Your Independent Journal from the Heartland
We are a rogue nation.Not just an imperialist nation, but a rogue one, imposing our will outside international norms and despite the constitutional and legal safeguards we’ve long believed structure not just our domestic politics but our relationship with the world community. We act as international judge and jury, decide who gets to lead other nations, how their economies will function, and what they can do with their natural resources.
This is what we are witnessing with the U.S.takeover of Venezuela, a military operation dressed up as police action designed to give American interests control over Venezuelan oil, and one with unflattering echoes in the Russian invasion of Ukraine,
Our rogue status shouldn’t surprise us. Successive presidents have pushed against and broken these rules and norms since our founding — in Mexico and Haiti, in Cuba and the Philippines. Mexico, Vietnam and Laos, the Dominican Republic, Chile, Panama, Iraq and Afghanistan. Our history is one of continental conquest and slaughter, the use of atomic weapons and their testing on unsuspecting Pacific Islanders, drone wars, and covert operations and political assassinations.
All of this in the name of democracy and the American interest.
Trump is making that claim now, in the wake of the administration’s kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro on Jan. 3. Maduro took office following the death of Hugo Chavez, his complicated yet popular predecessor, and Venezuela’s refusal to follow he United States’ lead has had it in the U.S. crosshairs for decades.
Maduro’s record in Venezuela — failing economy, violence against his opposition, a stolen election — has Venezuelan emigres in the United States rejoicing now, though I can’t help but remember Iraqis doing the same in 2003 after Saddam Hussein was deposed.
The news at that time was full of Iraqis cheering and, later, raising a purple index finger as a proclamation of their new democracy, one promised by George W. Bush and his administration as the direct outgrowth of the Iraq War. That never happened. Instead, the aftermath of the U.S. invasion was a long civil war and American scandal, and the rise of new and more violent groups— with Iraqis paying the price.
But Venezuela is not Iraq 2.0, nor is it Panama 2.0, where George H.W. Bush invaded and arrested then-President Manuel Noriega. But what it is not matters far less than what it is: a lawless invasion and kidnapping of a foreign leader that grows from our historical DNA, the false assumption (Americans do not know or fully understand our own history) that we always act in righteous ways, that we are indispensable, that we not only can but have the divine rights to remake the world to our liking.
Mark Twain saw this at the dawning of the 20th Century when he proclaimed himself an anti-imperialist, and wrote that the wars in Cuba and the Philippines were not about democracy or liberty, but about possession and theft. “(W)e do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people, he said, adding that we seek “to conquer, not to redeem.”
Trump made it clear on Jan. 3 that his motives are purely transactional, when he laid out a vision for Venezuela that essentially would make it a vassal of American power: he intends for the U.S. to run the South American nation in the short run and grant American oil companies access to Venezuelan crude. This is consistent with earlier statements he’s made going back to the 2024 presidential campaign, when he mused over annexation of Greenland and making Canada the 51st state.
Trump, who ran against the idea of endless wars, made clear he is an imperialist war president.
“We’re not afraid of boots on the ground,” he said.
“We are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition, and it has to be judicious,” he said.
Judicious is the key word, one that usually means slow and considered, but that here carries more weight. It is his stand-in for a transition to a pliable, U.S.-supporting government willing to let us control Venezuela’s vast oil reserves — which he argued (in the words of the HuffPost — “that Venezuela had ‘stolen’ oil from the United States.
“We built Venezuela’s oil industry with American talent, drive, and skill, and the socialist regime stole it from us during those previous administrations. This constituted one of the largest thefts of American property in the history of our country. Considered the largest theft of property in the history of our country. Massive oil infrastructure was taken like we were babies.”
That is why, he said, the United States would be taking control of Venezuela’s oil industry, inviting in U.S. oil companies and letting them strip Venezuela of its resources. Venezuelans will prosper from this, he says, an absurd statement on its face and contradicted by his claim that the oil companies are going to take back the oil that, frankly, we should have taken back a long time ago. A lot of money is coming out of the ground. We’re going to get reimbursed for all of that. We’re going to get reimbursed for everything that we spend.
This is, as some are saying, an example of “naked imperialism,” consistent with our historical arrogance and interference in the region, but more open, more overt, more public in its thievery — and perfectly keeping with Trump’s kleptocratic administration and the lawless violence he has unleashed in American cities.
This is not about American safety or the Venezuelan people or their democratic desires. This is about Trump and his desire for power and proof that the safeguards we believed would protect us do not exist. This is about now-unchecked American power that endangers everyone.
Hence the phrase “rogue nation” — corrupt, dishonest, dangerous, and unpredictable.
Hank Kalet is a writer from New Jersey. He teaches journalism at Rutgers University. Email hankkalet@gmail.com; X @newspoet41; Instagram @kaletwrites; See hankkalet.substack.com.
