{"id":10148,"date":"2026-02-14T15:24:21","date_gmt":"2026-02-14T15:24:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/2026\/02\/14\/can-the-maga-coalition-survive-trumps-imperialist-pivot-inkstickmedia-com\/"},"modified":"2026-02-14T15:24:21","modified_gmt":"2026-02-14T15:24:21","slug":"can-the-maga-coalition-survive-trumps-imperialist-pivot-inkstickmedia-com","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/2026\/02\/14\/can-the-maga-coalition-survive-trumps-imperialist-pivot-inkstickmedia-com\/","title":{"rendered":"Can the MAGA Coalition Survive Trump\u2019s Imperialist Pivot? – inkstickmedia.com"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A mere 15 years ago, during an epoch that now seems as distant as the Paleozoic era, an American president attempted to use military power to prevent a dictator from slaughtering his own citizens. Barack Obama billed the action in Libya as a humanitarian intervention, citing<\/strong><\/a> the new United Nations doctrine of \u201cresponsibility to protect\u201d (R2P). The president hoped to avert a massacre by Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi rather than, as usual, coming in afterwards to count the dead and try to bring the malefactors to justice.<\/p>\n

Obama intervened like a global police officer, following the letter of the (international) law. Eager to be seen as a \u201cgood cop,\u201d the president even promised to \u201clead from behind.\u201d It\u2019s impossible to know if the US-led action did indeed prevent massive war crimes. However, the disastrous aftermath<\/strong><\/a> of that Libyan campaign \u2014 the summary execution of Qaddafi and a civil war that would kill tens of thousands \u2014 was yet more evidence that Washington\u2019s attempts to police the world are quixotic at best.<\/p>\n

Public support for the Libyan action was decidedly mixed<\/strong><\/a>, with criticism of the president coming from all sides of the political spectrum. On the left, former Congressman Dennis Kucinich thundered<\/strong><\/a> that \u201cwe have moved from President Bush\u2019s doctrine of preventive war to President Obama\u2019s assertion of the right to go to war without even the pretext of a threat to our nation.\u201d Steven Groves of the Heritage Foundation complained that Obama was too scrupulous<\/strong><\/a> in his adherence to the principles of R2P, which might only raise the bar for future US interventions.<\/p>\n

Ah, the good old days, when the left and the right both took international law seriously enough to argue over how a US president should engage with it!<\/p>\n

Donald J. Trump has shown no such scruples. He considers international law nothing more than a trifling impediment by which the weak try to drag down the strong. He boasts<\/strong><\/a> that he didn\u2019t even bother to consult the UN when pursuing his trumped-up peace plans and creating his laughably ill-named \u201cBoard of Peace<\/strong><\/a>.\u201d He certainly didn\u2019t consider international law recently when he bombed<\/strong><\/a> Nigeria, seized<\/strong><\/a> Venezuela\u2019s President Nicol\u00e1s Maduro, and threatened<\/strong><\/a> to annex Greenland. He may be the first American president to treat international law as if it were as fictional as intergalactic law.<\/p>\n

By contrast, the only principle that Trump now invokes in his foreign policy is the infamous law of the jungle. He believes that power \u2014 its threat and its exercise \u2014 is all that matters for apex predators like the United States (and himself). The rest is just the chittering of potential prey.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy own morality. My own mind. It\u2019s the only thing that can stop me,\u201d the amoral Trump told<\/strong><\/a> the New York Times<\/em> in a recent (and terrifying) interview. \u201cI don\u2019t need international law.\u201d<\/p>\n

Global cop, then, would not seem to be a suitable aspiration for the likes of Donald Trump. Unlike Obama, he\u2019s not interested in making sure that laws are observed and miscreants punished. Instead, Trump practically fawns over the miscreants: Russia\u2019s Vladimir Putin, Israel\u2019s Benjamin Netanyahu, Saudi Arabia\u2019s Mohammed bin Salman. The duties of policing the planet \u2014 both the adherence to law and the expenditure of resources \u2014 simply don\u2019t appeal to him.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re spending tremendous amounts of money for decades policing the world, and that shouldn\u2019t be the priority,\u201d Trump said<\/strong><\/a> back in 2018. \u201cWe want to police ourselves and we want to rebuild our country.\u201d<\/p>\n

That was the old Trump. The new Trump looks at things quite differently.<\/p>\n

Maybe when you hear the expression \u201cworld\u2019s policeman,\u201d you think of Officer Clemmons on the once-popular children\u2019s TV show Mister Rogers\u2019 Neighborhood<\/em>: a genial upholder of community morals, but on a global scale.<\/p>\n

Or maybe you\u2019re like former NATO head Anders Fogh Rasmussen who, in 2023, pined for an upright world policeman with superpowers and lofty principles. \u201cWe desperately need a US president who is able and willing to lead the free world and counter autocrats like President Putin,\u201d he wrote<\/strong><\/a>. \u201cThe world needs such a policeman if freedom and prosperity are to prevail against the forces of oppression, and the only capable, reliable and desirable candidate for the position is the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n

Donald Trump doesn\u2019t want either of those jobs.<\/p>\n

But let\u2019s face it, that\u2019s not how a large number of police officers actually operate. In 2025, police across the United States killed 98 unarmed people<\/strong><\/a>, the majority people of color. The misconduct of more than 1,000 dirty cops in Chicago \u2014 ranging from false arrests to the use of excessive force \u2014 cost that city nearly $300 million<\/strong><\/a> in court judgments between 2019 and 2022 alone, a pattern repeated at different magnitudes across the country<\/strong><\/a> and still ongoing, given the recent ICE killings<\/strong><\/a> in Minneapolis.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Elsewhere in the world, the police suppress dissent and fill prisons at the behest of dictators from Russia and North Korea to Saudi Arabia and El Salvador.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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\"Trump <\/picture>
Trump meets with El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele in the Oval Office in April 2025 (Daniel Torok\/White House\/Wikimedia Commons)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
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In democracies, the police break laws, often with impunity; in autocracies, they follow unjust laws while systemically violating human rights.<\/p>\n

A globocop embracing that kind of outlaw justice would disregard international law, make a mockery of institutions like the United Nations and the International Criminal Court, and attempt to establish alternative bodies that privilege the powerful. That\u2019s exactly the kind of police officer that Donald Trump aspires to be, wielding power not on behalf of principle but in the service of personal gain and autocratic control.<\/p>\n

The United States has long been tempted to play good cop\/bad cop with the world. President Trump is simply taking things to the next distinctly psychopathic level.<\/p>\n

The first American president to dream of raising his country to the status of world policeman was Teddy Roosevelt. As a former police commissioner of New York City, he ardently believed that the federal government needed to use its constabulary power to intervene in society to maintain order, including suppressing labor unrest.<\/p>\n

At the international level, like Trump, Roosevelt articulated his vision as a corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. In a 1904 address to Congress, he laid out his vision<\/strong><\/a> this way: \u201cChronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Roosevelt believed that the United States \u2014 and other major powers \u2014 had to step in to right wrongs in the absence of robust international institutions. He proposed<\/strong><\/a> a global \u201cLeague of Peace\u201d to prevent wars and end conflicts. In the meantime, according to his problematic take on \u201ccivilized\u201d behavior, Roosevelt justified US interventions not only in the Western hemisphere but also farther afield. In fact, Roosevelt won a Nobel Prize for his mediation of the Russo-Japanese War where, in a secret agreement, he gave Japan control of Korea in exchange for US control over the Philippines.<\/p>\n

Trump has borrowed much from Roosevelt in his approach to global affairs, now aptly known as the Donroe Doctrine<\/strong><\/a>. The \u201cLeague of Peace\u201d has become Trump\u2019s \u201cBoard of Peace.\u201d Roosevelt\u2019s interventions in the Western Hemisphere to keep out European powers have become selective moves to push out the Chinese and (less so) the Russians in Venezuela and elsewhere. Roosevelt\u2019s \u201ccivilizing mission\u201d has become an equally abhorrent commitment by the Trump administration to advancing the interests of White people, as in the preferential treatment<\/strong><\/a> of White South Africans when it comes to immigration to this country. Like Roosevelt, Trump considered<\/strong><\/a> a \u201cspheres of influence\u201d swap with Russia, exchanging Ukraine for Venezuela, before ultimately rejecting the deal.<\/p>\n

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\u201cTrump practically fawns over the miscreants: Russia\u2019s Vladimir Putin, Israel\u2019s Benjamin Netanyahu, Saudi Arabia\u2019s Mohammed bin Salman.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

By now, all of America\u2019s historical justifications for acting as the world\u2019s policeman have fallen away, including the assertion of self-determination (Woodrow Wilson), the mobilization against fascism (Franklin Delano Roosevelt), the crusade against communism (Harry Truman et al), and all talk of global democracy and human rights (the post-Cold War-era presidents). Trump has instead quite openly embraced Teddy Roosevelt, big stick and all, along with Roosevelt\u2019s tendency to link the suppression of conflict at home and abroad. In Donald Trump\u2019s world, ICE agents killing protestors Ren\u00e9e Good and Alex Pretti, and Special Forces kidnapping Nicol\u00e1s Maduro are two sides of the same impulse: the use of constabulary force to extinguish dissent and maintain a pyramidic order nationally and hemispherically, with Donald Trump on top of it all.<\/p>\n

Like Roosevelt, Trump showed no regard for the principles of sovereignty in his intervention in Venezuela. Roosevelt didn\u2019t think Filipinos were civilized enough for self-government and Trump, by insisting that Greenlanders must submit to US control, repeats the colonialist pattern. Trump\u2019s major innovation: speak loudly<\/em> and carry that big stick.<\/p>\n

The trajectory of the world order over the last 75 years has been in the direction of safeguards for weaker nations and controls on the exercise of power by stronger nations. An elaborate system<\/strong><\/a> of international agreements governing human rights has been designed to protect individuals and groups from the predations of states and corporations.<\/p>\n

Trump wants to reverse that trajectory, just as he wants to roll back all the gains social movements have made within the United States, from civil rights and feminism to the victories of the LGBTQ community.<\/p>\n

In Trump World, those with the guns make the rules. They take Crimea, Gaza, and Greenland \u2014 at gunpoint, if necessary.<\/p>\n

Corrupt cops have long been involved in protection rackets, shaking down gambling establishments, prostitutes, and drug dealers. Trump, a shady businessman at heart, thrills to that side of the globocop business. All of his \u201cpeace deals\u201d cut him or his cronies in on a piece of the action.<\/p>\n

Take, for instance, last year\u2019s deal between Armenia and Azerbaijan. It includes a \u201cTrump Route for International Peace and Prosperity\u201d that connects Azerbaijan with its enclave of Nakhichevan. In addition to naming rights, Trump negotiated as part of the agreement a TRIPP Development Company to construct the corridor, with the United States owning 74%<\/strong><\/a> of its shares for the first 49 years.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no word yet on who the members of the US-Armenian steering committee will be for that project. If Gaza is any indication, however, it will be yet one more goodie to be distributed to friends and CEOs through Trump\u2019s patronage system. The Gaza peace deal established a Board of Peace whose executive committee is dominated by Trump cronies, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, diplomatic emissaries Steve Witkoff and the president\u2019s son-in-law Jared Kushner, billionaire businessman Marc Rowan, and Trump security advisor Robert Gabriel.<\/p>\n

An even more audacious profit-seeking deal was his recent multipoint proposal to end the war in Ukraine. In it, Witkoff and his Russian counterpart imagined a scenario in which US businesses would profit by gaining access<\/strong><\/a> to frozen Russian funds for the reconstruction of Ukraine, while also making billions from restarting business relations with Russia. Again, it\u2019s not difficult to imagine who would profit from such arrangements. After all, Jared Kushner, architect of the Abrahamic Accords that normalized diplomatic relations between Arab countries and Israel, became a billionaire<\/strong><\/a> thanks to contacts in and investments from the Gulf States.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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\"Trump <\/picture>
Trump greets Russian President Vladimir Putin in Anchorage, Alaska, in August 2025 (Daniel Torok\/White House\/Wikimedia Commons)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
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Trump is all about extraction. If he has his way, the Venezuelan operation will net billions of dollars in oil revenues for major US companies. Similarly, his obsession with Greenland is driven, at least in part, by his lust for the reputed mineral wealth that lies beneath that giant island\u2019s snow and ice. The United States is dependent<\/strong><\/a> on imports of critical minerals, many now controlled by China. Like a cop who eyes the riches generated by someone else\u2019s protection racket, Trump is desperate to muscle in to grab some of the profits.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the most vulgar expression of his desire to run a global protection racket is that Board of Peace of his. Countries that want to have permanent seats on it have to pony up a billion dollars apiece. Warmongers like Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates are welcome as members as long as they\u2019re willing to fork over the money. On the other hand, Canada has been banned from it because, in a speech at Davos, its prime minister, Mark Carney, tried to rally the globe\u2019s middle powers against the United States and other rule-breaking great powers.<\/p>\n

Originally established to administer the Gaza peace deal, the Board seems to have much greater ambitions. As its \u201cpresident for life,\u201d Trump has promised to cooperate with the United Nations. But the Board\u2019s membership, with the United States first among unequals, suggests a rival body with no interest in abiding by international law. Think of it as the UN\u2019s evil twin and its creation as a signal that the United States has officially gone rogue cop.<\/p>\n

Not everyone in the MAGAverse is happy with America as a globocop.<\/p>\n

Some isolationist remnants of the Republican Party have criticized the operations in Venezuela, though not enough to make a difference in Congress. Marjorie Taylor Greene, once Trump\u2019s greatest congressional advocate, parted ways with the president on a number of issues, including the Venezuela intervention<\/strong><\/a>, and decided to step down early from her position rather than face his political vengefulness.<\/p>\n

Trump has insisted that, the attacks on Venezuela\u2019s sovereignty notwithstanding, the United States is not at war with that country. He ruled out any alternative interpretations of MAGA doctrine. \u201cMAGA is me,\u201d he said<\/strong><\/a>. \u201cMAGA loves everything I do, and I love everything I do, too.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump has made some noises about a spheres-of-influence approach with his Donroe Doctrine<\/strong><\/a>, prioritizing US control over the Western hemisphere. He has been happy to reward Russia for its \u201cpolicing\u201d of neighboring Ukraine, and he\u2019s been ambiguous<\/strong><\/a> at best about coming to the defense of Taiwan, should China threaten it. Indeed, he has been more than happy to delegate such responsibilities to others, whether it\u2019s Israel in the Middle East or acting president Delcy Rodr\u00edguez in Venezuela. In a complex world as full of nukes and conventional missiles as the United States is of handguns, globocops need their deputies.<\/p>\n

However, neither isolationism nor the idea of global spheres of influence has truly captured Trump\u2019s imagination. In the first year of his second term, he has instead driven a stake through the very idea of isolationism by launching military operations in Venezuela, Nigeria, Iran, Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, and Syria. Nor has he shown any deep interest in confining his ambitions<\/strong><\/a> to the Western hemisphere. Instead, he has continued to build the Pentagon budget to counter China, while fancying himself a peacemaker across the Global South. Wherever his critics continue to dance beyond his grasp, as in Cuba and Iran, and wherever valuable resources can be extracted for personal and political gain, as in Greenland and the Congo, Trump will try to press any military advantage he might have.<\/p>\n

For all of us who found fault with the \u201cgood cop\u201d approach of Obama in Libya \u2014 and there was much fault to be found \u2014 it\u2019s once again time to get a taste of America as the \u201cbad cop.\u201d So far, Trump\u2019s targets have been weak (Venezuela) or easy to attack (Iran, after Israel destroyed its air defenses). The grave danger is that, encouraged by such \u201csuccesses,\u201d Trump may move on to larger targets like China or the 60% of American citizens who oppose his policies.<\/p>\n

Cops, protected by their badges and their guns, think they\u2019re invincible. Taken to court over their crimes and corruption, they suddenly discover that they\u2019re not in fact above the law. Trump is now turning the United States into a \u201cbad cop.\u201d Let\u2019s hope that he learns a lesson about the limits of his power before he goes apocalyptically rogue.<\/p>\n

This article was originally published<\/a> by TomDispatch and is reprinted here with permission.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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\t\tJohn Feffer\t<\/h3>\n

John Feffer, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of the dystopian novel Splinterlands and the director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies. Frostlands, a Dispatch Books original, is volume two of his Splinterlands series, and the final novel in the trilogy is Songlands. He has also written Right Across the World: The Global Networking of the Far-Right and the Left Response.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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A mere 15 years ago, during an epoch that now seems as distant as the Paleozoic era, an American president attempted to use military power to prevent a dictator from slaughtering his own citizens. Barack Obama billed the action in Libya as a humanitarian intervention, citing the new United Nations doctrine of \u201cresponsibility to protect\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10149,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10148","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10148","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10148"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10148\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10149"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}