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President Donald Trump is ringing in 2026 with a new kind of American imperialism.
► The US Army’s Delta Force was dispatched to depose Venezuelan chief Nicolás Maduro in a snatch-and-grab operation Saturday. Now Trump says Secretary of State Marco Rubio can be half of “running” that oil-rich country, no matter that ends up meaning.
► Leaders of neighboring nations, together with Colombia and Mexico, have been placed on discover by Trump that he might take some variety of motion in opposition to them, too — a clear warning to fall in line.
► Trump on Sunday expressed a renewed need to take over Greenland, claiming the US wants it for safety functions. Both Greenland and Denmark, a NATO ally of the US, are staunchly against the concept.
► The president additionally threatened to take new motion in opposition to Iran on behalf of protesters there, suggesting the US might revisit the Middle East with its navy would possibly.
All of this means a new period of violent American affect in the remaining of the world. And Trump’s choice to turn the American arsenal back on the Western Hemisphere recalls the very lengthy, continuously dark historical past of American-led regime change nearer to residence.
Whether to intimidate European powers; to guard American-allied companies resembling banana exporters; to dominate delivery routes or to protect in opposition to the specter of communism, the US has been both toppling or propping up numerous governments for generations.
“This is one of the oldest stories in American history,” mentioned Stephen Kinzer, a senior fellow at Brown University’s Watson School of International and Public Affairs.
Maduro shares an necessary trait with different deposed Central and South American leaders over the previous 100 years or so, Kinzer mentioned.
“These are leaders who do not accept the right of the United States to dominate their countries and their region,” mentioned Kinzer, creator of the ebook “Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq.”
“The United States finds this intolerable,” Kinzer mentioned, “so it’s back to the future.”
Maduro, Kinzer acknowledged, is a far-from-sympathetic character — a brutal dictator main an undemocratic authorities. But that’s true of some who’re US allies.
“Mohammed bin Salman (the crown prince of Saudi Arabia) has never won an election and chopped up his main critic into little pieces, but that’s fine with us, because he’s on our side,” Kinzer mentioned with irony.
The snatch-and-grab arrest is one thing new
A novel characteristic of the Maduro toppling — which can find yourself being extra a decapitation of his regime than a full-scale regime change — is that he was primarily taken rendition-style from Caracas, in accordance with Alexander Downes, director of the Institute for Security and Conflict Studies at George Washington University.
“Foreign leaders do get indicted in the U.S. That’s fine,” Downes mentioned in an e mail. See Trump’s latest pardon of former Honduras President Juan Orlando Hernández, who was really convicted of trafficking medicine into the US.
“Kidnapping (rival world leaders) while in office, however, strikes me as a bad idea if not illegal,” mentioned Downes, creator of the ebook “Catastrophic Success: Why Foreign-Imposed Regime Change Goes Wrong.”
Downes added that the transfer could create a new precedent for different nations. How will the US react if China or Russia now merely kidnaps a rival chief?
The concept that Trump thinks the US is now operating Venezuela — one thing disputed by the country’s acting president — is just not more likely to endear him to anybody within the area.
The most blatant corollary to Trump’s Venezuelan operation could appear to be Panama, the place 36 years in the past this month, the strongman navy chief Manuel Noriega surrendered to US custody. He had been seeking refuge within the Vatican embassy in Panama City after US forces, together with paratroopers, invaded his small nation en masse.
Noriega was later tried and convicted in US court docket, though he gained the concession of being treated as a prisoner of war quite than a garden-variety drug trafficker.
Kinzer famous there are a lot of variations between Panama and Venezuela that additionally complicate comparisons between 1990 and 2026. Venezuela is a a lot bigger nation with extra rugged terrain. And again in 1990, the US already had a giant navy presence garrisoned in Panama. There’s no US navy base inside Venezuela.
The US invasion of Panama will not be remembered by many Americans, nevertheless it price a whole lot of lives within the small nation, and its anniversary is now handled as a national day of mourning.
Views of the Panama invasion could have turned over time, nevertheless it stays among the many most profitable US regime change operations as a result of it allowed the US to topple Noriega and a democratic authorities to take over.
Defending democracy has lengthy been a acknowledged, if generally unbelievable, objective of latest US-led regime change, however Trump doesn’t seem significantly fascinated by it.
In that regard, Trump is recalling the primary half of the twentieth century, when presidents resembling William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft have been swinging “big stick” or “gunboat” diplomacy across the Caribbean.
“We invaded Cuba in 1898 with the promise that once we helped the Cubans chase out the Spanish overlords, we would turn Cuba over to its people. As soon as the Spanish were gone, we changed our minds and decided we wanted to rule Cuba,” Kinzer mentioned.
He then ticked by way of different US interventions on the behest of enterprise that led to the overthrow, ouster or resignation of governments in the course of the early twentieth century, together with in Nicaragua and Honduras. The US navy additionally occupied Nicaragua, Haiti and the Dominican Republic at numerous factors for years throughout this period.
Later, because the Red Scare and Cold War consumed the US, administrations from each events meddled overseas for extra ideological causes, resembling preventing socialism and the unfold of communism — however these strikes additionally helped US companies.
The CIA, on the urging of the United Fruit Company, helped engineer a coup in Guatemala in 1954 that achieved the objective of toppling the democratically elected authorities. Subsequent a long time noticed navy juntas and mass killings.
That’s about the identical time the US and the United Kingdom have been colluding to assist overthrow the democratically elected authorities in Iran.
“What looks like an immediate success can turn into a long term failure,” Downes mentioned, pointing to Iran as Exhibit A. “Washington has been dealing with the fallout, including the Iran hostage crisis, Iran’s bid for nuclear weapons, and its hostility to Israel for almost 50 years.”
The similar could possibly be mentioned of the unintended penalties of more moderen US actions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya.
Decades later, in 1973, the US helped overthrow the democratically elected Chilean President Salvador Allende, who died in a coup. His successor, Gen. Augusto Pinochet, led a repressive right-wing regime.
For Trump, who has variously cited drug trafficking, immigration and different justifications for going after Maduro, the tip objective may be energy.
“This is not about values. This is simply about maximizing US security and prosperity,” mentioned Alan Kuperman, a professor of public affairs on the University of Texas at Austin, who has written about regime change.
“What he wants is to make the US the dominant power in Latin America, and he wants for the resources of Latin America to benefit the US more than they have,” Kuperman surmised.
That helps clarify why, for now, Maduro’s regime has been left intact, simply with out Maduro. Trump has mentioned he doesn’t suppose opposition leaders can rule.
Setting apart values like democracy and human rights, Kuperman mentioned US-led regime change accomplishes its targets about half the time.
It doesn’t take a lot of a leap to see that whereas Trump largely talks about medicine, his administration can be very a lot fascinated by opening extra of Venezuela’s oil fields to US firms.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the Cuban American who Trump mentioned can be part of “running” Venezuela in the intervening time, appears to have some of his personal motivations. Rubio’s household fled Cuba, the nation the place the US did not depose or take out communist chief Fidel Castro.
Castro is useless, however Cuba remains to be communist and depends closely on Venezuela for assist. Taking out Maduro could possibly be a step to regime change in Cuba.
“It’s amazing how Cuba has had such a hold on the United States and on the American imagination for so long. This little island has distorted our foreign policy over generations, and it’s happening again. I think, without the fact that Venezuela is the lifeline for Cuba, this might never have happened,” Kinzer mentioned.