At the turn of the 20th century, the United States was embroiled in foreign conflicts that challenged Americans’ understanding of themselves and their place in the world. The same nation that just a little over a century earlier had declared life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to be unalienable rights was now pursuing policies of repression of people outside its borders. In 1890, the U.S. Census Bureau declared the frontier closed. This transition, from continental expansion to overseas empire-building, sparked an ideological break and sought a new meaning of expansion: from land intended for statehood to the acquisition of foreign colonial possessions. All of this was justified by Americans at the time as necessary to meet the demands of industrial expansion, national security, and a perception of the United States as a benevolent power.
Dan Carlin once described the United States as a “schizophrenic giant,” having two halves of its identity, “the one that wants things and the one that considers itself almost unrealistically good” (Hardcore History, 2013). Americans were challenged with the realization that the same nation that had produced the Declaration of Independence and its anti-colonial undertones was actively pursuing imperialist policies in Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Guam, the Philippines, Hawaii, Samoa, and Cuba. In a remarkable shift, the era was the moment that the idea of American moral exceptionalism turned outwards. Away from continental conquest and towards global intervention. The American shift in global engagement was fed by the belief that it was the duty of the United States, as a chosen people, to spread American democracy to the rest of the world, regardless of the cost to those we claimed to save. In speaking about intervention, Dan Carlin said, “What do you do when it’s obvious that the very people you are trying to save are becoming victims of your efforts to save them?” (Hardcore History, 2013). The Dominican Republic provides a glaring example. A month after President Roosevelt declared his corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, in January 1905, the U.S. seized the Dominican Republic’s customs houses. At the time, customs houses were the Caribbean nation’s highest source of revenue. Under this new policy, the U.S. claimed that it had the right to act as an international police force in Latin America. Seizing the Dominican Republic’s financial infrastructure led to a military occupation and ultimately to a brutal dictatorship. For roughly the next two decades,
Americans witnessed a similar playbook with similar outcomes during the military occupations of Haiti in 1915 and Nicaragua through the 1910s and 1920s, which also included financial extraction, furthering America’s policy of Dollar Diplomacy.
We saw this pattern play out throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. Interventions in Vietnam and Iraq gave American taxpayers fifteen-plus-year entanglements overseas. It must be said that with those policies, the past hundred years also gave us countervailing moments like FDR’s Good Neighbor Policy and post-WWII multilateralism, which suggested America could engage globally without imperial domination or aspirations. That small evolution in behavior, regardless of the degree to which it may be true, is now in regression.
Americans are repeating the pattern of justifying imperial expansion through moral
exceptionalism, and we need to recognize it before we’re fully committed. The intervention in Venezuela at the beginning of 2026 culminated in the extradition of President Maduro on charges of narco-terrorism and drug trafficking. Maduro is now awaiting a June 2027 trial in New York City, after a brief federal court hearing in July (ABC, Jul. 2026). Following the intervention in Venezuela, the State Department declared on X, “This is Our hemisphere” (State Department on X, Jan. 5), an explicit assertion of U.S. control. To further justify this tonal shift, Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff, in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, declared, “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time” (CNN, Jan. 2026).
Speaking to reporters on Air Force One, President Trump said oil companies “want to go in so badly” (NBC News, Jan. 2026), and that they would spend their own money, not taxpayer money, to “fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country” (Reuters, Jan. 2026). Almost nine months later, that early industry skepticism has diminished, and major oil companies have begun reinvestment. Despite the oil majors’ return to Venezuela and the 4% annual GDP growth (Prensa Mercosur, Aug. 2026), the minimum wage remains at 27 cents a month, which means that working for three straight months still won’t amount to a single dollar (CNN, Apr. 2026). The United States now controls the revenue stream of Venezuela through Executive Order 14373, titled “Safeguarding Venezuelan Oil Revenue for the Good of the American and Venezuelan People” (EO 14373, Jan. 2026), while 90% of those people live in poverty (Romero et. al., Jun. 2024). This policy places proceeds collected from
Venezuelan crude into U.S. Treasury accounts, with both the State Department and the
Treasury Department holding sole authority over what is released back to Venezuela (Brookings, Jul. 2026). Venezuelans have seen this before; the 1922 Hydrocarbons Law was written to benefit foreign oil companies under a dictator who welcomed them; production climbed, while the country stayed poor (McBeth, 1983). The government of the South American nation has freed hundreds of political prisoners in the months following the extradition of Maduro (Al Jazeera, Feb. 2026), but the oil wealth that was promised to the Venezuelan people flows to foreign operators and the state-owned oil and gas company, PDVSA, while the people it was collected for see almost none of it. Here was the fusion that Carlin described again: our strategic interest packaged as economic salvation. From the Dominican Republic in 1905 to Venezuela today, the throughline is unmistakable.
In January, President Trump signed an executive order accusing Cuba of taking “extraordinary actions that harm and threaten” the U.S. (EO 14380, Jan. 2026). This policy change would impose strict penalties on anyone selling oil to Cuba. A few months later, the U.S. did just that. In March, the U.S. intensified its isolation of Cuba, cutting off its ability to import oil from other countries by enforcing an economic blockade (CNN, Mar. 2026). The lifeblood of the island nation, oil, and its scarcity have plunged the island’s inhabitants into a humanitarian crisis. Cuba has sunk into a nationwide fuel crisis, significantly harming the nation’s energy infrastructure, tourism industry, and hospitals. Early on, President Trump had said: “We want to help the people in Cuba, but we also want to help the people that were forced out of Cuba and living in this country” (The Hill, Jan. 2026). And again, punitive action was framed as humanitarian concern. The blockade remains in effect, as does the humanitarian crisis. Since March, the country’s fuel shortages have led to rolling blackouts, healthcare disruptions, grid collapse, and severe impacts on municipal water infrastructure (U.S. Embassy in Cuba, Aug. 2026; Time, Apr. 2026). At the turn of the 20th century, these types of interventions were argued to be of great industrial economic need and vital to our national security. The arguments in favor of these interventions today are eerily similar. The schizophrenic giant has returned, fusing both halves of the American character: conquest and righteousness.
This pattern of self-deception not only compromises our values, but it also blinds us to devastating fiscal realities. Our growing national debt, according to our Treasury Department, now sits at over $38 trillion. Interest payments on that debt are now equivalent to roughly 19% of total federal revenue (American Action Forum, Oct. 2025). This fiscal stress comes at a time when Americans face crumbling infrastructure, unaffordable healthcare, and stagnant economic mobility. As these foreign interventions increase, whether through military action in Iran or economic pressure campaigns in Greenland, American taxpayers have and will continue to bear the costs. The war in Iran has gone on for five months now; in that time, it has ballooned in costs. Figures place those costs between the $29 billion Pentagon figure and independent estimates upward of $200 billion (Fortune, Jun. 2026).
From Ancient Rome to the modern day, history shows that empires that overextend collapse.
Late in the 1980s, the Soviet Union was economically strained by its prolonged war against the Mujahideen in the Soviet-Afghan War. The Trump administration and congressional allies are proposing to increase our defense budget by a staggering $500 billion, bringing the total to approximately $1.5 trillion (Politico, Jan. 2026). This drastic increase would add $5.8 trillion to the debt in the next decade, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB, Jan. 2026). This is fiscally unsustainable. The examples in Vietnam and Iraq weren’t merely moral failures of our foreign policy; they were economically devastating for the U.S. Iraq alone cost over $2 trillion (Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University, Sept. 2021). We cannot afford another round of imperial overreach while neglecting crises at home. The only question that remains is whether we’ll recognize the pattern before it’s too late.
References
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2. ABC News. “Ousted Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro will stand trial June 1, 2027.” July 22, 2026. abcnews.com/Politics/june-2027-trial-date-proposed-ousted-venezuelan-president/story? id=134966907
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cnn.com/2026/01/06/politics/trump-greenland-venezuela-colombia-miller-analysis
5. NBC News. “Trump: Venezuela Oil Companies to Reimburse.” January 2026. nbcnews.com/business/energy/trump-venezuela-oil-companies-reimburse-rcna252434
6. Reuters. “Trump says the U.S. government may reimburse oil companies for rebuilding Venezuela’s infrastructure.” January 3, 2026. reuters.com/business/energy/trump-says-us-oil-companies-will-spend-billions-venezuela -2026-01-03/
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https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/23/americas/venezuela-economy-delcy-rodriguez-intl-lata m
9. Executive Order 14373, “Safeguarding Venezuelan Oil Revenue for the Good of the American and Venezuelan People.” Federal Register 91, no. 10 (January 15, 2026):
2045–47. govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2026-01-15/pdf/2026-00831.pdf
10. Romero, Dalia Elena, Anitza Freitez, Leo Ramos Maia, and Nathalia Andrade de Souza.
“Self-Rated Health and Sociodemographic Inequalities Among Venezuelan Adults: A Study Based on the National Survey of Living Conditions (ENCOVI 2021).” Cadernos de Saúde Pública 40, no. 6 (2024): e00149323. DOI: 10.1590/0102-311XEN149323.
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18. Time. “Cuba Is Not a Prize. It Is a Warning.” April 24, 2026.
https://time.com/article/2026/04/24/cuba-trump-castro-regime/
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fortune.com/2026/06/24/how-much-did-the-iran-war-cost/
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