What confronts the world today in relation to Venezuela is not merely a crisis of one nation or one government, but a revealing moment in the evolution of global power – from the steady unraveling of the post-World War II international order to the return of an openly coercive imperial logic. Recent commentary on Venezuela has rightly noted how closely the present crisis follows a familiar imperial script of overreach, moral certainty and strategic calculation, which recur with unsettling regularity. This indeed is a New Columbus moment, not in the sense of discovery, but in the reassertion of a worldview treating sovereignty as flexible and certain regions as available for domination.From the standpoint of institutional political analysis, this moment must be understood within the framework of unipolar politics. Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has occupied a position of unprecedented global dominance. For a brief period in the 1990s, liberal internationalists claimed that American power could be embedded within multilateral institutions, particularly the United Nations, and constrained by international law. That illusion has now collapsed. What Trumpism represents is not merely a break from this trajectory, but the very abandonment of even rhetorical commitment to restraint or respect for law.What we are witnessing today is not merely a new phase of American assertiveness, nor simply the turbulence associated with Donald Trump’s return to centre stage. Something more consequential is underway, as seen in the re-legitimation of colonisation itself becoming a permissible political practice in the twenty-first century. Trump’s intervention in Venezuela, coupled with his explicit threats regarding Greenland, marks what might be called a Columbus moment – again, this is not because new lands are being discovered, but because conquest is once again being spoken aloud.For decades, US power relied on moral mediation. Even its most destructive interventions were framed in the language of humanitarianism, democracy promotion or international responsibility. That pretentious diplomacy has now collapsed. Venezuela is no longer discussed primarily in terms of rights or reform, but in terms of governance, control and administration. Greenland, astonishingly, is spoken of as an asset to be acquired, coerced or managed, even if it belongs to a formal ally. This is not imperialism in denial. It is colonisation without apology.Apparently, Latin America offers the clearest entry point into this logic. The region has long functioned as the laboratory of American power, from the Monroe Doctrine through Cold War interventions to the age of sanctions and regime management. Venezuela’s current predicament fits seamlessly into this history. What distinguishes the present moment is not the act of intervention itself, but the abandonment of justificatory restraint. Earlier incursions were clothed in anti-communism or democratic rescue. Today, such mediation appears unnecessary. Venezuela is rendered as a managerial problem, not a political community.Latin America has long been the principal arena in which this pattern has been tested and seasoned. The historical record is indisputable. In Guatemala in 1954, a democratically elected government was overthrown to protect corporate and strategic interests. In Chile in 1973, constitutional socialism was destroyed through a US-backed military coup. In Nicaragua during the 1980s, Washington financed and armed the Contras, fuelling a devastating civil war. When Nicaragua took the United States to the International Court of Justice, the court ruled unequivocally that US actions violated international law. The US response was to brusquely reject the court’s jurisdiction rather than comply with its judgment.Hannah Arendt’s warning that imperial practices abroad corrode political judgement at home proved decisive here. Once domination became normalised, it no longer respected geography. The logic that permits the management of Caracas now licenses coercion in the Arctic.Also read: Trump’s 2025 NSS Maps an ‘America First’ Order, Taking Aim at Europe and Downgrading India’s Strategic RoleThis blatant assertion of entitlement has a long genealogy. The Monroe Doctrine of 1823, often misrepresented as a defensive assertion against European colonialism, was in fact the foundational articulation of US ambitions of hegemony in the western hemisphere. While framed as opposition to Old World empires, it simultaneously declared Latin America a legitimate sphere of US influence. Over time, the doctrine evolved from diplomatic assertion to a coercive policy instrument, providing ideological cover for military occupations, regime change and economic coercion throughout the twentieth century. What was once concealed in the language of protection has now re-emerged as an unvarnished claim to hegemonic responsibility – all with no embarrassment but a brash confidence of a street-bully.These actions were not mistakes; they were part of the system. As political theorists have long argued, Latin America’s political instability cannot be understood apart from unremitting external interference. Civil wars in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua were not merely internal conflicts; they were internationalised struggles shaped by Cold War and post-Cold War geopolitics. The result was not democratic consolidation but militarised societies, debilitated institutions and enduring social trauma. And now Venezuela must be read within this continuum, not as an anomaly but as a recurrence.A crowd walks to the US consulate to protest against Trump’s policy towards Greenland in Nuuk, Greenland, January 17, 2026. Photo: Evgeniy Maloletka/APEdward Said, during his lifetime, had sent out a warning that empire survives by transforming how it sees the world, by reducing societies to spaces, histories to obstacles and peoples to variables. Trump’s language exemplifies this shift. Colonised spaces are no longer expected to speak; they are expected to comply. Frantz Fanon, writing from the ruins of European empire, went further. Colonisation, he insisted, is not an event but a structure that survives defeat by reinventing its idiom. The current phenomenon should be understood not as regression but as a cyclical recurrence. It is the same colonial grammar reactivated, stripped of moral disguise.The consequences in Venezuela have been similarly immediate and expansive. Following months of US strikes on Venezuelan drug boats and facilities beginning in September 2025, Trump’s public remarks have singled out multiple countries as needing to act like “good neighbours,” a phrase heavy with imperial implication. Mexico has been repeatedly accused of being overrun by cartels, Colombia has also been placed under explicit threat.Also read: Latin America and the US: Changing Equations and Diplomatic Failures Under TrumpEven close allies have not been exempt. Trump’s repeated references to Canada as a “51st state”, while framed jokingly, have coincided with escalating trade disputes, Arctic competition and increased US leverage through NORAD. Greenland has been treated even more bluntly. In December 2025, Trump appointed a special envoy tasked with advancing US interests including potential integration, stating flatly that “we need Greenland from a national security standpoint”.This ludicrous colonial project has triggered panic within the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). European reactions clearly reflect this recent recognition. Germany speaks of expanding its Arctic role. France and Poland quietly discuss contingencies against a hypothetical American move. Italy reopens dialogue with Russia, not out of ideological sympathy, but strategic anxiety, signalling a collapse of trust that once sustained Atlantic cohesion.NATO now risks collapse, not through American retreat but American excess. An alliance premised on collective defence against external threats cannot survive if its leading power openly threatens allied territory. Article 5 becomes incoherent when the threat comes from within.Those who defend Trump often argue that his hostility toward NATO has always been transactional, driven by burden-sharing rather than domination. That reading is now insufficient. “America First” has mutated from a slogan of retrenchment into a doctrine of aggressive reassertion, coalescing nineteenth-century territorial imagination with twenty-first-century power. The broader strategic picture reinforces this reading. Trump’s intervention in Venezuela hints at a revived, openly neo-Monroeist posture. The Western Hemisphere is no longer merely an area of influence; it is a space of ownership.This is the deeper danger of the moment, when the Columbus metaphor becomes loud and clear. Columbus did not merely “discover” lands already inhabited – he inaugurated a way of seeing the world as available by force. Trump’s geopolitics operates on a similar cognitive map, where Greenland is ostensibly not a society with rights and histories, but a resource platform. And Venezuela is not a nation, but an administrative problem.The tragedy is that this moment will not remain uniquely American. Once colonisation is re-legitimised as a political imagination, it invites imitation. What was once imposed on the Global South now threatens to become a universal template. The question, then, is no longer whether Trump will dismantle NATO, but how this logic unsettles the Western Hemisphere, restructures Latin America and reverberates across East Asia, particularly in the event of a Chinese move on Taiwan, with direct implications for Japan. A world reorganised into spheres of influence, protectorates and managed territories is a blatant regression into empire.Shelley Walia is formerly Professor of Cultural and Literary Theory and UGC Emeritus Fellow at Panjab University, Chandigarh. He has been Senior Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford. He writes on education, culture, war and international relations.