Donald Trump’s Imperialism of Decline Is a Global Menace

To make sense of US foreign policy under Donald Trump, we need to see it against the long-term historical background. Trump’s approach to world affairs may be erratic, but that does not mean it is completely without precedent.

The United States has long been an imperial power. While not establishing formal colonies, the US has instead created an informal empire in which obsequious governments in the Global South enable the pursuit of American political and economic interests.

Throughout its history, American imperialism has come in three varieties: hard militarism, covert regime change, and multilateral coercion. Trump’s brand of imperialism continues along these pathways, albeit with some significant changes, especially its brazenness.

America’s Militarist Tradition

Recent US intervention in Iran is part of a long American tradition of hard military imperialism that stretches back to the Philippines in the early twentieth century and notably includes Vietnam and Iraq in the post–World War II period. American goals in such cases were often grandiose but vague.

In the case of the Philippines, for example, the stated goal was to establish an entrepôt to China that could be America’s version of Hong Kong. Saving Southeast Asia from communism was of course the justification for the invasion of Vietnam, while the war in Iraq was supposed to be the beginning of a mission to bring democracy to the Middle East.

Hard militarism in these imperial interventions of the past seldom enabled the United States to achieve its avowed goals: the US never really gained access to the enormous Chinese market; Vietnam did go communist, but the rest of Southeast Asia was never threatened and very much remains capitalist; Iraq is now a chaotic state, and the war destabilized the entire Middle East.

Meanwhile, poor countries of the world have paid a heavy price, not only in economic devastation, but especially in lives lost. For example, when the deaths of soldiers and of war-related civilians are combined, nearly half a million Filipinos died during the US-Philippines war; some three million Vietnamese died in the Vietnam War; and half a million Iraqis may have perished during George W. Bush’s preemptive war of choice.

Why the United States went to war in Iran in 2026 remains a puzzle. The consensus within the American intelligence community was that Iran did not pose any immediate threat to the US. While Israel was an integral partner in the war, the suggestion that Israel pushed the United States into attacking Iran is also not persuasive; the tail does not wag the dog.

American intervention in Iran was, once again, an imperial war of choice. The vague but grandiose goals included further destroying Iran’s military and nuclear capabilities (a preemptive war), access to Iranian oil (a war of greed), and liberating Iranians from a theocratic dictatorship (a quixotic war).

Although the war is still unfolding, the results will probably not be all that different from those in the past. Iran and its people will have paid a heavy price in terms of lives and well-being, but the United States is not likely to achieve its grandiose goals.

Profitable Failures

Given this record of recurring failures, the question that remains is why the United States repeatedly treads the path of military imperialism. The sanguine answer that such wars are recurring mistakes will not do; to accept such a view, one would have to assume that there is no learning curve among America’s powerful. The genuine answer is more complicated and has both a political and an economic component.

The United States possesses enormous surplus power in the world. The temptation to use this power is ever present, especially if provoked by lesser powers. As Madeline Albright, Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, famously remarked to Colin Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: “What is the point of having this superb military that you are always talking about if we cannot use it?” The readily provoked Trump does not ask such probing questions; he has already used military force against seven countries, and more may well follow.

Military interventions also lead to economic benefits. Discussions of the failure to achieve avowed war goals often proceed by underlining the cost of particular wars. In the case of Trump’s latest adventure, estimates range from some $40 billion to more than $100 billion. While useful, such discussions often miss a core dynamic of imperial interventions. Taxpayers and soldiers are the ones who bear the costs of such wars, while the benefits accrue to a much more select layer.

In the case of Iran, oil companies have profited handsomely: both ExxonMobil and Chevron Corporation reported record profits due to higher oil prices resulting from the war. In addition, the defense budget is likely to go up significantly because of the war, benefiting military industries.

This pattern of overseas interventions providing an occasion for higher defense budgets also has a long American history; for example, during the early Cold War years, there was considerable reluctance in the United States to increase defense expenditures to the levels sought by the Truman administration. The Korean War put an end to such hesitations, and the budget skyrocketed. As Dean Acheson, Truman’s secretary of state, then crowed: “Korea came along and saved us.”

Regime Change

Covert capture of Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro is also part of a long tradition of deposing rulers in the Global South who are deemed to be antithetical to American interests and replacing them with pro-American minions. Earlier examples include Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran, Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala, Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, and Salvador Allende in Chile.

Such regime change operations have often led to significant economic gains for American corporations but also to unsavory rulers and distorted economies in poor countries. Anointed by the United States, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi of Iran replaced the democratically elected Mossadegh, ruling autocratically, selling oil to the United States, and establishing a cozy relationship with American corporations based on the exchange of oil revenues for American goods, especially military hardware.

In Guatemala, the overthrow of Árbenz enabled the United Fruit Company to recover its expropriated land and to reverse labor and land reforms, creating a classic banana republic. Lumumba’s assassination led to three decades of ruinous rule by Mobutu Sese Seko in the Congo (which he renamed Zaire) while providing an economic opening for US companies. The Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet reversed Allende’s nationalization of US companies such as Anaconda, Kennecott, ITT, and Dow Chemicals.

Venezuela is very likely to follow this pattern. The removal of Maduro was clearly an effective military maneuver, but it was also an act of extreme imperial hubris. The fact that an alternate leadership was found so quickly — and without violence — appears to be a modest departure from similar covert actions of the past. But taking direct control of Venezuela’s oil revenues goes further than previous interventions in Latin America or other regions.

This brash move hearkens back to an earlier phase in the history of informal empires. Britain controlled the finances of post–Opium War China and then managed the finances of Egypt in the late nineteenth century in partnership with France. The reappearance of this form of financial control in the twenty-first century marks a further erosion of previous norms of sovereignty and self-determination.

As the United States eases sanctions on Venezuela and American investment returns, Venezuela’s economy is bound to grow. Much will then be said in official circles and mainstream media outlets about how much better off Venezuelans now are under American tutelage. What will be forgotten is how much American sanctions hurt Venezuela’s economy in the first place. The pattern of Venezuela’s rebound is also likely to involve a sharply unequal economy still dependent on oil exports to the United States for its erratic buoyancy.

Trump was strikingly brazen in stating that the goal of this intervention was to gain access to Venezuela’s oil for American companies. Gone were all the shibboleths of saving a country from communism or promoting democracy. How does one interpret this shift? The answer could simply be the leadership team involved: Trump and his acolytes are no liberals; they believe in “might is right” and do not feel the need to cover up their rapacious actions in ideological clothing.

But it is more plausible that we are seeing a growing realization at the highest echelons of the US state that America is a shrinking power. Legitimacy and soft power are resources that global hegemons value. It may well be that the United States is giving up on such ambitions and is likely to be even more dangerous in the future, because declining powers believe in taking what they can by force, consequences be damned.

Forcing Doors Open

This suggestion that America is a shrinking empire is consistent with the fact that its third imperial pathway, multilateral coercion, may also be in retreat. Historically, the United States has cooperated with other Western powers to subjugate countries in the global periphery. For example, it was part of an imperial condominium that divided up China in the first half of the twentieth century.

As a matter of fact, the Unites States used the decline of Qing China as an occasion to promulgate the Open Door Notes, a set of propositions that became a framework for America’s preferred road to imperialism, informal empire. This would mean that poor countries could enjoy nominal sovereignty if they left their economies open for advanced capitalist countries to exploit.

Following this roadmap, the United States in the post–World War II period frequently cooperated with other lesser capitalist powers like Britain and France to keep open the economies of the developing world. Most recently, the US used multilateral organizations like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to impose the Washington Consensus on countries in the Global South, especially in Latin America; these actions ensured that indebted American banks did not suffer financial losses.

This third form of American imperialism may well now be in decline. The reasons are not hard to understand. The US economy is no longer competitive in the global arena. Free trade imperialism does not pay anymore; Trump’s tariffs and blatant imperial interventions are both indicative of this new global reality. The United States can forcibly open Latin American countries to international trade and investment, only to see China move in rather than American firms.

In the political arena, too, a declining hegemon is not in a position to direct multilateral organizations to do its bidding. Nor can it readily cajole lesser powers to join imperial ventures, especially when the United States treats such powers with scorn. Notice how few takers there are as the US invites European countries to join it in opening the Strait of Hormuz.

Most Americans do not think of America as an imperial country. With Trump’s overt imperialism, that form of hypocrisy is hard to sustain. Good American liberals may still take comfort in the belief that, following Trump, a well-meaning America will reemerge as a benign global hegemon. Unfortunately, that was never true in the past, and it is not likely to be so in the future.