This thug has dragged us back to the imperial age — what comes next should terrify us all

In the first year of Donald Trump’s second term, he imposed his thuggery on the United States. In the second year, apparently he will impose it on the hemisphere.

America’s takeover of Venezuela — because it’s in our “backyard” and we didn’t like its leader — strengthens Vladimir Putin’s claim over Ukraine, Xi Jinping’s over Taiwan, and Benjamin Netanyahu’s over the West Bank and Gaza.

Make no mistake: Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro was a vicious dictator who harmed Venezuela and its people. But the world is populated by many vicious dictators. We don’t take over their countries.

The postwar order was supposed to stop thugs who use aggression to take over their “backyards,” as Hitler had done in Europe and Japan in East Asia.

But Trump is now reverting back to the pre-World War II, might-makes-right, spheres-of-power, order.

For more than 80 years, America’s moral authority has rested on our claim to be on the side of democracy. That claim was often belied by American aggression that bolstered dictators — in Vietnam in the 1960s, in Latin America in the 1970s, and more recently in Afghanistan and Iraq — but it at least gave a patina of legitimacy to our alliances and to our “soft power” through USAID and the United Nations.

Now we’re back to the rawest form of neo-imperialism.

“We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country,” Trump explained on Saturday morning.

Let’s be clear: When it comes to Venezuela’s giant oil reserves, America’s oil companies will be making money for themselves. During the 2024 campaign they made a deal with Trump on which they’re still cashing in.

In December, Trump tried to justify his blockade of Venezuela by referring to its “expropriation” of U.S. oil company assets, presumably referring to the nation’s nationalization of its oil reserves in 1976.

“They’re not going to do that again,” Trump told reporters. “We had a lot of oil there. As you know they threw our companies out, and we want it back.”

Rubbish. The 1976 nationalization was the culmination of decades of efforts by both left-wing and right-wing administrations in Venezuela to regain financial control over oil that earlier had largely been given away.

Trump seems intent on carving up the world into three large power blocs: one under the thuggery of Putin, the second under the thuggery of Xi, and the third under Trump’s thuggery (allied with sou-thugs like Israel’s Netanyahu).

To be a “neighbor” of a thug is to surrender to the thug’s wishes or to the thug’s direct control. Within Putin’s thuggery fall Ukraine and quite possibly Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and the rest of the former Soviet bloc.

Within Xi’s thuggery fall Taiwan, Tibet, Mongolia, and possibly Nepal.

Within Trump’s thuggery fall the rest of Latin America, including Mexico, and possibly even Greenland and Canada.

Beware. The Trump world order makes the world safe only for major tyrants.

• Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.
• Robert Reich's new memoir,Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org