History of the Land That Is the United States Today
If Part IX described the architecture of American primacy after 1945—institutions, alliances, and a global military posture—then Part X asks a harder question: what happens when the United States begins to treat that architecture as optional, while simultaneously using its unmatched reach to pursue openly coercive objectives?
The tension is not simply “Trump versus the founding.” It is more structural: a country that expanded through settler colonialism and slavery, consolidated through civil war and Reconstruction, and projected influence through a post–World War II rules-and-institutions project, now shows signs of reverting to a blunter logic—territory, resources, and intimidation—as a first resort. The novelty is not that power politics exists. The novelty is the declining need to hide it.
The post-1945 “order” was never pure idealism—yet it did impose restraints
America’s postwar order-building created durable frameworks: Bretton Woods institutions (IMF and World Bank), NATO’s collective security commitment, and an overseas basing network that made global logistics routine rather than exceptional.
Those structures did two things at once:
- They amplified U.S. power by embedding it in rules, institutions, and allied commitments.
- They constrained U.S. action by creating expectations—consultation, reciprocity, treaty obligations, and the reputational costs of violating them.
NATO’s founding logic is explicit: collective security and stability grounded in democracy, individual liberty, and the rule of law. And CRS’s long-running “U.S. Role in the World” framing is useful precisely because it treats American strategy as a domestic political argument over costs, obligations, and identity—not a settled doctrine.
This matters for the present moment because “undoing” a founding order rarely means erasing it. It more often means hollowing out its operating norms: treating alliances as leverage rather than commitments, treating sovereignty as negotiable, and treating law as a tool for opponents but an inconvenience for oneself.
The longer continuity: the United States always mixed universal language with coercive practice
To understand why recent events feel like a return to colonial-era vocabulary, it helps to acknowledge the older continuity. The United States’ domestic growth was built on dispossession and coerced labour; its external influence often relied on unequal bargaining and selective enforcement of norms. That history is not an accusation for sport—it is a background condition for honest analysis.
Even the Monroe Doctrine—a foundational statement of hemispheric control—defined the Americas as a U.S.-protected sphere and warned European powers against treating the region as a canvas for future colonization. It functioned as anti-colonial rhetoric paired with sphere-of-influence practice.
Later, resource security and geopolitical rivalry repeatedly pushed U.S. strategy toward coercive commitments. One example is the Carter-era shift that treated control of the Persian Gulf as a vital interest with military implications—an early expression of how energy security can reshape the boundaries of “acceptable” force.
So the analytic challenge is not to pretend America was ever innocent. It is to identify what is changing now: the move from managed contradictions (ideals plus selective intervention) to a more explicit claim that might makes right—sometimes even against friends.
From bipolar order to contested primacy—and a harsher domestic mirror
After the Cold War, U.S. power remained enormous, but the environment changed: fewer peer constraints at first, then more diffuse threats, more contested legitimacy, and sharper domestic disagreement about the price of leadership. That is the CRS point in plain terms: the “role in the world” became a recurring fight inside U.S. politics, not a post-1991 consensus.
In parallel, historical memory became political infrastructure. Debates over how to teach slavery and dispossession, how to acknowledge institutional benefit, and how to repair long-term inequality became central rather than peripheral. University investigations into slavery-linked wealth and governance—at Harvard and Columbia in the U.S., and Cambridge in the U.K.—illustrate a broader shift: elite institutions are documenting entanglement rather than denying it, making the past harder to dismiss as “regional” or “settled.”
This domestic mirror matters because it alters how Americans interpret power abroad. When a society is fighting over its own history, it is less able to sustain a shared story of benevolent leadership. That creates a strategic vulnerability: credibility becomes contested at home before it is contested overseas.
The Trump-era doctrine: the shift from “leadership through institutions” to “dominance through leverage”
President Trump’s second-term National Security Strategy (released in late 2025) formalizes a reorientation toward border security, migration control, and hemispheric primacy, including a revivalist reading of Monroe Doctrine logic and a more transactional conception of alliances and institutions.
The strategy does not merely argue for prioritization; it signals a willingness to treat sovereignty and territorial status as bargaining objects when they intersect with “core” U.S. interests—energy, supply chains, and strategic geography. That framing becomes legible when you place the document next to the administration’s behaviour in early 2026.
Venezuela: regime-change as seizure, and oil control as policy instrument
The Venezuela operation is a defining case because it fuses coercive force with resource logic in unusually explicit terms.
The United States carried out a military operation on January 3, 2026, captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, and moved him to the United States to face charges—while President Trump stated the U.S. would effectively “run” Venezuela until a transition he deemed acceptable, and indicated openness to “boots on the ground.”
In parallel, the U.S. escalated a campaign to seize Venezuelan-linked oil tankers and consolidate control over oil shipments—using court warrants and civil forfeiture mechanisms—explicitly framed as part of a broader effort to control Venezuela’s oil trade.
Whatever one thinks of Maduro’s governance, the legal and normative significance is immediate: forcibly capturing a sitting leader and asserting external administrative control over a state’s core industry is the kind of act that collapses the distinction between intervention and occupation in the eyes of many foreign audiences. Legal experts quoted in reporting have raised serious concerns about international-law permissibility absent consent or a recognized multilateral mandate.
If you want the “oil geopolitics” reading: the operational logic matches a long pattern in which U.S. leaders describe themselves as democracy promoters while using economic chokepoints, sanctions, and security leverage to shape outcomes in resource-rich states. The difference here is rhetorical candor. Reuters reported the administration’s approach as a hemispheric dominance project—sometimes nicknamed in commentary as a “Donroe Doctrine”—with energy and supply chains near the center of gravity.
Greenland: allied sovereignty treated as negotiable, minerals treated as strategic destiny
Greenland is where the issue becomes even more destabilizing for the post-1945 order, because Greenland is part of the Kingdom of Denmark—an ally inside NATO’s collective-defense framework—and Greenland’s people are not a conquered population in legal limbo. They are a self-governing society within an allied constitutional arrangement.
Trump always reiterate that the U.S. “must” acquire Greenland for national security reasons and suggest that military action is not off the table; Greenland’s prime minister publicly rejected U.S. control and reaffirmed alignment with Denmark, NATO, and Europe.
The factual baseline matters:
- Greenland has had expanded self-government within the Danish realm since 2009, while Denmark retains responsibilities such as foreign affairs and defense.
- Major U.S. media and wire reporting describe Trump’s claims about hostile military activity near Greenland as contested or false in key respects, undercutting the asserted necessity of coercion.
The strategic motive is also not mysterious. Greenland is mineral-rich and increasingly relevant to “critical minerals” supply chains, with analysts noting deposits that could matter for advanced industry and defense, even if extracting them is economically and environmentally complex.
When an administration frames mineral access as national security and then treats sovereignty as negotiable, the signal to the world is clear: resource geography can override alliance geometry. That is precisely the kind of move that turns a rules-based order into a “menu” rather than a binding framework.
The domestic blowback is also telling. Financial Times reporting describes U.S. senators introducing legislation intended to prevent U.S. military action to occupy or annex NATO territories, explicitly naming Greenland—an extraordinary step that underscores how seriously lawmakers view the precedent risk.
Iran: the rhetoric of “help” and the shadow of intervention
On Iran, the current pattern is more about signalling than completed action—but signalling itself is strategy. Trump urged Iranian protesters to “keep protesting” and said “help is on its way,” while declining to clarify what that meant and warning of “very strong action” under certain conditions.
Even without a strike, the posture matters because it reinforces a larger theme: politics in other states is treated as a space for U.S. direction rather than U.S. diplomacy. For adversaries, it looks like regime-change intent; for allies, it looks like escalatory risk that they may be asked to absorb later.
The Nobel Peace Prize paradox: coercion marketed as peacemaking
The Nobel episode is not trivia; it is a window into narrative strategy.
After Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado suggested giving her 2025 Nobel Peace Prize to Trump, the Nobel Institute publicly clarified that the prize cannot be transferred, shared, or revoked.
Here is the paradox identified, stated in geopolitical terms: a leader can pursue territorial demands and coercive interventions while simultaneously seeking moral legitimation through a peace symbol. In the colonial era, empires did something similar—“civilizing missions” alongside conquest. In the modern era, the packaging is “stability,” “security,” and “order,” even when the mechanism is force.
The deeper point is not psychological; it is structural. If American primacy becomes primarily a spectacle of dominance, then awards, ceremonies, and rhetorical claims of peacemaking become part of the power toolkit—because legitimacy is harder to earn through shared institutions when institutions themselves are being weakened.
The immigrant contradiction: a colonized republic policing the door
A morally charged line that is also analytically relevant: the U.S. ruling class is largely descended from subsequent waves of settlers and immigrants (alongside the forced migration of enslaved Africans and the continued presence of Indigenous nations), yet contemporary policy can treat new migrants as a civilizational threat rather than a constitutive feature of the country.
Recent reporting on immigration enforcement in the current administration—such as the termination of Temporary Protected Status for certain groups (for example Somali TPS holders)—is one piece of a broader posture that emphasizes removals and restriction as markers of sovereignty and cultural control.
From an “order” perspective, this matters because it recodes the meaning of the United States. The post-1945 U.S. identity was partly “a nation of laws,” partly “a nation of immigrants,” and partly “leader of an open economic system.” If immigration becomes primarily a punitive performance—and if external policy becomes primarily coercive extraction—then the national story shifts toward ethnicized membership at home and imperial leverage abroad.
Are we going back to the colonization era—or admitting we never fully left it?
The strongest analytic claim you can make, consistent with the record, is not that Trump invented imperial behaviour. It is that his administration is lowering the threshold for saying it out loud and for applying it against targets that earlier U.S. governments handled with more procedural caution.
Consider the combination:
- Hemispheric dominance framed as doctrine, with rivals warned off and energy control treated as strategic necessity.
- Direct coercion in Venezuela paired with the practical mechanics of oil control (tanker seizures and re-routing of exports).
- Territorial ambition aimed at Greenland, with coercive implications against a NATO ally’s realm and congressional alarm.
- Legitimation theatre around the Nobel Peace Prize, even as force and threat shape the policy environment.
In that sense, the world is not being “taken back” to colonization as a historical repeat. It is being pushed toward a future where three things coexist more comfortably than they should:
- Spheres of influence (great powers asserting veto zones);
- Resource-nationalism on a global scale (critical minerals and oil as drivers of territorial and coercive ambition);
- Institutional hollowing (alliances and international law treated as tools rather than constraints).
The risk is contagion. When the most powerful state signals that sovereignty is negotiable and territory is a bargaining chip, other powers learn the same lesson. The post-1945 order survived not because countries stopped wanting empire, but because the costs of overt empire were made high—legally, diplomatically, economically, and reputationally. If those costs are reduced by precedent, then coercion becomes more attractive for everyone.
Closing bridge: what “undoing the founding order” can mean in practice
If the series here began with deep time and the first footprints, it built toward a clear historical recognition: the land that becomes the United States was made through extraction, violence, and contradiction, and then stabilized through institutions that tried—imperfectly—to limit chaos at home and abroad.
Part X’s argument is that Trump-era policy does not “erase” those contradictions; it weaponizes them. It turns the older imperial residue—hemispheric entitlement, resource coercion, selective legality—into a governing style, while demanding moral titles (like “peacemaker”) that no longer match the methods used.
The paradox is not only Trump’s. It is America’s unresolved identity crisis: whether it will be a republic that treats law and consent as limits on power, or a superpower that treats law and consent as instruments of power.