MAGA Empire w/ Aslı Bâli and Greg Grandin

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Quote, "Mr. Trump seems perfectly happy to deal with the remnants of the Maduro government, as long as it follows his commands and gives him access to the oil and compensation for nationalizing the assets of US firms. That is a very different nation-building mission than, say, the types that George W. Bush pursued in Afghanistan and Iraq. Mr. Bush claimed, at least, that he was creating models of democracy in the Middle East. Mr. Trump is claiming nothing more than transactional rights to Venezuela's underground riches. That's from the New York Times. I found that passage striking because, while it's true, it also exemplifies the mainstream media's inability to identify how those war-on-tar imperialist politics laid the groundwork for Trump repudiating them in favor of this crude. Explicit, imperialist gangsterism, how the war on tears democratic and universalist ideological pretense was contradicted by the reality of coalition of the willing unilateralist invasion, Guantanamo and extraordinary rendition, the clash of civilizations and drone assassinations. How those contradictions laid the groundwork for this mega-impurealism that dispenses with all such pretense entirely is Trump continuity or rupture. The answer is clearly both. The inability to understand this is symptomatic of deep problems in US liberal institutions from the New York Times to the Democratic Party. The very sort of problems that have helped bring Trump to power and that have undermined attempts to oppose him from the center left. It's not surprising that liberal imperialists can't comprehend their own complicity and trumpism, and it's one of many reasons why we can only defeat Trumpism by overthrowing the Democratic Party establishment. The war on terror and invasion of Iraq were legitimated however absurdly through a universalist neo-conservative call for the liberation of Arab and Muslim people. But when that universalist rationale crashed into intense, durable armed resistance to the US occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan when those occupations absolutely failed on their own terms. That, in the mid-Auts, is when both nativism and Islamophobia alongside an incoherate anti-war politics when all of that began to explode, powerfully in the US, all sentiments that helped Trump win the presidency in 2016. It's important that we understand that the explosion of Islamophobia and nativism in the mid-Auts was not simply an immediate reaction to the 9/11 attacks but rather a product of the utter failure of neo-conservative interventionism to achieve any of its stated goals in response to those attacks. Anti-war sentiment became a powerful force in US society. The Democratic establishment however failed to take advantage of that, doubling down on militarism. The ascendant far right advanced nativism in Islamophobia as its explanation for the crisis. In that explanation was so successful in substantial part because it was never met by a coherent anti-imperialist rebuttal from Democrats. Trump's anti-war politics, it turns out, were always a more narrow critique of neo-conservatism in its universalist liberal pretensions. The problem wasn't that we invaded Iraq so much as that we tried to turn its government into a liberal democracy and, of course, that we didn't take their oil. Trump's nativism in Fortress America, illiberal Don Roe doctrine imperialism, are in fact one political program, both products of this shared history. This might makes right, post-called war, post-liberal imperialist moment, is also a white supremacist moment of terror against foreigners. The virtues of explicitly racist immigration restrictions are rehabilitated alongside those of classical imperialism and colonialism. A recent tweet from Stephen Miller summed up the worldview, quote, "Not long after World War II, the West dissolved its empires and colonies and began sending colossal sums of taxpayer-funded aid to these former territories, despite having already made them far wealthier and more successful." The West opened its borders, a kind of reverse colonization, providing welfare and thus remittances, while extending to these newcomers and their families, not only the full franchise, but preferential legal and financial treatment over the native citizenry. The neo-liberal experiment, at its core, has been a long self-punishment of the places and peoples that built the modern world. In fact, the neo-liberal experiment, of course, has been an organized capitalist and neo-colonial assault on organized workers everywhere in decolonizing movements across the global south, and that's the reality precisely what mega-politics, including very much mega-empire, are intended to confuse. It's straight up authoritarian gangsterism at home in abroad, one project that serves US political and economic power on the global stage, and political economic power of capitalists and grifters of so many varieties here at home. And so here we are. Afro-conners are the only real refugees because the only true victim in the post-colonial world is the settler robbed by decolonization. In fact, the West must now decolonize itself through racialized mass deportation in the resubordination of the lesser races to white domination. There is a current of the far-right that is criticized Trump's militarism as a betrayal of core mega-principles. People like Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massey, though notably, Carlson has somewhat praised the Venezuelan invasion for seizing Maduro without trying to bring down the whole regime. What's clear is that the bedrock consensus behind a certain form of liberal imperialism continues to fracture, breaking down into a growing kaleidoscope of ideological formations. From the cold war through the war on terror, the US imperialist project has overwhelmingly been a bipartisan one. We are now witnessing, in fits and starts, the emergence of polarization over US Empire between Democrats and Republicans, but also critically among Republicans and among Democrats. Establishment Democrats oppose Trump on the grounds of a bipartisan liberal internationalism that has long since lost its mojo. Others, an hour rising left from Zoran to Platner, speak out forcefully against imperialism and propose social democracy as the real solution to this crisis. Today, I'm discussing Maga Empire with two guests, Oslobale and Greg Grandin. before we get rolling. What keeps the podcast that you're listening to up and running are the contributions of listeners like you at patreon.com/thedig. We are a not-for-profit operation. If we were all about maximizing revenue, we would pay well episodes. That would raise a lot, lot, lot more. This is a political education project. We want everyone to listen to every episode. Your contributions are what allow us to put up every episode pay while free. Please contribute now. Be a part of making the dig possible. That's p-a-t-r-e-o-n dot com slash the dig. Okay, here's Oslobale and Greg Grandin. Oslobale is a professor of law at Yale Law School who focuses on public international law and has published essays and op-eds in the New York Times, Boston Review, London Review of Books, Jacobin, Descent, and elsewhere. Before joining academia, she worked for the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. She's past president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America, co-chair of the Advisory Board for the Middle East Division of Human Rights Watch, and a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Greg Grandin teaches history at Yale University and is the author of a number of books, including the Pulitzer Prize winner, The End of the Myth, and most recently, America, America, a new history of the New World. Oslobale and Greg Grandin, welcome back to the dig. Thanks for having us. Trump ran for office seemingly as an opponent of the Forever Wars, and many took him, many took him at his word. But of course, he just invaded Venezuela, kidnapped its president, declared the US to be running the whole country, all part of this expansive corollary to them in road doctrine that he's announced, the so-called Don Road doctrine, threats to Greenland, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico. In his first term, he assassinated Kusim Soleimani in his second, partnered with Israel to Bamaaron, and he's now threatening to Bamaaron again. He promised to end the war in Ukraine and has repeatedly tried but failed to do so on Russia's terms. His foreign policy toward Europe, meanwhile, is just nakedly hostile, supporting far-right parties overthrowing the governing liberal order, that and threatening to seize Greenland from Denmark. He orchestrated a purported cease-fire in Gaza, even as Israel continues daily killing indelegal annexation. He used massive tariffs to support and aid allied countries to his economic demands, but after he tried to do the same with China launching an enormous tariff war, he quickly folded when Xi in response wielded some very powerful economic weaponry. We'll get into a lot of these particulars and more, but let's start with a big picture question. How would you characterize Trump's foreign policy and his brand of US imperialism? Literally, on election night in 2024, he said, "I'm not going to start a war. I'm going to stop wars. Has Trump sold out Maga anti-war politics as some far-right dissidents contend or or has he always not so much opposed war as much as he's been promoting a new model for US militarism and empire?" I think that we are witnessing the merger of two different veins of Trump's approach to foreign policy. On the one hand, very clearly, we are in the midst of a kind of resource imperialism. So it's very clear that he is targeting countries and territories that he views as having resources of value to the United States, particularly those that he can describe as in the so-called Western hemisphere, sphere of influence that he's trying to build. As far as he's concerned, the United States has to be the hegemonic actor of that Western hemisphere, the Western hemisphere stretches from Venezuela to Greenland in his account, it encompasses resources of all kinds, where earth minerals in the case of Greenland fossil fuel energy in the case of Venezuela, but also the Panama Canal as a resource that perhaps falls into this universe of resource imperialism. And here, it's simply old school gumbo diplomacy of "We will have your assets, its expropriation of the most naked and sort of 19th century variety very much of a piece with his kind of gilded age domestic politics as well." So there's that piece, but then there's also a second piece which I think is really important and also helps us to understand the nature of his sphere of influence thinking and the shifting of his relationship to Russia and China and his orientation to Europe. And this is a kind of vision of the globe divided amongst civilizationally distinct ethno-national communities. And this corresponds directly to the nativism that we see at home. It's the white Christian nationalism expressed in foreign policy terms. And in this universe, of course, U.S. security is best preserved by reshaping its hegemonic sphere of influence in its own domain as the civilizationally superior ethno-national nation of the Western hemisphere. But also, he has a very clear idea about reshaping the character of Europe, which requires those far-right parties in Europe to govern, to have the same civilizational conception of governance on the continent of Europe, which is the only part of the world that shares the civilizational ethno-national distinction of the United States from his perspective adequately. Even North America, yes, Canada might and Canada's another target potentially for his expansive resource imperialist vision, but one that's compatible in the case of Canada with the ethno-nationalism, right? Canada, he also understands to be essentially a white Christian nation, therefore capable of absorption in a way that, you know, then as well as not a candidate for none of these other entities in the region or candidates for. Europe has to be reshaped in this image. Separately, though, Russia and China in this understanding are also entitled, that's on level, to a kind of regional sphere of influence of their own. They are entitled to expressing their own hegemonic ambitions in their regions. And he seems, I mean, one way of thinking about this form of imperialism is it's just not interested in doing more than punching down. So he's not going to be seeking out wars with co-equals or other actors that may be, you know, capable of asserting hegemony in other regions. Instead, it's a kind of division of the world amongst these civilizationally and ethno-nationally distinct entities, as he understands them, which means there's a very particular imprint on the Western hemisphere. Now, the one exception I would say to this is the Middle East, where there is again an entity that perhaps fits into this model of, let's say, Judeo-Christian-shared civilizational identity, which is Israel with which there is deep identification, and that is actually now contested in the Mago world, but at least Trump is on one clear side of that division for the moment. And moreover, it's a very resource-rich part of the world, in which an assertion of the resource imperialism continues to dominate the way in which he thinks about the United States relationship to that region. So it remains a kind of special region, if you want, of Geo-economic competition, but one in which the United States will not allow a different rival, or a different Hegemon, apart from perhaps a civilizational aligned local Hegemon to assert dominance. And then finally, you have these kinds of peripheral expressions, like Nigeria as one example, where you see a sort of, I think, variant on the themes I've just described. Obviously, Nigeria is a resource-rich nation. There's that possibility. The explanation of the strikes in December were along civilizational lines. We are there defending fellow Christians, however, empirically unrelated, the actual strikes may have been to any specific Christian community or any particular threat, but the action was described in civilizational terms. In reality, on the ground, further control in Nigeria would serve resource imperialism. So I think there's a kind of adhocary, if you want, to the way that these two pieces get mixed and matched in the Trump universe, but that's how I would describe his current version of imperial form policy. Yeah. I agree with all of that. And I think that to understand the nature of what we're seeing and how crazy and confusing it is, you have to kind of triangulate between the particularities of Trump's political success is unique charisma, which seems to be the only thing that holds the mega coalition together is that he likes the kind of one and done demonstrations of power and then and then to be able to negotiate from a position of strength and that kind of sense in which he's able to embody the contradictions of the population, the United States, that was exhausted by war, so he's the peace president, but then still kind of embody the fact of the matter is that the United States does continue to project its power and the main source of power increasingly is it's military power, so he does it through these demonstrative actions. So you got that on one hand, and then the other hand you have all the the ethno-national nationalist project that Asla just mentioned. We might also also call it tribal nationalism or American first tribalism, a very particular form of nationalism which understands itself as opposed to a kind of liberal universalism. And I wanna come back to that in a second. And then the larger demands of the US global power which are complicated and is an enormous array of entanglements and entitlements and interests at play. The United States is not withdrawing behind its borders in any sense soon. It's got an enormously complicated and complex political economy and finance that it projects with finance and still through manufacturing to some degree in technology. So, you know, negotiating that. I think what you see Trump doing and from my perspective as somebody interested in US-Ladden American relations is there's an explicit, in the national security strategy document which they released a month ago, they come straight out and say that the post-Cold War consensus in which the United States would superintend the world as a liberal hegemon in which the world is treated as a unified object and nations participate through a set of common rules, governing property and trade and investment was a mistake and we're moving beyond that. And Aslan, as I mentioned, what's the planting it is a vision of a kind of tripotite balance of power between these hegemon, civilization of hegemon's, Russia, China, and the US and the each get their own Sandlot. They're he's supposed to organize, you know, the hinterlands, Russia is supposed organized for the Soviet republics and maybe Ukraine, China, the South, South China, sea and Asia and the United States of course, Latin America. But what's particularly interesting about the United States and Latin America is that is this resurgence of the Monroe doctrine. And in some ways, this goes back deep, but America first tribal nationalism, which is deeply rooted within the conservative, quote unquote, isolationist tradition of the United States as opposed to the internationalists and the globalists always liked the Monroe doctrine. The Monroe doctrine was a, was very, there was a harmony between how they imagined the United States and its dominance over its own hemisphere. And in some ways, the Monroe doctrine is the way America first nationalists become internationalists. They project themselves. But why they like the Monroe doctrine is a number of reasons. One, it's not universalist. It's specifically territorial and specific to the Western hemisphere. So it's supposed to liberal internationalism. And they also like it because it predates all of those other predates San Francisco and the founding of the United Nations, the predates the organization of American states, the predates the liberal international, the predates suffrage, the predates abolition. It goes back to close to the founding of the United States. So it's the world, it's the kind of adenic world that people like Steve Miller want before liberal internet, before the globalist kicked him out of the Anglo-Saxon God and whatever. So there's a effective attachment to the idea of the Monroe doctrine. What's interesting though about this new Trump corollary to the Monroe doctrine, because of course there has to be a Trump corollary to the Monroe doctrine, is that in the past, the Monroe doctrine, at least when nationalists or imperialists like Teddy Roosevelt invoked the Monroe doctrine, they at least gestured to one of its fundamental and first features, this notion that the Western hemisphere was shared a commonality of interests and we were system nations and to agree that the United States acted beyond its borders was to protect the sovereignty of all. Trump has totally stripped all of that out of the Monroe doctrine, it really is just like a property deed for the whole Western hemisphere, where the United States is just straight out saying the Monroe doctrine is the United States dominance of our hemisphere. And there's two things going on with this, then Latin America then becomes an object lessen of what the United States could do elsewhere than wants to, right? So it could use Latin America's target practice, it could kill speedboat operators, it could take out presidents. And JD Vance explicitly said that the easy takeout of Maduro is a lesson for the rest of the world to quote, unquote, nations who might want to cross us. So it's clearly a kind of, a fantasy of a kind of a warning. And then there's also an implicit expansion of the Monroe doctrine within that national security doctrine, which I think they imagine it as supplanting the logic of liberal internationalism, it becomes how the United States will act if it could to the rest of the world. It's basically said it will interfere in European politics as if to bring forward and support conservative coalitions within Europe for all of the reasons that Oslo mentioned. And so there's a way in which this resurrection of the Monroe doctrine really, in some ways, is key to understanding a lot of the puzzles that Trumpism represents, especially the way that America first nationalism, which presents itself as isolation, as becomes and has always been internationalist. Greg, just ahead of the US invasion of Venezuela, the New York Times published an interesting deep dive, laying out all of the various forces and factors within the Trump administration that had converged upon intensifying pressure on Venezuela, the boat strikes, laying the groundwork for the invasion. And that included Marco Rubio's anti-communism, Stephen Miller's deportation agenda. He wanted a wartime pretext to mass-deport Venezuelans. Stephen Miller was also obsessed with bombing cartels on Latin American soil, not necessarily in Venezuela, but somewhere. Trump's, of course, intense desire to control oil. But then when the invasion happened, the result was this bizarre regime change that keeps the regime in place minus Maduro. Chavismo, or some form of chavismo, is still in power, maybe better put Maduroismo without Maduro. But now, allegedly, we'll see, subordinate to US power. What do you make of both this over-determined set of magma motives for the regime change intervention in Venezuela? And then what do you make of the peculiar way that it played out? How might both teach us about how to read and understand Trump's imperial statecraft? Yeah. The over-determined set of justifications is a commonplace when it comes to Latin America. This is something that I've written about and was maybe one of the main theses in the book, Empire's workshop that the way, you're not the United States during moments of global crises in which its power is retracted and constricted, turns to Latin America and then works out new ways of figuring out how to project its power. And so whether it be FDR or whether it be Reagan, there's often multiple venues of vectors for justifying how the United States returns to Latin America and what it does in Latin America. And so I think you see that's what the Trump administration, but what's fascinating about the Trump administration is that unlike FDR say or unlike Ronald Reagan, they don't see it as a place to rebuild hegemony, right? I mean, the thing about the New Deal and the New Ride in Latin America, 'cause they use Latin America to turn that partisan coalitions into an adorable governing majority, says by figuring out how to overcome contradictions and work out tensions within the coalition, they use Latin America for that. I think what Trump has is completely uninterested in turning Trumpism into some kind of enduring majoritarian coalition or new order in the framework of a political scientist, even scurronic. He's not a reconstructive president that rebuilds political legitimacy. He's just really just continues to run the culture wars and order to secure his 30%, 40% minoritarian base. He's not interested, it doesn't seem to so there's that. And then I think the other thing that Latin America serves the United States, I was often reveals the limits of US power. And so yeah, Trump wanted a grab and go operation in Venezuela and then some kind of extortion scheme. That would have been great, but it turns out that things are a little bit more complicated and they're always more complicated. It reveals the limits of what the United States can do. So I don't know what will happen. I know ideally, obviously they will constituencies within the Trump coalition that would have liked to have seen Maria Machado, the Venezuelan one, the Nobel Peace Prize, who's very much linked with the most intransigent anti-communist wing of the Venezuelan opposition and is very much tied to the whole anti-cube. Cuba, Greater Florida, current within Trumpism, the Marcarubio current. And ideally they would have obviously liked to just install her as queen of Pan American MAGA in Venezuela. But they realized that can't happen. It's actually was quite, I was wondering who was intelligent enough in the Trump administration to realize that they couldn't do that. And I don't know the answer to that, but they looked at what happened in Iraq in 2003 where they debatified the party and it was a complete catastrophe. So they realized they couldn't teach Al Vista the Venezuelan government. They had to work with what was there. And then there are other complications. And it turns out that oil's already cheap. There's a lot of oil on the global market. Exxon basically is ending a list of things that have to happen before they even think of going back to Venezuela. So how deep does Trump get pulled into actually administering it in formal, you know, protectorate in Venezuela is the question that's still left to be seen. Yeah, Asal, what do you make of this emerging Venezuela model? Does Trump think he's, that he's figured out a way, a new trick to, to do regime change without the bloody and expensive messiness of boots on the ground? Yeah, I mean, I think the signature move of the Trump foreign policy is just pure coercion. So if he can bully an existing system into simply acquiescing to his demands, then that's all he's looking for. I mean, the sense in which he's issuing the traditional universalism of the United States is there is no liberal pretense to any of this, right? The nakedness of the new national security strategy is the only thing that really represents rupture in my mind in that it expresses unabashedly a desire to see a world dominated by coercion in which the US is the biggest stick in essentially a lawless order. And in that universe, the US has two potential avenues by which it can achieve its ends. It can do so by finding client elites that will simply do its bidding and agree to its terms, not through negotiation, but through capitulation, or it can replace existing elites with new, compliant elites that will do so. So in Venezuela, I think what's been modeled is, and I do think this is the only sense in which there is a clear departure from regime change, right? It's not regime change as such because there's no transformative ambition for the domestic political governance structures of the state. It's regime change only in the sense of an alternation of those that are actually holding the levers of power to ensure that those most willing to play along with the US's ambitions are the ones that hold those levers. Now, it may well be that the current previous vice president of Maduro ends up being that person or it may be an underling or a general or some other person. She may be dispensable. We may not be done with the quote unquote transformation of Venezuela, but the transformation question is simply to ensure that you have an elite in power that will say yes to oil deals with US companies, yes to knuckling under with whatever demand the Trump administration makes. For example, we might well see on the horizon the return, quote unquote, of tens of thousands of Venezuelans to Venezuela with a compliant regime that's willing to describe that as some kind of homecoming. And so basically there are two critical elements of America first that need to be served by the model of control in the hemisphere that that Trump is now experimenting with in Venezuela. The two elements are a domestic statement of ethno racial identity that asserts a fortress wall against immigrants, right? So so Venezuela can serve that and right now the demonization of Venezuela and immigrants and migrants was the sort of precursor that produced attempted to manufacture consent in some way for some kind of action in the Caribbean and action against Venezuela. So you can achieve that goal and a general statement of dominance, you know, the strongest stick in the region. And that too is being expressed here clearly in Venezuela by saying they are going to do our bidding. We have them exactly under our control. Now the degree to which that's that can be replicated is of course an open question. It's one that we're seeing right now play out in Iran, right? In a region farther away with a less sort of fully sclerotic political system and regime and when in which the critical actors in the Trump administration have less familiarity and less capacity to imagine exactly what they're going to do right. We have now an account of what preceded the intervention or incursion in Venezuela, which included apparently weeks of attempted negotiations through multiple proxies including the Vatican to get Maduro to leave, right? Not necessarily to prosecute him. It doesn't turn out to be the case that having custody of Maduro was necessarily a critical element. What was necessary was removing Maduro as figurehead and replacing him was some kind of a compliant person, whoever that person might be from within his entourage or from outside of his entourage. But someone without replacing the system without taking responsibility for the domestic politics of the state, getting access to the resources and achieving the anti-immigrant goals that the United States has in mind. With respect to Iran, it's much, much more difficult to achieve any of these ends, right? So we're not seeing, I mean, I think I'd be very surprised if we were to see military action to actually remove leadership from Iran at this point. And in Iran, you run a series of risks that I think are very unknowable whether or not, for example, the regime would be able to survive a decapitation, whether the territory itself would be subject to fragmentation, its heterogeneous, ethnically diverse, et cetera, and what are Israel's objectives and goals. So the idea that we can just go around the world replicating a Venezuela wherever we see a regime that we would like to see change, I think, is not obvious. And nor is it clearly in the mind of the Trump East that's here again, I think the hemispheric, the spheres of influence universe is ascended. So I do believe that Marco Rubio and others in the Trump administration intend to replicate the Venezuela model in Cuba as an example. I don't think they believe they can do so in Iran. And so the question becomes, is there a single model of America first regime change? I don't think so. You know, it's a sort of mix and match strategy. The one thing that's really clearly distinct from neo-con regime changes, the absence, and here I'm also reprising some of what Greg said of the universalist claims, the aspirations of the things about America that used to at one time under a bipartisan prior foreign policy, self-understanding, represent the way that the United States presented itself to the world, committed to democracy, committed to the rule of law, committed to sets of universal doctrines, allegedly advancing human rights. All of that has been stripped away. And now the question is, what specific goals of the Trump administration can be served by any particular intervention? As I've said, they're resource driven. They're also driven by this ethno-national conception, the fierce anti-immigrant sentiment and within our own hemisphere ideas of, quote unquote, return of those who have migrated to U.S. shores. But when you go beyond the Western hemisphere and you look abroad and you look to a place like Middle East, what kind of regime change model might the Trump administration be imagining? They are running a very serious risk of replicating an Iraq model in Iran if they engage in any form of coercive intervention. And even if they endorse a coercive intervention by one of their proxies, specifically by Israel, there again, they run that risk and whether they're willing and have the appetite to undertake that is to me not clear. The, the rapidity with which another possible Iran intervention is already on the table, I think also points to this thing that's common to Trump's domestic and foreign policy, which is just to keep moving, stay on offense on one front and then the other. So many crazy things happening so fast that people at home in a broad really have a lot of trouble keeping track of it all. I mean, we, I started preparing intensively for this interview around the time of the US invasion of Venezuela and already all eyes are on the streets of Minneapolis where ice thugs assassinated a woman in broad daylight. Greenland is on the table and it's off the table. Then it's back on Europe thinks they've placated Trump and then he has a conversation with Putin potentially going after Petro and they have a phone conversations tariffs on and off and on and off again, they're always flooding the zone and it's dizzying and it really does seem like it's part of the point of it all. Well, it feels like it's a tech bro forum policy of move fast and break things and of a constant politics of spectacle. So it's difficult to be held to account for anything when you're constantly moving to the next front and you're toggling between this kind of coercion and that kind of coercion in an enormous array of theaters. So I agree with that. I think that it's also the strategy domestically in the United States to move from one form of norm breaking or rule breaking to another, one initiative of lawlessness to another, making it very difficult. And I mean, of course, they've been explicit about this, right? This is this was a big piece of the planning of project 2025 was as you've already said to flood the zone. So there's no doubt that this is by design and it is very, very, very, very, very, very, difficult to react to, but one has to also step back at some level and take a view of the horizon as a whole and see the places where we see rupture and where we see continuity. And while it's true, for example, that the national security strategy reflects rupture in how the United States presents itself, as I've said, right? That self-image is gone. It has been shorn. But there's so much continuity. I mean, this is really the culmination of the decades long set of practices dressed up by much better salesmen of the United States as somehow rule-based order, etc. But when you get down to brass tax, the Caribbean sea militarization was preceded by decades of targeted killing, which basically said, the world is our battlefield. We can engage in drone strikes wherever we want, and we can come up with a license for murder. And now, I mean, we no longer bother with even the legitimating frame of claims of international law, etc., for a variety of reasons that themselves also have predicates in prior administration. So, I mean, there is a level of continuity here of the ways in which the United States is prepared to coercively reshape economies, geographies, and its own access at rendering this permeable, the sovereignty of any number of parts of the world that are deemed peripheral, essentially. And then you have the places where you have rupture, where you have real change in the terms of relations. And here, I think it's more critically with allies. I mean, this is the story of Europe and the remaking of and genuine repudiation of multilateralism for any purpose, right? So, there's a targeted dismantling of international institutions and forms of international law that themselves were designed and authored by the United States precisely to project its own power. So, there's a shift in the terms of how the United States is going to project its power. That shift is to pure coercion at this point and to reshape allies around other like-minded authoritarian hedgements, frankly, and seeking to reshape Europe to have a set of governments that share both the civilizational mindset and the willingness to essentially prescribe to a world primarily driven by power, by the Stephen Miller vision of, you know, we live in the real world where might makes right. So, there's an element of rupture, but again, I just want to underscore that this is a world that's been in the making for at least a quarter century, if not longer. This is the culmination of what the post-Cold War unipolarity imposed globally. It just didn't impose it initially on our allies. But really, we created a world of constant discretionary defection from existing rules, and we rewrote licenses to enable arbitrary murder across the globe at Arbohes using the metaphor of war to re-describe the actual nature of political contestation in countless geographies around the world. And now we have a government that wants to dispense with the normative trappings that once attached to that, but we're increasingly corroded and by the Biden administration and the Gaza genocide had become in any case totally untenable. I mean, had already unraveled. Yeah, I mean, I definitely agree with with all everything that Oslo just said that the continuity is obvious and intensive to anybody who wants to take a moment to look behind every outrageous Trump scandal or policy. There is a long, predatory, long trail of previous presidents. I mean, the drug war itself is 50 years old and Trump is doing that is really a break with any of the assumptions or practices that were put into place by every president who escalated the drug war since Richard Nixon first declared it. And the drug war itself was in some ways an extension of the Vietnam war. The DEA was created shortly after the United States and did its involvement in Southeast Asia. Certainly, the extra-digital killings, the United States is assuming for itself, figuring out ways to break out of multilateral restraints and exert power. But that it's a trick to figure out what is distinct about the Trump rupture. Is it that he does it through spectacle, does he take what used to be done behind the scenes and then politicize it and fold it into the culture wars and then it becomes part of the whole Trumpism? I mean, every president after you all wanted Greenland, Nelson Rockefeller tried to buy it in 1974. You know, when he was vice president, you know, but then Trump does it and he does it in a way that it becomes part of this spectacle of the atrix of power. There's also a way in which he does like these displays of raw power and well, for instance, the way he settled on oil as the reason for the invasion of I, of then as well, you know, he worked through immigration and then drugs and fentanyl and cocaine and then he kind of settled on oil. So he likes playing the role of the corporate cutthroat that speaks out of way real, the world really works. And some of that is just pure theatrics. Obviously, oil is important. Obviously, oil has been central, has been undercurrent of fossil fascism, at least since the 1920s. But Trump by politicizing it in such a way, he then folds that into the culture war too. I mean, all interests are ultimately ideologically determined, this ways of getting oil. You know, there was a ways of getting oil from Iraq that didn't that didn't tell a global war on on on on radical Islam that cost tens of trillions of dollars, right? They could have just they could have just gotten oil from Iraq by making a deal. They could have done the same thing about as well. So there's ways in which ideology and interests kind of fold into each other and get very confusing. One of the things that Trump is doing is I think it's Richard Seymour makes this argument about about asset stripping liberal internationalism, basically selling off the parts that don't work anymore and and and just keep, you know, trying to keep the the parts that are profitable. And it's interesting how personalistic it is. I like a small circle of people around Trump that immediately made a ton of money off of Venezuela, Paul Singer, who was also involved in rolling back the Kishnas debt negotiation in Argentina and making billions off of Argentine bond debt. And now he's he's made billions off of the the Venezuelan intervention because he invest because he managed to somehow take control of Sitko, which used to be a Venezuelan asset. So these people are very close to Trump, you know, making a lot of money, but then you're seeing the larger kind of infrastructure of the economy saying, well, we don't actually want a lot of oil on on the global market. So I guess I guess what I was trying to say is that yes, it is true that flooding the zone, but the zone also floods them, right? Classic kind of boxes thing. We work on the world and the world works on us. It's the same thing for these political coalitions. Like they, you know, they do want the illusion that they're in control and they have all the plates spinning in the air, but you know, a lot of them are spinning on their own and they're and they're rushing the catch up to it. This, this second term Trump seems out of the during Trump's first time, he seemed more involved, but he had Republican establishment people that put limits on him and and dampened some of his more some of the extremism. This time he seems like he just wants to host dinner bodies of Mar-a-Lago, but he has a whole team of ideologues that know what they're doing. Steven Miller and JD Vance and Marco Rubio and the guy who's heads a DA and you know, all of these people are acting and they're acting and they're acting. But at the same time, there's no move to turn again to come back to this idea to turn it into a durable coalition, you know, and so the question is this violence, this violence that's you know, that that's exercised abroad and and at home the shooting of speedboat pilots and the shooting of of white women in Minnesota, this is obviously going to lead to a disastrous midterm election for them and and so then what's next is it really does it really just devolve into there's a way in which escalation has its own logic and that that that I think that's true in terms of the exercise of violence is true in terms of foreign policy and domestic policy. They get out ahead of their skis and they really actually don't have control of the situation. The invasion of Venezuela is of course just the most dramatic of Trump's many interventions in Latin America, bailing out Argentine president Javier Malay, punishing or attempting to punish Brazil for its defensive its institutions and crackdown on Bolsonaro's attempt to subvert them pushing for the victory of the right wing presidential candidate in Honduras. Could this although backfire against Trump's agenda and his right wing allies across the region look at Brazil where where Trump's attacks urged on publicly by the Bolsonaro's played ultimately very much to Lula's advantage and the same thing could be playing out for the Colombian left right now in the wake of all of the U.S. pressure on Gustavo Petro. Stepping back 20th century liberal imperialism it was a hegemonic project that combined sometimes incredibly brutal illiberal violence with all sorts of policies and politics to manufacture consent across the globe. Could could this all stick no care at imperialism? turn out to not work out so well in Latin America and beyond. Greg, you were just talking about the lack of any real intent to create a hegemonic project domestically and the problems that will likely cause for Trump is the same thing in the process of being recapitulated globally. Well, I don't know about globally, but in terms of Latin America, there's certainly a social base for Trumpism in Latin America, right? Both among voters, voters are a target of crime voters who have been pulled into the culture wars. If you compare the set of presidents, leftist presidents that are in power now with the post-2000 in which Chavez and Lula and Evolmovellas, all of Latin America, united and spoken of very confident, rhetorically dominant voice in the public realm against George Bush's wars and ways that was quite inspiring and managed to push back. People were talking about the end of the Monroe doctrine, Latin America's second independence, that all of this stuff. Now, you have Lula and you have Claudia Shinebaum in Mexico, but Latin America is much more divided. And what's very notable, I think, is when the United States invaded Panama in 1989, every nation in the OAS voted against it, and it was roundly condemned by all public opinion polls. Medora really was a dead weight around the left for a long time in Latin America that created the sense that something had to happen. And I don't know if I trust these opinion polls, but there's a sense that more Latin Americans were in favor of the intervention than would previously had been possible, considering that the ideal of sovereignty, the ideal of non-intervention was so cherished within the region. And now you have these, you know, you have Latin America literally divided, but then on the other hand, even as close allies, when it comes to what matters, when it comes to China, maybe a delay, I think, right now is in China, before the Federal Reserve bailout of the peso, China had a currency swap holding the peso up, and that's still in place. You're not going to unwind all of these, this deep investment that China has in agriculture and infrastructure and technology in Latin America, even allies of Trump are going to back away from that, like Millay. So it's a little unclear, I think it's a kind of up in the am moment in Latin America. Trump certainly always undermines that, again, just as in the United States, he seems unconcered with building a majority of the coalition. In Latin America, it seems like he takes actions that seem to undermine the possibility of solidifying a pan-American trumpism. And certainly this intervention is a fault line, but also one of the things that's holding the left back is a certain hesitance, a certain nervousness about the right in Latin America. The right back in the 2000s and 2010s, the right lost every election because they were running on a kind of traditional anti-communism, nutrition, Catholic agenda that was a kind of old right or a Cold War right. And they couldn't deal with the horizon that Chavismo and Lula had opened up. The right in response borrowed all the cultural world politics from the United States, you know, and all conspiracism and the grooming and the duty of Butler and the gun rights and the evangelicals and the illibitarians. And so they've been totally cultural warized and they've had some success in Ecuador and Chile electorally in Argentina. And some of it is in reaction to the vast, impressive spread of abortion rights and rights related to sexual identity and gender and other things that the left in Latin America has embraced in some countries in Mexico and Argentina. And so it's a reaction to that. So I think the left is nervous. It doesn't respond to Trump the way it responded to Bush. You know, the Communist Party kind of they had in Chile didn't run, didn't internationalize the election and run against, you know, Trumpism. She ran a kind of ineffectual Hillary Clinton kind of campaign. You know, that was very foreshortened. So I think that's one of the things that hold the left back from becoming an effect of opponent to Trump the way it was to George Bush. It's notable. Just on the premise of the question, it's not only sticks, right? There are carrots. There are carrots from Malay and there are carrots for Orban and others. But it is interesting. I do think like what Greg is pointing to is that there were already a set of dynamics that were a foot, well, before Trump's election, this round in South America and Latin America that were allowing the right to be ascendant or rise in a variety of domestic context. And I do think it's an interesting question whether that will actually be blunted in some way now, not because the left is organizing itself well or is able to articulate an opposition, but because a rally round the flag effect is still available as a script for anybody that now, you know, identifies with Trump as a problem. I mean, it's one thing to say Maduro needed to go. It's a different thing to say countries around South America are going to sign on to we're taking your oil or we're, you know, we're taking back our assets or we own these, you know, resources that has to play badly literally everywhere in Latin America because it's staying the quiet part out loud over and over again. And I do think there is a real risk that Trump overplays that hand and actually ends up diminishing the ascendance of the right, which was it existing. I'm not going to call it an independent phenomenon because I think it was related to Trump one and to Bolsonaro and to others. I mean, these cultural factors like Trump himself as a culmination of a set of forces and dynamics domestically in the United States that have their analog and are, you know, that there's like a way in which there is synchronicity if you want bit or an echo of factor mirroring or whatever. So Trump one, I think, did have real influence in the hemisphere in enabling the right ascent to accelerate in the South America. But Trump too is running a real risk, uh, blunting that in, in my view, because not so much because of the rule of Maduro, but because of the language and the framing of what follows. And if that continues with Nicaragua, if it continues with Cuba, if we see more and more claims that basically say we're taking this and we're taking that, we're taking it back, we're, and continually reference 19th century gumbo diplomacy. It's, it's almost inevitable that the region will ultimately find, you know, it will be on popular and those opinion polls will go in a different direction in my view. Yeah. Preston, how is attack on Venezuela might be distinguished from the murderous Iraq debacle that the very sort of intervention that Trump ostensibly ran on opposing. Trump said, quote, the difference between Iraq and this is that bush didn't keep the oil. We're going to keep the oil. And he's really been very consistent on this for quite a long time. This is from 2016 on Iraq. Quote, I've always said, shouldn't be there. But if we're going to get out, take the oil. Did people misunderstand Trump as an isolationist because, because they misunderstood his criticism of neo conservatism as a criticism of imperialism more generally when it, when it instead was a very specific criticism of neo conservatism for its pretense to liberal universalism, democracy, promotion, nation building, as much as those things are, you know, on some level, not credible. They were an explicit part of that project's discourse. And they did facilitate the US ending up in forever wars, expensive and bloody in Iraq, Afghanistan, elsewhere. Yeah, I do think that's what has emerged here is that when Trump says, I'm not the president of war. I'm the president that ends wars. What he means by that is I'm not going to oversee projects to invade and remake the sort of political structures of other countries. But clearly, he doesn't mean by that. I'm not going to use military force and coercion around the world to achieve my ends. And he doesn't mean by that. I'm not going to replace, as we've already discussed. I'm not going to replace governments. I don't like. So clearly what he criticized about the Iraq war was the fact that there were boots on the ground. There was a long term presence. There were a set of ambitions around reshaping institutions in the image of the United States. But I think we need to be careful here. It's true that he repudiates the American self-understanding, as I've already said, around liberalism, democracy, rule of law, etc. And to the extent that the Neocons were ironically advancing those kinds of universalist claims by purporting to remake countries in the model of democracy and make democratize the Middle East with a demonstration effect of Iraq and going after other countries, etc. All of that, he has clearly repudiated and that's very, very clear. But the thing that Trump is embracing, and in a way, one might think of this as a kind of symptom of late imperialism or imperial decline, right? He's no longer about remaking the world in the image of the United States. A, he's altering the image of the United States domestically, right? It's not clear that any of that self-understanding about what we do abroad is even true at home. We're not about the rule of law or democracy here either. He's made it very clear that both of those things are are oftentimes constraints on the forms of power that he wants to exert domestically. And we could turn to that either today or in a different episode. But globally, what he's interested in is the use of coercion for the purposes of advancing ends that are about US control over the resources that he deems to be most valuable. So exactly as you pointed out, it's not so much it turns out that he was opposed to the Iraq war. He might have been opposed to the Iraq war 'cause Iraq isn't the most important target if you're after oil. You might go after more oil-rich targets, then as well, for example, which is closer to home and has larger proven reserves might be the better target. But it turns out that if you're, as he said, if you're gonna be in Iraq at least take the oil, right? But take the oil seems to be an important theme. And so when he says I'm not the war president, what he seems to mean by that is that it's a cute, spectacular, short-term acts of coercion that are going to then create a playing field in which the United States can coercively achieve its ends. Now the challenge here, there are a couple of challenges. The first is that if you are going to rely on a politics of pure coercion, then you need to have a lot of coercive capability. And really it's not clear, it seems already as if the United States may be overstretched. Now there are ways in which he's compensating for that, right? Biden was clearly engaged in overstretched when he was providing all the munitions necessary to sustain both Israel's genocide and Gaza. And Ukraine's defense against Russia, and it would have been difficult to proceed to other, further adventures at that point, just as a pure matter of munitions. So Trump brought to an end the sort of hot fire element of Gaza and has put it on this kind of low burn, slow burn of continued demolition, give Israel the license that it needs, but simply reduce the military profile and the munitions requirements of that particular theater while withdrawing the commitment to Ukraine. So he's freed up capacity there, but still, there are gonna be real capacity constraints. The reason that US Empire, as it was ascending, took the form that it did through multilateralism, through alliances, et cetera, was that it enabled the United States to project its control globally at a much lower cost. And whether Trump doesn't appreciate that or simply doesn't believe that that's a kind of competitive project that the US is in a position to launch any longer is unclear to me, or whether the people around him think either multilateralism is now more constraint than a capacity to project, and he doesn't wanna compete in that way, but it does seem to me that the really driving factor here underlying all of this is a redistribution of power globally away from the United States, which means on the one hand, the US has to cope with an actually multipolar world. And one way you might do that is through multilateralism, that way has been repudiated by Trump. Trump is not interested in that. So it's less that he's necessarily a president of war as in the face of multipolarity, as China's ascent becomes real. The one thing that I think is a genuine rupture from Biden is what the pivot to Asia has historically meant under the bipartisan foreign policy of old school cold warriors, and how today we seem to be oriented towards China. So you made the point earlier, Dan, that Trump began with this bravado of tariff war, and then as soon as China used an economic weapon in its own arsenal, Trump blinked and in fact, back down and gave up on the core elements of the tariff war against China and limited, obviously there are still tariffs on China, but the principle, you know, sort of targets and objects of this tariffs at the moment are not really driven by the China rivalry rhetorically, at least. That's not how he's selling tariffs to the US public. He's selling it as a matter of equity against all comers, and we're simply going to change the terms of trade generally globally in our favor, but not uniquely about China. So interestingly, to my own mind, the old bipartisan foreign policy was driving us into a new Cold War Biden was very comfortable with that way of thinking and was actually escalating risk in this multipolar order where there has been a general redistribution of power in a way that means the United States as a relative matter has declined as compared to China, and when you have Russia reasserting a kind of control over its own near abroad, what Trump is currently doing in traditional IR terms is kind of a sphere of influence, politics of balancing that is actually somehow less prone oddly enough to driving us into World War III. I mean, irony is really in that sense, Biden was the war president, right? Everything was war with China. Chips were war with China. The chips act was war with China. Literal chips were war with China. The entire commerce department was turned into a war department was tripled in size in order to prosecute an economic war against China. And ironically, for all the bully and bluster and coercive reliance of Trump, the one real war that would have had existential consequences for the United States seems far less likely to be on the horizon. He seems to be saying Taiwan is your Venezuela. And the South China Sea is your Caribbean. And I have a vision for the world in which there are places where I will assert dominance. And there are resources over which I will not allow you to gain dominance China. So I will strike a deal with DRC. I will take over Greenland. I'm going to find a way to box you out of rare earth minerals in various parts of the world because I understand that those are the terms of tech competition today. But beyond that, I'm actually going to allow a world in which I can use small increments of coercion against much less powerful countries to maximal effect to seize their resources. And otherwise, I'm retreating from the kinds of wars that actually require significant American material and treasure to be expended and represent a significant threat to American positions globally. Yeah, he not only surrendered to Xi in the trade war once Xi imposed export restrictions on the critical minerals that China overwhelmingly controls. He proactively lifted export restrictions on US semi-conductors on chips that had been put in place, which for the Biden administration was seen as a key strategy and its geoeconomic conflict with China for Trump. He seems to be reverting to perhaps like a more old fashion form of geoeconomics, which is just seizing the resources of not very powerful countries close at hand. And don't also forget the unraveling of the TPP in the first Trump administration. It's a consistent through line of the Trump administration that that is not the world that he is interested in. The one kind of war he's not is a Cold War era. That's not where he's going. He may have anti-communist, for sure, in his coalition, right? And when it's about the Cold War against Cuba, that's exactly the kind of thing that he's going to co-sign, because that's precisely the kind of punching down control of his own region. But when it comes to the possibility of ginning up a genuine and quasi-exitential economic and military confrontation with China, something I would note that the bipartisan foreign policy establishment of the United States has been driving towards both under Obama and under Biden. That was the key pivot to Asia logic that we were previously confronted with. That is a kind of war that he has decided to withdraw from. And was part of Trump 1.0? It was a key feature of his first term. The assertion of that kind of bravado against Xi specifically at an interpersonal and rivalless way. But as I said, he undid TPP. The core bipartisan foreign policy strategy of essentially containing China and ringing it around and preventing it from actually being able to benefit from its global position economically was immediately the very first thing that was undone by the original Trump administration. And also, Trump never was willing to say, I'm going to support Taiwan, not in Trump one and not now. So the key features of the underlying earlier, previous Republican, let's say, Neocon Democratic sort of shared vision of what a world of rising China required of the United States is something that he has genuinely broken with. I mean, that's really the only place where I would say we are talking not continuity but rupture. I'm Michael U-Trick, editor of Jacobin. You're listening to The Dig, a podcast that brings you an incredibly wide-ranging analysis of politics, history, economics, and more, covering the entire planet at a consistent depth that frankly, I find a little hard to comprehend. I'm not sure exactly how Dan does it, but I'm pretty sure it's connected to you supporting the podcast at patreon.com/TheDig. This episode of The Dig is brought to you by our listeners, who support us at patreon.com. And by equator, a new magazine of politics and ideas. The ongoing moral catastrophe in Gaza shattered the moral authority of the Western establishment and its media. Equator believes that the end of the West is not the end of the world. Indeed, we're in a moment when new political horizons can be glimpsed in radical forms of action and imagination are possible. Equator.org is launching a new cultural platform, which challenges the narratives that equate Western interests with universal truth. Instead, we're building a future where equality and justice define the global conversation. Contributors include dig guests like Naomi Klein, Rockmonidriza, Adom Gattacho, Nikhil Paulseng, and many others. but equator is more than a magnet. It's a rallying point for a global community built through reading groups, online seminars, film screenings, workshops, and events. I've been reading Equator and I love it. This work needs your support. Join the community. Digital memberships start at just $6 a month. Find the essential voices you've been missing. At Equator.org. Greg, you cited the wonderful writer, Diggest, Richard Seymour earlier. And I wanted to quote from a recent piece of his on Venezuela, where he wrote, quote, "We're supposed to be impressed without thinking too much about the yield. We're supposed to forget the dilemma of a dying empire, which is that almost everything it does to hold off to climb. It diminishes its own future power to act. Nor do I want to give the impression of being somehow triumphalist or complacent about American downfall. A dying empire is a dangerous beast and will extract a big price in blood for its decline." The more desperate it becomes, the more reckless it grows, even without such a notoriously dosy incompetent and self-aggrandizing leadership. However, for the moment, as far as I can see, this really is US power consuming itself in the act of being exercised. And I think it's important not to accede to the spectacle of sovereign power, because its effects depend to a large extent on people buying into the spectacle. What do you make of this analysis? Can we see the intervention in Venezuela and more generally this post-liberal phase of US imperialism, nakedly looting and dominating smaller and weaker countries while pulling back from conflicts with powers like Russia and China, taking multilateral institutions like NATO, that, as Asal was just discussing, served as a conduit for US power, seeing them as shackles on US power. Can we view this all as symptomatic of US imperial decline, or is that wishful thinking? Well, I think maybe it's too early to tell that it could be. But there have been moments in the past that seemed like the US was at the precipice of imperial decline in the 1970s, for instance, the late 1970s, and it turns out that effective political coalitions that the United States does have a remarkable array of resources to mobilize if it can rationally mobilize them. It seems that Trump is not a reconstructive president, but a destructive president, and going back to not having a plan to build a majoritarian coalition, I don't know what comes next, but one could imagine. It depends on what the world is like and what the United States is facing. I mean, it is true that a balance of power could be less prone to confrontation than a kind of mobilized liberalism that's universal in pretension and sees the world as a thing to remake. But balance of powers are also very prone to being unsettled and uprooted, or you need to start power to kind of throw the whole thing. I mean, world will run and world will two in some ways, where the outcomes of balance of powers that collapse, the pressure and wars of the 1970s, the 1870s, sorry. You know, these are all results in some ways of collapse, balance of power. Latin America's critique of balance of power politics going back to its foundation was that if you didn't have a transcendent hegemonic belief in some kind of virtuous order, balance of powers on themselves will always lead to war and always lead to conflict if you just have different hegemons pressing against the other pushing their own interests. So I don't know, you know, it is true that I think that Trump is he is part of a coalition that does see the world in terms of war, in terms of demographic war, in terms of civilizational war, in terms of, you know, low birth rate rates of white people, that's a kind of war, a natalist war. And the national security strategy document did see, did kind of posit Latin America as an arena in which superpower competition was taking place with the United States would confront China and push it back where it could. And fairly aggressive terms so you could see you could see this slipping out of their hands, you know, despite Trump's particularities and the way that he is at times cowed and or backs off, you know, there's larger tectonic forces at play that could lead to more confrontation, but there's also large tectonic forces at play that could lead to consolidation in ways that the United States somehow recovers itself. And because China has its own problems, Russia certainly has its own problems is not Europe is not Europe's in bad shape. But one would have said the same thing in the late 1970s and you know, and Reagan's obsessive focus on Central America in the 1980s as it was a symbol of decline and it turns out well, he managed to pull it off and grow. That's what show and lie said about the French revolution. It's tour. It's too early to tell. Yeah, and I mean, it also depends on what kind of time scale or even talking out here decline could be what like a 300 year long process. And I mean, I just just to be clear here, decline is not an absolute terms, but in relative terms clear, right? There's no question. Because we're talking about a moment at the end of the Cold War. I mean, part of it, I think it's Adam Tuesday that said that part of the problem here is a misunderstanding of how the Cold War ended like the idea that the Cold War ended with just US victory straight forwardly, right? Suggest that an understanding that only is focused on the Soviet Union, right? And instead like confronted with state capitalism and its remarkable successes. It's true that we now live in a world where unlike what was said in 1989 or 1990 where there are meaningful rivals, at least at a regional level to US control. And there are different ways that one might respond to that. So the way that the traditional bipartisan foreign policy responded to that was doubling down on the order that was created at the end of the second world war. But we're fashioning it to now contain not the Soviet Union, but to contain China. And that's what TPP means. That's what a revitalized and expanded NATO means it's canceling Russia and focusing pivoting Tasia. That is not the vision of Trump. So we are in as just as a relative matter, we are in a time of decline in the sense of the sort of zenith of American unipolarity is behind us. We no longer live in a world where we can say comfortably the US has the largest economy, the largest military, et cetera. It's still militarily the most powerful actor, but it has naval rivals now in China and as an economy, it's confronted with an economy that's growing faster and as larger that has its own internal pathologies no doubt. But that's simply the case. And so now we have to rethink like how do we understand the end of the Cold War and how do we think about this post Cold War moment instead of understanding it as in the beginning of a unipolar time of pure American ascent and American remade world. We're now confronted with an alternative set of potential institutions and potential multilateral responses the Shanghai cooperation organization all of this. In that universe, this is what like Trump is marking out a lane that's different than the lane that the traditional bipartisan foreign policy of the United States had tried to gin up basically to contain China. And the question is, how should we think about it? Is it more or less belligerent? We've even focused on the degree to which it's extremely coercive, which it is it relies on pure coercion without any normative story without trying to manufacture consent really at home or abroad. It's just saying, you know, again, like you would think if you were attentive to the politics of the rise of the right in South America, you might not just say we're going to take the oil, etc. And like, you know, you might have some other ideological story about what was necessary and removing Maduro. He's not even bothering with that. Right. So there's that kind of a pure coercion story. But there's also this other undercurrent that I wanted to point to where actually there's a retreat from the most Bella coasts sort of self presentation of the United States like the United States is not right now underscoring the degree to which it's prepared to militarize its own presence in the Asia Pacific, right. And there's enormous anxiety in Australia and in India and elsewhere about what is the US commitment to August and to these various kinds of ways that the that under Obama and under Biden, the architectures were being created to present a military alliance to confront China. Right. Of course, the US is going to compete and try to box out China in its own hemisphere. That's that is the definition of its, you know, Don Ro doctor, no, whatever. I mean, clearly, right. To the extent that we're talking about a globe divided amongst regional spheres of influence. The US has marked out which one is going to be its own and there can be no Russia and there can be no China here. But the willingness of the United States to say we're going to project into the Pacific theater to confront China and its own Europe, that's the thing that's shifting. And of course, like we can't say which one is going to be more stable at this point. That's not totally clear, but it is to my mind pretty clear that Biden, I mean the attempt to just like re crank up the Cold War machine was really risky strategy and one that seemed to be driving. towards immediate confrontation. What the medium-term result is of this worldview and how long it's going to even take hold, right? Because as I say, the consequence of not even trying to manufacture consent is that there is no essential beltway behind this. There's the Heritage Foundation, there's the, you know, cabal of people that were nicely described as dozy and loony, you know, that are around him right now, but like whether there's any kind of bench for this that could succeed this and also what the domestic plan is. I mean, as we've already mentioned, Greg made really clear and eloquently clear, this is a recipe for catastrophe at the midterms. Right now it looks like if we're talking about ordinary elections and ordinary competitive playing field, that we may not be, right? We may be talking about Jari Mandar districts and ice at the polling places and what have you. Like it does look like Trump is developing in a way that he didn't have in his first administration the trappings of paramilitary forces on the ground that are necessary for a fascist agenda at home. All options are open, but under ordinary circumstances, this is not an attempt to sell this to the American public and it does not play well, honestly, because you have those who thought they took seriously at face value, what it meant to say, I'm opposed to the Iraq war, which is I'm not going to engage in these kinds of military adventures abroad. America first means investing money at home. And so spending now $1.5 trillion on a military ready to engage in coercion everywhere doesn't sound like that policy inflation continues to be an issue, etc. I mean, he is, he is not making the case at home to make this popular. And so it may not stick. But if it were to stick, I think we're now, it's an open question, which of the two, the traditional American form of bipartisan imperialism or this current Trump war, which one is the more destabilizing? You know, there's no question which one is the more destabilizing for the global south as an example, right? This strategy of pure coercion and punching down means you can expect the US to engage in things like strikes in Nigeria, meddling in Iran, this Venezuela adventure and much more. It's extremely violent in a way that does harken back to an earlier, both Cold War, but also 19th century kind of naked coercive imperialism. But in terms of like the stakes of world war, it's a, I think it's a little less clear. I think the idea that declining empire is a dangerous beast is exactly right, right? All of these, all strategies could be ones that basically spell doom for the rest of the world because you have a concentration of military power that is unrivaled at the moment, facing a reality of declining relative power. That's just a secular fact. And what kind of domestic regime in the United States can manage that in a way that doesn't end up threatening the whole planet is I think one of the critical questions we never asked when we look at domestic elections. But that's really what's at stake for the world. What do you make of the entanglement of Trump's imperialist project abroad in his nativist project at home? And not just his nativist project, but his law, his broader law in order project for which nativism has been a pretext because of course the military assault on Venezuela was legitimated in so many ways by the demonization of Venezuela and migrants more so than by some sort of neo conservative call to liberate the Venezuelan people. Trump has framed his occupation of US cities as targeting immigrants and criminals and again, as an opportunity to train troops, US troops for new foreign wars. Generally speaking, this, this, the justifications for, for this violence at home in abroad, it seems to rest on this, this shared generalized notion that the US needs to behave behave like a powerful nation. And what a powerful nation does is exercise exercise violence to impose order on its cities, order and security at its borders and order security control domination power beyond those borders. What does this all suggest about mega ideology and how it frames its enemies at home in abroad in ideological terms, racial terms, geographic terms both, both across the United States and across the world, enemies for whom only violence and intimidation appears to be the appropriate response, whether they be Nicholas Maduro or the wine moms that the Trump administration is now demonizing as though they are domestic terrorists. I mean, I think, you know, this, this goes back to the question of continuity and the United States came, we spoke about the end of the Cold War and the, and the order that was imposed. I mean, Bill Clinton presided over, you know, this is the enormous victory in which the United States emerges from the Cold War without a superpower in sight that could, that could check it. And he, and he proceeds to treat the United States as an occupied country and its citizens as belligerents. When one thinks about the series of legislation that he presided over the anti-terrorism law, the welfare law, the militarization of the border, all of the, you know, the expansion, it's just remarkable that, to the degree that neoliberalism went hand in hand with the militarization of society and this, and treating the United States as if it was an occupied territory coming out of this enormous victory when you could imagine different possible futures. That said, I think there's, I think that the kind of nationalism, America first nationalism that Trump represents, that understands the self to be isolationist, but is, is totally happy to project power within its own hemisphere. There's been a long history of demonizing Latin American activists and leaders going back to the 19th century, going back to Superiano Castro and then Venezuela, who rose to Velcoil, the villainous little monkey, you know, he was, he, he was, he, he had the temerity to try to renegotiate the, the legitimacy of debt that it owed to the United States and to Europe. But the other thing is that there's always been a connection between the foreign and the domestic in the sense that these nationalists or these isolationists, whatever you want to call them, that opposed, you know, say the post World War II order, right? The United Nations, the Declaration of Human Rights. You know, you could even go back to actually Simón Boulivar and his, and his invitation to attend the Congress of Panama in, in 1826. It was always a kind of current with, within reactionary United States that saw any kind of internationalism as a danger in which liberalization or, you know, I mean, slave-own is were afraid that if they allied with the United States, they'd have that abolition would make inroads through internationalism. In the post World War II period, a southern segregationist didn't want to sign on to John Dulles' treaty of Japan because it had an anti-racist clause. There was always a fear that some kind of liberal internationalism would be the backdoor through which both desegregation and some form of social democracy or economic rights would make their way into domestic politics. So right from the beginning, there was always a sense in which the foreign was connected to the domestic. And that kind of liberal internationalism was the venue in which we, the United States didn't just take on entitlements and obligations abroad. It also took on entitlements and obligations at home to make the country more liberal, more progressive. And you know, I'm not easily done and not without a fight, but there was some. So there was, so Trump represents that tradition of like brutality abroad when needed and brutality in hierarchy at home, restoring a certain kind of vision of a hierarchical, patriarchal homeland, all of the different, you know, to borrow Richard's phrase, "loony," and not so much dozy, but loony visions of kind of restored white patriarchy. You know, Stephen Miller watching a Christmas special with Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin and saying, "Oh, you know, isn't this wonderful, you know, this is the world we could have had if it wasn't for the 1964 immigration law." I mean, so there's always been this way in which these, you know, a foreign and domestic agenda was, was, was bolted together in America first nationalism, which is Saxon, Anglo-Saxon supremacy, would everyone call it? Yeah, I want to just echo some of the things that Greg had said, including again, the continuity story here going white back to Clinton and that post-war moment that right back at that point, Oklahoma City becomes the opportunity to unleash Islamophobia in order to pass this anti-terrorism actor, alien-effective death penalty act, right, Ed Pah, which is presuming that the threat comes from abroad. And the truth is this, like when you are the seat of empire, and at that moment, in that unipolar moment, right, it was a moment when the United States understood itself to now be the sole, unrivaled, global imperial actor, there is no distinction between foreign and domestic. The truth, because the imperial project is about enrichment and projection of power for the purposes of enriching the homeland, right? So there is, I mean, the foreign policy is simply an expression of the continued welfare of the domestic forum and vice versa. Everything, I mean, it's a single cycle. And so that, I mean, it has real implications for thinking as an American about what an mass-prior politics should look like. because maintaining allowing that distinction between the domestic and the foreign to cloud our own understanding of what we are confronting, what the challenges, its nature, its expression, and how one can confront it is a category mistake that basically limits our ability to come up with a meaningful emancipatory politics. So in Trump one, when Trump was saying Seattle, Portland, these cities are essentially Kabul and Baghdad, right? We need to unleash the military on these cities, et cetera. -Shit hole cities and shith hole countries. -Right, exactly shith hole cities, shith hole countries. People began to see the connections, right? What he does that's helpful is he makes explicit and brings to the surface and makes salient. These connections that in any case are ever present without any question, right? We're sending people abroad in a global war on terror and then we're bringing them home and having them use those same ideas and tactics in SWAT teams domestically, literally the same personnel and the same weaponry. It's a complete circle. It's a cycle of material, of weapons, of personnel in our confrontations abroad and at home across all administrations. But when Trump explicitly says we need to treat Portland as Kabul, et cetera, or we can use these cities as a training ground for our military to Pete Heggseth today when he says that, which is just an echo of 2020. This was exactly his response to George Floyd. Then suddenly we say, oh my god, the domestic and the foreign, there doesn't turn out to be a distinction. No, it's always the case. It's just Biden, Obama, Clinton, they would not use this language. They're, again, as I've said previously, much better salesmen because they care about manufacturing consent, both at home and abroad. So they project a particular account of the United States abroad that's more attractive than that. They give a story to citizens at home that's more attractive than that. But the underlying reality in an imperial capital is there is no such distinction. Our war machine is part of our policing machine. When Trump says this is a law enforcement action in Venezuela, how is that different than the United States policing, terrorists or ISIS or whatever it is in Syria, in Somalia, elsewhere, right? Without consent, we have deployed what amounts to a police power across the globe in the name of the Cold War, in the name of the war on terror for three quarters of a century. All of a sudden, when Trump says it's a law enforcement action that Caribbean people are like, well, it would be unlawful. Otherwise, of course, the United States has defected from international law routinely from the moment that it authored the post-war World War 2 international legal order. The difference with Trump is that Trump is at war with international law as such, not that he's violating international law. And again, we need to be clear about our categories, like not make these category mistakes. So the fact of engaging in so-called law enforcement actions in the Caribbean Sea is no less plausible than engaging in law enforcement operations in Syria. And in Somalia, everywhere else in the world where we purport to be exercising police power and decry that we're not at war. That is a longstanding reality of the way that the United States uses its police power. And the reality is it's continuous from what we do at home to what we do abroad and back. There's a continuous cycle. It's not just blowback. Blowback suggests that there's a way that we intentionally project power and then unintentionally it has consequences at home. I'm saying it is of what? It is a design of the machine. We need to be able to recognize the machine for what it is. Trump makes it much easier to do so because he says it always out loud. And that's what we're actually witnessing. But when we go back to like how do we explain this? I mean, the Islamophobia, the anti-immigrant sentiment, the nativism which explains the natalism, the basic white supremacism, the core racial project here, again speaks its name. He is constantly articulating it explicitly as are those around him and the Heritage Foundation documents, et cetera. We doesn't require complex analytic machinery. We don't have to have a big apparatus. He says everything that critical race theorist said, this is the hilarious thing about Trump. Like he's against CRT. He is the exemplar of CRT. He's literally saying out loud constantly the things that previously due to the salesmanship of other administrations, it took some work to unearth what's actually going on as the dynamic. He tells us what he's doing. And the question then is what kind of politics does that make possible in terms of opposition? And here things like Mamdani. And also, I mean, this is a little bit off our script, but interesting to me is the way he received Mamdani, right? He also loves to curry favor with anybody who he views as a winner. And so there's a weird dynamic with which those who literally win to oppose the different. Mamdani on some level, they're the same for him. Exactly. There's like a strange attraction. I mean, there are just so many, right? Like you're an Islamophob who wants to embrace Ahmad Shada. Why? He's a former ISIS fighter, but he came out on top in Syria. And now he's being welcomed at the White House at the same time that rank Islamophobia against the same exact ISIS is the alleged basis for our strikes in Nigeria. I mean, there's not without a racial understanding and without an understanding of the man's really basic winner takes all instincts. There's no way to make rhyme or reason of what they're doing. But because he makes all of this explicit, I think we need to take it on face value essentially and understand it on its own terms. And what it helps us do-- and again, this I just want to underscore-- by making transparent and absolutely explicit the continuities of the domestic and the foreign, he enables us to then think in very clear terms about what the stakes are of opposing a certain kind of imperial power in terms of our domestic politics, right? These are not distinct projects. The US is in the process-- right now, Trump is in the process of articulating a new way of understanding America's imperial projects. It's fundamentally racialized. It's fundamentally coercive. It's about the use of our police powers at home and abroad. It is a war against immigrants domestically and the countries from which they emanate. It is a war that is defined in terms in civilizational terms. And so we need to organize ourselves in opposition by understanding the terms by which this new imperial project is being constructed. It has, as we all of us have underscored, both continuities and elements of rupture. And we need to orient ourselves around both of those features. But to me, I mean, the foreign and domestic blurring, I think it's as it was in Trump one, so it is in Trump, too, an advantage in thinking more clearly than we typically do on the left about exactly how we need to be able to orient ourselves to those continuities and not allow the domestic foreign distinction, which is, to my mind, really fantastical, to obscure our politics. Trump's behavior in his second term, for me, has really echoed Israeli foreign policy in terms of this naked, unapologetic, aggressive militarism. Obviously, the US has been an aggressive and militaristic country from the get-go. But what's so distinct here is this sort of self-presentation of unapologetic gangsterism justified in the language of might makes right alone. It's frequently remarked that the Gaza genocide destroyed the legitimacy of the liberal international order. And that seems very correct. But could we also say more specifically that the genocide has in the place of the liberal international order legitimated or at least popularized these more brazen forms of gangsterist militarism that celebrates impunity instead of very explicitly instead of articulating any sort of moral rationale? So it's important to understand to my mind about the genocide what kind of a crucible it came to be. So it exposed the rank hypocrisy of claims about liberal internationalism. Biden came into office claiming that he was going to represent a return of America, a return to a call to order, to multilateralism, et cetera. And then the war basically begrapped at that vision and made very clear his willingness to provide a pure license at the discretion of Israel and the United States alone to use a level of violence that shredded any modicum of the remaining rules of the international legal order. And that meant that for the rest of the world, it's not that the rules themselves or international law itself came to be undone. What was unraveled was the United States capacity to claim that it would act in a way that reflected self-constraint at all or that it would require that of its privileged partners. So the legitimacy, the ability of the United States to legitimate its actions in the language of international law was decimated. But the rules themselves actually were remarkably robust. I mean, it was international law that was repeatedly made recourse to including by South Africa and the International Court of Justice case, the International Criminal Court. The institutions themselves did it strikingly well. The UN General Assembly repeatedly reflected very much as it had done under apartheid in an earlier period, the universal condemnation of the rest of the world of this form of gangsterism, as you've described it, and that itself conveyed a message. It conveyed a message that the United States and Israel were isolated. And I think that remains true. This kind of naked gangsterism, as we've been discussing throughout our conversation today, is not manufacturing consent. There is no constituency for this in the rest of the world. There are, of course, other powers that will take advantage of these new rules. There's also no limit. A lawless world is-- a world in which your rivals or other actors are also going to make recourse to force wherever they can and in whatever way they choose to. But truthfully, there isn't an audience for this. I mean, again, every time you have an assembly of states, whether it's NATO allies, whether it's general assembly, whether it's non-align movement actors, whatever, it's a condemnation and repudiation of these politics. Now Europe finds itself hamstrung and its ability to be explicit because they feel deeply threatened both because of their dependency on the NATO alliance and constraining Russia and because of their genuine concern about Greenland and what it might mean if Denmark is forced to relinquish its relationship to Greenland and Greenland's own people and population and territory are forced to relinquish their sovereignty. So Europe feels threatened by the United States at the moment and therefore is not speaking as clearly. But for the rest of the world, I mean, there's an actual defense interestingly. In fact, a group formed of other states that called themselves the "Hey Group" that are actually all about the defense of the international legal rules against the Israeli and American project. It emerged out of Gaza. It said, basically, we're going to defend international law and international institutions as the United States tries to sanction them to force them to discourage. And the fact of the United States doing that itself is also interesting. Why is the US engaging in sanctions against international criminal court judges? Why are they important enough to require this kind of rhetorical grandstanding, right? I mean, as I said, what's distinctive here with Trump is not that he's breaking the law. The US at its own discretion routinely has broken international law from the get go. That's like the whole strategy. While simultaneously playing lip service, the difference with Trump is the absence of the lip service and the direct war against international legal institutions. He's actually trying to sanction international organizations and their participants. And he is also in a spectacular way with drawing from specific organizations. He and his entourage have concluded that multilateralism isn't just not serving their power projection. There are new brand of imperialism doesn't need it, but that it's actively a hindrance. That's the conclusion they've drawn. Israel clearly also understands that. Any rule, any suggestion that Israel is subject to any external constraint is a nathema to the current government. And the current government is Trump isn't personified. In fact, if anything, Trump himself is, you know, a pale imitation of a set of other actors that are that define this playbook partly in consultation with people that are in Trump's current entourage. His hangers on. So Trump has fashioned himself after a bunch of, let's call them mentors or, you know, avatars, Netanyahu, Arduan or a ban. I mean, there's a list of strong men globally that he admires that he wants to replicate the path of. And they have actually innovated all of the things that Trump is doing from his treatment of the judiciary to his treatment of domestic administrative state to his use of law enforcement and conversion of law enforcement personnel into paramilitary entities, the creation of a new federal paramilitary force through ICE, et cetera, et cetera, all of this. We've seen globally in multiple iterations. And Netanyahu is just one of those examples. So I would say it's less than Israel. I mean, Israel is the trailblazer here. Trump is the, is the late guest to the table if you want. But there's no doubt that it is a single project. And from Trump's perspective, as I said earlier, the special status of the Middle East means, in many ways Netanyahu and together with him, whichever Gulf partner, and it's not clear right now whether that means MBS or NBC, the head of the Crown Prince in Saudi Arabia or the head of the UAE is going to be the principal Israeli partner and hence the principal US partner in dictating terms for that region. But it's clear that the US has that model in mind for the Middle East and is also doubling down on that gangsterism as you've put it with respect to international law for a variety of its own reasons. But it is an unpopular project, interestingly, and also interestingly, in the face of American revisionism, in the face of American attacks on international law and the existing international legal order, the powers that now ironically are being positioned as status quo powers that are looking to shore up the existing system that is use it as their mechanism for projecting power are China. I mean, China is the principal actor today that is active in those multilateral fora and prepare to defend them and it has a set of wares to sell to the global south that is much more attractive than the package that the United States is currently offering, which is pure coercion and discretionary trampling on other country sovereignty. China is soverntist, China is traditionalist with respect to multilateral fora, and China is offering the one thing that the United States historically in its Geo economy had once provided, and now only very limited basis is prepared to do in carrots like we saw with Millay is finance and investment and development funding and so forth. It's striking partnership and it's tying up strategic assets globally not by invading countries and through pure coercion, but by giving them an economic model of partnership that's more appealing than the looting and ransacking that the United States is currently providing. So, I mean, there's no doubt that the gangsterism is the approach that the United States is currently taking and it definitely echoes the Israeli approach, but international law interestingly is proving to be a resource for as a consequence of American and Israeli conduct a resource for America's rival. The gangsterism also, we can look at the domestic sources of it and the way that Israel and the way that Israel's genocide in Gaza completely described as a democratic party and basically let Trump off the leash in terms of a second term when it comes back and where he's able to run the table and settling these grievances whether it be pottening January 6th riot is whether it be going after his perceived personal prosecutors or persecutors. There was a way in which that plays out domestically as well, Trump as the domestic gangster, but that I think is the point of weakness because majority of the United States doesn't want to be treated as if it's being run by Al Capone. They at least want the illusion of the rule of law and due process and it's coming to ahead in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It's quite amazing that the report's coming out of what's happening in those cities. This is not just like cosplaying, occupying a city, the little bit of literally going restaurant to restaurant and business to business and treating the city as if it's undamilitary occupation, which it is. And people are fighting back quite bravely. Yeah, quite bravely. And it is interesting, it's also notable that it is the city that is in the most social democratic city. The state that is most social democratic state in the country. So that's also a kind of flashpoint. Well Greg Grandin and Oslobale, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you for having me then. Thanks so much for having me, Dan. Oslobale is a professor of law at Yale Law School who focuses on public international law and who's published essays and op-eds in the New York Times Boston Review, London Review of Books, Jacobin, Descent and elsewhere. Thank you for listening to the dig from Jacobin Magazine. 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