The recent US military action against Venezuela, culminating in the capture of its leadership, represents far more than an isolated intervention. According to Guardian columnist Owen Jones, it is the opening salvo in a radical reordering of American global strategy under Donald Trump, one that abandons the pretence of worldwide hegemony for a more brutal, focused imperial project in the Americas.
The End of Global Hegemony and the Return of the Monroe Doctrine
The Trump administration has formally declared an end to the era of US global dominance. Its published National Security Strategy dismisses the post-Cold War ambition of permanent American world leadership as a failed elite project. "The days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over," it states, marking what Jones describes as an unceremonious funeral for superpower status.
What replaces it is a vision of rival spheres of influence. For the United States, this sphere is explicitly defined as the Western Hemisphere. The strategy announces a forceful reassertion of the Monroe Doctrine, a 19th-century policy that historically enabled US domination over Latin America under the guise of opposing European colonialism.
Trump's own comments have stripped away any diplomatic veneer. In 2023, he bluntly stated that under his leadership, the US would have "taken over" Venezuela to acquire "all that oil." This candour, Jones argues, is Trump's defining feature, discarding the traditional rhetoric of democracy and human rights to reveal the naked pursuit of resource wealth and regional control.
A Challenge to the 'Pink Tide' and Chinese Influence
The assault on Venezuela is not happening in a vacuum. Over the past three decades, US influence in Latin America has faced significant challenges. The rise of progressive governments, known as the 'pink tide' and led by figures like Brazil's former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, sought greater regional independence.
More critically, China has emerged as a major power across the continent. The two-way trade in goods between China and Latin America was a staggering 259 times larger in 2023 than in 1990, making China the region's second-largest trading partner after the US. Trump's move against Venezuela is, therefore, a direct attempt to roll back this geopolitical shift and re-establish uncontested American primacy in its traditional backyard.
Jones notes that Washington's violent interference in the region is a long-standing tradition, citing the US-backed coup in Chile that overthrew socialist president Salvador Allende and support for right-wing dictatorships across South and Central America during the Cold War.
The Imperial Boomerang: From Foreign Policy to Domestic Repression
The implications of this shift extend far beyond foreign borders. Jones warns of the 'imperial boomerang' effect, a concept articulated by Martinican author Aimé Césaire, where the tools and ideologies of foreign oppression inevitably return to reshape the domestic polity.
We have already seen, Jones contends, how the language of the "war on terror" has been repurposed for domestic political repression. He quotes Trump's former deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, labelling the Democratic Party a "domestic extremist organisation." The deployment of National Guard troops into Democrat-run US cities is framed as an echo of military "surges" once used in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The potential annexation of Greenland, which Trump has explicitly stated the US "need[s], absolutely," would represent a brazen seizure of over two million square kilometres of European territory. Such an act, following a muted European response to Venezuela, could shatter the NATO alliance, founded on collective defence.
Jones draws a historical parallel to the American Anti-Imperialist League, formed after the US seized the Philippines in 1898, which warned that "no nation can long endure half republic and half empire." The question now is whether America's democratic institutions, however flawed, can withstand the pressures of this new, openly imperial project.
The emerging world order, as outlined in the column, is one where authoritarian powers use force to subjugate neighbours and seize resources. Trump's indulgence of Russian ambitions in Ukraine may be part of this grim realpolitik. The new order, Jones concludes, is being assembled in plain sight, raising the urgent question of whether there is sufficient will and means to counter it.
