Trump Era or The New Imperial Age

There’s a line from 2014 that’s aged in a way John Kerry probably didn’t expect. Back then, he scolded Vladimir Putin for acting in a “nineteenth-century fashion” after Crimea. The jab was aimed at old-school conquest, borders taken by force, empires reviving their habits.

Fast-forward to the Trump era—especially after the sudden U.S. operation in Venezuela—and that phrase starts to feel uncomfortably transferable.

People are already reaching for historical analogies. That’s what we do when the present looks too large to hold in one head. The twentieth century offers plenty: coups, proxy wars, interventions dressed up as stability missions. But if you want the era that rhymes most with what’s happening now, you have to go further back—past the Cold War, past Vietnam, past even the CIA’s heyday—and land on 1898.

Because 1898 wasn’t just an event. It was a shift in how Americans imagined power.

It was the moment the United States stopped being a country with overseas interests and began acting like a country with an overseas destiny.

Contents

1898: when the sun didn’t set

After the Spanish-American War, the U.S. didn’t merely beat Spain. It stepped into Spain’s imperial footprint.

In a short stretch of time, Washington acquired Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico, and turned Cuba into something like a ward of the American state. Around the same time, it annexed Hawaii, chased the dream of an isthmian canal, and even flirted with buying territory from Denmark in the Caribbean.

For decades after, the United States didn’t behave like a republic that occasionally used force. It behaved like a rising empire that believed force could reorganize geography.

Woodrow Wilson, years before becoming president, looked at that moment and basically said: we are not the same country anymore.

That’s the kind of psychological pivot that matters. Not a policy memo. Not a treaty. A mental switch: we can do this.

And once a great power internalizes “we can do this,” it starts seeing the world differently. It starts seeing opportunities where it used to see limits.

The old vision: wealth, land, civilization

The late nineteenth-century American worldview rested on a simple tripod:

Wealth as the foundation of power
Land and geography as security
Civilization as both moral hierarchy and strategic logic

William McKinley is the cleanest representative of the first piece. He didn’t come into office obsessed with foreign adventures. He came in thinking about domestic prosperity. His fear wasn’t invasion. His fear was depression—panic, instability, social fracture. Power, in his mind, began at home: industrial growth, economic confidence, national cohesion.

But McKinley also understood that territory changes a nation’s self-perception. When he talked about America’s expanding footprint, he didn’t speak like a reluctant custodian. He spoke like someone adding square mileage adds destiny.

Then Theodore Roosevelt took it further. For him, land wasn’t just pride—it was strategy. With Cuba and Puerto Rico under Washington’s shadow, Latin America became a kind of geopolitical interior. Not formally American, but treated as a space where America had special rights.

That’s where Roosevelt’s famous “corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine came in—and it’s worth pausing on why this mattered.

The original Monroe Doctrine was, on paper, anti-colonial: Europe, stay out of the Western Hemisphere. It framed U.S. power as a shield for sovereignty.

Roosevelt flipped that.

His corollary didn’t protect the hemisphere from Europe. It gave the U.S. an asserted right to intervene in the hemisphere because of “instability,” because of “disorder,” because countries needed protection from themselves.

It didn’t pit Washington against imperial Europe.

It pitted Washington against the hemisphere.

And that’s how you can tell when a doctrine has mutated from defense into dominance: it stops being about keeping outsiders out and starts being about walking neighbors into line.

The third leg—civilization—is the one modern readers tend to underestimate. People think of it as outdated rhetoric, some dusty mix of racism and missionary arrogance. But “civilization” was more than an excuse. It was an organizing concept: a way to fuse culture, morality, and security into one picture.

Elites believed societies existed in a hierarchy of progress. The “civilized” were orderly, lawful, productive, Christian, modern; the “less civilized” were disorderly, incapable of self-rule, prone to chaos. This hierarchy was riddled with prejudice—yet it shaped how policymakers decided what counted as a threat.

It shaped immigration debates. It shaped interventions. It shaped the idea that some peoples could be incorporated, managed, disciplined, or “uplifted” without their consent—because, in the civilizational lens, consent was a privilege that had to be earned.

Even in 1898, some American officials warned: if you annex places full of people you don’t regard as political equals, you don’t just gain territory—you import contradictions.

But the imperial current was already flowing.

Why this matters now

The argument isn’t that Trump is reenacting history scene-for-scene. The argument is that his administration is reviving the mental model of that era: power as wealth + geography + civilizational control.

Look at the surface echoes first:

protectionism and tariffs
a fixation on manufacturing revival
talk about reclaiming the Panama Canal
tension with Canada framed in territorial language
renewed focus on Latin America
flirtations with Danish territory again
and a personal admiration for McKinley’s kind of nationalism

The point isn’t nostalgia. The point is orientation: a worldview that measures security not just by military deterrence, but by control over space, control over resources, control over social cohesion, and the belief that America must manage “disorder” nearby.

And then Venezuela happens.

A military operation to seize Nicolás Maduro—followed by talk of “running” the country until a “proper transition”—doesn’t land in the mind as a one-off raid. It lands as a claim: the U.S. can decide when another nation is ready to govern itself.

That is a very 1898 sentence, even when you don’t say it out loud.

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Venezuela as a Philippines moment

Here’s where the comparison gets sharp.

In 1898, many Filipinos initially welcomed the defeat of Spanish rule. The U.S. arrived as a liberator—until it became clear liberation was not the end of the story. Filipinos didn’t get a real vote on what followed. The U.S. decided it “owned” the outcome because it had won the war, controlled Manila, and feared what might happen if it left.

And once McKinley framed the Philippines as a vital interest, the logic became self-feeding:

if we leave, chaos will follow
if chaos follows, rivals will exploit it
if rivals exploit it, we are threatened
therefore we must stay
and because we stay, it becomes even more vital
and because it becomes more vital, leaving becomes unthinkable

That’s the core of what you might call the Meddler’s Trap: intervention inflates the importance of the place intervened in. The act of meddling manufactures the “vital interest” it later claims to protect.

If Trump’s administration starts “running Venezuela,” even in an improvised, quasi-protectorate form, it risks repeating the same pattern. Not because Venezuela is the Philippines. Because the psychology of control is the same.

Once you take responsibility for governance—even temporarily—you inherit every problem as your problem:

factional power struggles
corruption
shortages and protests
criminal networks
border spillover
insurgent violence
economic collapse
ecological damage
humanitarian crisis

Many of these issues previously mattered to Washington only indirectly. After “running” a country, they begin to feel existential—because they threaten American prestige, American credibility, American control.

And then you’re stuck in the worst kind of loop: a mission that can’t succeed cleanly, but also can’t be abandoned without humiliation.

The civilizational undertow

The most revealing detail is not the raid itself. It’s the language around it.

When a leader implies that a society cannot govern itself and must be “run properly,” that is not just strategy talk. That’s civilizational talk.

It mirrors McKinley’s anxiety about Filipinos—an anxiety expressed in the paternal idea that America had to teach a people how to govern.

It also mirrors Roosevelt’s logic: intervention as a duty, punishment as a lesson, order as a civilizational imperative.

And it doesn’t stop at foreign policy. The same frame can bleed into domestic policies that treat heterogeneity as threat and cultural unity as security. When “civilization” becomes the object to protect, borders become moral boundaries, and the state starts thinking of culture as a strategic asset to homogenize.

That is how an imperial mindset spreads: first abroad, then inward.

The danger isn’t just moral. It’s strategic.

Here’s the grim lesson of the old imperial era: the more you meddle, the more everything starts to look vital.

Empires don’t collapse only because they do immoral things. They collapse because they accumulate obligations faster than they can manage them.

Every intervention creates:

new enemies
new dependents
new reputational stakes
new “credibility” stories
and new reasons for your rivals to probe you

You don’t become safer. You become busier, more paranoid, more overextended.

Roosevelt once described the Philippines as America’s Achilles heel. That’s a perfect phrase: what you acquire as strength becomes vulnerability because you now have something you can’t easily defend and can’t easily abandon.

If Trump turns Venezuela into a protectorate in practice, he may discover the same thing: the country becomes both ungovernable and impossible to let go.

Not because Washington lacks power, but because power cannot convert cleanly into legitimacy, and legitimacy is the real fuel of long-term control.

The choice in front of Trump

There are only two ways out of the Meddler’s Trap:

Define an endpoint immediately—and stick to it.
Treat the operation as a discrete act with a narrow purpose, then hand off political outcomes to Venezuelans and regional diplomacy.
Or slide into imperial management—and accept the century-old consequences.
Once you promise to “run” another country, you invite escalation, resistance, and responsibility that will outlive your term.

The deeper point is this: the return of 1898 isn’t about uniforms or flags. It’s about a resurrected measure of power—wealth, land, civilization—and the intoxicating belief that America can reshape neighbors because it is America.

History doesn’t guarantee repetition. But it does offer a warning: the empire mindset expands faster than the empire can pay for it.

And the hardest part won’t be taking Venezuela.

The hardest part will be letting go.