https://www.lewrockwell.com/2026/01/ron-unz/how-china-can-burst-the-bubble-of-donald-trumps-american-empire/

By Ron Unz
The Unz Review
January 21, 2026

Donald Trump and His American Empire

Just after New Year’s Day, President Donald Trump ordered a successful raid on Venezuela that abducted President Nicolas Maduro and his wife. Many of his angry critics denounced this as a return to the notorious Gunboat Diplomacy of President Theodore Roosevelt and others in the early years of the twentieth century. Trump had allegedly now adopted a similar policy, proclaiming his corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, which his supporters hailed as “the Donroe Doctrine.”

But this really isn’t correct.

TR never did anything like that, nor did any of the leading advocates of European imperialism such as Disraeli, Palmerston, or Kaiser Wilhelm. The notion of attacking a weaker but sovereign country without any fig-leaf of legal justification and seizing its ruler would have been unthinkable during all the centuries since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 ended the Thirty Years’ War and established our modern respect for national sovereignty.

However, many aspects of Trump’s boastful statements did indeed hark back to that era of high imperialism. He explained that since Venezuela was in the Western Hemisphere—“our own backyard”—it had no right to trade or conduct normal business relationships with whomever it wished, including China and Russia. Instead, Venezuela must market all its oil through America, only purchase American products, and only allow investment by American corporations or by those that America approved.

All of this was exactly the way that colonies of a century or more ago were treated, with their economic activity under the tight control of their distant colonial masters such as Britain or France. But although those imperial powers did regularly try to expand their holdings in the unclaimed portions of Africa and other backward regions, world leaders would have been utterly scandalized if a more powerful nation of that era had used its superior military power to subdue a weaker one and reduce it to the status of a mere colony.

Stephen Miller is one of Trump’s most influential advisors and in a very telling CNN interview just after our attack on Venezuela, he argued that as a consequence of unmatched American military power, we could and should do exactly that. I’m not sure that I’d ever heard any American official declare that “Might Makes Right” in such totally brazen terms. His statements would have completely shocked and outraged all the Christian presidents, prime ministers, and monarchs of the nineteenth century Age of Imperialism.