Trump campaigned on the promise that the United States would stop policing the world,
that the era of regime change and open‑ended intervention was over.

Now we have invaded Venezuela, kidnapped their president, and Trump tells us we “are going to run the country for a long time,”
as if Venezuela were a failed subsidiary being placed into receivership.

Next up was Iran, with a New York Times banner headline proclaiming, “Trump Calls for Overthrow of Government.”

The idea that the United States will “run” or administer another sovereign nation,
even “temporarily,”
ought to trigger every alarm that still works in Washington.

We are entering a new era of American imperialism.

Trump Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller recently told CNN’s Jake Tapper,
“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.”

As Jonathan Last wrote in The Bulwark,
in both Venezuela and in Minneapolis,
“What we are seeing is a worldview for which the only value is the domination of enemies.

There is a name for that.

It is fascism.”
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/renee-good-ashli-babbitt-fascism

American fascism,
to the extent that it exists as more than a slur,
expresses itself less in blackshirts than in the quiet normalization of permanent imperial management.

The classic fascist regimes insisted that a nation’s vitality depended on expansion
— that without new territories to subdue and administer, the social order would atrophy and turn inward on itself.

Contemporary American power dresses this same logic in the language of
“stability operations,”
“rules-based order,”
and “responsibility to protect,”
-- but the underlying premise is familiar:
the United States must supervise, discipline, and, when necessary, occupy other societies
in order to preserve its own sense of mission.

What Hitler called “Lebensraum”
and Mussolini cast as a “proletarian nation” bursting its confines
reappears in the Washington vernacular as
forward deployments,
security partnerships,
and transitional authorities that somehow never transition.

The point is not that today’s policymakers are closet Nazis,
but that a republic which comes to believe it cannot remain itself without governing other people’s territory
has already internalized a key article of the fascist creed:
that conquest is not an emergency measure
or tragic exception
but the normal condition of a serious country.

As Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny, noted,
“Fascism demands a major foreign war to kill one’s own people
and thereby generate a reservoir of meaning that could be used to justify indefinite rule and further oppression,
to make the world seem like an endless struggle and submission to hierarchy as the only kind of life.”

Trump is not wrong to demand that Europe shoulder more of its own defense.

In March of 2016 he told the New York Times’ David Sanger,
“at some point, we cannot be the policeman of the world.”

The irony, of course, is that under his watch American defense spending has only swelled
and America has assumed a belligerent stance towards both competitors and former allies.

No American troops have been withdrawn from Europe.

Trump’s new demand for a 50 percent jump in the Pentagon’s budget is not a policy so much as a symptom.

It reads less like a response to any discernible strategic assessment than as a sequel to the Maduro raid,
an attempt to convert one clean, televisable operation into a permanent line-item tribute to himself.

In that sense the proposal is pure Trump:
spontaneous, grandiose, and retroactively draped in the language of “long and difficult negotiations”
that plainly never occurred in any conventional budget process.

The point is not whether Congress ever enacts a $1.5 trillion authorization;

the point is to establish a new psychic baseline in which anything less than a “Dream Military” feels like an insult to the man who ordered Maduro’s capture.

Seen from the vantage of America after empire,
this is what late-imperial politics looks like
when the imperial story has outlived the material conditions that once sustained it.

The old language of sober responsibility and tragic necessity has given way
to the logic of the algorithmic feed:
each crisis, each boat bombing, each killing, each “decisive” show of force
must be instantly topped by something louder, costlier, more spectacular.

Trump is only the most garish embodiment of a broader political class
that long ago internalized the idea that military power is the last reliable currency of national meaning;

he simply strips away the last restraints and says the quiet part out loud,
equating the health of the republic with the size of his own arsenal.

The danger in such a politics is not just fiscal or geopolitical.

It is that, in a country willing to spend $1.5 trillion to feel invincible abroad
while treating the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti at home as collateral damage to be managed with fearmongering and lies about domestic terrorism,
the distinction between security and domination disappears entirely.

Adjusted for inflation,
the United States will spend in 2027 almost a trillion dollars more on the military than it did at the height of the Cold War.

The combined military budgets of China, Russia, Germany, India, United Kingdom, and France are only $786 Billion.

Yet for all that money,
the structure of the armed forces has been hollowed out:

we have roughly half as many active-duty service members,
half as many ships in the Navy,
and half as many aircraft in the Air Force.

More than half of the Pentagon’s budget now flows not to soldiers or sailors,
but to private firms
— the contractors, consultants, and corporate intermediaries
who have become the real custodians of the American war machine.

For more than three decades, the Pentagon has functioned as a kind of black hole in the federal ledger,
failing audit after audit
even as nearly a trillion dollars a year disappears into a fog of untraceable contracts,
“improper payments,”
and bureaucratic bloat
that its own buried studies estimate in the hundreds of billions.

The inability
— or refusal
— to produce a clean set of books is not a technical glitch
but the operating system of American militarism,
a permanent state of engineered opacity
in which waste and fraud cease to be aberrations
and become the business model of empire itself.

When Donald Trump proposed buying Greenland in 2019
— and later mused about “taking” it
— the impulse seemed so outlandish that much of the world laughed it off
as another episode in the long-running theater of American excess.

Yet the Greenland moment, in retrospect,
looks less like farce and more like a kind of tragic symbolism,
the twilight gesture of a hegemon that had forgotten the difference between dominance and delusion.

Trump’s threats to “conquer” or annex the island
— a NATO-protected territory of Denmark
— encapsulated a fantasy of American omnipotence that no longer existed,
while accelerating the very unraveling it sought to deny.

The fantasy that Washington can script another nation’s political future at the point of a gun survives only by ignoring the wreckage already left behind
— from Saigon to Baghdad and beyond.

It rests on a peculiar imperial arrogance:

the conviction that history’s verdicts do not apply to us,
that this time the occupation will be brief,
the technocrats wise,
and the locals grateful,
until the cycle of disillusion and violence begins again.

The financial foundations of U.S. power have also begun to look less secure.

A Deutsche Bank report that once would have been confined to economic circles recently became geopolitical fodder,
noting that Europe is America’s largest creditor,
holding roughly
$8 trillion in U.S. assets.

If Trump’s trade wars once seemed like symbolic politics,
they have since revealed an unsettling asymmetry:

the United States depends more on foreign financing than most Americans realize,
-- and its leverage is waning.

The same government that once underwrote the Marshall Plan and NATO’s defense architecture
now talks like a debtor demanding tribute from its lenders.

It is vintage Trump.

Having driven his Atlantic City casinos into bankruptcy,
he fixated not on his own recklessness
but on the temerity of those who financed it.

He even threatened to sue one of his lenders,
as if the real offense lay in having believed him capable of repayment.

Meanwhile, the ghosts of the old Cold War have returned,
but their allegiances have shifted.

Critics accused Trump in 2016 of election collusion with Putin
— an allegation Republicans dismissed as hysteria
— but in dismantling NATO’s cohesion,
Trump pursued what had long been the supreme objective of Putin’s worldview.

For Moscow, NATO’s eastward reach has always been seen as aggression;

for Washington, it was deterrence.

But in the grand scheme of things Russia is a minor power,
with a GDP considerably smaller than California.

For now, the center of modernity is in Shanghai.

While we borrow money from China to fill the coffers of the military industrial complex
and subsidize the fossil fuel industry,
the Chinese are building the low carbon, high intelligence future.

The United States, restless and unfocused,
turns again to the vanities of empire
— scheming over Venezuela,
coveting Greenland,
bombing Iran
— while across the Pacific,
China gathers its strength in silence,
investing colossal sums in the instruments of the coming age:
artificial intelligence,
robotics,
quantum code,
the manipulation of life itself.

By purchasing power,
its economy already surpasses America’s by nearly a third;
its factories and power grids hum at twice the scale;
its navy, relentless in construction, will eclipse America’s within the decade.

China now leads in the engines of the future
— electric mobility, fourth-generation reactors
— while the United States grows dependent on its former pupil for the most vital sinews of modern life,
from antibiotics to rare earths.

The balance of the century is shifting
— not with banners or battleships,
but with algorithms, reactors, and the quiet gravity of accumulated power.

So, what drives us to spend our blood and treasure on the military?

Surely the answer lies in Eisenhower’s
“unwarranted influence … of the military-industrial complex.”

In 1993, Clinton’s Defense Secretary Les Aspin and his deputy William Perry
effectively told the big prime defense contractors at the so‑called “Last Supper”
that post–Cold War budgets would not sustain the existing industrial ecology,
and that they were expected to merge or die;

over the following decade the number of major prime contractors collapsed from dozens to roughly a handful,
even as the top five’s share of federal defense contract dollars rose from around one‑fifth to nearly 50 percent.

What was sold as rationalization and acquisition “reform”
in an era of peace dividends
instead entrenched a structurally dependent state,
increasingly reliant on a few leviathans whose pricing power, political leverage, and freedom to offshore and financialize only grew
as real competition disappeared.

Although Clinton, Bush and Obama paid lip-service to the idea of competition
they were all neo-liberals at heart who had adopted Reagan’s mantra of deregulation.

And the monopoly defense contractors stopped investing in
R & D
and instead became vehicles to funnel their cash to shareholders and executives.

Now, a new group of monopolists,
based in Silicon Valley
are vying to create a digital military industrial complex.

Their philosopher king, Peter Thiel,
made it clear to the Wall Street Journal,
...
“Americans mythologize competition
and credit it with saving us from socialist bread lines.

Actually, capitalism and competition are opposites.

Capitalism is premised on the accumulation of capital,
but under perfect competition,
all profits are competed away.

The lesson for entrepreneurs is clear:
if you want to create and capture lasting value,
build a monopoly.”
...

Thiel and Marc Andreessen’s drone maker, Anduril,
and Elon Musk’s Space X
are determined to put that philosophy into practice.

And because figures like Musk and Thiel are exceptional hype artists,
they have a new trillion-dollar project for Trump to fund:
the Golden Dome.

The Golden Dome is a $3.6 trillion bid to turn the old Reagan Star Wars fantasy into a homeland missile shield,

using constellations of space-based sensors,
AI-driven command systems,
kinetic interceptors,
and eventually directed-energy weapons
to track and kill missiles in every phase of flight.

In theory it promises an always-on, automated perimeter for the continental United States:
satellites watching for launches in real time,
software fusing the data,
and interceptor swarms
— some in orbit, some at sea and on land
— firing fast enough to handle hypersonics, saturation attacks, and decoys.

The Silicon Valley pitch is that breakthroughs in AI, sensor fusion, quantum computing, and commercial space launch
finally make this dream technically attainable,

and the roster of expected winners
— Palantir, Anduril, SpaceX, and other “defense tech” firms
— reads like a venture-backed sequel to the classic Beltway contractors.