubles (such as the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant in Ukraine).
How far we have come from the neoconservatism of the George W. Bush years. Its overweening sin (in which I shared) was an excess of idealism about the U.S. ability to export democracy. The overweening sin of Trump’s neocolonialism is the absence of any idealism at all. It is a cynical doctrine perfectly suited to a president who has devoted his life to making money, but it is at odds with the idealistic impulses long embedded in U.S. foreign policy. It smacks of 19th century imperialism, devoid of any lofty justifications about spreading Christianity and Western civilization.
There are many good reasons why colonialism went out of style. Imperial competition for resources helped to spark two world wars, and the rise of Nazism discredited the racist rationales used to justify White rule over people of color. The spread of nationalism, moreover, meant that people were no longer willing to be ruled by foreigners. The spread of democracy in Europe, meanwhile, led to voters demanding that money be spent on social welfare, not on the aristocracy’s foreign adventures.
European countries lamented the loss of their empires after World War II but now are much better off. That’s no fluke: Prosperity in the modern world derives primarily from human, not natural, resources. Per capita gross domestic product in Israel (which until recently had no oil or gas of its own) is 50 percent higher than in Saudi Arabia.
Trump is trapped in a Gilded Age bubble where tariffs are good and imperial resource grabs are even better. But imperial adventures often went awry in the past; for example, the U.S. annexation of the Philippines sparked an armed uprising that took years (and 126,000 U.S. troops) to put down.
The risks of miscalculation loom anew today. If Trump tries to acquire Greenland, the move could destroy NATO. If he keeps extorting Venezuela, it could lead to anti-American uprisings across Latin America. If he orders further military forays, they could result in U.S. fatalities — as the Maduro operation almost did. Why risk it? America is self-sufficient in oil and doesn’t need Venezuela’s. Denmark already allows the U.S. to pursue its economic and security interests in Greenland; no “ownership” needed.
Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tennessee) may be delighted that America has become “the dominant predator force in the Western Hemisphere,” but millions of people are likely to be horrified. (Hence the bipartisan Senate support last week to limit Trump’s war-making power in Venezuela.) The U.S., despite its own flirtations with imperialism, was born from an anti-colonial struggle and has long supported other people fighting for freedom.
Even the Monroe Doctrine, which Trump often cites, was a rebuke of European imperialism in Latin America, not a mandate for U.S. micromanagement. By turning the Monroe Doctrine on its head, Trump is squandering America’s moral capital — and inviting a global backlash against his avaricious overreach.
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