Donald Trump’s eagerness to use military violence, both in deploying armed forces to U.S. cities and in using them overseas, has become a defining feature of his increasingly authoritarian rule. His 2024 campaign posturing against U.S. “forever wars” aimed at regime change seems like a distant memoryafter the January operation to abduct Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, and now a devastating, open-ended U.S.-Israeli war on Iran aimed at overthrowing its government. Just as the White House has borrowed white supremacist and fascist imagery and language from the 19th and 20th centuries to dehumanize Black people and other communities of color as part of a campaign to dismantle civil rights and curtail political freedoms, Trump is using tropes, policies, and justifications for war from previous imperial eras to destabilize the existing international order and strengthen U.S. geopolitical and economic domination in the more violent and volatile world that emerges.

U.S. militarism with Trump at the helm can appear impulsive and chaotic. His narcissism, corruption, and erratic behavior — threatening to bomb a country one day, then offering to “make a deal” the next; forming a self-styled Board of Peace, then launching the most intensive U.S. military action in decades — can obscure the logic that underlies this shift to a new, cruder approach to U.S. imperial power. But there is a logic that should not be reduced to Trump’s personal appetites for grandeur and self-enrichment, nor the temporary need for distractions from polarizing domestic issues.

The White House’s escalation of military violence is critical to Trump’s whole program of asserting the unrestrained, unaccountable power of U.S. rulers to serve their own economic and political interests, no matter the cost. As we work to confront Trump’s white supremacy and authoritarianism inside the U.S., we should not ignore how these are connected to his aggressive imperialism around the world. As at home, our solidarity is with our siblings, sisters, and brothers around the world who are on the receiving end of U.S. violence.

Understanding Washington’s imperial motives in launching a war on Iran that threatens catastrophe in the Middle East is complicated by Trump’s erratic tendencies. During his first five months after taking office, Trump sought talks to reach a new nuclear agreement and opposed Israel attacking Iran; then he supported Israel attacking Iran and joined the strikes; then, after those operations killed roughly 1,000 Iranians,he declared a cease-fire and took credit for it. This year, Trump continued to dangle the possibility of a new deal while ordering the largest buildup of U.S. military power to the region since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In his State of the Union address on Feb. 24, Trump spent all of three minutes on Iran and claimed to prefer diplomacy. Four days later, a massive joint U.S.-Israeli assault was directed at decapitating the Iranian government, along with terrorizing the country’s population, who were then told “the hour of your freedom is at hand.” As chaos and destruction mounted in the opening days, Trump’s war aims seemed to shift with each reporter he spoke to.

But beneath the lurches back and forth, the underlying aim is to secure the unquestioned power of the U.S., its key ally Israel, and the other Middle Eastern states it collaborates with. No one can miss the dark irony of Trump convening his handpicked Board of Peace and then, within weeks, going to war to topple the Iranian government.But these are two faces of the same imperial project that aims to secure U.S. corporate and financial domination in the Middle East, Israel’s unrivaled regional authority, the stability of the Gulf regimes, and the continued subjugation (or, in the case of Palestinians, outright annihilation) of any forces or peoples that defy Washington.

Similarly, Trump’s strategy in Venezuela was unexpected. After spending months murdering people on fishing boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, the U.S. launched a targeted assault on Caracas in the first days of January to abduct the country’s head of state and his wife.This appeared to follow the pattern of previous U.S. actions, like the 1989 attack on Panama to abduct the country’s ruler, Manuel Noriega, and replace him with an opposition leader.María Corina Machado looked to be the perfect candidate, with enough support among Venezuelans and so much fealty to Trump that she dedicated — and ultimately handed over — her Nobel Peace Prize to him. It seemed certain that Machado would step into power with the blessings of Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

That is not what happened. Trump — with all the condescension of a self-appointed emperor — dismissed Machado as a “very nice woman” who wasn’t ready to assume the presidency. Instead, at his triumphant press conference flanked by Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Gen. Dan Caine, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Trump declared, “We’re gonna be running it.” The administration then made clear that Venezuela would be administered by Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s vice president, who was sworn in as head of state.Maduro’s entire state apparatus was left in power, including Minister of Defense Vladimir Padrino López, who, like Maduro, had a U.S. bounty on his head. After years of demonizing the Venezuelan regime, the U.S. is negotiating civilly with it (minus Maduro) about the future of Venezuela’s oil and U.S. companies’ access to it.

The Venezuelan writer and scholar Omar Vázquez Heredia’s article “Venezuela: The Hour of Perplexity” described the confusion. “A sector of the Venezuelan population is bewildered because many had ruled out the possibility of a U.S. military operation on Venezuelan territory after five months of verbal threats from Trump,” Vázquez Heredia wrote. “Another sector is disconcerted because it believed that the capture of Nicolás Maduro in a ‘surgical’ armed operation would mean the fall of the entire Bolivarian regime and the immediate beginning of a ‘democratic transition’ under the leadership of María Corina Machado.”

Trump has discarded large parts of the playbook familiar from U.S. imperialism’s most recent chapters. Gone is the pretense (always paper-thin anyway) that Washington acts in the interest of democracy and human rights, along with any commitment to alliances beyond short-term transactional arrangements. Previous rhetoric about America’s supposed ideals has been replaced by might-makes-right boasting and openly stated plans to plunder less powerful nations for their resources, such as Venezuela’s oil and Greenland’s minerals.

This is a break from the dominant approach to foreign policy during the seven decades after World War II, when the U.S. emerged as the world’s dominant superpower. Locked in a Cold War battle with the USSR, the U.S. led the way in creating a trade and financial architecture that made the U.S. dollar the world’s key currency and established the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and other institutions to facilitate international commerce and banking. Washington organized its allies into NATO and other military alliances, and it supported new structures and means to mediate international conflicts, from the United Nations to international law and organizations associated with human rights. Though all this was justified with rhetoric about defending democracy and free-market capitalism, a world order led by the U.S. benefited its own corporations and political elite more than anyone else. The system helped the U.S. — along with its senior colonizer allies, such as Britain and France — open new forms of exploitation across Africa, Latin America, and Asia, even as decolonization swept those regions, showing the glaring hypocrisy of Washington’s rhetoric about human rights.

By and large, this post–World War II system served the U.S. elite well. But within the political class, there was always a dissenting faction. Elements on the right and far right rejected even the pretense of U.S. accountability to international law. They resented the enormous financial commitment required for the permanent deployment of hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops abroad to maintain the world order. Those frustrations grew stronger in the 21st century after Washington’s post-9/11 wars went awry, not only devastating peoples across the Middle East, South Asia, and beyond but also wounding U.S. power and prestige on the world stage. At the same time, China emerged as a superpower with the potential not just to rival the U.S. but eventually to dominate it economically and militarily — a prospect that alarmed conservatives and liberals alike.

For all his arbitrary and erratic behavior, Donald Trump emerged in the 2010s as a political figure who asked the brewing questions about U.S. power: Should the U.S. permanently underwrite the security of global capitalism with its military? Does it need to bankroll military alliances like NATO that include countries wealthy enough to sustain their own large militaries? The U.S. doesn’t actually take international law seriously, so why pretend to? Why participate in global or regional free-trade agreements when the U.S., with its massive economy and resulting power to impose tariffs, can get a better deal negotiating with countries one by one?

Trump is providing answers to those questions, though they are colored by his own brutish behavior. Whereas previous presidents saw themselves acting as responsible custodians of U.S. power, Trump shows no shame in pursuing his personal interests. He is undoubtedly subject to institutional pressures and limitations, like any president, but his naked greed in using the incredible power of the presidency to score deals to enrich himself and his family is unprecedented. He seems less interested in upholding the prestige of the presidency than figuring out how to cash in on it.

Trump’s willingness to buck convention and more aggressively assert U.S. corporate, political, and military power has won over enough of the upper echelons of the ruling class for his administration to operate largely unhindered to this point. It is conceivable that eventually enough of the business and political establishment will find Trump’s loose-cannon nature to be a liability that they will turn decisively against him — especially if popular outrage with his presidency turns from broad disgust and localized resistance to generalized obstruction of their ability to profit, financially and politically. At the moment, however — especially given the disarray of the Democratic Party — Trump seems to have room to maneuver, and even the more squeamish of his peers are willing to tolerate him.

Trump is not yet in a position to fully replace the imperialist approach of the second half of the 20th century. This is the time in between: Trump is operating in a transition period after the postwar U.S.-led world order has broken down, but before another order has been established.

U.S. imperialism has had other modes than the one that existed before Trump came to power. Trump is drawing from a deep well of colonial and imperial violence from the era before World War II. We are witnessing experiments with old and new elements of imperialist domination as Trump sees what he can get away with in the 21st century.

With roots in the country’s genocidal westward expansion across the continent, U.S. imperialism extended the logic of colonialism beyond national borders in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. When the U.S. seized Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines following the 1898 Spanish-American War,the conquerors combined the nativist ideology of “civilizing” subjugated peoples with a frankly stated determination to extract natural resources and establish military bases for further overseas expansion. Smedley Butler, a former Marine Corps major general, wrote of his military service in a 1935 article in the magazine Common Sense:

I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. … I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. … I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras “right” for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested.

Butler’s words seem especially appropriate in the Trump years. During the early decades of the 20th century, the U.S. was carrying out military interventions around the world, unfettered by NATO or other alliances and unbound by international law or institutions. At home, these years were characterized by rampant racist violence and white supremacy, the disenfranchisement of women, criminalization of homosexuality, and the greed of the robber barons and savage repression of labor.Trump’s unabashed desire to take over Greenland, return the Panama Canal to U.S. control, and plunder Venezuela’s oil are all drawing from this period in the history of U.S. imperialism.

Trump’s military actions today also bear some resemblances to the years when the U.S. was attempting to restore the credibility of its imperial power after its defeat in Vietnam. During the 1980s, the U.S. carried out interventions to overthrow political leaders and governments in Grenada and Panama.These were guided less by their geopolitical significance to the U.S. and more by the fact that Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush found them convenient settings to demonstrate overwhelming U.S. power and win easy victories.

As always with Trump, a certain measure of chaos is involved. Contemptuous of expert knowledge and the Washington establishment, he has assembled a foreign policy team with conflicting ideas that reflect the contradictory perspectives inside the MAGA coalition. He has placed JD Vance, who tends toward the orthodox MAGA aversion to foreign military action, alongside Marco Rubio, who is guided by Cold War anti-Communist ideology. Trump’s Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has been an opponent of U.S. regime change wars, especially in the Middle East,while United Nations Ambassador Mike Waltz is an old-school neoconservative who agitates for war against Iran and escalating hostility toward China. While the different sides are united by a chauvinistic embrace of U.S. supremacy and an enthusiasm for using violence, which faction will prevail in a given conflict or issue is often hard to predict.

Nevertheless, this is clearly a time of experimentation for Trump to see how far he can expand his and his administration’s power. From the militarized deployment of ICE agents, the National Guard, and even Marines in U.S. cities to his escalating actions outside the U.S., Trump is violating U.S. and international law and daring anyone to stop him. Just as he does in domestic politics, Trump alternates between bullying other countries — both adversaries and allies — and celebrating deals based on what he has extracted from his victims.

Trump is explicitly blurring the lines between domestic and foreign policy, with racism, Christian nationalism, Islamophobia, and Western chauvinism as the connective tissue. His racist diatribes against Somalis and other diaspora communities are a cruder version of his administration’s commitment to “restoring Europe’s civilizational self-confidence and Western identity,” as stated in the White House’s 2025 National Security Strategy. Trump himself is making it clear that building an effective resistance against his authoritarian rule at home requires opposing his white supremacy and violence around the world.

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