Trump's Davos embarrassment proves who is pulling his strings

Thom Hartmann
January 22, 2026 

RAW STORY

Donald Trump attends the 56th annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. REUTERS/Romina Amato

Donald Trump went to Davos on Wednesday morning and gave the speech that Vladimir Putin wanted him to, lying and pissing off Europe and shaking the North Atlantic alliance to its core.

Our president has refused to help Ukraine in any meaningful way for a year now, giving Russia the room to destroy much of that country’s electric and heat infrastructure so badly that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had to cancel his trip to Davos to deal with the crisis.

Trump’s now invaded Venezuela and is threatening the same with Greenland, legitimizing Putin’s land-grabs in Georgia and Ukraine.

Trump’s ICE goons are destroying the rule of law in America, running amok in Minneapolis, punishing — and killing — the residents of that city for having elected politicians who’d dare advocate democracy over autocracy.

Russian media is proudly proclaiming that their own internal crackdowns on immigrants, dissidents, and people of color aren’t so bad because Trump’s doing the same thing in America. We’ve legitimized Putin’s racist police state.

Trump’s destroyed much of America’s “soft power,” our friendly relations with resource-rich developing nations, by killing off John F. Kennedy’s USAID program, directly causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people with more to come.

Many of the countries we’ve abandoned are now re-aligning themselves with Russia and China, to Putin’s delight.

Trump’s duplicating Putin’s “enemy within” rhetoric to amplify the Russian-promoted “Great Replacement Theory” meme that claims wealthy Jews are paying to have Black and brown people “replace” white men in their jobs and lives.

It’s become the operating system for ICE and is tearing America apart, pitting friends, neighbors, and relatives against each other while Russian media celebrates.

The biggest thorn in Putin’s side has been NATO, all the way back to his days as a murderous KGB intelligence officer, and Trump is now shaking that organization all the way down to its foundations by threatening to seize Greenland and trash-talking alliance member states.

Early on as Putin was rolling out his dictatorship, having destroyed Russia’s brief experiment with democracy, he put himself above the law by simply refusing to enforce rights the Russian constitution and laws gave to average citizens.

Trump’s today doing the same thing, simply defying the Epstein Transparency Act and other laws while approving as his ICE goons routinely violate Americans’ civil rights.

From Russia’s point of view, America’s biggest historic strength hasn’t been our formidable military (they have just as many nukes) but was our rock-solid multi-century relationships with allies.

Today, Canada is — for the first time in over a century — preparing to fight back against an American invasion, while the European Union is trying to figure out how to disentangle itself from our economy in the event we start a war with them.

Meanwhile a bigoted Australian billionaire family continues to pump daily pro-Russian-worldview (racist, nationalist, anti-democratic) poison into the minds of Americans.

In the 1940s, Sir Keith Murdoch built his family’s media empire, in part, by running sensationalist articles about Black American GIs stationed in Australia during World War II “raping” and having affairs with white Australian women. Now Fox “News” is one of the most frequently quoted American sources for Putin’s captured domestic media, according to The New York Times.

Everything Trump does, when it doesn’t involve soliciting bribes, hustling pardons, or making himself richer inures benefit directly to Putin. Which raises the question diplomats and leaders across Europe are increasingly asking out loud: why are elected Republicans tolerating this?

Is it just because five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized bribery and thus billionaire oligarchs who don’t believe in democracy now own them?

For example, billionaire Peter Theil, who financed JD Vance’s rise to power as the senator from Ohio, has said:
“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” and “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”

Could it be that most Republican politicians simply agree with those types of sentiments, that democracy is mob rule and inconvenient, and that strongman autocracy is a more stable and predictable form of government? That they’d love to jettison European and Asian democracies in favor of corrupt police states like Russia and Hungary where they can get away with just about anything just so long as they keep the emperor happy?

After all, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was nakedly taking millions in “gifts” from rightwing billionaires with business before the Court and became the deciding vote in the Citizens United case; are Republicans going along with Trump’s corruption because they, themselves, are also taking bribes and using otherwise illegal insider information to make themselves rich?

Or is it because six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court gave Trump immunity from crimes and he thinks of himself as America’s monarch, as if he were mad King Ludwig of yore?

Are Republicans afraid — as Mitt Romney told his biographer, McKay Coppins — that Trump will use the force of law or activate his lone-wolf white supremacist terrorists to bring GOP politicians to heel or even have their families intimidated or their homes attacked like the Trump supporter who went after Paul Pelosi?

Could it be that Republicans know that most Americans — at least those who haven’t bought fully into the Fox “News” and MAGA cults — have figured out that the GOP’s only loyalty is to billionaires and massive corporations?

All they’ve done since the Reagan Revolution is cut taxes on the morbidly rich while gutting the agencies that catch criminal or unethical activity in government and the military; maybe the GOP now realizes we’ve got their number and that’s why they’re working so hard to purge voting rolls in Blue cities?

Trump’s shocking behavior — and the even more shameful docility of elected Republicans and the lickspittles he’s surrounded himself with — raises questions that will probably only be answered by future historians.

Nonetheless, we must push back. Democrats need to grow a spine, and the upcoming vote on the DHS budget is a great place to start. Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) have indicated they may support the legislation, while Reps. Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Ilhan Omar (D-MN), and Sen. Rubén Gallego (D-AZ) are signaling a fierce opposition. The battle will almost certainly play out in the Senate over a Democratic filibuster; you can call your two senators and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) at 202-224-3121.

Democrats also must signal now and repeatedly that Trump’s pro-Putin, anti-American rhetoric and actions are so unacceptable that impeachment is necessary, both for him and his brownnosers at DHS, ICE, and the FBI.

And if there are any Republicans who have left an ounce of decency, now is the time for them to stand up and speak out. And not to back away as soon as Trump growls, the way Sens. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Todd Young (R-IN) just did with the proposed Venezuela war powers legislation.

Republican senator Barry Goldwater famously walked from the Capitol to the White House to inform Richard Nixon that his criminality had become so severe and obvious that Republicans in Congress could no longer support him and would, if necessary, vote to impeach and convict him.

America needs today’s Republicans to find their spines, reclaim their integrity and patriotism, and politically stop Trump in his tracks. And maybe it’s starting to happen: Republican Rep. Don Bacon (R-NB) just told reporters he’s threatening impeachment:
“I’ll be candid with you: There’s so many Republicans mad about this [Greenland issue]. If he went through with the threats, I think it would be the end of his presidency. And he needs to know: The off-ramp is realizing Republicans aren’t going to tolerate this and he’s going to have to back off. He hates being told no, but in this case, I think Republicans need to be firm.”

It’s a start, but there’s a long way to go if Trump is to be held to account.

When future historians ask what Putin wanted from Trump, the answer may be painfully simple: “Everything America once stood for.”

Whether that happens is not yet settled and ultimately depends on what we Americans — across the political spectrum — do next.

Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.

Trump the Davos diva only made this key weakness more obvious — and more costly

John Casey
January 22, 2026 
RAW STORY


Donald Trump attends the 56th annual World Economic Forum. REUTERS/Denis Balibous


Donald Trump didn’t just fly to Davos, after a false start thanks to problems with Air Force One, to attend the World Economic Forum. He fled there to be with his brethren.

Some say he fled mounting scrutiny of the Epstein files. More likely, he fled the affordability crisis crushing working Americans, and the reality that his central campaign promise, to lower the cost of living, has collapsed under the weight of his obsessions with revenge and self-enrichment, and his insatiable need to dominate the global spotlight.

Davos gave Trump what he craves: billionaires, deference, a room full of powerful people forced to listen to his garbage and kowtow. A far cry from the poor, obtuse, gauche MAGA crowd he secretly loathes like everyone else.

In the days before Davos, Trump kicked up a geopolitical kerfuffle, threatening to acquire Greenland, floating military action against Venezuela, aiming reckless rhetoric at allies. None of it was accidental, none of it served American interests. It served Trump.

Trump is obsessed with attention, and Davos, an annual gathering of the world’s wealthiest elites, was the perfect stage. He didn’t want to attend as a participant; he wanted to be the main character. He wanted to dominate the news cycle, command the room, and surround himself with flunkies eager to flatter, validating his delusions of dominance.

And it worked. Everyone scampered around him, wanting to know about Greenland, and wouldn’t you know it, as evening fell, he miraculously announced that one of his “framework” agreements had been reached with NATO. It happened so quickly because Trump got the attention he wanted.

It was from his patented playbook of pandemonium: Trump creates a problem, and lo and behold, Trump fixes the problem, and Trump is the hero.

But Trump has also created an affordability problem, and he has no idea how to fix it. While he hobnobbed in Davos, working Americans were being crushed at home.

Prices are rising. Groceries cost more. Health insurance premiums are surging. And now even executives aligned with Trump’s economic worldview are admitting the obvious. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy recently acknowledged that Trump’s sweeping tariffs are beginning to show up in consumer prices, as sellers pass costs on to shoppers.

Economists warned this would happen, the moment Trump launched his tariff tantrum last year. Consumers picking up the tab was never a question of if, but when.

That “when” is arriving now. The only question is whether it will wake people up.

Democrats are rallying around two simple words: affordability and accountability. As the midterm campaigns ramp up, affordability will only grow more urgent. By summer, after the primaries, as messaging crystallizes, the cost-of-living crisis will hit an inflection point. Prices will continue rising, largely unchecked, and voters will start looking for answers.

Trump has none. And Republicans are having hissy fits, panicking that he’s coming up empty-handed on the issue that put him back in power.

Accountability stretches across the wreckage of Trump’s second term: Justice Department retribution, Homeland Security overreach and ICE raids, legally dubious experiments like the Department of Government Efficiency, reckless military action, and an administration increasingly untethered from the Constitution.

But Trump’s most glaring failure is personal. He promised to lower costs for working families, and he has abandoned even the pretense of trying.

Instead, he is enriching himself at breakneck speed.

He surrounds himself with gold. He covets prizes, accepts luxury gifts, and monetizes everything: Bitcoin, branding, real estate, and influence. Billionaires flocked to his inauguration. Tech CEOs and luxury executives parade through the Oval Office, bearing tribute. Trump isn’t governing. He’s cashing in like he always planned to do, because he couldn’t do it in the business world.

When Trump failed as a businessman, he didn’t regroup or reform. He declared bankruptcy. Six times. The lazy way out. That instinct hasn’t changed. Faced with an affordability crisis he created and cannot solve and a working-class base he can no longer plausibly serve, he is once again walking away. He’s declaring political bankruptcy on the very people who put him in office.

And he knows it.

Trump may be unread and uninformed, but he isn’t stupid. He understands that his MAGA base, especially its lower-income core, will be hit hardest by rising prices and economic instability. He also knows he doesn’t need them the way he once did. If he wants to retain power, he’ll pursue it through intimidation, exploiting legal loopholes, or he’ll do it illegally. He won’t go to the trouble of stumping red states.

Trump has turned the People’s House into a personal palace, complete with ballrooms and gilded excess. The choice before him is simple: invest in affordability or indulge in opulence. For Trump, there is no choice.

At Davos, surrounded by the world’s richest men, Trump tried to sell a fairy-tale economy built on lies and bravado. “Nobody thought it could be done.” “Numbers nobody’s seen in years.” But those numbers aren’t real, and working Americans feel it every time they pay a bill.

Some of Trump’s base will never see this. They live in an echo chamber where imperial bullying sounds like strength and every hardship is blamed on Democrats or invented statistics. Even an economic calamity may not shake their loyalty.

But independents are paying attention. Casual voters will notice. People who don’t follow Davos or cable news will still recognize betrayal when their bills rise and Trump is nowhere to be found, except on a global stage, basking in billionaire adoration.

Trump is inching away from MAGA. He knows he can. He knows many will never leave him. And he knows the elite world he always wanted has finally opened its doors.

That’s what makes him so dangerous and so offensive. He doesn’t just exploit his supporters. He holds them in contempt.

Empathy for MAGA was always a lie. Davos just made it more obvious.

John Casey was most recently Senior Editor, The Advocate, and is a freelance opinion and feature story writer. Previously, he was a Capitol Hill press secretary, and spent 25 years in media and public relations in NYC. He is the co-author of LOVE: The Heroic Stories of Marriage Equality (Rizzoli, 2025), named by Oprah in her "Best 25 of 2025.”

Trump’s Foreign Policy, the Comic Book Edition

Alfred W. McCoy

 January 21, 2026

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Image by Jon Tyson.

Writers often try to gild their tawdry times or dignify their flawed leaders with lofty literary analogies — notably, America as the New Jerusalem; Lincoln as Moses leading his people through the wilderness of the Civil War; the Kennedy White House as an incarnation of King Arthur’s “Camelot“; or Lyndon Johnson living his last years as a latter-day King Lear, cast off by his ungrateful children into the moors of south Texas.

But what are we going to do with Donald Trump? Wouldn’t his vanity, his vulgarity, and his relentless pursuit of money and minerals in every corner of the globe turn any literary analogies into soggy clichés? Like the showman P.T. Barnum, Trump is an American original, whose true metaphors can be found only in comic books (America’s one true art form), not literature. As Ariel Dorfman reminded us once upon a time in How to Read Donald Duck, that classic guide to U.S. cultural imperialism in Latin America, there was always more to a Disney comic book than gags.

To understand Trump’s America, we need our own comic guidebook to his global misadventures, which might be titled something like “How to Read Scrooge McDuck.” After all, in case you never had the pleasure of his acquaintance, Scrooge McDuck was the predatory billionaire in Disney comics, who was amazingly popular among teenagers in Cold War America. In that era when American corporations scampered around the global economy extracting profits wherever they saw fit, Scrooge McDuck put a friendly face on U.S. imperialism, making covert intervention and commercial exploitation look benign, even comic.

From 1952 to 1988, a period coinciding almost precisely with the Cold War, the comic’s creator, illustrator Carl Barks, filled the country’s magazine racks with more than 220 comic books celebrating Scrooge’s schemes to accumulate ever more billions by dispatching Donald Duck and his triplet nephews (Huey, Dewey, and Louie) to scour the world for riches — gems, minerals, oil, and lost treasure. No place on the planet was too remote, not even the Arctic or the Amazon, and no people too poor or obscure, not even Hondurans and Tibetans, to escape his tight-fisted grasp. And yet in that innocent world of the comic book, every adventure, no matter how twisted the plot, always ended with a light laugh for those duckling heroes and the diverse peoples they encountered on their global travels.

Let’s visit a few of my favorite comic books from my Cold War childhood, starting with the 1954 story “The Seven Cities of Cibola.” Its initial panels show a butler showering the billionaire duck with coins while he swims around in his Money Bin’s “three cubic acres” of cash. At first, Scrooge McDuck seems content as he gloats about making money from “about every business there is on Earth” (from “oil wells, railroads, gold mines, farms, factories”).

Suddenly, however, saddened by the realization that he’s exhausted every possible domestic path to profit, Scrooge decides to lead his nephew Donald and the triplets into the desert borderlands between Mexico and the U.S. There, they come upon a lost Eldorado, a towering, multitiered city with gold-paved streets and a cistern filled with opals and sapphires. But caution intrudes when Huey, Dewey, and Louie discover that the whole edifice is poised dangerously atop a spindly stone pillar. Then, at their moment of near triumph, the ducks are denied any treasure by Scrooge’s recurring nemesis, the comically criminal Beagle Boys, who break in and grab the city’s bejeweled idol, triggering a hidden mechanism that fractures the pillar. As those fabled cities collapse into a heap of rubble, our duckling heroes escape unharmed, ready for their next adventure.

The first panel in a 1956 comic book, the “Secret of Hondorica,” shows Scrooge McDuck pointing to a map of the Caribbean as he dispatches Donald Duck and his three nephews deep into tropical jungles near — yes, how sadly appropriate almost seven decades later — Venezuela to recover his lost deeds to the region’s rich oil wells. After crossing steep mountains and crocodile-infested creeks, the Ducks happen upon a Mayan temple filled with spear-carrying “savages” arrayed around their idol. By translating the “picture writing” on the temple walls with the help of their handy encyclopedic “Junior Woodchuck Guidebook,” the nephews deceive the natives with incantations in their own language and escape with the idol’s crown of gold.

President Donald Trump is, of course, our real-life Scrooge McDuck. Mar-a-Lago is his Money Bin. And the world is his playground for schemes to add another billion or two to his and his family’s growing fortune. Just as Scrooge McDuck scoured the world in a relentless, even ruthless search for wealth, so our real-life Donald has made mineral deals everywhere on the planet his top presidential priority — rare earths from Ukraine, oil from the Middle East, and (someday perhaps) a frozen treasure trove of minerals in Greenland. And just as Scrooge dispatched Donald Duck on a mission to recover his lost oil wells from the jungles of “Hondorica,” so our real Donald did indeed send U.S. special forces to capture President Nicolás Maduro and win yet more of Venezuela’s oil fields for American companies.

Back to the Reality of the Old Cold War

Alas, my innocent childhood is long gone. The world is no backdrop for comic book adventures and imaginary heroes don’t flit from frame to frame to amusing endings. In the real world of 2026, we are already deep into a “new Cold War” against nuclear-armed powers, and President Donald J. Trump’s comedic foreign policy is dragging us toward a dismal defeat.

First, let’s snap back to reality by taking stock of the world we’ve actually been living through all these years and review how we got here. During the real Cold War, the global conflict that lasted from 1947 to 1991 (when the Soviet Union collapsed), the one I describe in my new book, Cold War on Five Continents, Washington’s geopolitical strategy was brilliantly ruthless in its basic design. After fighting quite a different global conflict, World War II, for four years with the aim of defeating the Axis powers (Germany, Italy, and Japan) entrenched at both ends of Eurasia, America’s leaders of General (and future president) Dwight D. Eisenhower’s generation knew instinctively that geopolitical control over that vast continent was indeed the key to global power.

Guided by that fundamental strategic principle (which had, in fact, held true for the last thousand years or so), Washington’s early Cold War leaders worked hard to “contain” the Sino-Soviet communist bloc behind an “Iron Curtain” that stretched for 5,000 miles around the rim of Eurasia. With the armed forces of its NATO alliance securing that continent’s Western frontier and five bilateral military pacts ranging along the Pacific littoral from Japan to Australia for its eastern border, Washington bottled up the communist superpowers. That strategy freed the U.S. to make the rest of the planet into its very own “free world.” In exchange for open access to the markets and minerals of the countries in much of that free world, the U.S. distributed a few development dollars of aid to the emerging nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, which often served to fatten up the bank accounts of their nominally “democratic” dictators.

After two decades of being locked up inside Eurasia, however, Beijing and Moscow tried to break out of their geopolitical isolation by arming allies for revolutionary warfare on Cold War battlegrounds stretching from South Vietnam across the Middle East and through southern Africa, all the way to Central America.

To counter that gambit and push those communist powers back behind the Iron Curtain, the U.S. sometimes sent in its own troops, whether successfully to the Dominican Republic in 1965, or disastrously to South Vietnam from 1965 to 1973. But most of the time, Washington dispatched individual CIA operatives armed with impunity to do whatever — and I do mean whatever — they wanted to deflect Moscow’s and Beijing’s gambits and secure contested terrain. Usually misfits, even oddballs at home, those surprisingly significant historical actors, whom I’ve come to call “men on the spot,” often proved quite successful abroad. Using the cruelest instruments in the toolkit of modern statecraft — assassinations, coups, surrogate troops, torture, and psychological warfare — those covert operatives fought for control of foreign capitals as diverse as Kinshasha, Luanda, Saigon, Santiago, San Salvador, Tegucigalpa, and Vientiane. And then, with the Soviet Union significantly “contained” geopolitically within its borderlands, Washington could just sit back and wait for Moscow to make a strategic blunder.

That blunder came in 1979 in one of those classic military misadventures that often hasten the deaths of empires in decline. When Moscow sent 100,000 troops to occupy Afghanistan, Washington sent just one CIA operative, Howard Hart, to defeat that occupation. Acting as Washington’s “man on the spot,” he used the agency’s millions of dollars to form a guerrilla army of 250,000 Afghan fighters. By the time the Red Army was bled dry and left Afghanistan a decade later, defeated and demoralized, Moscow’s satellite states in Eastern Europe were erupting in mass, anti-communist protests. With the Red Army generally unable or unwilling to intervene, the Soviet bloc broke apart as the Soviet Union broke up, ending the Cold War with an unqualified U.S. victory.

Toward a New Cold War

If Washington’s strategy for waging the Cold War was a successful exercise in geopolitics, its use of “unipolar” power in the decades to come was, as I also argue in Cold War on Five Continents, much less so. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Washington stood astride the globe like a Titan of Greek legend — the sole superpower on earth, at least theoretically capable of remaking the world as it wished. Convinced that “the end of history” would make its free-market democracy the future of all mankind, America’s leaders, “drunk with power,” advanced sweeping plans for a new world order, grounded in a globalized economy that served their short-term interests but would have deleterious long-term consequences for their global hegemony.

Only a decade after the Cold War ended, Washington started facing serious strategic challenges across the Eurasian continent, which, then and now, has been the epicenter of geopolitical power. In the heady aftermath of its Cold War victory, the U.S. attempted some bold strategic gambits that would soon prove to be distinctly ill-advised. Above all, Washington’s leaders believed that they could co-opt Beijing’s rising power by recognizing China as an equal trading partner. In a parallel attempt to curb any of Moscow’s future imperial ambitions, the U.S. also presided over NATO’s expansion until that alliance surrounded Russia’s western borders, sparking security concerns in Moscow. Such ill-fated initiatives, combined with ill-considered military interventions in Afghanistan and also Iraq, created conditions for the revival of a great-power rivalry that, since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, many observers have called “the new Cold War.”

After the collapse of the Soviet Union and its socialist economy in 1991, Washington seemed to feel its post-Cold-War globalization would both promote democracy there and integrate that country into an emerging American world order, perhaps as a secondary power supplying cheap commodities, including oil, to the global economy. For the Russians, however, such globalization produced the dismal decade of the 1990s that would be marked by what economist Jeffrey Sachs has called a “serious economic and financial crisis” and a privatization of state enterprises “rife with unfairness and corruption,” creating a coterie of predatory Russian oligarchs.

When Vladimir Putin became prime minister amid the post-Soviet malaise of the late 1990s, he reverted to Russia’s centuries-old imperial mode. He found his vision for the country’s revival as a “great power” in the sort of geostrategic thinking that Washington’s leaders seemed to have forgotten in the afterglow of their great Cold War victory. Following a 2005 address calling the collapse of the Soviet Union the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,” Putin set about systematically reclaiming much of the old Soviet sphere — invading Georgia in 2008 when it began flirting with NATO membership; deploying troops in 2020-2021 to resolve an Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict in favor of a pro-Moscow regime in Baku; and dispatching thousands of Russian special forces to Kazakhstan in 2022 to gun down pro-democracy protesters challenging a loyal Russian ally.

Concerned above all with securing his western frontier with Europe, Putin pressed relentlessly against Ukraine after his loyal surrogate leader there was ousted in the 2014 Maidan “color revolution.” First seizing Crimea, next arming separatist rebels in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region adjacent to Russia, and finally invading Ukraine in 2022 with nearly 200,000 troops, he would spark a protracted war that has yet to end.

At first, as Kyiv fought the Russians off, Washington and the West reacted with a striking unanimity by imposing serious sanctions on Moscow, dispatching armaments to Ukraine, and expanding NATO to include all of Scandinavia. Moreover, Ukraine showed a formidable flair for unconventional operations — clearing Russian ships from the Black Sea with naval drones and sabotaging that country’s massive gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea.

As Russia’s war on Ukraine reverberated across Eurasia and beyond, geopolitical tensions also rose in the Western Pacific, sparking a renewed great power rivalry that became worthy of the phrase “the new Cold War.” In a striking parallel with the 1950s, in February 2022, just before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Beijing and Moscow forged a multi-faceted economic and strategic alliance that they claimed had “no limits.” In an eerie reprisal of the early Cold War years, Russia and China were in that way united against a Western alliance, once again led by Washington with its military forces still deployed in Western Europe and East Asia.

After two years of continuous combat in Ukraine, however, cracks began to appear in the West’s anti-Russian coalition. Most critically, American domestic support for Ukraine started to falter under partisan political pressures, amplified by a rising populist opposition in both the U.S. and Europe to the globalized economy and its military alliances. After successfully rallying NATO to stand with Ukraine, President Joseph Biden opened America’s arsenal to Kyiv until Republican legislators, at Donald Trump’s behest, delayed military aid throughout much of 2024.

President Trump’s Second Term

Following his second inauguration in January 2025, President Trump’s initial foreign policy initiative was a unilateral attempt to negotiate an end to the Russia-Ukraine war — an effort that would be complicated by his underlying hostility toward NATO and his sympathy for Russian President Putin. On February 12th, Trump launched peace talks through a “lengthy and highly productive” phone call with the Russian president, agreeing that “our respective teams start negotiations immediately.” Within days, Defense Secretary (or do I mean Secretary of War?) Pete Hegseth announced that “returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective,” and Trump added that NATO membership for Kyiv was no less unrealistic — in effect, making what a senior Swedish diplomat called “very major concessions” to Moscow before any talks even began.

At month’s end, those tensions culminated in a televised Oval Office meeting in which Trump berated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, saying, “You’re either going to make a deal or we’re out, and if we’re out, you’ll fight it out. I don’t think it’s going to be pretty.” That unilateral approach not only weakened Ukraine’s ability to defend itself, but also degraded NATO, which had, for the previous three years, supported Ukraine’s resistance to Russia. Recoiling from the “initial shock” of that utterly unprecedented breach, Europeans quickly appropriated $160 billion to build up their own arms industry in collaboration with both Canada and Ukraine, thereby reducing their dependence on U.S. weaponry.

For the rest of the year, Putin continued to work on Trump. He even scored a state visit and meeting with the American president in Alaska, without making any concessions whatsoever. In the process, he reduced U.S. envoys to messenger boys for his unyielding demands, while using disinformation to drive a wedge between Washington and Kyiv. Even if the Trump administration does not formally withdraw from NATO in the years to come, the president’s repeated hostility towards it, particularly its crucial mutual-defense clause, may yet serve to weaken, if not eviscerate the alliance.

Amid a torrent of confusing, often contradictory foreign policy pronouncements from the White House, the design of Trump’s de facto geopolitical strategy soon took shape. Instead of focusing on mutual-security alliances like NATO in Europe or NORAD with Canada, Trump seems to prefer a globe divided into three major regional blocs, each headed by an empowered leader like himself — with Russia dominating its European periphery, China paramount in Asia, and the United States controlling the Americas. That aspiration to hemispheric hegemony lent a certain geopolitical logic to Trump’s otherwise quixotic strikes on Venezuela (and his capture of its president and his wife), as well as his overtures to claim Greenland, reclaim the Panama Canal, and even to make Canada the 51st state.

Last November, formalizing that approach, the White House released its new National Security Strategy, which proclaimed a “Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine” aimed at achieving an unchallenged “American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere.” Think, of course, the Donroe Doctrine. To that end, the U.S. will reduce its “global military presence to address urgent threats in our Hemisphere,” deploy the U.S. Navy to “control sea lanes,” and use “tariffs and reciprocal trade agreements as powerful tools” to make the Western Hemisphere “an increasingly attractive market for American commerce.” In essence, “the United States must be preeminent in the Western Hemisphere as a condition of our security and prosperity.”

For over a century, the Caribbean region had consistently experienced the most brutal, least benign aspects of U.S. foreign policy and now that reality has only worsened. Not only has Trump reverted to the gunboat diplomacy of Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, but he’s done so with a caricatured cruelty — sinking boats in the Caribbean in the name of drug interdiction and sending troops to invade Venezuela, a sovereign state.

Just as Theodore Roosevelt used the Navy to seize land from Colombia for the Panama Canal, so Trump sent Special Forces into Venezuela to gain control over its oil. “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies… go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country,” Trump said at a January 3rd press conference just hours after President Maduro’s capture. “We’re gonna rebuild the oil infrastructure, which will cost billions of dollars. It will cost us nothing. It’ll be paid for by the oil companies directly.” Such a caricatured assertion of economic interest is likely to inflame resentment in a region where anti-imperialist sensibilities remain strong.

Although it has little chance of success, Trump’s attempt at a tricontinental grand strategy will likely leave a residue of ruin — alienating allies in Latin America, weakening NATO’s position in Western Europe, and ultimately corroding Washington’s global power. From a strategic perspective, a staged U.S. retreat from its military bastion in Western Europe would end its long-standing influence over Eurasia, which remains the epicenter of geopolitical power in this new Cold War era, just as it was in the old one. Such a retreat, at the very moment when Russia and China are expanding their influence over that strategic continent, would be tantamount to a self-inflicted defeat in this era of a new and intensifying Cold War.

To return to those Donald Duck comic books for an appropriate analogy: just as that bungled grab for a bejeweled idol collapsed the spindly stone pillar holding up the “Seven Cities of Cibola,” so the Trump administration’s inept foreign policy is potentially destabilizing a fragile world order with dangerously unpredictable consequences for us all. And count on one thing, unlike in the comic books, it won’t be even a little bit funny.

This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.

Trump’s Ignoble Interventions: How “Regional Imperialism” Leads to World War

Richard E. Rubenstein

 January 21, 2026

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Photograph Source: Official White House Photo by Molly Riley – Public Domain

Shortly after Donald Trump was elected president for the first time, someone asked me in a public forum whether I thought he was a fascist.  I replied that Trump was an ultra-nationalist conservative who would attempt to privatize public services, further empower the oligarchs, and reverse many liberal social policies – but that two essential aspects of fascism were missing from his MAGA agenda.  One was a commitment to conduct aggressive wars against “inferior” nations deemed to threaten the security of the Sacred Homeland. The second was the militarization of domestic society, accompanied by uncontrolled executive power, widespread denials of civil rights, and campaigns of state terror against the Leader’s real or fancied opponents.

These two aspects of fascism, as Hannah Arendt pointed out 50 years ago in The Origins of Totalitarianism, are organically related. Techniques of conquest and domination of subject populations used in imperialist wars are brought back home by the warmakers and become essential tools of domestic governance. First the fascists decapitate, divide, and conquer the “shithole” nations (to quote Mr. Trump.) Then they do the same to “shithole” elements of their own nation’s population.

This process has not, in my view, been completed in the United States. Despite Trump’s gross misuses of executive power, MAGA’s dehumanizing policies, and the violent excesses of ICE, domestic militarization has not yet reached the point of state terror against most American citizens. But the direction of these policies is unmistakable. The attack on Venezuela on the heels of U.S.-financed genocide in Gaza is a clear step in the direction of a fascistic foreign policy whose pursuit generates global warfare.

What obscures this reality at present and muddles media coverage of the situation is Trump’s invocation of the Monroe Doctrine (aka the Don-Roe Doctrine) to justify his sharp turn toward interventionism.  Yes, he has abducted the Maduros, killed Venezuelan and Cuban soldiers, declared himself the owner of Venezuela’s oil, destroyed or captured ships and crews sailing from Venezuelan ports, threatened the rulers of Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, and Brazil, and promised to take over Greenland. He has also intervened directly and through proxies in the Middle East, Ukraine, Africa, and elsewhere.  Even so, many commentators conclude that Trump’s intention is to exercise military power primarily in the U.S.’s Caribbean and Latin American “backyard,” while other regional hegemons such as China and Russia do as they wish in their own spheres of influence.

This bully-boy version of multipolarity may satisfy members of the MAGA coalition who want to believe that the would-be Nobelist will remain true to his original promise to avoid “endless wars.”  It has even gained acceptance among some analysts at the mainstream foreign policy journals and NGOs. To accept this regional focus, however, means shutting one’s eyes to the history and dynamics of imperialism.

History.  Amid the deluge of articles and broadcasts covering Trump’s Venezuelan adventure, one finds few analyses comparing U.S. aggression with the imperial wars of the 1930s: in particular, Japan’s seizure of Manchuria, Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, and Hitler’s interventions in Central Europe and in the Spanish Civil War. But the analogy is startling.  Like Trump’s recent actions, these were short-term, asymmetrical assaults against nations resisting domination by a regional hegemon. Their impact was minimized by characterizing them as limited wars conducted in some imperial power’s sphere of influence.  But today we understand that they were also significant steps toward world war.

How come?  Why doesn’t this sort of violence remain in the regional backyard instead of generating global conflict?  The first reason is that these interventions target imperial competitors, not just local resistors. Italy’s war in Ethiopia was aimed at British interests in the Horn of Africa, Japan’s aggression in Manchuria at Chinese and Russian interests, and Germany’s machinations in  Europe at Western and Russian interests. Forty years later, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger overthrew the Allende regime in Chile and installed Pinochet’s dictatorship because they considered Allende a potential Soviet (and Cuban) ally. Similarly, Trump’s overarching aim in Latin America is to limit the growing influence of China (and the less substantial influence of Russia) on that continent.

Dynamics. Don-Roe doctrines aside, the apparent local focus of operations like the Venezuela attack is an illusion. The fact that the major target is a competing empire compels other nations in the affected region to choose sides – a polarizing process that tends to create armed multinational blocs and a bipolar world order.  Barbara Tuchman’s classic work, The Guns of August, shows exactly how this operated to produce the unbelievably destructive “war to end all wars” in 1914. We are likely to see such polarization take place with increasing intensity over the next few years in Latin America, Africa, and East Asia.

But that’s not all. Imperial powers prevented from acquiring essential industrial resources in regions claimed by their competitors tend to retaliate by seizing control of other regions where those resources can be obtained. In 1931 Western attempts to weaken and contain the Japanese led the Tokyo regime to manufacture a “false flag” incident in Manchuria to seize that nation’s coal and iron. A decade later, Japanese imperialists conquered Vietnam, Indonesia, and Malaya to secure the oil, rubber, tin, and other industrial materials monopolized by French, Dutch, and British imperialists in what had been considered up to then a European backyard.

The moral?  All modern empires are global. The U.S and its rivals are not like the ancient empires that conquered weaker nations as a kind of sport, extracting tribute from their rulers, but generally leaving subject peoples to their own devices.  Modern empires are late-capitalist powers driven to compete globally for essential industrial materials, markets, and investment opportunities, and compelled to “develop” or transform the societies that they dominate.  There is no way that their ruling classes can remain in their own backyards – and when they go abroad (as they must, to maintain their own viability), they go armed to the teeth.

Liberal as well as conservative commentators may hate to admit it, but Lenin’s work on imperialism got this right. For limited periods of time, while issuing threats of violence and engaging in covert operations, the empire-builders may manage to negotiate their differences “peacefully.”  But these periods of relative quiescence do not last. Unable to solve global problems that their own profit-dominated systems exacerbate – problems like radical social inequality, human-caused climate change, and mass migration – they employ threats of war and war itself as their favored methods of conflict management. They call this strategy “peace through strength,” but we understand that what they really mean is Empire First, by any means necessary.

The fact that warfare is now entirely industrialized and that weapons of mass destruction, including nukes, are proliferating at a dizzying pace does not alter these dynamics.  Nor does the existence of a sadly weakened United Nations provide much hope that inter-imperial conflicts can be controlled before they become part of another run-up to global violence. Once again, history sets off alarm bells that anyone not deafened by present-day cacophony should be able to hear. It was precisely when the League of Nations proved unable to stop Japan’s, Italy’s, and Germany’s localized aggression that the Kellogg-Briand Pact outlawing war as an instrument of national policy – a treaty signed by almost all the world’s nations – became a dead letter. Then and now, intensified regional imperialism was a symptom of impending global war.

Donald Trump’s interventionism thus represents a significant turn toward fascism – but its significance is already being minimized not just by MAGA cultists, but also by a large cross-section of establishment liberals, centrists of both parties, foreign policy mavens, and the corporate media. Devoted to the dogma of “peace through strength,” Democratic Party leaders like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries are unable to criticize Trump’s military adventures, except to complain that he doesn’t consult Congress as he should and sometimes acts “recklessly.”  With Iraq in mind, the New York Times editors warn that attempting to occupy nations that don’t want to be occupied is a bad idea. But if Trump gets away with seizing Venezuelan oil without provoking a guerrilla war, destabilizing Cuba without a new Bay of Pigs attack, setting up his colonialist “Board of Peace” for ruined Gaza, or absorbing Greenland by means of threats and bribes, we will not hear a word of serious criticism from the advocates of U.S. “world leadership.”

Whether anti-Trump or pro-Trump, our imperial misleaders and their corporate partners ignore the connections between regional warmaking, the militarization of domestic society, and the increasing likelihood of world war.  That’s the bad news. The good news is that Trump’s increasingly unhinged and unapologetic interventionism is waking people up on a wide variety of fronts.  Empire, imperialism, and the military-industrial complex are no longer taboo words and concepts. Even Marjorie Taylor Greene understands that Trump’s promise to be a good isolationist was a lie and that the current frenzy of U.S. military interventions is a symptom of an empire in decline.

Meanwhile, the citizens of Minnesota and several other American states are learning what it feels like to be subjects of imperial domination. The masked, armed agents of ICE, acting out of fear and rage in an increasingly hostile environment, could as well be descending on Fallujah as on Minneapolis. It will take a while longer before our awakening becomes general, but this will happen, I hope and pray, before Trumpian violence generates an irreversible movement toward world war.  To quote the banner that appears at the conclusion of Stanley Kramer’s 1959 anti-nuke movie, “On the Beach,”

“THERE IS STILL TIME . . BROTHER.”