Sunday Times 2
Trump’s Imperialism Without Alibis
View(s):By Ricardo Hausmann, PROJECT SYNDICATE, EXCLUSIVE TO THE SUNDAY TIMES IN SRI LANKA
DAVOS – Commentators have largely framed the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro as a US-orchestrated attempt at “regime change,” or as an effort to preserve the country’s existing political order, minus Maduro. But these interpretations overlook the more consequential development: the emergence of a new, more discreet form of imperialism.
Rather than installing an American colonial governor in Miraflores Palace, this system operates through subtler means that are, in some ways, more cynically effective. Venezuela still has ministries, security services, courts, and ceremonial symbols like the presidential sash. Yet its economic lifeline – the ability to sell oil and access the proceeds – has been placed under the United States’ control. As President Donald Trump told reporters, “We need total access. We need access to the oil and to other things in their country that allow us to rebuild their country.”
Unlike traditional sanctions, which seek leverage through external punishment, this arrangement functions like an informal receivership. The US government markets Venezuelan oil, deposits the revenues into accounts it controls, and uses access to these funds to discipline local authorities.
The nearest historical precedent is not the postwar reconstruction of Europe and Japan but colonial-era indirect rule. Under such a system, a local government remains in place to administer daily life, maintain order, and manage dissent, while the imperial power retains the core attributes of sovereignty, including trade, foreign policy, and control over the principal sources of state revenue.
Contrary to many outside observers’ expectations, the vast majority of Venezuelans welcomed the apparent end of their sovereignty, according to a recent Economist poll. That response is less an endorsement of American imperialism than a devastating indictment of Chavismo. For years, many Venezuelans believed sovereignty had already been lost, effectively outsourced to powers like Russia and Cuba through dependence on foreign intelligence services and opaque financial entanglements.
The January 3 raid to capture Maduro and his wife only reinforced that perception. Cuba later reported that 32 members of its armed forces and intelligence services were killed during the US operation, a striking indicator of how deeply Cuban personnel had been embedded within Venezuela’s security apparatus.
Venezuelans must thus confront a bitter irony. Long perceived as a client state, their country is now being recast as an American protectorate through control of its oil exports and revenues rather than through formal annexation or a ground invasion.
This is where narratives, often dismissed as mere rhetoric, become strategically imperative. Empires have always relied on stories not only to legitimize coercion before domestic and international audiences but also to shape expectations in ways that make power predictable and enforceable.
European empires in the 19th century understood this well, often cloaking imperial domination in uplifting narratives of moral duty and civilisational progress. France spoke of its “civilizing mission” (mission civilisatrice), while British imperial ideology found its most notorious expression in Rudyard Kipling’s exhortation to “take up the White Man’s burden.” In 1884, French statesman Jules Ferry articulated the imperialist logic with striking bluntness, writing that “the superior races have a right because they have a duty” to “civilize the inferior races.”
By contrast, postwar America advanced a different narrative. President Harry Truman emphasised support for “free peoples” resisting “attempted subjugation,” while John F. Kennedy pledged to “pay any price” and “bear any burden” to “assure the survival and the success of liberty,” explicitly linking US power to shared purpose rather than imperial plunder.
That self-image was later inscribed in stone at the World War II Memorial in Washington, which declares that “Americans came to liberate, not to conquer, to restore freedom and to end tyranny.” In a farewell statement shortly before his death, Senator John McCain drew on the same tradition, describing America as “a nation of ideals, not blood and soil” that was at its strongest when it helped “liberate more people from tyranny and poverty than ever before in history.”
Far from being mere rhetorical flourishes, these narratives helped shape America’s postwar foreign policy, making US commitments more credible and strengthening alliances built on shared values. Crucially, they also raised the reputational cost of predation.
Trump’s emerging narrative breaks sharply with that tradition. Whereas earlier forms of imperialism relied on moral justification, he dispenses with such alibis, reducing the exercise of power to an entry on a balance sheet. Trump himself made that shift explicit in a recent New York Times interview, brushing aside international law altogether. Asked what, if anything, constrained his actions, he replied, “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” He also spoke of rebuilding Venezuela “in a very profitable way,” adding, “We’re going to be using oil, and we’re going to be taking oil.”
The implications for Venezuela and the international order are profound. Rules-based narratives bind power to institutions, generating and sustaining trust. Personalist narratives, on the other hand, tie power to temperament, making it unpredictable and ultimately unreliable.
If the US wants Venezuelans – and the world – to regard its intervention as temporary and legitimate, it must impose clear structural constraints: a credible, time-bound path to elections; transparent, independently audited management of oil revenues; and a firm commitment to human rights, including the release of political prisoners. Above all, the US must recognise that its power is not self-justifying.
Absent those constraints, Venezuela will not be moving from dictatorship to democracy. Instead, it will simply be trading one form of tutelage for another.
Ricardo Hausmann, a former minister of planning of Venezuela and former chief economist at the Inter-American Development Bank, is a professor at Harvard Kennedy School and Director of the
Harvard Growth Lab.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2026.
www.project-syndicate.org