“We’re going to run the country,” Donald Trump told a press conference, hours after U.S. military forces bombed Venezuela and abducted its head of state. Has there been a more brazen manifestation of American empire this century? Of all Trump’s audacious moves in the first weeks of 2026, this provided the clearest confirmation of a profound and destabilizing geostrategic shift.

There was the oil and there was American security and there was the Monroe Doctrine. There was “the good of the Venezuelan people” too—though euphemism seemed to follow from Trump’s imprecise extemporizing more than from any concern for conjuring a jus ad bellum. And there was loose talk about narcoterrorists, the latest fantasy-antagonist begotten of the rhetorical fusion of villainies. But there was barely any of the institutional melodrama that characterized the previous generation of American interventionism: no PowerPoint presentations to the UN Security Council, no dismissals of international civil servants, no dodgy dossiers cooked up by allied governments.

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