{"id":312436,"date":"2026-01-26T12:00:38","date_gmt":"2026-01-26T12:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=312436"},"modified":"2026-01-23T07:37:14","modified_gmt":"2026-01-23T07:37:14","slug":"understanding-trumps-interventions-how-regional-imperialism-generates-world-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2026\/01\/understanding-trumps-interventions-how-regional-imperialism-generates-world-war\/","title":{"rendered":"Understanding Trump\u2019s Interventions: How Regional Imperialism Generates World War"},"content":{"rendered":"

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 \u201cendless wars\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

What obscures this reality at present and muddles much media coverage of the situation is Trump\u2019s invocation of the Monroe Doctrine (aka the \u201cDon-Roe Doctrine\u201d) to justify his activities in the Western Hemisphere. \u00a0Yes, he abducted the Maduros, killed Venezuelan and Cuban soldiers, declared himself the owner of Venezuela\u2019s 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.\u00a0 Even so, many commentators conclude that Trump\u2019s intention is to exercise military power primarily in the U.S.\u2019s Caribbean and Latin American \u201cbackyard,\u201d while other regional hegemons such as China and Russia do as they wish in their own spheres of influence.<\/p>\n

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. \u00a0It has even gained acceptance among some analysts at the mainstream foreign policy journals and NGOs. To accept this regional focus, however, means shutting one\u2019s eyes to the history and dynamics of imperialism, especially as illustrated by the imperial wars of the 1930s<\/p>\n

Amid the deluge of articles and broadcasts covering Trump\u2019s 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. \u00a0In 1931, Japan conquered Manchuria after manufacturing a false-flag incident at Mukden and then attacked China, seizing Beijing and Shanghai.\u00a0 In 1935 Mussolini invaded Ethiopia and two years later defeated Haile Selassie\u2019s outgunned regime.\u00a0 Around the same time, Hitler invaded the demilitarized Rhineland.\u00a0 He would soon move to overthrow the Austrian and Czechoslovak governments and send military forces to aid General Franco\u2019s fascists in the Spanish Civil War.<\/p>\n

Of course, these events took place almost a century ago \u2013 but the analogy is startling.\u00a0 Like Trump\u2019s 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\u2019s sphere of influence. \u00a0But today we understand that they were also significant steps toward world war.<\/p>\n

Why doesn\u2019t this sort of violence remain in the regional backyard instead of generating global conflict? \u00a0The first reason is that interventions like these always target imperial competitors, not just local resistors. Italy\u2019s war in Ethiopia was aimed at British interests in the Horn of Africa, Japan\u2019s aggression in Manchuria at Chinese and Western interests, and Germany\u2019s machinations in Europe at Western and Russian interests. The pattern of targeting an imperial competitor\u2019s local \u201cagents\u201d persisted long after the end of World War II.\u00a0 In the 1970s Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger overthrew the Allende regime in Chile and installed Pinochet\u2019s dictatorship there because they considered Allende a potential Soviet (and Cuban) ally. Similarly, Trump\u2019s overarching aim in Latin America is to limit the growing influence of China (and the less substantial influence of Russia) on that continent.<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 a polarizing process that tends to create armed multinational blocs and a bipolar world order. \u00a0Barbara Tuchman\u2019s classic work, The Guns of August<\/em>, shows exactly how this operated to produce the unbelievably destructive \u201cwar to end all wars\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.\u00a0 (Indeed, with the advent of climate change, the list of scarce resources grows to include essentials such as water and breathable air.)<\/p>\n

The moral?\u00a0 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. \u00a0Modern empires are late-capitalist powers driven to compete globally for essential industrial materials, markets, and investment opportunities, and compelled to \u201cdevelop\u201d or transform the societies that they dominate. \u00a0There is no way that their ruling classes can remain in their own backyards \u2013 and when they go abroad (as they must, to maintain their own viability), they go armed to the teeth.<\/p>\n

Liberal as well as conservative commentators may hate to admit it, but Lenin\u2019s 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 \u201cpeacefully.\u201d\u00a0 But these periods of relative quiescence do not last. Unable to solve global problems that their own profit-dominated systems exacerbate \u2013 problems like radical social inequality, human-caused climate change, and mass migration \u2013 they employ threats of war and war itself as their favored methods of conflict management. They call this strategy \u201cpeace through strength,\u201d but we understand that what they really mean is Empire First, by any means necessary.<\/p>\n

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. \u00a0Nor 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\u2019s, Italy\u2019s, and Germany\u2019s localized aggression that the Kellogg-Briand Pact outlawing war as an instrument of national policy \u2013 a treaty signed by almost all the world\u2019s nations \u2013 became a dead letter. Then and now, intensified regional imperialism was a symptom of impending global war.<\/p>\n

Donald Trump\u2019s interventionism thus represents a major escalation of inter-imperial conflict \u2013 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 \u201cpeace through strength,\u201d Democratic Party leaders like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries are unable to criticize Trump\u2019s military adventures, except to complain that he doesn\u2019t consult Congress as he should and sometimes acts \u201crecklessly.\u201d \u00a0With Iraq in mind, the New York Times<\/em> editors warn that attempting to occupy nations that don\u2019t want to be occupied is a bad idea.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s 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 \u201cdecapitated\u201d existing regime with substantial mass support to guarantee U.S. control of that nation\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 If Trump gets away with seizing Venezuela\u2019s oil without provoking a guerrilla war, destabilizing Cuba without a new Bay of Pigs attack, setting up his colonialist \u201cBoard of Peace\u201d 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. \u201cworld leadership.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 That\u2019s the bad news. The good news is that Trump\u2019s increasingly unhinged and unapologetic interventionism is waking people up on a wide variety of fronts.\u00a0 Empire, imperialism, and military-industrial complex are no longer taboo words and concepts. Even Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, formerly one of Trump\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 To quote the banner that appears at the conclusion of Stanley Kramer\u2019s 1959 anti-nuke movie, \u201cOn the Beach,\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cTHERE IS STILL TIME … BROTHER.\u201d<\/p>\n

__________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Richard E. Rubenstein is a member of the <\/em>TRANSCEND Media Service<\/em><\/a> Editorial Committee, of the <\/em>TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/em><\/a>, and a professor of conflict resolution and public affairs at George Mason University\u2019s 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 <\/em>Resolving Structural Conflicts: How Violent Systems Can Be Transformed (Routledge, 2017).<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Trump’s 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[3143,2642,417,2857,2159,880,249,2200,2534],"class_list":["post-312436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-editorial","tag-anti-hegemony","tag-anti-imperialism","tag-bullying","tag-monroe-doctrine","tag-rogue-states","tag-state-terrorism","tag-trump","tag-us-empire","tag-wwiii"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=312436"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312436\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":312437,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312436\/revisions\/312437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=312436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=312436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=312436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}