When scholars characterize and articulate US President Donald Trump’s ‘America First’ vision, they paint the President as someone who believes in recovering and liberating the US from financial burdens and losses that it has been incurring in trade, investment and security relationships with other countries. As a corollary, he was depicted as someone who advocated peace. By pursuing peace, he believed the US could focus on its own issues and commitments to allies and bleeding and resource-crunching military operations against enemies would wind down. His excruciating criticisms against earlier administrations for entangling the US for prolonged periods bleeding its resources for instances, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria were cast as President’s focus at home and his flair for restrained foreign policy. President Trump also featured prominently as a candidate for last year’s Nobel Peace Prize. However, the President has contradicted himself more often than not which was articulated by some as his impulsive personality and unpredictable nature. His unbridled push for trade wars which hurt the American economy as well as that of others exemplified his impulsive personality. Similarly, he has led the US to withdraw from many multilateral institutions which have been instrumental in inflating the US’s soft power potential, its leadership position and addressing global problems. President Trump’s ‘America first’ vision also gradually sent a message that it has a cultural dimension. It is not that all Americans would be treated equal and first by his administration. His administration started purging the American society by erecting barriers against the immigrants and directed the European countries to purge their own societies.

American Imperialism not America first

Military operations in Venezuela, a sovereign country and President Trump’s authorization of taking out President Nicolas Maduro and his wife from the sovereign territory for legal proceedings against them in the US sent a clear message that rules based international order is dead. Though President Trump’s myopic understanding of ‘America first’ has been logically justified as multilateral institutions take a bigger toll on American resources, his threats to snatch away sovereign territories by force such as his threats to annex Greenland, Panama Canal, Canada and Mexico drive home the point that he does not stand for an equitable world where the US would not have to bear larger burdens. His administration has clearly pursued American primacy based on cultural and territorial imperialism rather than maintain a normative liberal international order. President Trump has subscribed to the old Monroe Doctrine not only to assert its hegemony in the Western Hemisphere by keeping the intervention of external powers at bay, he has also resorted to a kind of civilizational logic implying to govern a territory- Venezuela marked by anarchy until an indefinite period. The imperialist operations were well-planned and executed that resulted in deaths of civilians of Venezuela even though no American lost life. Maduro was swiftly captured and arrested perhaps faster than many would have imagined. The leader had successfully crushed many armed opposition to his rule. He did not budge from his authoritarian grip over the country even in the face of American economic sanctions.

The imperialist undertones of US policy pertaining to the Western Hemisphere can be grasped from the National Security Strategy unveiled by the administration in December last year that laid down central focus on the Hemisphere.

The Trump administration’s primary objective was projected from the beginning of the bickering with Maduro regime was to destroy the drug cartels, however, the objectives widened to include keeping the oil reserves of Venezuela under control, second, to send the immigrants back home and third, to engineer a US prop/democratic regime to keep the country in the American grip.

While the Trump administration has removed Maduro, it has kept the political structure below the leader unaltered. For a while Vice President Delcy Rodriguez was placed as the interim President but being dissatisfied with this arrangements, Trump soon declared himself as the Acting President of Venezuela. The political opposition led by Maria Corina Machado wanted the entire regime being replaced. Had Trump supported her demands, it would have generated reactionary headwinds against the US. This implies that the Trump administration has not stepped in to support any anti-regime democratic voices. It will have difficult times to address the question what next after removing Maduro.

Trump administration has perhaps begun to repeat an episode in Venezuela which was earlier invoked against Saddam Hussein regime of Iraq. President Trump has expressed his aspirations to turn Venezuela into a democratic state. He may indulge in a nation-building mission there just like his country indulged in following the regime change in Iraq. Any long-term entanglement of the US in nation-building efforts outside may prove to be a quagmire as decades of efforts at stabilizing and democratizing Iraq and Afghanistan have yielded outcomes that the successive administrations in US might not have ever desired. The two countries witnessed more deaths, destruction and instabilities in the process of external engineering of the nation-building projects led by the US.