Trump’s neo-imperial impulse is hardening into an expansionist doctrine, one that echoes the playbook of colonial empires rather than the norms of the post-1945 international order.

Brahma Chellaney, OPEN magazine

There is no precedent in modern history for what the world is witnessing today. A single leader—at the helm of the very superpower that designed and sustained the post-World War II international order—is now dismantling it with startling speed while mocking international law.

Since returning to the White House, Donald Trump has cast aside longstanding norms of international law, authorized military strikes across multiple sovereign states and weaponized economic interdependence against both allies and adversaries. His administration’s actions—from the slow strangulation of Cuba through blockade-induced deprivation to a war on Iran that triggered worldwide turmoil—have pushed the international system into uncharted territory.

Like his military intervention in Venezuela eight weeks earlier, Trump launched his war of aggression against Iran in the language of American power and strategic dominance. But the consequences of that war unfolded globally in the language of scarcity—of fuel, of food and even of survival.

What started on February 28 as a joint US-Israeli military assault on Iran swiftly metastasized into the most consequential energy shock in modern history. Unlike the oil crises of 1973 and 1979, which were driven largely by political embargoes, the 2026 upheaval arose from the physical destruction of energy infrastructure and the breakdown of critical supply routes.

Because energy is the foundation of the modern global economy, the shock could not be contained within oil and gas markets. It cascaded outward, destabilizing food systems, straining financial structures and hitting vulnerable populations the hardest.

What began as a regional conflict with global implications turned into a world-spanning crisis driven by a regional war. This is the enduring lesson of the Iran war.

More fundamentally, Trump has barely disguised his neo-imperial yearning, which may explain his growing expansionist itch.

From renewed pressure for US control over Greenland and the Panama Canal to open-ended military intervention in Venezuela and talk of redrawing borders or relocating populations, he has revived a logic more familiar to the age of empires than to the post-1945 international order.

Since his return to the White House, Trump’s actions have suggested a reversion to 19th-century imperial precedents. The old Monroe Doctrine has been globalized into a claim that American power itself is legal authority.

Today, from high fuel and food prices in Africa to fiscal stress in Asia and Latin America, the burden of Trump’s ambitions is being borne far from the corridors of power where they were conceived.

Arsonist of the World Order

The question is no longer whether Trump is disrupting the global order. It is whether there is any historical parallel for such systematic disruption. There isn’t—at least not in the post-1945 world

The US was the principal architect of the current international system. The rules governing trade, sovereignty and collective security were largely American designs, forged in the aftermath of World War II to prevent precisely the kind of instability and volatility that has now unfolded.

What makes the present moment unique is not simply that these rules are being broken, but that they are being dismantled by an American president.

History offers multiple examples of wayward or ruthless leaders—including Mao Zedong in China, Pol Pot in Cambodia, Idi Amin in Uganda and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. But these figures operated either on the margins of the international system or in opposition to it.

Trump, by contrast, is tearing down the house from within.

Nowhere is this more evident than in his weaponization of global interdependence. Trade, once treated as a stabilizing force largely insulated from geopolitical rivalry, has been recast as an instrument of coercion. Tariffs are no longer economic tools; they are strategic weapons.

By linking military protection to trade concessions and tribute payment, Trump has effectively transformed alliances into transactional arrangements—security for sale. The post-World War II idea of collective defence has been replaced with something closer to protection racketeering.

This shift signals a profound reordering of international relationships, where commitments are perpetually open to revised terms.

Equally consequential is the erosion of sovereignty. US military strikes have extended across the Middle East, Africa and even into the Caribbean, targeting states without clear legal justification under the UN Charter.

Earlier eras did see US expansionist doctrines—from Theodore Roosevelt’s “Big Stick” diplomacy to William McKinley’s imperial ventures. But those belonged to a pre-1945 world, before the present international legal framework was established. Today’s expansionist actions carry a different weight because they explicitly defy the legal and normative structure the US itself helped create.

Launching war on Iran marked a particularly dangerous escalation. By targeting the energy infrastructure of a major oil-producing state and inviting Iranian retaliatory strikes on US-aligned Gulf Arab states, Washington triggered what the International Energy Agency called “the largest supply disruption in history,” surpassing even the shocks of the 1970s. But there is a critical difference: those earlier crises were driven by producer decisions, including Saudi King Faisal’s use of oil as a weapon. Trump is the first leader to trigger a global energy crisis through direct, unprovoked military action initiated by him.

At the same time, Trump’s expansionism is hollowing out multilateralism—the connective tissue of the current international order. Just weeks before launching war on Iran, the US withdrew from 66 international organizations in one stroke, including the World Health Organization, while imposing sanctions on International Criminal Court (ICC) officials.

Other leaders have defied international institutions and norms, but typically from the outside. Saddam Hussein and Vladimir Putin challenged the international system as adversaries.

Trump’s approach is more destabilizing precisely because it represents an “insider” threat. By walking away from agreements such as the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris climate accord, while openly entertaining territorial ambitions from Greenland to the Panama Canal, his administration has signalled that it no longer considers itself bound by the rules the US once championed.

The cumulative effect is not just disorder, but disorientation. If the international system’s guarantor no longer believes in the system, what remains of it?

To find even a loose historical analogy, one must look back at bygone eras. Napoleon Bonaparte reshaped Europe through force, rewriting borders and legal codes. Otto von Bismarck discarded alliances in pursuit of strategic advantage. Yet even these comparisons fall short: Neither operated within a global order they themselves had constructed and sustained for decades.

What we are witnessing now is something unique: Trump, the arsonist of the US-designed international order, causing worldwide upheaval by pursuing an unabashedly expansionist agenda. Consequently, the “leader of the free world,” as the US long described itself, has voluntarily abdicated that role to become its primary disruptor.

The present turmoil and the fragmentation of alliances point to a world moving beyond the era of Pax Americana. But this is not a managed transition to a new order but a descent into uncertainty.

Put simply, the greatest threat to international peace and security today is not a rising challenger or an external adversary. It is the transformation of the international system’s central pillar—the US—into its main disruptor.

A Structural Rupture

At the centre of the global crisis lies a strategic gamble that went catastrophically wrong.

Any serious assessment of a war against Iran—strategically overlooking the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s most critical energy chokepoint—would have anticipated severe disruptions to global energy flows. About 20% of the world’s oil and more than a fifth of liquefied natural gas (LNG) transit this narrow waterway. It is the single most important artery of the global energy system.

Yet the Trump administration appeared to have assumed that military escalation could be managed without triggering systemic consequences. That assumption was swiftly shattered once Trump launched the attack on Iran.

Tehran’s effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, combined with tit-for-tat strikes on energy infrastructure in Iran and the Gulf Arab states, choked off supply at its source while simultaneously degrading production capacity. Facilities such as Iran’s South Pars gas field and Qatar’s Ras Laffan LNG complex—pillars of the global energy system—were damaged or rendered partially inoperable.

This resulted in a dramatic surge in international energy prices and, more importantly, a fundamental shift in risk. Oil prices climbed steeply, while global gas markets were thrown into disarray.

Even more significant is the structural repricing of energy risk. The Middle East is no longer seen as a reliable supplier but as a persistent source of volatility.

This was not an unavoidable outcome. It was the predictable consequence of initiating an unprovoked war in the epicentre of the global energy zone.

The world has experienced energy shocks before. But the present turmoil is not limited to oil. The simultaneous disruption of LNG—now central to electricity generation across Europe and Asia—has amplified its impact. In an era where power grids depend heavily on gas, the loss of LNG supply is as destabilizing as any oil embargo.

While the oil shocks of the 1970s resulted from policy-driven embargoes that were reversible, the current turmoil involves the destruction or damage of energy infrastructure, which cannot be quickly repaired. The damage will likely linger long. Qatar has said that it may take up to five years to repair damage to the Ras Laffan site.

The global economy is more interconnected, and growth more fragile, than in previous decades. Supply chains operate on “just-in-time” principles, leaving little buffer against disruption. When a critical node such as the Persian Gulf is destabilized, the effects ripple rapidly across sectors and regions.

For all these reasons, the shock from Trump’s Iran war was not merely another cycle of volatility; it represented a structural rupture.

The most consequential, and least understood, dimension of the energy crisis lies in its transmission to the global food system.

Modern agriculture is fundamentally energy-intensive. Natural gas is the key input for nitrogen fertilizers, which underpin global crop yields. Oil powers tractors, irrigation systems and transport networks. Food, in effect, is energy transformed into calories. When energy systems are disrupted, food systems inevitably follow.

The Persian Gulf region plays a central role in the global fertilizer supply chain, producing large shares of urea, ammonia and sulfur. With exports curtailed by conflict and maritime disruption, fertilizer prices surged dramatically, as demand outstripped supply.

The timing could not have been worse. The war coincided with the spring planting season across the Northern Hemisphere—from Asia to Europe and North America—meaning that reduced fertilizer application is already “locked in” for the 2026 harvest. Farmers across South Asia, Africa and even parts of North America have had to cut usage, switching in some cases to less input‑intensive crops.

The consequences will not be immediate, but they are inevitable.

The first stage of this global crisis was the input shock: rising costs and declining availability of fertilizer and fuel. The second stage is set to be the production shock: lower yields as under-fertilized crops produce less. The third stage will be the consumption shock: rising food prices and declining access, particularly for low-income populations.

By next year, agricultural analysts expect significant increases in the prices of grains, vegetable oils and meat. Corn, the backbone of global feed systems, is particularly vulnerable. As its price rises, the effects cascade into meat and dairy markets, producing what can only be described as a “protein shock.”

Exacerbating this dynamic is a policy-driven feedback loop that further tightens food supply. As oil prices rise, biofuels become more economically attractive. Governments have responded by expanding mandates for ethanol and biodiesel in an effort to stabilize domestic energy costs. But this carries an international cost: crops that could be used for food are instead diverted into fuel production.

In the US, record biofuel mandates are channelling corn and soybean oil into energy markets. Brazil is diverting increasing volumes of sugarcane toward ethanol production. Indonesia is accelerating its palm‑oil biodiesel programme.

This “food versus fuel” trade-off is particularly damaging in the context of Trump’s global expansionism. At a time when agricultural output is already under pressure due to high input costs, the diversion of crops further reduces global food availability.

The result is a self‑reinforcing cycle: higher energy prices drive biofuel production, which tightens food supply, which raises food prices, which in turn exacerbates the humanitarian impact of Trump’s adventurism.

In short, Trump’s reckless war triggered a chain reaction that is undermining the economic and energy security of the world at large, while also delivering a political shock through a flagrant disregard of international law.

To make matters worse, the war unleashed a sharply unequal burden. While the energy and food shocks are global, their impacts are profoundly unequal.

In the West, the turmoil manifested primarily as inflation and industrial strain. Households faced higher energy and food bills, while industries grappled with rising input costs. Central banks were forced into difficult trade-offs, delaying interest rate cuts and prolonging economic uncertainty. Yet these developed economies possess buffers—financial resources, institutional capacity and diversified supply chains—that allow them to absorb the shock.

The Global South, by contrast, is faced with a far more severe situation.

Many developing countries are heavily dependent on imported energy, particularly from the Persian Gulf. The surge in prices and disruption of supply routes pushed them into crisis mode. Governments began implementing fuel rationing, cutting subsidies and scrambling to secure alternative supplies.

At the same time, the fertilizer shock started undermining domestic agriculture. Countries that rely on imported inputs faced shortages that will directly translate into lower production. In some cases, fertilizer became simply unavailable at any price, raising the spectre of “planting voids.”

More broadly, the convergence of pressures produced what can only be described as a “triple crisis” of fuel, food and finance. The financial dimension intensifies each of the others.

In the face of rising global uncertainty, investors have flocked to perceived safe havens, particularly US assets. This strengthens the dollar and drains capital from emerging markets like India. For countries with dollar-denominated debt, repayment is becoming more expensive even as access to new financing tightens.

At the same time, high energy prices have inflated import bills, widening current account deficits and putting pressure on currencies. Depreciation of the Indian rupee, for example, makes imports even more expensive. Given that, unlike Asia’s export‑oriented economies, India’s overall imports are far larger than its exports, this trend will likely fuel inflation at home and erode purchasing power.

Many other Global South states face a similar vicious cycle: higher costs, weaker currencies and mounting fiscal stress. For some vulnerable countries, the risks have become existential, given the spectre of balance‑of‑payments crises and sovereign defaults.

Perhaps the most underappreciated dimension of the global crisis has been the sharp downturn in remittances from overseas. For many countries in the Global South, remittances are not merely supplementary income. They are a critical source of foreign exchange and a key stabilizer of national economies.

Millions of workers from developing countries, from the Philippines and India to Egypt and Lebanon, are employed in Persian Gulf economies. The war disrupted these economies, leading to job losses, delayed payments and a dramatic decline in remittance flows. The implications are profound.

At the household level, families are losing remittances just when food and energy costs are rising. At the national level, governments are losing a crucial source of foreign exchange, weakening their ability to finance imports and stabilize their currencies. This dual shock—rising costs and falling incomes—has intensified the crisis across all dimensions.

The geographic contours of the crisis are already clear.

In South Asia, high fuel costs are limiting irrigation and transport, while fertilizer shortages are becoming severe. Bangladesh, the world’s eighth‑most populous country, has been forced to shut five of its six urea plants due to interruption of LNG supplies from the Gulf, specifically Qatar. In East Africa, import‑dependent economies are facing sharp increases in food prices. In the Middle East and North Africa, supply disruptions are straining already fragile food systems.

These regions are being thrusted toward what might be called “humanitarian red zones.” The UN World Food Programme (WFP) has warned that tens of millions of additional people could be pushed into acute food insecurity as a result of the upheaval.

As history has repeatedly shown, food crises do not remain contained. They destabilize societies, fuel political unrest and redefine international relations.

Against this backdrop, what makes the present moment particularly dangerous is the simultaneous disruption of multiple global systems. Energy supply chains are fractured. Agricultural input systems are under stress. Financial flows are being redirected. Trade routes are costlier and more uncertain.

This convergence of disruptions has created a systemic crisis—one in which shocks in one domain rapidly propagate to others. The era of cheap energy and seamless globalization is giving way to a more fragmented and volatile order.

Ultimately, the defining feature of this Trump‑created turmoil is its asymmetry. The war was initiated by the world’s most powerful country; its consequences are being borne disproportionately by the Global South.

America First, World Last

Trump’s governance style centralizes power, often ignoring traditional checks and balances. The phrase “one-man wrecking machine” has been used by political opponents at home, such as New York Governor Kathy Hochul, to describe his approach. In foreign policy, Trump has been more of a “demolition man” of established global alliances and agreements, as well as longstanding international norms.

Trump may be “erratic, unpredictable, inconsistent, irresponsible, reckless and incompetent,” as one American commentator described him in his first term. Yet there now appears to be a strategic logic driving his aggressive expansionism in the second term.

The common factor behind Trump’s military intervention in Venezuela and his war on Iran is oil. Venezuela and Iran together hold nearly one‑third of the world’s proven oil resources.

By kidnapping Venezuela’s sitting president and forcing regime change in Caracas, the US has gained de facto control over the world’s largest proven oil reserves. Asked in a Fox News interview how taking out President Nicolás Maduro would help the average American, Vice President JD Vance said candidly, “It means we are going to be able to control the incredible natural resources of Venezuela.”

A similar outcome in Iran—by installing a pliable regime—would dramatically expand American sway over global energy flows, especially given that the US is already the world’s largest oil producer, churning out more oil than Saudi Arabia and Russia combined, and the world’s largest LNG exporter.

In seeking to bring Iran within America’s strategic orbit and fundamentally reshape the geopolitical landscape of the Middle East, Trump made two grave errors. He profoundly underestimated Iran’s retaliatory capabilities; and he conceitedly overestimated US capacity to control the war’s trajectory without triggering global economic consequences.

The war revealed that power, when exercised without regard for global interdependence or realities on the ground, can produce outcomes that are not only unintended but deeply destabilizing for the entire world.

Trump’s expansionist agenda is not just breaking international norms; it is also exposing the longstanding hypocrisy of US foreign policy in consistently invoking a “rules‑based international order” when, in reality, the rules were always flexible and adjusted whenever American interests required it. His renewed threats to annex Greenland and his proposal to incorporate Canada as America’s 51st state have further unravelled the US rationale for waging proxy war against Russia—that the Russian invasion of Ukraine violated a core international principle that borders cannot be changed by force.

After returning to the White House, Trump quickly shifted from a non‑interventionist international posture to a highly interventionist one, authorizing serial military operations overseas.

At home, Trump’s bid to wield untrammelled presidential power has been checked by US courts, which have struck down several major actions—from overturning sweeping global tariffs and quashing subpoenas targeting the Fed chair to now halting construction on the president’s White House ballroom plan.

Abroad, however, his use of American power faces few constraints. The United Nations has been sidelined, with the Security Council paralyzed. Other important Western leaders—such as Keir Starmer, Friedrich Merz and Emmanuel Macron—have proved too politically weak to counsel restraint or defend longstanding international norms.

The global silence on Trump’s expansionist actions underscores a vacuum of moral leadership across both the West and the Global South.

Against this backdrop, Trump framed his war on Iran as a demonstration of America’s unrivalled military might. Instead, the war unleashed forces that no single country could control.

In terms of global impact, the Ukraine conflict pales in comparison to the US-Israeli war of aggression, which has dimmed the economic-growth prospects of many countries, including India which was the world’s fastest-growing major economy until Trump decided to attack Iran.

The Iran war’s legacy will be defined not by victory or defeat, but by the scale of the global crisis it set in motion. The irony is stark: the bill from a war intended to assert US supremacy is being footed by the global population.

In the post‑World War II period, few world leaders have caused as much global upheaval as Trump in such a compressed timeframe—about 14 months. In terms of the erosion of international norms, the cascade of globe-spanning consequences unleashed and the volatility of world markets, he is playing the central role in fuelling global instability and undermining international peace and security. And he still has nearly 34 months left in his current term.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of two award-winning books on water: Water, Peace, and War; and Water: Asia’s New Battleground.

Great powers study each other closely, observing the strategies used, the resistance met, and the outcomes realized. Donald Trump’s strangulation of Cuba thus could become a template for others, beginning with Xi Jinping, who remains committed to achieving “reunification” with Taiwan.

By Brahma Chellaney, Project Syndicate

Since returning to office last year, US President Donald Trump has ordered military strikes from the Caribbean and eastern Pacific to Africa and the Middle East, targeting alleged drug-smuggling boats and suspected terrorist groups. He has attacked Venezuela and kidnapped its leader, Nicolás Maduro. And he has joined Israel in a large-scale assault on Iran that amounts to a major escalation from last year’s strikes, which supposedly “obliterated” the country’s nuclear facilities. Meanwhile, he is tightening a noose around Cuba, in the hopes that the resulting humanitarian crisis will open the way for a “friendly takeover” of the island by the United States. 

As Trump acts with open contempt for international law, China is taking notes. The Cuba model, in particular, offers a useful blueprint for Chinese President Xi Jinping to apply in pursuing his “historic mission” of “reunification” with Taiwan. This is a live demonstration of how a superpower can strangle a country into submission. 

Modern societies depend on a handful of critical systems such as food, water, transportation, and communications. But one system rules them all: energy. Electricity powers water pumps, refrigeration, health care, digital networks, and industrial and agricultural production. Once the grid begins to fail, so do all other critical systems – and social stability. This makes countries that depend heavily on imported fuel to generate electricity fundamentally vulnerable. 

For Cuba, which has long depended primarily on oil purchased from Venezuela and Mexico, Trump has exploited that vulnerability by imposing a complete blockade on fuel deliveries. Millions of people have lost access to electricity. Water-pumping stations have shut down. Tractors and delivery trucks sit idle, leading to food-price spikes, food shortages, and rising hunger. Hospitals struggle to function amid intermittent blackouts. 

The suffering is the point: it is the lever Trump is using to apply pressure to the regime, whose fall, Trump glibly maintains, is imminent. 

For Xi, such a coercive siege of Taiwan might be more appealing than a full-scale amphibious invasion across the Taiwan Strait, which would be fraught with logistical challenges and likely draw in the US and Japan. Instead of firing missiles at Taipei or storming Taiwan’s beaches, China could declare a maritime quarantine or customs-inspection regime around the island, with Chinese coast-guard vessels stopping energy tankers bound for Taiwanese ports for “safety checks” or “anti-smuggling operations.” 

Even modest disruptions could quickly create supply bottlenecks. Given that Taiwan imports nearly all of its fuel (mostly liquefied natural gas), and maintains barely two weeks’ worth of reserves, a line of LNG tankers waiting offshore could trigger cascading shortages within weeks. Like Cuba, Taiwan would face blackouts, which would disrupt its water and health-care systems. Industrial production, including the semiconductor plants that power the global digital economy, would grind to a halt. The goal would not be immediate surrender, but rather gradual exhaustion. 

This gradualism is essential. A single dramatic act would jolt the international system, forcing others to respond. But a steady rise in “routine” ship inspections, producing increasingly long delays and escalating economic and social pain, offers no such shocking moment. Each step appears insufficient to justify a major military response. This is no Trumpian innovation: Xi is a master of such tactics, which have enabled him to make major strategic gains, such as in the South China Sea and the Himalayas, without firing a single shot. 

In Taiwan’s case, China could simply wait until the economic and humanitarian crisis that it created became severe enough to justify moving in to “stabilize the island” and “rescue its people.” As with Trump’s “friendly takeover,” which makes geopolitical coercion sound like corporate restructuring, the logic is that of a protection racket: create the problem, then step in to “solve” it. 

All this could unfold under a shroud of legal ambiguity. While a formal naval blockade would be regarded as an act of war under international law, a quarantine or inspection regime could be presented as law enforcement, rather than military action. China’s government – which insists that Taiwan is a Chinese province, not a sovereign state – would likely portray maritime inspections as an internal matter of administrative enforcement. 

Would Japan and the US risk war with a major nuclear power and the world’s second-largest military spender over actions portrayed as customs enforcement? Would they want to take responsibility for a crisis-stricken Taiwan? The answer may well be no, especially at a time when the US is hemorrhaging blood and treasure, owing to Trump’s multiplying military adventures abroad. 

Other countries would be even less likely to jump to Taiwan’s defense. Just as the US is using tariff threats to prevent third countries, such as Mexico, from providing oil to Cuba, China could leverage its central role in global trade and its chokehold on rare-earth supplies to deter opposition to a siege of Taiwan. 

Great powers study each other closely. What works for one becomes a template for others, now and in the future. In this sense, what is happening to Cuba is not a one-off tragedy; it is a rehearsal and a test. If the world sits silently by as Trump strangles Cuba, with its 11 million people, Xi will see little reason not to apply the same strategy against 23 million Taiwanese.

Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research and Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of nine books, including Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press, 2011), for which he won the 2012 Asia Society Bernard Schwartz Book Award.

© Project Syndicate, 2026.

The old Monroe Doctrine has been globalized into a claim that American power itself is legal authority

By Brahma Chellaney, The Hill

By any conventional measure of power, the U.S. remains formidable. Its military power is unmatched, and it still possesses the world’s largest national economy. Yet power in the 21st century has never rested on material capabilities alone.

For decades, America’s true strategic advantage lay in something less tangible but more potent: its capacity to attract. Its ideals, openness and professed commitment to universal values conferred a moral authority that made alliances easier, its influence deeper and its leadership more legitimate. That advantage is now being squandered.

The current focus on the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran should not obscure a larger reality: The damage the second Trump presidency is inflicting on U.S. soft power — on the very credibility that made American leadership possible — is profound and likely to outlast the administration itself.

The concept of soft power, a term coined by the late Harvard scholar Joseph Nye, rests on three pillars: an appealing culture, political values that a country actually upholds, and a foreign policy imbued with moral authority. Today, each of those pillars is being eroded.

The most visible fracture is domestic. President Trump’s rhetoric has normalized a form of racialized politics that previous generations of American leaders, from both parties, publicly rejected. His disparaging comments about Somali immigrants, like his circulation of dehumanizing imagery of the Obamas, revives some of the ugliest tropes in the long history of racial oppression. These are not isolated excesses — they signal to the world that the U.S. is retreating from the very values it once claimed as its moral core.

For audiences across Africa, Asia and Latin America — regions whose histories are deeply scarred by European colonialism and extractive rule — such rhetoric is not just offensive. It is revealing. It suggests that the language of equality and human dignity, long invoked by Washington in international forums, may have been less a principled commitment than a convenient instrument of power.

That perception is reinforced by what Trump and his team now say about the world beyond America’s borders.

In his Jan. 21 address in Davos, Trump spoke with disarming candor about territorial acquisition and imperial expansion. Voicing nostalgia for colonialism, he said European empires had simply acquired “great vast wealth, great vast lands all over the world,” adding that “there’s nothing wrong with it.” This was a statement of worldview.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s Feb. 14 address at the Munich Security Conference only sharpened the point. He praised Western colonialists for settling “new continents” and building “vast empires extending out across the globe,” lamenting what he called the “terminal decline” of those empires after World War II. The signal was unmistakable: The age of empire was not a moral tragedy but a civilizational achievement.

Different tones, same message: The past they praise rests on racial domination.

No mainstream Western leader has voiced such unvarnished neo-imperial yearning in decades. For European allies who have spent 80 years publicly renouncing colonialism, and for countries across the Global South that fought to escape it, the implications are jarring. When American leaders speak this way, they do more than offend; they delegitimize the very international order the U.S. claims to uphold.

Words are only part of the story. Under Trump, they are increasingly matched by actions that suggest a return to 19th-century imperial precedents. From renewed pressure for U.S. control over Greenland and the Panama Canal to open-ended military intervention in Venezuela and talk of redrawing borders or relocating populations, the administration has revived a logic more familiar to the age of empires than to the post-1945 international system.

The old Monroe Doctrine has been globalized into a claim that American power itself is legal authority. The capture of Venezuela’s president, the tightening of a blockade that has deepened Cuba’s humanitarian crisis, and the assassination of Iran’s supreme leader represent a pattern that erodes major principles of international law.

This worldview may strike its proponents as a restoration of strength. In reality, it is a confession of insecurity. Great powers confident in their legitimacy do not need to glorify conquest or invoke racial hierarchy; they rely instead on the willingness of others to follow their lead. That willingness is precisely what is now eroding.

The consequences are already visible. Allies hedge. Partners question U.S. commitments. Countries across the Global South, long lectured by Washington on democracy and human rights, now hear such rhetoric with growing skepticism. Rivals, from Beijing to Moscow, find it easier to portray the U.S. as hypocritical and self-serving.

None of this means that American decline is inevitable or irreversible. The U.S. has reinvented itself before. Its greatest strength has always been its capacity for self-correction. But renewal begins with recognition.

The tragedy is not merely that America’s image is being tarnished by signals of a retreat into racialized nationalism and nostalgia for empire. It is that the very qualities that once made U.S. leadership attractive are being dismantled by American hands themselves.

Credibility, once lost, is hard to regain. Trust, once broken, is not easily restored.

If the U.S. continues down this path, the Trump presidency will not merely mark a contentious chapter in domestic politics. It will be remembered as the moment when America forfeited the moral authority that sustained its global influence, thereby accelerating a relative decline that no amount of military or economic power can easily arrest.

Brahma Chellaney is the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”