Trump’s Imperialism Revival

After a 100 years out of favour, imperialism is back.

A century ago, my own nation, Ireland, managed to wade through blood, bullets, mud and death to tear itself out of the grips of the largest colonial power in three centuries —the British Empire. WWI finished that empire but now, ironically, a revolutionary child of the British Empire has decided to revive a really bad idea. Welcome to the short age of Trumpian Colonialism..

Trump  attacked Venezuela, adding that mineral-rich nation to its budding Latin American empire. Just because it can, or rather, it thinks it can–just like it thought it could in Vietnam, in Afghanistan, in Iraq (you get the picture).

Of course, one of the real reasons this invasion happened now is that Trump’s approval ratings have plummeted. He promised jobs to his MAGA supporters and instead they got tariff inflation with tax cuts for the rich. Now they’re losing jobs to AI, and that process is accelerating. His popular promise to end wars is obviously going the wrong way. He couldn’t convince the European subcontinent not to tear itself apart, and Netanyahu twisted him around his little finger while lying his way into genocide with immunity.

Now Time Magazine has published a Trump wish-list for more invasions, from Cuba to Colombia, and from Denmark’s icy subcontinent, Greenland, to Mexico City. Rubio and Hegseth are calling for a bloodbath that will kill even, or especially, MAGA supporters.

Trump’s senile delirium is reaching a dangerous zenith. His midterm election prospects are so bad that the Republican Party may lose control of both the Senate and the House, and at his age this will be his last election. This means Trump could end up stymied, which will make his hawkish element, with Cuban-American Marco Rubio at the helm, even more dangerous. The military hawks and other advisors have convinced Trump that kidnapping a sitting president and stealing an entire country’s oil and minerals will help him in the election. What they haven’t emphasised is that the Venezuelan situation could unravel very quickly, to the detriment of all of the Americas.

Trump’s primary focus is on heavy crude—tar sands/Bitumen—to be processed by Koch Industries and other heavy crude cracking towers in the Midwest, Louisiana and Texas. Trump doesn’t believe in climate change, and he likes gold and the price almost doubled this year. Stealing gold mines from Russia and oil from China is not a good look.

Trump is trying to project strength as he reaches his 80th birthday. This can go very wrong for him, for the Republican party, and obviously for Venezuela and South America. Rubio paints Donald as a man of action for the hawkish deployment of U.S. soldiers in Latin America. Trump allowed Rubio, Hegseth and others to convince him that this was a good idea. They failed to ask for Congressional approval to go to war nor did they consider popular opinion.

The CIA-plus-military operation was couched as a “policing” move. “We are at war against drug trafficking organisations; it’s not a war against Venezuela”, Rubio said on Meet the Press. When George Stephanopoulos asked Rubio “Why wasn’t congressional authorisation necessary?”, he replied “[…] because this was not an invasion. We didn’t occupy a country. This was an arrest operation. This was a law enforcement operation. He was arrested on the ground by FBI agents, read his rights, and removed from the country. […]”. The Trump administration bombed various points of the country and Trump immediately announced that the United States government  “will run the country”. If that’s an “arrest operation”, I’d hate to see an invasion.

If Trump loses control of the House and Senate, calls for his impeachment for invading South America could advance. More than 110 people have died already in this election ploy, including 32 Cubans (thank you Mr. Rubio)

And on the ground in Venezuela, this is far from over. There is anger in the streets at the invasion and at the presumed treasonous sellout of some elements of the Venezuelan military. Soon they will find out who was responsible. Why did the Chinese and Russian air defence systems not fire? Could it be someone failed to pull the trigger? The CIA special operation in the country will make some people very rich–Maduro had a 50 million-dollar bounty on his head. Meanwhile in the U.S., Trump’s trillion dollar war machine may bankrupt his nation, but it will kill a lot of people first.

Resistance is growing among younger anti-war, anti-Trump democrats, but bipartisan support for the military and imperialist incursions is consistent in U.S. politics. Impeachment might work, but only if Trump loses the midterms very badly or creates a massive bloodbath that even the hawkish Democrats can’t ignore.

The Chilean deputy of Irish descent, Camila Vallejo Dowling, explained the situation clearly from a southern cone perspective. Trump wants Venezuela’s oil and says he’s taking political and administrative control of that nation, but this will not be just be a Venezuelan problem. “Venezuela today could be the Panama Canal tomorrow, Greenland, or who knows what other strategic resources like copper and lithium in other countries of the region,” she said.

“It´s time to open our eyes. He is telling us straight up… that because he has the power, he can do whatever he wants in Latin America because it’s his back yard. That’s something we cannot allow, no nation, no political sector. Because the sovereignty of nations is not negotiable.”