The global political scene is currently experiencing a period of turmoil. The U.S. is once again heavily embroiled in conflicts in the Middle East, thousands of civilian lives are being lost, and major conflicts in almost every corner of the world rage on. It seems as though every day, yesterday’s news becomes old news, which is why it is important to reflect back on previous events so that we may better understand today’s ones.
This article will take us back what feels like an eternity in politics, but is actually just two months, to January 2026, when the U.S. hurled two geopolitical grenades into an already volatile world. First, a renewed aggressive posture toward Venezuela. Second, barely concealed territorial ambitions over Greenland. The same question hangs over both: is this a superpower merely acting in its own defence, or one that never really stopped the covert imperialism that has been present under the constant guise of ‘foreign aid’?
The Greenland Debate
Greenland’s strategic value is real and worth taking seriously. Russia and China have both been expanding their Arctic presence, and the island hosts the Pituffik Space Base, a critical U.S. military installation. In a world of intensifying great power competition, wanting to secure that flank is not unreasonable.
But security and sovereignty are not the same thing. NATO allies have shared bases and intelligence for decades without one member attempting to annex another. The U.S. already has its base. What exactly does ownership add – other than ownership?
That question became considerably harder to brush off when Trump, on January 9th, told reports that the U.S. would take Greenland “the easy way [or]… the hard way”, then ordered the Joint Chiefs to draw up invasion plans. He then threatened 10-25% tariffs against eight NATO allies for daring to conduct a military exercise on Greenlandic soil.
Most remarkably of all, Trump looked into the camera and said plainly: “I don’t need international law”. For a country that has long presented itself as the guardian of the rules-based international order (an order built on the jus cogens prohibition of acquiring territory by force), the irony was difficult to miss. Trump eventually backed down at Davos on January 21st, pledging not to use military force and announcing a vague “framework of a future deal”. Whether that represented genuine diplomacy or a tactical retreat remains unclear.
Venezuelan imperialism?
Venezuela’s case is harder to dress up in the language of security, and yet the Trump administration has tried. The justification for Operation Absolute Resolve (the military strike on Caracas that captured President Nicolás Maduro) was framed around narco-terrorism, organised crime, and regional stability. These are not entirely invented concerns. Venezuela under Maduro had produced one of the largest displacement crises in the world, and Maduro himself faced longstanding U.S. indictments on drug trafficking charges. The security packaging was coherent.
Then Trump complicated things at the press conference. The U.S. would “run” Venezuela, he said, until a transition could take place. U.S. oil companies would move in immediately. Revenue from Venezuelan oil would go partly “to the United States of America in the form of reimbursement” for damages. Within days, Trump signed an executive order placing Venezuelan oil revenues under U.S. control. The operation was widely condemned by the UN, international law experts, and even members of the U.S. Senate as another jus cogens breach, this time not a threat but an act.
The Monroe Doctrine, that 19th-century declaration of hemispheric dominance, was never formally retired. With Venezuela, it seems it never needed to be.
A Pattern, Not a Coincidence
Two countries, thousands of miles apart, with little in common except one thing: both found themselves in the crosshairs of U.S. foreign policy within the same month. The Trump administration would have you believe these were separate, unrelated responses to separate, unrelated security concerns. But patterns have a way of revealing themselves.
A variety of sources from multiple countries show U.S. ambitions of securing rare earth element (REE) dominance. Greenland happens to sit atop one of the world’s most significant rare earth deposits. Venezuela, meanwhile, holds the world’s largest proven oil reserves, which Trump had placed under U.S. administrative control within days of Maduro’s capture. The through-line between the two cases is not security; it is resources.
This is not a new story, it is a very old one, dressed in a new suit. The United States has a long history of intervening in sovereign nations under the banner of security, democracy, or stability, with natural resources conveniently somewhere in the background. What is perhaps new is the brazenness of a president who draws up invasion plans against a NATO ally, seizes a foreign country’s oil revenues, and tells the world he does not need international law to do any of it.
So, Imperialism or Security?
The honest answer is: both, depending on where you look. Greenland’s Arctic security concerns are real, but real security concerns do not require invasion plans, NATO tariff threats, or a president announcing on camera that international law simply does not apply to him. American narco-terrorism charges against Maduro were not fabricated, but a country that arrests a foreign head of state, seizes his nation’s oil revenues, and announces it will “run” the country until further notice is not conducting security policy. It is conducting an empire.
What January 2026 revealed is not that the United States has changed, but that it has stopped pretending. The rules-based international order, largely built by Washington after 1945, turns out to have always had a small asterisk at the bottom: terms and conditions apply – unless you are the one writing them.
By Philip Shvander
March 22, 2026
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