Welcome to the New Year, I guess . . . . .
During New Year’s Day lunch with family the topic of predictions for 2026 arose. Predictions ranged from Democrats winning the mid-terms, to Trump being removed from office for health reasons, to Ukraine falling to Russia. I posited it will be a year of war, pointing to our country’s new national security strategy, particularly the part about the Western Hemisphere.
Little did we know two days later the United States would attack Venezuela, seize its President and his wife and transport them to Brooklyn, New York, to face drug trafficking charges (juxtapose that with Trump’s pardon of Honduras’s ex- president for drug trafficking) and declaring that America would “run” Venezuela, with a focus on its oil resources.
Expect more such military strikes and attacks in the months leading up to the mid-terms. This attack was predictable and conforms to the new national security strategy published this past November. It is a roadmap to war in the Western Hemisphere, even global war.
In a section of the strategy paper invoking the Monroe Doctrine, — which coined a new term “The Trump Corollary” — two new strategic dogmas for dominating the Western Hemisphere, ‘Enlist’ and ‘Expand,’ were fleshed out. Our national security policy strategy is clear in the Western Hemisphere: America will use force to seize and control assets it deems vital and strategic to America’s national interest …… if countries don’t kindly ‘enlist’ in our cause.
Pointedly, the new strategy targets the very things we, America, paradoxically created through our own past racist policies of empire and exploitation. America’s new hemispheric strategy of domination and control contains a measure of stick and carrot, ostensibly calling for willing partners, but like most domestic abusers, ready with a big stick or worse.
It says, in part, “After years of neglect the United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere, and to protect our homeland and our access to key geographies throughout the region. We will deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere. The “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine is a common-sense and potent restoration of American power and priorities, consistent with American security interests.” This includes further down the paper, “establishing or expanding access in strategically important locations,” as one of four pillars of this new robust Monroe Doctrine version 2.0.
The call to enforce the Monroe Doctrine, a relic of late 18th century and early 19th century empire, says much about the mindset of the Trump administration. A strategy stuck in an anachronistic mentality of empire, great powers, and white supremacy. It does not bode well for America.
This ostensibly back to the future strategy fails to recognize the complexities of today’s world. Much less acknowledge that the days of empire and colonialism died in the early to mid-20th century, first in the fields of Flanders and then in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. It is a mindboggling strategy that will be ruinous.
Are we really going to return to the days of a Darwinian global nation-state race to empire and war?
One can read “control strategically vital assets” as Venezuelan oil reserves, Panama’s canal, and the minerals in Greenland or the arctic. I think Greenland and the Panama Canal are Trump’s next military objectives, followed by Cuba, and then eventually seizing parts of the Arctic under Canadian sovereignty.
Seizing Greenland, an autonomous region under Danish sovereignty, would provoke a broader war. Denmark is a member of NATO, and an attack on Denmark would be an attack on all members of NATO. No doubt Denmark would invoke Article 5 of the treaty, which would oblige all 31 members (really 32 if you include the US), to come to Denmark’s aid militarily. Ditto if Trump attempts to seize parts of Canada that he deems of strategic, vital interest. The potential is a catastrophic war with Europe and Canada, global isolation, the loss of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, and devastating collapse of US exports to the world.
Strangely, for a purportedly modern, 21st century security strategy, the strategy paper reads, in part, like a white Christian nationalist cultural manifesto. Akin to the “white man’s burden” of late 19th century empire. In a section titled ‘What America Wants,’ it calls for the “restoration and reinvigoration of American spiritual and cultural health, without which long-term security is impossible. We want an America that cherishes its past glories and its heroes, and that looks forward to a new golden age.” It laments Europe losing its whiteness and thereby, its culture. The Right wing’s racist conspiracy ‘Replacement Theory’ has become a corner stone of our national security strategy.
This new security strategy is a dangerous call to return American hegemony in the Western Hemisphere, as part of a broader division of the world into global ‘spheres of influence,’ presumably he big three being China, Russia, and the United States. Yes, Russia because Russia is, for Trump, a fellow traveler, an archetype of white male Christian patriarchy and nationalism.
The past age of empire ended with two world wars. The historical impacts of these European colonial empires are the root causes of today’s wars, tensions, and conflicts in the Middle East, South Asia between Pakistan and India, Sudan’s civil war, and other places too numerous to list. Mass migrations to Europe are a result of these colonial conditions that persist to this day.
America’s empire building and meddling in the Americas contributes directly to mass migration to our southern border. Decades of America’s heavy hand, coups, regime change, looting and expropriation of natural resources by American corporations, encouragement of assassinations and death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala in the 1980s resulted in weak, corrupt states, an absence of civil society, the strangling of the rule of law, oligarchy, endemic poverty, and the rise of the Narco-state.
Haiti was a particular country of scorn and hate by America (and France) over generations as the result of its successful slave revolt that the rid the country of French rule. The South’s slave society feared the example set by black Haitians fight for freedom would spread to their slaves. Haiti would be punished and looted for well over a century by both France and the United States. Haiti’s failed state status is on us, yet Trump and the right vilify them as pet eaters, as savages. Who’s the real ‘savage’ in this story?
Pointedly, the new strategy targets the very things we, America, created through our racist policies of empire and exploitation. America’s new hemispheric strategy of domination and control contains a measure of stick and carrot, ostensibly calling for willing partners, but like most domestic abusers, ready with a big stick or worse.
Not only will this new national security strategy destabilize the Western Hemisphere, but it will also provoke land grabs by China and Russia, promote authoritarian rule, engender economic chaos, fracture long standing alliances beneficial to America, and reduce America to a pariah state. Trump has unleashed war as his domestic policies flounder.
For a president that promised America first, an end to forever wars, an end to military adventures in regime change and nation building, we seem to be heading in the opposite direction. He is letting loose the war dogs, not caging them. Americans will suffer and die along with those we murder in the name of Trump. Rise up America before it is too late.
