There’s something disingenuous about liberal Western media rediscovering that the term “imperialism” also applies to the US. Donald Trump is no radical departure from his predecessors; he simply abandons the pretense of exporting democracy.
It would require a highly selective memory to regard the abduction of Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro and his wife on January 3 as Washington’s return to an imperialist policy that it supposedly abandoned in 1945, or even 1918.
There’s something disingenuous about the sudden reappearance of the term “imperialist” in Western media outlets, which previously applied it only to Russia. For — to limit ourselves to the post–Cold War era — it is in a very similar manner that Washington returned to large-scale military operations in 1989 under President George H. W. Bush, after long years of “Vietnam syndrome.” Like the recent intervention in Venezuela, the invasion of Panama and the abduction of its dictator Manuel Noriega, in blatant violation of international law, were also presented as an anti-drug police operation.
This initiated a new sequence of US interventions, culminating in the invasion of Iraq in 2003 under George W. Bush. The occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan following the attacks of September 11, 2001, quickly turned into quagmires from which the United States only managed to extricate itself after significant losses — in 2011 in the case of Iraq, and a decade later in that of Afghanistan.
These two major fiascos — Iraq in particular, since it involved far higher stakes and deployed vastly greater US resources — revived the Vietnam syndrome. The lessons drawn from that earlier experience — avoid any prolonged occupation, set limited objectives, use massive force at the outset but for a short period, favor remote strikes over sending in ground troops — were reinvigorated, after having been deliberately ignored by George W. Bush’s administration. His successor, Barack Obama, who prided himself on having opposed the invasion of Iraq, broke records for the use of remote strikes, especially involving drones. Donald Trump pursued the same course during his first term as did Joe Biden.
What is so new then about Trump’s act of international piracy in Venezuela? It has been characterized as a return to a policy of “regime change” abandoned after the Iraqi debacle. But this misunderstands both the meaning of that term and Trump’s policy. The expression itself refers above all to the occupation of Iraq. It gained currency during George W. Bush’s first term, when his administration was packed with neoconservatives, mainly at the Department of Defense, who called for an end to a long tradition of “realist” policy-making, showing indulgence to dictatorships, even the most brutal, as long as they served US interests.
With the Cold War over, Washington’s ostensible new role was to match its deeds to its words by promoting democratic change on a global scale. Regime change in Iraq was supposed to go along with nation-building: the construction of a new state under the tutelage of the United States as the occupying power, along the lines of what had happened in West Germany and Japan after 1945. Iraq was slated to become the showcase for democratic change in the Middle East. So compelling would its example be that, combined with US pressure, it would push the other states in the region to imitate this virtuous model, and Washington would at last be able to create a world in its own image.
It goes without saying that such a prospect held little appeal for the Middle East’s autocracies, starting with Washington’s own vassal states, which had long benefitted from the American suzerain’s “realist” accommodation with their despotism. These vassal autocracies launched a battle against the neocons within the Bush administration, relying on the State Department and the CIA. The Saudis in particular sought to persuade the US president to abandon any ambition to fundamentally rebuild the regime in Baghdad.
Together with the CIA’s Iraqi ally (and later prime minister) Ayad Allawi, they proposed to Bush that he collaborate with the army leadership, helping them to oust Saddam Hussein and reorient Iraq in a direction compatible with US regional interests. “Our idea was to take off the upper crust and leave the rest of the regime intact,” Allawi later said.
When they caught wind of this, the neocons’ allies in Iraq, led by Ahmed Chalabi, sounded the alarm in the media, accusing an Arab-American coterie of wanting to perpetuate Saddamism without Saddam. With backing from British prime minister Tony Blair, the neocons prevailed. But their plan was to prove catastrophic for the United States: the dismantling of the Iraqi state in the name of “de-Ba’athification,” inspired by the denazification of Germany, descended into chaos, enabling both Iran to dominate the country’s Shia majority and an anti-American and anti-Shia insurgency to develop across the Arab Sunni regions, with al-Qaeda as its main force.
By 2004, Chalabi had been accused of working for Tehran and disowned by Washington. The neocons were ejected from the administration the following year and in 2006, the US Congress formulated an exit strategy, allowing dreams of democracy to wither on the vine.
Henceforth, the lesson from Iraq was taken to be that the fatal mistake had been dismantling the state apparatus, which should instead have been retained to govern the country. So with military-imposed democratization off the table, Obama attempted democratization from the bottom up. He sought to back the Arab Spring uprisings with Qatar’s help, banking on the protests being co-opted by the Muslim Brotherhood. The failure of this alternative strategy — notably the reassertion of military control in Egypt in 2013, with Riyadh’s support and against Washington’s wishes — hastened its demise.
Only the course that the Saudi leadership had advocated before the occupation of Iraq remained in play: the thinking is that where major interests are at stake, it is better to force existing regimes to comply with Washington’s wishes than to try to overthrow them and risk creating chaos.
That lesson was not lost on Trump. He reacted to the disaster in Iraq by calling for the use of force to seize its oil resources, in a manner that would later characterize his presidency. In 2011, the final year of the US occupation of Iraq, he rebuked Obama for abandoning the country without having taken control of its oil. In Time to Get Tough, a book that set the tone for his future presidential campaign, Trump dealt with Iraq in a chapter entitled “Take the Oil” under the subheading “To the Victor Go the Spoils.” The United States, he argued, needed to seize Iraqi oil — leaving a percentage for Iraq itself — in order to prevent Iran from getting hold of it. This is the same argument he has recently used to justify his designs on Venezuela and Greenland, both of which he claims are threatened by Chinese and Russian encroachment.
Having become highly critical of regime change that aimed to implant democracy, Trump drew the logical conclusions. In his first term, he negotiated the US withdrawal from Afghanistan with the Taliban — a withdrawal completed under Biden in disastrous fashion, as is well known. Inspired by the lesson from Iraq, his administration in 2018 cultivated links with Venezuelan military officers who were preparing a coup in Caracas, officers who nonetheless featured on Washington’s list of regime figures accused of crimes and involvement in drug trafficking. Their first attempt was stifled at birth. A second, in April 2019, also came to naught, having failed to mobilize the army or the population.
A key figure in the latter attempt was Manuel Cristopher Figuera, director general of Venezuela’s Bolivarian National Intelligence Service (SEBIN), who had been placed under US sanctions in February 2019 for “mass torture, mass human rights violations, and mass persecution against those who want democratic change in Venezuela.”
After the abortive coup, Figuera fled to the United States, where the sanctions against him were, unsurprisingly, lifted. The failure was nonetheless a bitter one for Trump, who in the name of democracy had been pushed by his first-term team to recognize Juan Guaidó (president of the National Assembly, which was then dominated by the opposition) as Venezuela’s president. This setback intensified his aversion to invoking the democratic cause.
Trump’s first political foreign visit of his second term last year was, as in his first, to Saudi Arabia. While sharply criticizing the very idea of promoting democracy in the Middle East, he also claimed to have little taste for the use of force. This hollow rhetoric, combined with his pretensions to be a peacemaker with his eye on the Nobel Prize, has fostered a misleading impression of Trump that associates him with isolationism — a political tendency traditionally linked to the American far right — and even pacifism.
But Trump has always prided himself on being a “tough guy” who, unlike Obama, won’t hesitate to strike when necessary, as he did in Syria and Iraq, among other places, in his first term, and has done far more often since the start of his second. The list of countries targeted by US forces since January 2025 is already considerable: Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Nigeria, in addition to strikes in the Caribbean linked to Venezuela.
Contrary to the reputation for unpredictability that he cultivates, Trump’s neo-imperial policy is far from incoherent. It is naturally dictated by his view of the United States’ material and strategic interests — and at times by his own personal and family ones. The lesson from Iraq is at the heart of his approach, as is clearly the case in Venezuela: he no longer bothers to pretend he is promoting democracy there and has not demanded free elections. He has even — for now — sidelined María Corina Machado, Venezuela’s main opposition figure, who has previously had the backing of Western states.
Trump boasts about the contacts his administration has established inside Maduro’s regime, including with the vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, the now acting president. He believes that after his show of force — and in light of the permanent threat of further military action and a tightening of the United States’ stranglehold on the country’s economy — the Venezuelan government has no choice but to comply with his demands, and the interests of Chevron, the main US oil company operating in Venezuela and those of other Trump allies. As Mike Johnson, Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, aptly said: “This is not regime change, but change of behavior by a regime.” The same approach underlies Trump’s insistence that Cuba and Iran “make a deal” with him — under duress, of course.
Trump’s second-term neo-imperial policy combines a cynicism that some have mistaken for honesty with a policy of brute force in the service of a worldview that displays a taste for both supremacism (America First) and lebensraum — the “Donroe Doctrine,” a new version of the Monroe Doctrine that claimed the Americas as the United States’ exclusive preserve.
And if Trump is not hypocritically posing as a champion of democracy, as his predecessors did, this is not because of any reluctance to interfere in other countries’ affairs. He and members of his administration — J. D. Vance foremost among them — openly support their ideological counterparts wherever they may be — especially in Latin America, as he has recently shown in Argentina and Brazil.
This article was originally published by Le Monde diplomatique.