By Sachithanandam Sathananthan –
Dr. Sachithanandam Sathananthan
Trump jettisons Washington’s civilising mission
The pretence of “Liberal” evaporated from the “International Order” at the Munich Security Conference (MSC) held in mid-February. The two proximate catalysts are: first, President Donald J. Trump’s brazen abduction of Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, on 3 January 2026 on the absurd allegation that both violated US Law while living in Caracas, under Venezuelan jurisdiction; second, the EU mis-characterised the kidnapping as a legal step towards a democratic transformation of Venezuela even as Trump underlined Imperialism’s rationale of economic exploitation by declaring, “Venezuela stole American oil” that lies beneath Venezuela’s soil.
For good measure, Trump dusted off the 1823 Monroe Doctrine by adding his corollary – “Donroe” Doctrine – to justify Washington’s attack on President Maduro, supposedly to stem the inflow of the drug Fentanyl that Venezuela neither manufactures nor distributes. What’s worse, Trump flaunted Fentanyl as a new-and-improved Weapon of Mass Destruction (WMD); he took an odious leaf out of President George W. Bush’s blatant lie that Iraq possessed WMDs, which fictitious threat Bush and his partner-in-crime UK Prime Minister Tony Blair had claimed to combat in order to “free its people” – a perversion of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) – and to “defend the world from grave danger”, while in fact eying Iraq’s ample petroleum resources.
The Trump administration repeated the lie, claiming Iran is on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons and must be stopped, though the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has found no evidence of such possibility. The threat has been blown up to include missiles that could reach US vassals in the Gulf and Israel.
By admitting US Imperialism is engineering regime change in Venezuela and Iran to loot the country’s oil and other resources, Trump shredded Imperialism’s tattered legitimating narrative of “protecting the free world”. He confirmed to soldiers, sailors and airmen in the US armed forces that they are fighting and often dying to enrich the Oligarchs and MNCs in their country.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio pawed the ground at the February MSC with a nationalist flourish to elaborate the geostrategic interests that drove Washington’s gratuitous violation of Venezuela’s national sovereignty. “This is the Western Hemisphere…where we live and we’re not going to allow the Western Hemisphere to be a base of operation for adversaries, competitors, and rivals of the United States.”
Two days later, Trump contemptuously dismissed International Law: “I don’t need international law”; and added, reeking of medieval Absolutism, that his actions are constrained only by “my own morality, my own mind”.
A month later Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller dropped all pretence US Imperialism promoting lofty ideals of democracy and freedom. “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else”, he scorned. “But we live in a world, in the real world…that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power…These are the iron laws of the world.” He cautioned recalcitrant US allies. “We’re a superpower. And under President Trump, we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower.”
Toward the Neo-Western Century?
Not one to be outdone, Rubio issued a strident call to the Collective West (13%) at the MSC to revitalise colonialism. “This is the path that President Trump and the United States has embarked upon,” he ruminated nostalgically. “It is the path we ask you here in Europe to join us on. It is a path we have walked together before and hope to walk together again. For five centuries…the West had been expanding…But in 1945, for the first time since the age of Columbus, it was contracting…The great Western empires had entered into terminal decline, accelerated by godless communist revolutions and by anti-colonial uprisings.”
He, in effect, confessed the US Neo-Conservatives’ delusion of turning the 21st Century into a “New American Century” has run its course; and he pleaded with European powers to help make it a Neo-Western Century, to jointly plunder the lands of the Global Majority (87%).
The US Deep State sugar-coated Imperialism’s aggression and violations of national sovereignty as a 20th Century civilising mission to “democratise” the Global Majority’s “backward” black, brown and yellow peoples by putting a gun barrel to their head; to “save” the Muslim women (Afghanistan, Iraq) while simultaneously subjecting tens of thousands of them to brutal sexual violence with impunity by invading western armies; and much worse. Where such peoples invariably resisted the alleged beneficence of being recast in the West’s presumed “Liberal image”, Imperialism ushered democracy in on the backs of battle tanks or dropped freedom from 60,000 feet, and for good measure overthrew legitimate, anti-Imperialist governments.
US Imperialism’s machinations, of course, are the new-and-improved version of Europe’s 19th Century racist civilising mission to impart the benefits of European Enlightenment and Christian virtues. The former colonial powers among the Collective West had similarly put to the sword those who refused to be “civilised”.
Many members of Western Intelligentsia who have proudly parroted to us the ruling class’ propaganda, that “the world looks to America for leadership”, are battling to reconcile the supposed moral stature of their uninvited and invariably despised world leader with the naked thievery in Venezuela, attempts to rob Denmark’s Greenland and the two illegal attacks on Iran in June 2025 and February 2026. They are caught off balance also by Trump’s disdain for the niceties of diplomacy as the US ruling class cannibalises fellow NATO members, Canada and Denmark, and focuses the cross hairs on Cuba and Columbia.
The Christian Right within Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) are struggling to square the circle, to make sense of the contradictions between the Superman myths of benign US “global leadership” they and their ilk fed on and the barbaric reality of US military’s recent interventions in Venezuela and Iran. They are less sanguine about Trump’s allegiance to Netanyahu after discovering Washington is backing an Israel bent on wiping out Christian Palestinians just as much as extirpating Muslim Palestinians. The recent anti-Trump shift amongst his two prominent former acolytes is emblematic of the unfolding change.
For the benefit of his own, opportunistic western intelligentsia John Perkins laid bare the machinations of the US Empire in his seminal 2005 publication Confessions of an Economic Hitman.
In short, the Trump administration has performed a historic function: it has ripped off Imperialism’s grotesque humanising mask the US ideologues diligently fabricated over several decades with their vacuous narrative about “Foreign Policy”. He has put to rest the US ruling class’ self-serving, allegedly altruistic declarations of “nation building”, of one-size-fits-all re-engineering of the world in its own Liberal image throughout the rapacious US Empire. A youtuber welcomed Trump’s candid admissions, noting “(t)here’s something thrilling about the honesty there”, and defended US Imperialism by celebrating Trump’s resolve to unblushingly defend US national interests in Latin America against adversaries, Russia and China.
The peoples of the Global Majority are far from thrilled.
A week after Washington’s February aggression against Iran, President Trump’s cheerleader Senator Lindsey Graham helpfully explained the dollars-and-cents of the “thrilling…honesty”, how the superpower’s ruling class would profit. Graham welcomed the estimated one billion dollars funnelled to the Military-Industrial Complex each day for the Iran war as the “best money ever spent” and bragged that the U.S. would “make a ton of money” off the war. Of course, he has in mind not the struggling wage earners but the Military Industrial Complex (MIC) (Lockheed Martin, RTX, Northrop Grumman, etc.) wolfing down defence expenditure, paid for by tax payers, that fattened the well heeled MIC shareholders and the Oil Majors (ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, etc.) raking in profits from the war-induced spike in crude oil prices to enrich investors; while the struggling consumers shoulder their economic costs.
The returns on the impact of divulging, that war is waged overwhelmingly for profit, upon the morale of the rank and file in the military and the political calculus of middle and working classes may roll in in due course. The deliberate blocking of the sewage system in the aircraft carrier USS Gerald Ford by sailors using their T-shirts, etc. and the “accidental” fire caused in the laundry room of the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln that disabled both vessels are not good omens.
Death rattles
The loudest death rattles of US Imperialism and Israeli Expansionism came out of the UNSC on 11 March, ten days after the US-Israeli illegal, decapitation strike – Operation Epic Fury – on 28 February 2026 that murdered Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, members of his family and several senior military officers. The Security Council adopted, by 13 votes with 2 abstentions (Russia and China condemned the Operation), the Gulf Cooperation Council’s Orwellian draft resolution blaming Iran, the victim, as the aggressor for retaliating against Gulf Countries and Jordan that facilitated and enabled the Operation. The votes by NATO members – the US, UK and France – and 10 other US vassals laid bare the terminal moral turpitude and political bankruptcy of the Collective West.
Second, Iran has neutralised the US-Israeli strategy of collapsing the government and imposing a quick victory, within four days, by turning the battle into a war of attrition in its favour.
Next, Tehran restricted access through the strategic energy artery, the Strait of Hormuz to unfriendly countries. The consequent global energy and economic shocks are cascading.
Fourth, the NATO allies (including UK, France, Germany) have not forgotten how Trump heaved them overboard barely a year ago, demanding they fend for themselves. Predictably they declined Trump’s desperate plea to sail their naval vessels up the Strait to challenge Iran’s domination over the strategic waterway. A German spokesman disdained Trump’s request saying the war with Iran has “nothing to do with Nato”, deftly implying Article 5 of the NATO Convention is inapplicable to illegal wars started by a member-country. Quite suddenly, they discovered International Law.
In desperation Trump threatened to “obliterate” Iran’s energy infrastructure if Tehran did not remove the restrictions within “48 hours” (by 23.44 GMT, on 23/mar/26). About 24 hours later he apparently climbed down, alleging “productive” talks with Tehran; but he said nothing about withdrawing the approximately 5,000 US Marines from two Marine Expeditionary Forces on their way to Iran. Tehran unequivocally denied any talks, either directly or through intermediaries.
This is the clearest indication so far that a Muslim country – Iran – has emerged, since the 1967 Yom Kippur war, as the credible military challenge to US Imperialism and Zionist expansionism in West Asia. The balance of power in favour of West Asia is enhanced as the Islamic Resistance of Iraq drives out US troops still controlling Iraq’s oil fields. The unfolding strategic advantage may, for the first time, hold prospects for peace.
Lastly, Tehran flatly rejected Washington and Tel Aviv’s repeated requests via third parties for a ceasefire and in effect called Israel’s bluff of resorting to a nuclear response, the Samson Option. In other words, Iran made clear if it goes down it would take Israel and the region down with it – a Persian version of the Samson Option. Iran underlined the message with the massive and relentless drone and missile barrage, targeting Washington’s vassals in West Asia. The retaliation inflicted widespread damage to US bases in the Gulf Monarchies and virtually destroyed Washington’s supposed security umbrella over the ruling families.
In short, we are witnesses to a rare geo-strategic shift. The US-provided security architecture has become, in a dialectical sense, the Gulf countries’ strategic vulnerability as soon as Iran perfected a credible, military deterrent.
Is Iran about to inflict a strategic defeat on the US-Israel axis? Is it dismantling the Collective West’s long established hegemony over the energy-rich West Asia?
*The author is an independent researcher who read Political Economy for the Ph.D. degree at the University of Cambridge Wolfson College. He was Visiting Research Scholar at the Jawaharlal Nehru University School of International Studies and taught World History at Karachi University’s Institute of Business Administration. In his Youtube channel @DrSSathananthan he discusses history and politics in the current context. He is an award-winning filmmaker. Email: commentaries.ss@gmail.com
