Princeton political scientist Atul Kohli reads Trump’s foreign policy against the long history of American empire rather than as a break from it. The United States has rarely built formal colonies; it built an informal empire in which governments in the Global South keep nominal sovereignty and open their economies. Across that history, Kohli argues, imperialism has come in three varieties:

  • Hard militarism — the Philippines in the early 1900s, Vietnam, Iraq, and now Iran
  • Covert regime change — Mossadegh, Árbenz, Lumumba, Allende, and the 2026 capture of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro
  • Multilateral coercion — the Open Door Notes, the IMF and World Bank, the Washington Consensus

What changes under Trump is not the repertoire but the candor. Where earlier interventions wrapped resource grabs in talk of saving countries from communism or spreading democracy, Trump said plainly that the Venezuela operation was about access to oil for American companies.

The military record is also a record of failure on its own terms. The Philippines never became the entrepôt for the China trade; Vietnam went communist while the rest of Southeast Asia stayed capitalist anyway; Iraq is a chaotic state and the war destabilized the region. What stays constant is the bill, paid by others — roughly half a million Filipinos, some three million Vietnamese, perhaps half a million Iraqis.

Kohli’s explanation for the repetition is structural, not psychological. The US has enormous surplus power, and the temptation to use it is permanent — he cites Madeleine Albright’s question to Colin Powell: “What is the point of having this superb military that you are always talking about if we cannot use it?” The economic payoff is real but never accrues to those who pay. Taxpayers and soldiers carry the cost of the Iran war, estimated between $40 billion and over $100 billion, while ExxonMobil and Chevron booked record profits on the resulting oil price spike, and the defense budget grows. Kohli pairs that with Dean Acheson’s line after Korea: “Korea came along and saved us.”

  • The 2026 Iran war was an imperial war of choice: US intelligence judged there was no immediate threat, and Israel was a partner but not the driver — “the tail does not wag the dog”
  • Trump has now used military force against seven countries
  • Venezuela goes further than past interventions in the region: the US took direct control of oil revenues, a form of financial supervision not seen since Britain ran the finances of post-Opium War China and, with France, of Egypt
  • Kohli expects Venezuela’s rebound to be credited to American tutelage, with the damage of US sanctions quietly forgotten — and the economy to stay unequal and oil-dependent
  • The third pathway is the one now failing: open markets by force and Chinese firms move in before American ones, and few countries accepted the invitation to help the US open the Strait of Hormuz

The piece’s sharpest turn is on decline itself. Brazenness is not confidence; it suggests American elites have quietly given up on the legitimacy and soft power that hegemons usually value. Declining powers take what they can by force, consequences be damned — which makes this one more dangerous, not less.

That leaves the liberal hope of a benign post-Trump hegemon exposed. America was never that, Kohli writes, “and it is not likely to be so in the future.”