On, Becoming an Empire

A couple of days ago, Donald Trump’s administration carried out a military operation in Venezuela. A Delta Force unit was deployed to abduct President Nicolás Maduro and his wife. The operation was accompanied by bombing inside the country, and between the airstrikes and the raid itself, roughly eighty people were killed. By all available accounts, the plan unfolded exactly as intended. Maduro was transported to New York to stand trial—though it remains unclear what, precisely, he has been charged with. Shortly thereafter, the administration announced that Venezuela’s acting leadership was being ordered to hand over up to 50 million barrels of oil to the United States. At the same time, U.S. forces seized a Russian ship that had been prevented from docking during the month-long naval blockade and bombing campaign along Venezuela’s coast.

This is, objectively, one of the most absurd positions the American military has ever placed itself in. However, this moment is not an aberration, rather, a logical extension of how American political elites have understood—and justified—foreign policy since at least the end of World War II, and arguably long before that.

I haven’t ever written about foreign policy before. That’s not because the subject hasn’t held my interest over the past decade. It’s because—embarrassingly—I bought into propaganda produced by people who claimed to understand the world better than the average American. I deferred to “serious” commentators. I trusted the experts.

That posture was summarized perfectly in a recent interview with Hillary Clinton, in which she reaffirmed her support for Israel amid its occupation and genocide of Gaza. She offered no substantive defense of her position. Instead, she scolded young people for forming opinions based on social media rather than through proper channels—traditional news outlets, which, she implied, alone possess the necessary historical context to evaluate Israel’s actions responsibly.

I’ve thought quite a bit about Israel for years, nearly as long as I’ve thought about politics, and I’ve always found Zionism to be an impossible position to support. But I’ve always hit a wall: commentators I genuinely respected—Sam Harris and Bill Maher, among others—insisted that any discomfort with Israel’s occupation of Palestine could be resolved by acquiring a fuller understanding of history. And I believed them.

Part of that was because the apparent hypocrisy seemed too extreme to actually be hypocrisy. Sam Harris, for example, is a fierce atheist who has spent years arguing against religious influence in government, particularly Christian and Muslim influence in Western states. So when Harris argued that Israel, because of its unique history, was perhaps the only state in history justified in existing as a religiously defined, authoritarian ethnostate, I assumed I must be missing something.

I wasn’t.

What looked like a contradiction too wild to be real was exactly that. I spent years reading, listening, and actively attempting to propagandize myself into believing the Zionist position. But it was always a lie. The United States has propped up one of the most brutal state actors in the Middle East for decades, while Americans who rejected the propaganda were dismissed as ignorant or naïve—told we simply lacked sufficient historical understanding. Given that the history stretches back thousands of years, it’s a clever argument. It’s also an absurd one.

But this essay isn’t just about Israel.

It’s about American military interventionism as a whole: regime change, occupation, coercion, and influence in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Cuba, China, Russia, Ukraine—virtually every country where American boots have touched the ground since World War II, and many before that. What’s most disturbing isn’t just that the United States has behaved as an imperial power every bit as ruthless as the British Empire it once rebelled against. It’s that a political elite has spent the last century convincing ordinary Americans that criticizing these actions is ignorant, unpatriotic, or dangerous—despite dissent being the very first right enshrined in the Bill of Rights.

There are, of course, many reasons elites pursue war. One of the most obvious is profit. But unlike empires of old, which plundered openly, modern American capitalism has become far more adept at extracting wealth without distributing it. The Iraq War under George W. Bush—engineered by figures like Dick Cheney—made billions for defense contractors and energy interests while leaving Iraq in ruins.

The Trump administration’s action in Venezuela may ultimately surpass even that in its brazenness. Reports already indicate that oil executives at companies like ExxonMobil were informed of the operation in advance, while opposition party leadership learned about it the same way the rest of us did—after it happened. At least Bush’s administration went through the motions of lying about weapons of mass destruction and seeking congressional authorization. This time, even the pretense has been dropped.

Still, there’s a deeper issue at play—one I’ve clearly been circling for years without naming. It’s the corrupted legacy of what figures like John Adams articulated as the Monroe Doctrine.

Originally, the doctrine wasn’t a blank check for imperial conquest. It was an acknowledgment that great powers exert influence over the territories they occupy—and a warning that European empires should stop treating the Western Hemisphere as their playground. Early American involvement in South America often aimed—however imperfectly—at undermining Spanish, French, and British imperial control. It coincided with westward expansion and the belief that a fledgling republic had the right to determine its own sphere of influence.

None of this is meant to romanticize early American expansion. That period included genocide against Native Americans, a war of conquest against Mexico, and countless other atrocities. Much of America’s territorial growth came not through legitimate purchase, but through violence indistinguishable from the imperialism it claimed to oppose.

The point is narrower than that: I don’t believe the Monroe Doctrine was conceived as a justification for indiscriminate invasion or resource theft. Early American military action was debated intensely by people who had personally experienced imperial subjugation. For a brief historical moment, the United States genuinely inspired independence movements abroad. That’s why statues of George Washington still stand in countries across South America and Europe.

Power corrupts even the most idealistic ideas.

The Monroe Doctrine, like so many philosophies before it, was stripped of its original intent and repurposed to justify exploitation. Nietzsche’s philosophy was bastardized by Ayn Rand. Jesus’ teachings mangled by the Catholic Church. And the writings of America’s founders have been contorted by generations of power-hungry political and corporate elites.

As much as I admire the early ideals of Adams, Jefferson, and Franklin, the nation they founded has become precisely what they once fought against. There is no hidden historical context that makes this make sense. No deeper understanding that redeems it.

War is America’s primary export. We no longer manufacture meaningfully. We don’t lead. We invade. We extract. We destroy. And we leave behind rubble, resentment, and mass graves.