Bluesky

On February 28, Trump embarked on a war against Iran, deliberately targeting its Supreme Leader, as well as a girls’ school, and calling openly for regime change. This aggression has been sanitized as a “war of choice” in the mainstream press, as if such an option exists in the domain of international law. This sugar-coating language seeks to divert attention from the massive breach in international law. The UN Charter couldn’t be clearer. Its core and most vital norm is set forth in Article 2(4), which without any qualification prohibits all uses of international force except in the exercise of self-defense against a prior armed attack.

In shallow efforts to offer legal justifications, hawks have called this unprovoked attack on Iran amid negotiations to end the threat of war “a war against Iranian terrorism,” “a preventive war against an imminent Iranian threat to US national security,” and “a regime-changing humanitarian intervention.” These are polemical talking points but not serious attempts to offer a rationale that remotely attaches a reputable argument as to the “legality” of recourse to war.

Somehow Trump gave the game away when he declared that he supports international law so long as he is the final arbiter of what is lawful or not. The precedent being set by the US in launching this war of aggression against Iran will long live in infamy, and not only for its victims, but for any hope of a sane, peaceful, law-abiding future for international relations. The Iran War, coming after the Venezuelan military operation, is a further sign that America’s support for internationalism has been replaced by a 21st-century variant of imperial geopolitics.

Withdrawing From Benevolent Internationalism

In the first week of the New Year, the White House released a largely neglected memorandum announcing US withdrawal from 66 “international organizations,” 31 of which are situated within the UN System. Another 35 were independent of the UN, dedicated to the functional tasks of global scope. In addition to ending participation, this withdrawal also means no more US funding. This would disastrously limit the capabilities and performances of these organizations, whose work is vital in so many areas of international life. Such an initiative, although unprecedented, should come as no surprise. Donald Trump has never made a secret of his hostility to internationally cooperative arrangements established to address practical global concerns, whether it be climate change, disease control, cultural heritage, economic development, human rights, enforcing piracy on international waters, and most of all, the management of global security and international conflicts.

The White House alleged that these organizations “operate contrary to US national interests, security, economic prosperity or sovereignty.” An accompanying memo elaborated on “bringing to an end…American taxpayer funding” and how such actions contribute to the wider Trump effort to “restore American sovereignty.” These misleading abstractions hide the true motivation behind this regressive series of moves.

The veil of deception surrounding this deliberately dramatic move against what might be called “global wokism” (the liberal extensions of domestic commitments to “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” reliance on cooperative international arrangements, and support for the UN and human rights). The Orwellian doublespeak of the Trump Memorandum was somewhat clarified in a statement issued on the same day by ever-dutiful Secretary of State Marco Rubio. It had this candid heading: “Withdrawal from Wasteful, Ineffective, or Harmful International Organizations.” In the text, Rubio elaborates that these organizations favor global governance and are “often dominated by progressive ideology and detached from national interests.” In other words, this anti-internationalism should not be sugarcoated as a revival of outmoded traditional US isolationism. It is a matter of clearing the path that impedes Trump’s brand of narcissistic imperialism as set forth in the National Strategy of the United States, which was released in November 2025.

The concluding words from Rubio also express the Trump ethos that this wholesale withdrawal from internationalism is an unmistakable message that the US government rejects any international entanglement that requires funding or dilution of American sovereignty:

We will not continue expending resources, diplomatic capital, and the legitimizing weight of our participation in institutions that are irrelevant to or in conflict with our interests. We reject inertia and ideology in favor of prudence and purpose. We seek cooperation where it serves our people and will stand firm where it does not.

Trump’s Geopolitical Internationalism

What the Trump leadership does not tell the world is that the US has its own preferred manner of dealing with threats to its economic and political interests, as amply illustrated by the recent Venezuela military intervention, the threats to unleash unprovoked military aggression against Iran, and the Greenland gambit best interpreted as a menacing new form of territorial piracy.

In effect, these MAGA moves are rationalized as a repudiation of the woke liberal “global leadership” style of American foreign policy that exerted influence by its participation in and funding of bipartisan internationalism. The argument, not without certain merits, is that the Obama/Biden geopolitics should not be romanticized as global benevolence, the virtues of “a rule-governed international order,” or an embrace of fiscal conservatism. In this spirit, it is responsible to recall that US pre-Trump military spending was 10 times greater than that of the next 10 states, and devoted in large part to maintaining US global dominance rather than national security as traditionally understood. To be sure, it is a glaring example of MAGA hypocrisy exposed by Trump’s seeking and obtaining from Congress a 50 percent increase in the US peacetime military appropriation, to a staggering total of $1.5 trillion.

A considerable amount of the bloated military budget will be used to pay the high maintenance costs of 850 military bases all over the world, a posture hardly consistent with the Trump claim to reduce American foreign policy ambitions to their earlier hemispheric dimensions, which itself overlooked US colonizing adventures in the Pacific region that peaked at the end of the 19th century. The smaller pre-Trump military budgets proved sufficient to finance regime-changing interventions and costly failed state-building and market-oriented undertakings, most visibly in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden’s Cold War nostalgia was not restrained by military budget constraints. He most revealingly chose war rather than diplomacy in the context of the Russian attack on Ukraine, and like Trump could find even less to criticize in Netanyahu’s genocidal approach to Gaza.

Trump’s refusal to expend US dollars to fund cooperative approaches to global issues, whether involving bettering economic and social conditions of others or working to control disease, food security, and climate in ways that benefit the US, exhibits an extremely shortsighted and dysfunctional view of national interests. True, such international activities go against Trump’s electoral pledge to contract the role of the state or to curtail the dangerously expanding national debt and certainly not to reduce militarist geopolitics. While defunding internationalism, the Trump military budget is the highest instance ever of peacetime military spending. It can neither be justified by national security nor be of benefit to the lives of the great majority of Americans.

As the National Security Strategy released by the White House in November 2025 explained, American foreign policy would henceforth reembrace the discarded Monroe Doctrine as expanded by the addition of the Trump Corollary. This bundle of initiatives was immediately dubbed the Donroe Doctrine, giving Trump’s brand of narcissistic geopolitics its due. This formal statement served as a clumsy doctrinal prelude to the attack on Venezuela as well as added threats directed at Cuba and Colombia to expect similar treatment if they don’t do what Washington demands. Even more radical in its implications were strong assertions that non-hemispheric actors were expected to refrain in the future from economic and infrastructure involvements in Latin America. Obviously, this was a thinly veiled warning to China to downsize, if not eliminate, its extensive investment and trade relations throughout Latin America. The message to non-hemispheric actors was henceforth to avoid economic, social, and political Latin involvements or else expect hostile pushback from Washington’s commitment to “hemispheric preeminence.” Time will tell whether this grandiose claim of control over Latin America will spark a new cycle of national resistance to such a brazen contraction of the right of self-determination of these countries as conferred by Article I of the Human Rights Covenant of Political Civil Rights. It also remains to be seen how China and other countries will respond to this outright interference with their freedom to engage in peaceful relations with Latin America.

This mass withdrawal from international cooperative problem-solving is also a virtual admission in this Trump era that the US has opted for “transactionalism” and post-colonial imperialism. The most salient feature of this tectonic shift away from Franklin Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy in Latin America, as brazenly announced to the world, and especially to the hemisphere, including more shockingly to Canada, is that the US is giving priority to its strategic ambitions free from discarded liberal pretenses of respect for international law and the United Nations. It seems to be telling the world that its only guide when it comes to foreign policy in the future will be the warped and personalist amorality of Donald Trump. In the future, Latin America can expect to be treated as an exclusive US “sphere of influence,” perhaps more accurately known as “a sphere of dominance.” If such is the case, the closest recent resemblance is to the Soviet relationship to Eastern Europe during the Cold War.

A Second Look at US Withdrawal From Internationalism and Pre-Trump Resistance to Latin Economic Nationalism

In this sense the withdrawal from the 66 organizations is a gigantic step away from US engagement with the liberal approach that served as a bipartisan guide to American foreign policy and the projection of its blend of hard and soft power ever since 1945. The previous posture of American foreign policy avoided the arrogant Trumpian language of “preeminence,” adopting as an alternative approach to the bipartisan post–Cold War euphemistic language of “global leadership.” This earlier terminology also did not play by the rules of respect for the sovereign rights of states. It too was guilty of geopolitical disregard of legal constraints when it served strategic national interests. It resorted to regime change by covert interventions throughout the Cold War on behalf of its free-market ideology and in opposition to economic nationalism by elected leaders or in the aftermath of popular revolution. This pattern of covert intervention in Guatemala in 1954 generated and orchestrated a coup against a democratically elected government that was alleged to have Communist leanings, and more concretely threatened the interests of United Fruit Company, nationalizing some unused land owned by this powerful corporate investor.

This pattern of a more overt justification for promoting regime change—combining an ideological rationale with underlying hostility to economic nationalism—shaped the US response to the Cuban Revolution a few years later. The US relied for many years on harsh economic sanctions while lending marginal support to counterrevolutionary Cuban exile proxies in a series of failed attempts to duplicate its earlier success in Guatemala. Castro’s leadership in Cuba was delegitimized by liberal American leaders at the time as “incompatible” with the ideals and values of the hemisphere, yet seemed more directly motivated by a toxic opposition to economic nationalism taking the principal form of nationalizing Cuba’s sugar industry, by a mixture of hardline foreign policy hawks and coup-minded Cuban exiles. In a shameful continuing display of heartless foreign policy, annual one-sided votes in the UN General Assembly favor ending sanctions against Cuba that have persisted for more than 60 years after the Castro ascent to power, causing severe economic hardship for the population.

The US also lent covert encouragement to the 1973 anti-Allende Pinochet coup in Chile. It also carried out in 1989 a lawless intervention in Panama centering on the kidnapping of the de facto head of state Manuel Noriega and forcibly bringing him to the US to face criminal charges of drug trafficking. The self-serving code name for the intervention was Operation Just Cause, officially defended as needed for the protection of US economic interests, enforcement against drug trafficking, and for the security of the Panama Canal.

These were peculiar ways of expressing neighborly good will, to say the least, covertly carried out or ideologically asserted as elements of Cold War “containment” geopolitics. This anti-communist veneer masked accompanying economic motivations to crush Latin nationalism and thereby promote the interests of US corporations to uphold the security of private-sector investments that had long exploited Latin resources. This pre-Trump strategic militarism was never limited to the Western Hemisphere, as many American regime-changing and state-building ventures were carried out in Asia and the Middle East. The arc of US interventionism after 1945 stretches from the CIA-engineered overthrow in 1953 of Mossadegh’s democratically elected government in Iran and its replacement by the authoritarian Pahlavi Dynasty to the Venezuelan undertaking in 2026. In both cases the common strategic stakes were to ensure that the vast oil reserves of these two countries were managed for profit by US corporate energy giants.

Before Trump, US foreign aid, support of the UN, and assorted initiatives such as the Peace Corps were in fact idealistic features of American foreign policy. Yet all along such policies had a hybrid character. They served also as PR ploys to pursue covertly the warrior and economistic sides of US “global leadership”—that is, covert means to prevent countries in the non-Western world from moving toward either socialism or economic nationalism. Unlike the Monroe Doctrine era, which was preoccupied with resisting European intervention, the Cold War period and its aftermath represented a geopolitical reset that was rooted in Atlanticism, pitting the West against the non-West in alliance with Europe, as given salient expression in the NATO alliance.

This alliance originated as a collective defense arrangement designed to deter alleged Soviet expansionist ambitions toward Europe but revealingly has limped along for more than three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which was its original justifying rationale. It should not be overlooked that principally the main NATO members after 1993 joined in their complicity toward Israel’s genocidal policies in Occupied Palestine. This was convincing testimony that the Atlanticist coalition that existed during the Cold War broadened its agenda to encompass Afghanistan and Israel/Palestine, redesigning containment to validate the post-Soviet civilizational containment of Islam. Such policies fulfilled Samuel Huntington’s prophetic expectations that the Soviet collapse would produce a “clash of civilizations” rather than “an end of history.”

Beyond Hemispheric Preeminence

Atlanticism is currently being redefined by Trump as acceptable so long as it submits to his efforts to control coercively ongoing confrontations with the non-West, shifting their ideational locus from Communism to Islam, with Iran currently in the US gunsights. As mentioned, the distinctive features of Trump’s overtly nihilistic geopolitics, despite its declared intentions, will not be confined to the Western Hemisphere. As metaphor and sign of political pathology, Trump’s absurd fantasy is that if the Bureau of Peace administering Gaza is “successful,” whatever that might come to mean, it will emerge as the peace-building center of yet another “new international order.” In that event, the UN will be cast aside as weak, wasteful, and ineffectual—a relic of the old order that will be replaced by the strong, efficient, and effective Bureau of Peace as administered from Washington. This outlandish project can be understood as an institutional equivalent to Trump’s anger that he was robbed of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize that he alone richly deserved.

Looked upon more objectively, if a Nobel War Prize existed, Trump would surely deserve to be the leading candidate, and likely recipient.

Where Is Trump’s Foreign Policy Headed?

In effect, Trump’s anti-internationalism should be reinterpreted. The US is certainly retreating these days from the Atlanticist neoliberal globalist model of world order. This disappoints and worries those who continue to value the US global leadership role, however blurry its nature, as the only feasible alternative to chaos, economic crisis, and Western decline. In contrast, what Trump seems to be now proposing is undisguised American unipolarity as qualified by transactional calculations of national advantage. This is the message to Europeans, as evident in the leveraging of tariffs as policy instruments to punish and reward, most recently softened somewhat by Rubio’s “breadcrumb diplomacy” speech that seemed to delight the European audience attending the Munich Security Conference in mid-February. Rubio’s well-chosen words were received as reassurance that after all Europe would not be cut loose to fend for itself and could still rely on partnering with the US so long as it let Trump run the show. The standing ovation given to Rubio at the end of his speech seems best understood as an unexpectedly servile display of fealty by the leadership of Europe to US global imperialism.

My suspicion is that, despite such appearances to the contrary, the Trump worldview might be slouching toward a “beautiful” geopolitical bargain with America’s two geopolitical rivals: China and Russia. Its enactment would involve enlarged spheres of influence reciprocally accepted, and a trilateral management of global security. The UN would be diminished, if not relegated to the status of serving minor functional issues—a kind of “petty internationalism” with tight budgetary constraints. It would be naïve to suppose that such a world order arrangement would benefit the majority of the world’s peoples or address the global public good as specified in general terms by the Preamble of the UN Charter, but we should all know by now that these goals were never endorsed by Trump.

A preferable alternative architecture for a new order exists but is hampered by the inter-civilizational rivalries now flourishing to block suitable attention to the agenda of benign internationalism—focusing on nuclear weaponry, climate change, xenophobia, developmental equity, racism, human rights, and fashioning regulatory frameworks for weapons, AI, and robotics. Such a future is also treated as irrelevant by the “political realists” who wield influence in the inner sanctums of the reigning geopolitical actors. Such thinking, however outmoded, continues to dominate the foreign policy elites of almost all major countries, undermining any present prospects for generating a new world order animated by promoting the global public good. The most that can be hoped for in the near future is a more prudent and responsible realism that becomes sensitive to the limitations of militarist geopolitics. Thus, adaptation to the changing global setting is confined to rearrangements of ill-fitting and often antagonistic “parts” rather than finally affirming the politics of the planet as an organic “whole,” which seems alone capable of preserving a humane and resilient future.