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Look, as an author, you always want your work to feel timely — especially when it’s a globetrotting deep dive into century-old history. But this is ridiculous.
We’ve got the Trump administration reinstating gunboat diplomacy in the Caribbean (see chapters on Panama, Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti, Dominican Republic, 6, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13) in preparation for a possible invasion of Venezuela. This invasion would be on the pretext of stopping “narcoterrorism” (see e.g., Ch 9 The Canal Zone, p. 174-75) and dismantling an alleged drug “cartel” (see Ch 10 Veracruz, p. 190). But in reality, as The Atlantic recently explained, it is actually based on Trump’s directive “to ensure future U.S. access to the extractive riches of Venezuela,” especially oil (Ch 10, 178-184, 201).
This possible war is springing from an intra-administration dispute between two factions. One, led by former public relations consultant and presidential bagman Richard Grenell (see journalist-turned-operative Roger Farnham in Panama, Haiti, Dominican Republic, and throughout book), thought he had secured access to Venezuela’s resources through coercive diplomacy (“dollar diplomacy” Ch 8 Nicaragua, 141-144).
But a hardline faction led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio (see Sec. Philander Knox, Ch 8, 134-35) sees far more opportunity in violently toppling the government of President Nicholas Maduro (too many examples of U.S.-sponsored Latin American coups to count), which Trump insiders reportedly believe could be simply the first step in launching a hemisphere-wide effort to “beat back Chinese encroachment in the U.S.’s sphere of influence” in the spirit of the so-called Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine (Ch 8, 133).
(The New York Times reports that China, meanwhile, is driven by a desire to wipe away the stain of “national humiliation” visited upon it by European empires — and, the paper fails to note, directly and repeatedly by the United States — from the end of the First Opium War in 1842 to the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949. See Ch 4 Northern China and Ch 16 Shanghai, esp. 66, 71-72)
In this light, the Trump administration's murderous illegal strikes on alleged “drug boats” in the Caribbean — for which they've provided no evidence, and at least some of which appear to be regular fishing boats — look like the Rubio faction hitting back against the Grenell faction through mafioso tactics against civilians (see title of my book).1
The Republican-controlled Congress has responded by abdicating its role in warmaking or holding the president even mildly accountable (see eg, McKinley re China, Ch 4, p. 65). Investors believe they will profit either way (see all pages 1-339).
Meanwhile, all this belligerence abroad, now and in our history, is coming back home to bite us. You have people, especially recent immigrants, being terrorized by law enforcement like ICE and CBP, using tactics and attitudes developed through our imperial wars abroad (see Ch 15 Philadelphia, 269, 272-274). You have the president threatening to unleash the full force of the active military against so-called radicals and revolutionists, on promises to stop an alleged Communist insurrection (see Bonus March, Ch 17, 312-316).
This is all a textbook case of the imperial boomerang (Prologue, p. 8-10). Trained to look at enemies abroad as being subhuman and unworthy of life, an entire political party, caught in a death spiral of insane capital accumulation and unchecked racism and nativist populism, has become hellbent on similarly destroying its rivals and perceived enemies at home, through similar means — military repression, starvation, drones. In a clumsy but on-the-nose effort to make sure the military is at least partially exempt from the chaos of his government shutdown, Trump is emulating Hitler and Mussolini’s strategy of keeping “soldiers on their payrolls in various ways” (Prologue on The Business Plot, p 3)2, paid for by the grandson of former Hoover Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon3 (Ch 17, 313).
The right is accordingly engaged in ideological struggle over exactly how much they should emulate (or anoint as a champion) the Holocaust denying, Hitler-defending, open antisemite Nick Fuentes. Fuentes — a modern-day Father Charles Coughlin (Ch 17, 317) or pro-Nazi “America Firster” Charles Lindbergh (Ch 17, 332) — was embraced as a guest on Tucker Carlson’s show last week.
But you also have liberals and democratic socialists like New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani4 grappling with the same situation. Emulating Franklin Roosevelt and his New Dealers of the 1930s (Ch 17, 318-319), they are trying to show people that liberal democracy and government can still work for the people while pointing to the dangers posed by authoritarianism and gangsterism. Maybe there’s a Smedley Butler, or millions of Smedley Butlers, out there, ready and eager to fight back.
1 Cheers to Greg Grandin, who made this argument yesterday during a talk I attended on his excellent new book.
2 Ironically, the point man of the Business Plot, Gerald C. MacGuire, thought “that set up would not suit us at all” because “the soldiers of America would not like that.” We’ll see!
3 Andrew Mellon infamously recommended to Hoover that the solution to the Great Depression would be to "liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate. Purge the rottenness out of the system. As a result, he promised, “high costs of living and high living will come down … [and] enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.” He lived long enough to see FDR’s New Deal prove him wrong, and died hated and in disgrace six years later.
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