Understanding Trump’s Interventions: How Regional Imperialism Generates World War

EDITORIAL, 26 Jan 2026

#935 | Richard E. Rubenstein – TRANSCEND Media Service

When Donald Trump was first elected U.S. president almost ten years ago, part of his appeal to many voters were his promises to reduce the level of US involvement in international conflicts and to avoid the costly “endless wars” fought by his predecessors. But his recent attack on Venezuela on the heels of U.S.-financed genocide in Gaza, as well as US air strikes in Somalia, Yemen, Iraq, Nigeria, Iran, and the Caribbean/Pacific high seas, represents a major turn toward military intervention in his foreign policy.

What obscures this reality at present and muddles much media coverage of the situation is Trump’s invocation of the Monroe Doctrine (aka the “Don-Roe Doctrine”) to justify his activities in the Western Hemisphere.  Yes, he abducted the Maduros, killed Venezuelan and Cuban soldiers, declared himself the owner of Venezuela’s oil, destroyed or captured ships and crews sailing from Venezuelan ports, threatened the rulers of Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, and Brazil, and promised to take over Greenland. He has also intervened overtly, covertly, and through proxies on every inhabited continent.  Even so, many commentators conclude that Trump’s intention is to exercise military power primarily in the U.S.’s Caribbean and Latin American “backyard,” while other regional hegemons such as China and Russia do as they wish in their own spheres of influence.

This bully-boy version of multipolarity may satisfy members of the MAGA coalition who want to believe that the would-be Nobelist will remain true to his original isolationist promises.  It has even gained acceptance among some analysts at the mainstream foreign policy journals and NGOs. To accept this regional focus, however, means shutting one’s eyes to the history and dynamics of imperialism, especially as illustrated by the imperial wars of the 1930s

Amid the deluge of articles and broadcasts covering Trump’s recent Latin adventures, one finds few analyses comparing U.S. aggression with the imperial wars of the 1930s that are now recognized as significant steps in the run-up to world war.  In 1931, Japan conquered Manchuria after manufacturing a false-flag incident at Mukden and then attacked China, seizing Beijing and Shanghai.  In 1935 Mussolini invaded Ethiopia and two years later defeated Haile Selassie’s outgunned regime.  Around the same time, Hitler invaded the demilitarized Rhineland.  He would soon move to overthrow the Austrian and Czechoslovak governments and send military forces to aid General Franco’s fascists in the Spanish Civil War.

Of course, these events took place almost a century ago – but the analogy is startling.  Like Trump’s recent actions, these were short-lived, asymmetrical assaults by imperialist powers against nations resisting their hegemony. Their impact was minimized by characterizing them as limited wars conducted within some Great Power’s sphere of influence.  But today we understand that they were also significant steps toward world war.

Why doesn’t this sort of violence remain in the regional backyard instead of generating global conflict?  The first reason is that interventions like these always target imperial competitors, not just local resistors. Italy’s war in Ethiopia was aimed at British interests in the Horn of Africa, Japan’s aggression in Manchuria at Chinese and Western interests, and Germany’s machinations in Europe at Western and Russian interests. The pattern of targeting an imperial competitor’s local “agents” persisted long after the end of World War II.  In the 1970s Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger overthrew the Allende regime in Chile and installed Pinochet’s dictatorship there because they considered Allende a potential Soviet (and Cuban) ally. Similarly, Trump’s overarching aim in Latin America is to limit the growing influence of China (and the less substantial influence of Russia) on that continent.

In short, the apparent local focus of operations like the Venezuela attack is an illusion. The fact that the major target is a competing empire compels other nations in the affected region to choose sides – a polarizing process that tends to create armed multinational blocs and a bipolar world order.  Barbara Tuchman’s classic work, The Guns of August, shows exactly how this operated to produce the unbelievably destructive “war to end all wars” in 1914. We are likely to see such polarization take place with increasing intensity over the next few years in Latin America, Africa, and East Asia.

But that’s not all. Imperial powers prevented from acquiring essential industrial resources in regions claimed by their competitors tend to retaliate by seizing control of other regions where those resources can be obtained. In the 1930s, Western attempts to weaken and contain the Japanese Empire led the Tokyo regime to seize Manchuria’s coal and iron. A decade later, the Japanese conquered Vietnam, Indonesia, and Malaya to secure the oil, rubber, tin, and other industrial materials monopolized by French, Dutch, and British empires in what had been considered up to then a European backyard. Today we see the same sort of competition over resources such as rare earths, industrial minerals, oil, and natural gas inflaming conflicts between imperialist powers on a global scale.  (Indeed, with the advent of climate change, the list of scarce resources grows to include essentials such as water and breathable air.)

The moral?  All modern empires are global. The U.S and its rivals are not like the ancient empires that conquered weaker nations as a kind of sport, extracting tribute from their rulers, but generally leaving subject peoples to their own devices.  Modern empires are late-capitalist powers driven to compete globally for essential industrial materials, markets, and investment opportunities, and compelled to “develop” or transform the societies that they dominate.  There is no way that their ruling classes can remain in their own backyards – and when they go abroad (as they must, to maintain their own viability), they go armed to the teeth.

Liberal as well as conservative commentators may hate to admit it, but Lenin’s work on imperialism got this right. For limited periods of time, while issuing threats of violence and engaging in covert operations, the empire-builders may manage to negotiate their differences “peacefully.”  But these periods of relative quiescence do not last. Unable to solve global problems that their own profit-dominated systems exacerbate – problems like radical social inequality, human-caused climate change, and mass migration – they employ threats of war and war itself as their favored methods of conflict management. They call this strategy “peace through strength,” but we understand that what they really mean is Empire First, by any means necessary.

The fact that warfare is now entirely industrialized and that weapons of mass destruction, including nukes, are proliferating at a dizzying pace does not alter these dynamics.  Nor does the existence of a sadly weakened United Nations provide much hope that inter-imperial conflicts can be controlled before they become part of another run-up to global violence. Once again, history sets off alarm bells that anyone not deafened by present-day cacophony should be able to hear. It was precisely when the League of Nations proved unable to stop Japan’s, Italy’s, and Germany’s localized aggression that the Kellogg-Briand Pact outlawing war as an instrument of national policy – a treaty signed by almost all the world’s nations – became a dead letter. Then and now, intensified regional imperialism was a symptom of impending global war.

Donald Trump’s interventionism thus represents a major escalation of inter-imperial conflict – but its significance is already being minimized not just by MAGA cultists, but also by a large cross-section of establishment liberals, centrists of both parties, foreign policy mavens, and the corporate media. Devoted to the dogma of “peace through strength,” Democratic Party leaders like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries are unable to criticize Trump’s military adventures, except to complain that he doesn’t consult Congress as he should and sometimes acts “recklessly.”  With Iraq in mind, the New York Times editors warn that attempting to occupy nations that don’t want to be occupied is a bad idea.  The liberal critics of military intervention rest their arguments on the tendency of interventions to produce Iraq-style occupations that trigger mass rebellions requiring lengthy, costly, and brutal counterinsurgency campaigns.

Trump’s answer to this, up to this point, has been to rely on covert operations, proxy wars, air strikes, and commando raids to avoid the necessity to deploy massive occupation forces in subject nations. The Venezuelan coup represents an attempt to use a “decapitated” existing regime with substantial mass support to guarantee U.S. control of that nation’s resources without provoking a local insurgency. This tactic may not work, but even if it does, the imperialist dynamics that we have been describing will continue to drive the world toward war as they did in the thirties.

After all, Japan quickly suppressed rebellion in Manchuria, which became the puppet kingdom of Manchukuo, and the Nazis took over Austria and Czechslovakia without provoking mass rebellion. The world system does not become more pacific because an empire succeeds in pacifying its newly acquired subjects.  If Trump gets away with seizing Venezuela’s oil without provoking a guerrilla war, destabilizing Cuba without a new Bay of Pigs attack, setting up his colonialist “Board of Peace” for ruined Gaza, or absorbing Greenland by means of threats and bribes, we will not hear a word of serious criticism from the advocates of U.S. “world leadership.”

Whether anti-Trump or pro-Trump, our imperial misleaders and their corporate partners ignore the connections between regional warmaking, the militarization of domestic society, and the increasing likelihood of world war.  That’s the bad news. The good news is that Trump’s increasingly unhinged and unapologetic interventionism is waking people up on a wide variety of fronts.  Empire, imperialism, and military-industrial complex are no longer taboo words and concepts. Even Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, formerly one of Trump’s most passionate supporters, understands that his promise to be a good isolationist was a lie and that the current frenzy of U.S. military interventions is a symptom of an empire in decline.

Meanwhile, the citizens of Minnesota, California, and several other US states are learning what it feels like to be subjects of imperial domination. The masked, armed agents of ICE, acting out of fear and rage in an increasingly hostile environment, could as well be descending on Fallujah as on Minneapolis. It will take a while longer before an US awakening becomes general, but this will happen, I hope and pray, before Trumpian violence generates an irreversible movement toward world war.  To quote the banner that appears at the conclusion of Stanley Kramer’s 1959 anti-nuke movie, “On the Beach,”

“THERE IS STILL TIME … BROTHER.”

__________________________________________

Richard E. Rubenstein is a member of the TRANSCEND Media Service Editorial Committee, of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment, and a professor of conflict resolution and public affairs at George Mason University’s Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter Center for Peace and Conflict Resolution. A graduate of Harvard College, Oxford University (Rhodes Scholar), and Harvard Law School, Rubenstein is the author of nine books on analyzing and resolving violent social conflicts. His most recent book is Resolving Structural Conflicts: How Violent Systems Can Be Transformed (Routledge, 2017).

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 26 Jan 2026.

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One Response to “Understanding Trump’s Interventions: How Regional Imperialism Generates World War”

1. Hoosen Vawda says:

   26 Jan 2026 at 14:26

   PLEA TO PROFESSOR RICHARD E. RUBENSTEIN IS A MEMBER OF THE TRANSCEND MEDIA SERVICE EDITORIAL COMMITTEE.
   Dear Professor Richard E. Rubenstein
   Greetings from Durban, South Africa. Trust you are well and settled in, for the winter in Washington. I humbly apologise for corresponding with Professor Rubenstein, on this platform. I read your paper with great interest, and concur that the world is heading towards WWIII. Thank you for the report.
   I am compelled to write to you, dear Dear Professor Richard E. Rubenstein, directly, in your official capacity, as a member of the TMS Editorial Committee, and as a professor of conflict resolution and public affairs. The matter concerns a simple request made to Madam Marylyn Langlois, a fellow member of the TMS Editorial committee, with two personal e-mails, three appeals on the good lady’s website, including one in Italian, to please send me an Editorial Policy document, with reference to publication policies of papers submitted to Professor Rosa for publication in TMS. Initially, I was informed that my e-mails could not be transmitted.
   I have sent Madam Langlois and Professor Rosa, e-mails (Tuesday, 13 January 2026 21:56 and on Thursday, 15 January 2026 10:41 SAST.) to suggest an alternative mode of transmission, through the service of Professor Rosa, as well as inviting Ms Langlois to contact me directly, to no avail. In fact, my very polite request for your Editorial Policy, a simple straightforward request, by an active, contributing member has been responded by rude and terse e-mails, which are uncalled for, while Ms Langlois did not respond at all. I understand that it is a common American culture NOT to respond to e-mails from South Africans, noting that I receive e-mails from senators and other US administrative persons, hence, I find a non-responsive ethos from a TMS Editorial Board officer, rather an odd occurrence.
   The purpose of my present communication, is to lodge a humble plea, to appeal to Professor Rubenstein to kindly send me the following, as several of my submissions which are totally non-inflammatory, have been censored for publication, or NOT published at all, without any reasons being advanced.
   1. A TMS Editorial Policy Document, which I am confident that TMS has in its file, drawn up previously.
   2. A complete list of the Editorial Committee Members of TMS
   3. The name of the Chair of the Editorial Committee, Member
   I know that what I am requesting, are public domain documents and not classified government documents. This is in conformity with access to Information Act.
   I respectfully request that my appeal be attended
   From: Hoosen Vawda
   Sent: Monday, 26th January 2026 at 16:26 hours SAST
   To: Professor Rubenstein as comment on a paper in TMS on 26-01-2026

   Thank you
   In respectful collegiality
   Kind regards, God be with you
   Hoosen Vawda
   Durban
   Global: + 27 82 291 4546
   e-mail: vawda@ukzn.ac.za

   Reply