How China Can Burst the Bubble of Donald Trump's American Empire

By
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.

Around the same time, Trump himself gave a wide-ranging two-hour interview to four New York Times journalists, and his own statements were of similar boldness. He declared that he had no regard whatsoever for international legal niceties or normative traditions and was only restricted by his own personal morality, as he chose to interpret it:

And he said that he did not feel constrained by any international laws, norms, checks or balances.

Asked by my colleagues if there were any limits on his ability to use American military might, he said: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

This seemed an alarming expression of megalomania, far beyond anything I’d ever seen expressed by any petty Third World despot, let alone by the elected leader of a top world superpower.

A few days later I’d seen a facetious posting in which Trump had declared himself “the Acting President of Venezuela.” I had been absolutely sure that it was merely satirical, only wondering whether it had been concocted by his supporters or by his opponents. But it turned out to be absolutely true.

During the heyday of Western imperialism, I think that any national leader who publicly exhibited such delusional pretenses would have been immediately thrown out of office or even dispatched to a lunatic asylum. Henceforth, I will be reluctant to ever assume that anything regarding Trump is a joke.

There are many larger implications to all of these dramatic developments. Venezuela has been Trump’s current target but his arguments about “the Donroe Doctrine” seemed fully applicable to every other country in the Western hemisphere. Although he has not yet tried to implement that policy, Trump had effectively declared that all the once-sovereign nations of North and South America would be reduced to becoming our colonies, merely components of a vast American Empire.

Little Denmark had been a staunch American friend and NATO ally for more than three generations. So Trump’s announcement that he intended to seize its Greenland territory because he was much more powerful would certainly have horrified all the Western imperialists of that bygone era, and his past statements about annexing Canada fell into that same category.

I’d discussed all of these shocking developments in my article last week, with my title summarizing my own interpretation of what actually constituted “the Donroe Doctrine:”

According to all our school textbooks, the American constitutional system has been based upon a system of checks-and-balances maintained by our three co-equal branches of government. But so far at least, Trump’s appalling actions have provoked no substantial push-back from Congress or the courts, with Trump actually boasting that he hadn’t even bothered informing the Congressional leadership of his plans to attack Venezuela and seize its president.

One of the small number of Congressmen expressing his outrage over this illegal behavior has been Republican Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), and Trump and his billionaire donor allies have therefore targeted Massie for removal. Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) had spent years as one of Trump’s staunchest MAGA loyalists, but when she began expressing serious doubts about some of his recent decisions, she was quickly driven from office by a wave of death threats directed against both herself and her family members.

Trump’s domestic and economic policies have been implemented in just as shockingly high-handed a fashion as those involving foreign affairs.

Tariffs are just the name that we give to taxes on imported goods, and according to our Constitution, all changes in tax law must be made by legislation originating in the House of Representatives. But in total disregard of centuries of these legal precedents, last year Trump began issuing a very long series of executive orders drastically changing tariff tax rates at weekly or sometimes even daily intervals, based solely upon his personal will or personal whim. I’m not sure whether any major country in the entire history of the world has ever enacted so many large, rapid-fire changes in its tax, financial, and economic policies.

Having freely gotten away with such an extreme aggrandizement of presidential authority, Trump then took matters even further. Growing dissatisfied with the performance of some leading defense contractors, he issued an executive order severely restricting all their financial activity:

An executive order posted Wednesday evening said companies “are not permitted in any way, shape, or form to pay dividends or buy back stock, until such time as they are able to produce a superior product, on time and on budget.”

Earlier Wednesday, Trump said in a Truth Social post that he would limit executive pay to $5 million, but the dollar figure wasn’t included in the executive order.

Thus, our president has now apparently asserted his right to issue executive orders setting the terms and conditions of all corporate dividends, buybacks, salaries, and bonuses as he saw fit. These are surely economic powers as sweeping as those enjoyed by any absolute monarch in human history.

For many months, Trump has been acting in these astonishingly high-handed ways, totally disregarding all American laws and Constitutional restrictions. He has been doing so without any significant reaction from the Congressional leadership, which has apparently been intimidated into such silence that they have seemingly disappeared from the American political landscape. This obviously represents a dramatic, almost unprecedented change in our form of government, and quite a number of prominent individuals have taken note of what has been happening.

With a career stretching back six decades, former Ambassador Chas Freeman ranks as one of our most distinguished diplomats and he had also served as an assistant secretary of defense. In numerous interviews, he has suggested that America had essentially become a presidential dictatorship in all but name, and that since Congress seemed no longer to play any role in our foreign or domestic policies, perhaps it should just be abolished.

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Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University has taken much the same position, arguing that unless the Supreme Court very soon took decisive action to curb Trump’s outrageous aggrandizement of political power, we should no longer be considered a republic, but had instead followed ancient Rome down the path towards becoming a monarchy that retained some vestigial republican institutions.

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Tucker Carlson ranks as the most popular figure in the world of conservative media and he has spent years as a crucial Trump ally. But in the wake of our president’s unilateral attack on Venezuela and his boasts that he had seized control of that Latin American country, Carlson concurred with Sachs that America had made the transition from a republican to an imperial form of government, though he carefully stated those conclusions without rancor, in merely descriptive terms.

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Freeman and Sachs greatly lamented these developments and Carlson sought to maintain his neutrality. But success succeeds, and the near-flawless execution of Trump’s Delta Force commando raid on Venezuela’s presidential palace has gained him strong support in some other quarters. Quite a number of right-wing pundits have become wildly enthusiastic over what they regard as Trump’s striking victories on the international stage.

Over the last few years and especially the last few months, right-wing podcaster Nick Fuentes has become one of the most popular rising stars on the Internet, attracting a huge audience among younger Americans because of his perceived willingness to shatter so many widespread taboos, notably those involving any candid discussion of Jewish power.

During most of this period, he has often been very critical of Trump and he certainly didn’t endorse him during the 2024 presidential campaign. But he later became enthusiastic over the sweeping worldwide tariffs that Trump had unilaterally imposed during his “Liberation Day” declaration of April 2nd, and he has become even more gleeful over Trump’s attack on Venezuela and our president’s boasts that he now controlled that country’s oil.

The podcaster’s recent shows have included many such dramatic statements, and quite a number of these were collected together by Brad Griffin, a right-wing blogger, who argued that these demonstrated that Fuentes had now gone “full Neocon imperialist.” Considering all those clips, one can hardly dispute that assessment.

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Ron Unz, publisher of The American Conservative, served as chairman of English for the Children, the nationwide campaign to dismantle bilingual education. He is also the founder of RonUnz.org
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