American Empire: Spheres of Influence
What Donald Trump is saying in this moment is that legitimacy and international law do not matter. Only power does.
The United States, under Donald Trump, just invaded Venezuela.
Not with another round of sanctions, but with airstrikes and special forces. It was quickly followed by a presidential press conference where Donald Trump announced that Nicolás Maduro had been captured and flown out of the country.
You might feel relief. You certainly wouldn’t be alone. Maduro was an authoritarian whose presidency was broadly considered illegitimate due to election rigging. He dismantled Venezuela’s democratic institutions.
But it’s easy to miss the forest for the trees here. One the one hand, yes, Maduro was a bad guy. There’s no question about that. Indeed, the Venezuelan people are celebrating. But the Iraqis, too, celebrated the ouster of Saddam Hussein. Nearly 23 years later, the destabilizing effects of the Iraq War are still being felt across the Middle East.
The question here isn’t “Is Maduro bad?” The question we need to ask ourselves is what kind of world we create when the United States decides it can invade a sovereign country, seize its head of state, and then openly talk about “running” that country’s transition while getting “reimbursed” by selling their oil.
This invasion is the clearest sign yet that Trump is actively seeking to replace the post-World War II international order with an older — and more dangerous — concept: a planet carved into spheres of influence.
Pretext vs. Reality
The pretext for the invasion is drugs. Trump framed it as a strike against “narcoterrorism” and has, for some time, cast Maduro’s Venezuela as an effective narco state. And because he invokes the magic word, “terrorism,” he’s able to dodge hard questions: like why the president believes he can bomb a country the United States is not at war with, without congressional authorization, and then tell the world he’s also going to personally rule that country during its transition.
Congress was not notified before the operation. The United Nations charter bars the use of force against another state unless a specific set of criteria are met — and drug trafficking, no matter how awful it may be, does not automatically qualify. This invasion was illegal.
When Trump tells you he decided to depose Maduro because of some moral crusade against narcotrafficking, don’t believe him. Because just last month, in December 2025, he pardoned former Honduran president and convicted narcotrafficker Juan Orlando Hernández.
The reality is that this is a project aimed at continuing to consolidate power. To lay claim over a geographical backyard and control neighbors while profiting off of their natural resources.
Spheres of Influence
“Spheres of influence” refers to a world where the strongest states get control of their own global neighborhood and the countries inside it are expected to behave. For the most part, they’re free to vote, protest, trade, and pick leaders. But only until their choices annoy the local hegemon. Then the hegemon reminds them who’s actually in charge. Think of the Soviet Union and its satellite states during the Cold War.
What Donald Trump and his regime are trying to accomplish here is to return to this system and abandon the global rules-based order.
In this vision, the United States, Russia, and China all get control over their own distinct global domains.
And that is the worldview that the Venezuelan invasion fits into. Not a country with millions of real human beings, but simply a piece on a geopolitical chessboard.
One might be inclined to object and say that the United States has interfered in Latin America before. True. We have a long and sometimes shameful history of treating the region as a playground for coups and coercion.
The difference now isn’t that America somehow suddenly became sinful. It’s rather that Trump is openly stripping away the pretense than any rules apply at all.
Even when the United States acted with brutality during the Cold War, it tended to wrap itself in a story about global stability, alliances, or democracy. Sometimes those stories were true. They were often self-serving. Sometimes, they were just lies. But they still signaled that legitimacy mattered.
What Trump is saying in this moment is that legitimacy does not matter. Only power does.
Because when a president says he plans to run a country he illegally invaded; when he says we’ll take their oil; when he boasts that no one can stop us from doing it to others; he’s describing conquest.
This is why so many governments are condemning the invasion even while loathing Maduro himself. As Brazil’s president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva warned: “Attacking countries in flagrant violation of international law is the first step toward a world of violence, chaos, and instability, where the law of the strongest prevails over multilateralism.”
Foreign policy is a stress test for presidential power. If a president can invade a country because its leader has an indictment, he’s basically found a war-powers loophole that can be used ad infinitum.
And under that rule, any sovereign state becomes a valid battlefield while a spineless Congress is relegated to helplessly spectate.
And once a president normalizes using the military this way — without Congress, without international authorization, without even pretending there’s a valid reason — it’s easy to imagine how that same logic of “urgent necessity” might be applied elsewhere.
The famous Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt took this same approach to destroy the Weimar Republic and give a dictator absolute power. Through exception, precedent, and chipping away at the edges of the law until nothing was left.
A Cornered Animal
The strategy being employed here is sinister. Ignore the oil aspect. Ignore the feeble pretext about narcotrafficking.
Trump is feeling immense pressure from both the Epstein files coverup and his deeply unpopular economic policies.
He’s using the invasion and his “temporary” rule over Venezuela to flex his dictatorial muscles and hopefully distract from the things destroying his support.
He likely intends to install a stooge. If the plan succeeds, Venezuela will effectively become an American vassal state. Similar to the Soviet Union whose satellite states included countries like Poland, East Germany, Hungary, and Romania, among others.
This sounds sensational. But it’s an incredibly dire moment in our nation’s history. If the Republican Party continues to abdicate their power — as they have for the last decade — and does nothing to curb his power, the American experiment as we know it may be over.
Because the President of the United States has been and continues to assert more and more authoritarian control. Every spineless acquiescence by the Republican Party drives us further and further toward the point of no peaceful return; an “event horizon” for tyranny.
If we do nothing, the republic may be lost.
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