In early January the United States invaded a sovereign nation in the Western Hemisphere and abducted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. President Trump declared that the US would ‘run Venezuela and rebuild the oil infrastructure.’ Then Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the US intention to purchase Greenland from Denmark, and asked about the potential use of military force, the White House declined to rule it out, causing many European leaders to affirm that Greenland belongs to its people, and that an attack would mean the end of NATO.Both Venezuela and Greenland reveal a coherent logic: the return of imperialism in great-power competition, now driven by the demands of artificial intelligence and management of America’s relative decline.A new mercantilismIn the 19th century, European powers scrambled for colonies because mercantilism believed in zero-sum wealth, trade partners were not to be trusted and territorial ownership was the only guarantee of supply, a doctrine that ultimately produced two world wars. This century’s neo-mercantilism is about supply chain vulnerability; namely, the exposure of advanced economies to disruption of the complex chains that produce semiconductors, batteries, defence systems, and AI infrastructure.High-tech economies are fragile; a modern semiconductor requires thousands of inputs from many countries, processed through facilities that took decades to build. A single missing component, a rare earth element, a specialized chemical or precision tool, could halt production. Unlike wheat or oil, these inputs have no ready substitutes, and processing is more concentrated than mining. China controls roughly 60 percent of global rare earth extraction, but over 90 percent of processing capacity, a dominance constructed through sustained industrial policy, state subsidies and tolerance of environmental costs. Its strategy has been to construct chokepoints across critical supply chains: rare earth processing, lithium battery production, solar panel manufacturing and pharmaceutical precursors. Chinese strategists note that the US weaponised interdependence first, using control of the SWIFT financial network and the dollar to sanction adversaries, restrict China’s access to semiconductors and block technology transfers. China repaid the US in the same coin when it announced export controls on rare earth elements in October 2025, and a former White House staffer observed that China “crafted a policy that gives it the power to forbid any country from participating in the modern economy.”China’s Belt and Road Initiative has made inroads into Latin America since the early part of this century, financing ports, railways and mining operations. This was tolerable to the US as long as it was normal economic competition but the 2025 embargo revealed it to be construction of leverage that could be activated.Building alternative processing capacity takes a decade or more. An adversary can disrupt supply chains faster than markets adjust. Trump’s response looks imperial because supply chain vulnerability in high-tech economies creates pressures that alternative liberal reactions will struggle to address. Liberal miscalculationPost-Cold War western liberalism rested on three assumptions: trade is positive, creating mutual gains; interdependence generates shared interests; institutions influence states into cooperative norms. This reasoning welcomed China into the World Trade Organization in 2001. Such openings had worked before with Germany and Japan, who integrated into the liberal order and became democracies. President Clinton called China’s accession “the most significant opportunity that we have had to create positive change in China.” The new Chinese middle class was expected to demand political liberalisation. These expectations proved wrong; China’s GDP increased roughly tenfold between 2001 and 2025 under a state-led, mercantilist trade regime. The expectation that prosperity would produce demands for liberal democracy rested on the notion that any people, once educated and materially secure, would demand recognition as autonomous individuals with rights against the state. DependenceEvery technological revolution creates resource dependencies. The steam age required coal, the automobile required oil, AI requires rare earths, copper, lithium and vast amounts of energy. Copper is critical and constraints and deficits are forecast as emerging soon. The Western Hemisphere contains substantial reserves of every resource critical to the AI economy and the rationale for the Monroe Doctrine revival is that a secure hemispheric supply chain would reduce American vulnerability to Chinese leverage. Greenland, the world’s largest island, combines the arguments for territorial acquisition, strategic materials and geographic position. Holding an estimated 1.5 million metric tons of rare earth reserves, it sits astride passages linking the Arctic to the Atlantic. China launched its first regular container service last year through the ‘Polar Silk Road’ and Russia has refurbished more than 50 Soviet-era Arctic bases. Material vulnerabilities explain the drive for resource security, and hemispheric consolidation addresses the risk of great-power confrontation. China has achieved parity; the rare earths embargo demonstrated Beijing’s economic leverage. DeepSeek, the Chinese open-source model that matched American AI capabilities, signaled that American technological superiority could no longer be assumed. Trump’s foreign policy could represent a strategic reorientation; what looks like a US retreat to regional hegemony may be risk management, to secure critical supply chains while conceding East Asia to China rather than contesting it. The risksTrump’s policy might signify that the US will not militarily contest China’s sphere of influence in East Asia, Europe must carry its security burden, Latin America is in the US sphere of influence. Whether this policy can be sustained is uncertain; spheres of influence require clear boundaries, and the ambiguities that make spheres seem manageable are the same ambiguities that produce wars.The strategic logic might be coherent but that does not imply it is workable. The liberal order provided a framework for cooperation that made peace possible. Spheres of influence offer no guarantees and are historically unstable. Neo-mercantilist competition spirals, export controls breed counter-controls and tariffs provoke retaliation. Resource strategies face implementation obstacles; rebuilding Venezuela will take years; Greenland’s deposits require at least a decade of investment, with processing capacity that barely exists outside China. The postwar order rested on assumptions that proved false. Trade was supposed to create shared interests; instead, it created asymmetric vulnerabilities. Interdependence was supposed to guarantee peace but it became a liability. And the assumption that the Chinese valued individual autonomy was a Euro-American delusion. Such presumptions mattered less when structural conditions compensated for their weaknesses. Under American hegemony after 1945, the US could enforce liberal norms, and underwrite the costs of free-loading allies. During the Cold War ideological competition disciplined both blocs and clarified boundaries. But now there is the multipolar world of China in East Asia, India in South Asia, Russia reasserting its near abroad, the United States emphasising its dominance in the Western Hemisphere. Europe is unable to cohere into a unified actor, and presages instability rather than the reverse. No single power can enforce global rules; no ideological conformity can provide stability. Trump’s USA is responding with hemispheric consolidation and a quest for resource security. This new imperialism is different in character from its Monroe predecessor, but driven by similar pressures, high-tech economies seeking to avoid supply chain dependence. Trump’s imperialism is merely an adaptation to realities. Statesmen in the 19th century believed they were managing imperial competition successfully until August 1914. Can new imperialism be managed successfully? History offers warnings, but no guarantees.Krishnan Srinivasan is a former foreign secretary.