Trump risks pushing world back to age of empires

Only a few hours after the Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro was removed from his palace, his job and his country by US special forces, Donald Trump was still marvelling about how it felt to monitor a live feed of the raid from his Mar-a-Lago mansion.

He shared his feelings with Fox News.

“If you could see the speed, the violence, they call it that… It was amazing, amazing work by these people. No one else could do something like this.”

The US president wants and needs quick victories. Before he took office for the second time, he boasted that ending the Russia-Ukraine war would be a single day’s work.

Venezuela, as presented in Trump’s statements, is the quick, decisive victory that he has craved.

Maduro is in a prison cell in Brooklyn, the US will “run” Venezuela – and he has announced that the Chavista regime, now with a new president, will turn over millions of barrels of oil and that he will control the way the profits are spent. All, so far anyway, without an American life lost and without the long occupation that had such catastrophic consequences after the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

For now, at least, Trump and his advisers, publicly at least, are ignoring Venezuela’s complexities. It is a country bigger than Germany, still run by the regime of factions that has embedded corruption and repression into Venezuelan politics.

Instead, Trump is enjoying a geopolitical sugar rush. Judging by their statements as they flanked him at Mar-a-Lago, so are US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.

Since then, they have repeated that Trump was a president who does what he says he is going to do.

He’s made it clear to Colombia, Mexico, Cuba, Greenland – and Denmark – that they need to be nervous about where his appetite will take him next.

Trump likes nicknames. He still calls his predecessor Sleepy Joe Biden.

Now he’s trying out a new name for the Monroe Doctrine, which has been a foundation of US policy in Latin America for two centuries.

Trump renamed it, naturally, after himself – the Donroe doctrine.

James Monroe, the fifth president of the United States, unveiled the original in December 1823. It declared that the western hemisphere was America’s sphere of interest – and warned European powers not to meddle or establish new colonies.

The Donroe Doctrine puts Monroe’s 200-year-old message on steroids.

“The Monroe Doctrine is a big deal, but we’ve superseded it by a lot,” Trump said at Mar-a-Lago as Maduro, blindfolded and shackled, was on this way to jail.

“Under our new national security strategy, American dominance in the western hemisphere will never be questioned again.”

Any rival or potential threat, especially China, has to stay out of Latin America. It’s not clear where that leaves the massive investments that China has already made in the region.

Donroe also extends the huge area the US calls its “backyard” north to Greenland.

The 2026 equivalent of Monroe’s copperplate handwriting is a photo of a frowning, moody looking Trump posted by the US State Department on social media. The words with it say, “this is OUR hemisphere – and President Trump will not allow our security to be threatened”.

That means using US military and economic power to coerce countries and leaders that get out of line – and to take their resources if necessary. As Trump warned another…