Donald Trump is hardly the first US president to look south and conquer. Over the last century, no fewer than a dozen of Trump’s predecessors embraced the belief that democracy and profit in Latin America were only one successful coup d’état away. But the particular strain of imperial ambition that Trump appears to have set loose with this weekend’s raid in Venezuela appears simultaneously to be deeply atavistic and uniquely Trumpian. And it’s one that doesn’t look set to die down anytime soon.

It took only a few hours, following the US military’s daring seizure of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, for Trump’s rationale to shift from hand-waving about democracy and fighting narcotics toward taking control of that nation’s vast oil reserves. “We’re in charge,” Trump told reporters. “We’re going to run everything. We’re going to run it—fix it.” And even before Maduro appeared in a New York City courtroom Monday, Trump had begun to celebrate what he’s calling his “Donroe Doctrine,” explicitly threatening a half-dozen other nations, from Colombia and Cuba to Mexico and Denmark’s Greenland, in a talk with reporters on Air Force One on Sunday.

As much as it may seem like we’re heading into a new, dangerous, and destabilizing period of Donald Trump’s authoritarian regime—his actions in Venezuela appear illegal under both international law and US law and happened without any congressional consultation—it’s important to recognize and understand some context. The history of the region—and, more importantly, of how Donald Trump himself operates, how he seems caught in the mindset of 1980s America—make clear that Trump may be embarking on what may someday be viewed as the last war of the 20th century. In fact, there are three main principles that help explain where the US finds itself just days into a new year—principles that make clear how, despite how shocking Saturday morning’s breaking news alerts turned out to be, this moment is actually quite unsurprising:

1. The US is good at coups, bad at what follows.

For a century, the two chief hallmarks of US meddling in Latin America have been short-term tactical military success and long-term strategic failure. These two themes are, in fact, deep, venal strands of America’s political DNA. Case in point: Long, long before he was indicted for his role in the Watergate burglary and meddling in the 1972 presidential election, E. Howard Hunt spent his career as one of the CIA’s best overthrowers of governments.

In the early 1950s, the powerful United Fruit Company feared the land reforms Guatemala’s democratically elected Jacobo Árbenz might implement and convinced the Truman and Eisenhower administrations that the new Central American leader might embrace communism. The CIA, founded in 1947, was relatively new to the business of meddling in Central and South America, but the US certainly was not—among other expeditions, it had occupied Nicaragua on and off from 1912 to 1933, invaded and occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934, and occupied Cuba from 1906 to 1909 and then returned from 1917 to 1922, to protect US-owned sugar plantations.

Hunt was a decidedly middling spy, stationed in Mexico City—where he’d helped recruit another would-be junior officer, William F. Buckley, Jr.—but his career got a big boost when he helped lay the groundwork for overthrowing Árbenz. “What we wanted to do was to have a terror campaign to terrify Arbenz particularly, to terrify his troops,” Hunt said, decades later. It was one of the only successful CIA-backed coups of the 1950s, so Hunt was a natural to include when the agency began planning the Bay of Pigs invasion.

A major (and eventually fatal) difference from previous efforts across the 20th century was that in seeking to overthrow the Castro regime, the government relied this time not on the Marines but on an army of Cuban exiles: Hunt was placed in charge of creating the provisional government, friendly to the US, that would take over once the CIA-trained invasion force overthrew Fidel Castro. That invasion, just weeks into the presidency of John F. Kennedy, failed spectacularly—more than a hundred freedom fighters died on the beaches when US air support didn’t materialize, and within days, 1,200 were captured and surrendered, leading to hundreds more executions.

The debacle, though, hardly slowed the CIA’s appetite for overthrowing governments in Central and South America. In 1961, the CIA supplied the weapons to murder the leader of the Dominican Republic. That same year, it helped a coup in Ecuador—then, unhappy when the new leader turned out to be even less friendly to the US than the one who had been overthrown, backed a different junta in another coup in 1963.

In the years that followed, the CIA backed other coups—including in Brazil (1964) and Chile (1973)—and dabbled with supporting other armed military uprisings and right-wing rebels across the region (see the Iran-Contra scandal). Most administrations wanted to go even further than they did; Reagan’s secretary of state Alexander Haig pleaded to invade Cuba, telling Reagan, “You just give me the word. I’ll turn that fucking island into a parking lot.”

In almost every case of US intervention throughout the western hemisphere, what followed the US meddling was worse than what came before. Chile’s democratically elected Salvador Allende, for instance, was replaced by the brutal 17-year military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. (And that’s all before you get to this century’s examples overseas in Iraq and Afghanistan.) After the US offered tacit support for a 1976 coup in Argentina, overthrowing Isabel Perón, a brutal military ruled for decades and perfected horrors like throwing dissidents out of helicopters into the ocean.

The region’s instability and authoritarian regimes were aided by elite training from the US military. The Defense Department trained tens of thousands of Latin American military, intelligence, and law enforcement at its infamous School of the Americas in Georgia; many went on to be accused of terrible human rights abuses, including alumni who, according to a Duke scholar’s investigation, went on to be “dictators, death squad operatives, and assassins,” including Manuel Noriega himself, Bolivian dictator Hugo Banzer Suárez, Haitian dictator Raoul Cedras, Pinochet’s secret police leader, and even the general who this weekend was Maduro’s defense minister, among other so-called “Hall of Shamers.”

For decades the US and president after president justified these interventions and political support for dictatorships through the lens of the Cold War—arguing that supporting terrible regimes was better than allowing the risk they might fall to communism. Indeed, ironically, it’s the very strength, dominance, and exquisite skill of the US military and intelligence community to achieve their tactical victories that make such interventions look so much more alluring than they should be to presidents, from Eisenhower to Reagan to Trump. You can almost always win the short term—depose, overthrow, or kidnap the leader—and then the long term is a gamble.

But the unintended long-term consequences of these actions have ricocheted through American domestic politics for decades. Indeed, their second- and third-order effects have done more to shape US politics today than most Americans understand.

There have been obvious links: For instance, it was while planning the Bay of Pigs operation that Hunt met the four Cubans he would later recruit to burglarize the Watergate. And less obvious ones: Most notably, the US meddling in places like the so-called “Northern Triangle” of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador unleashed destabilizing forces that contributed to waves of migration northward to the US border—millions of would-be immigrants whose arrival in the US over the last decade has exacerbated nativist fears and helped power Donald Trump first to the presidency in 2016 and then back to the White House in 2024. Many of them were driven north as climate change and deforestation affected agriculture and caused the collapse of local farms and economies; some of that destabilizing deforestation, in places like Guatemala, came after the military burned highland regions to remove the remote sanctuaries of rebel groups. As Jonathan Blitzer outlines in his award-winning study of Latin American immigration and the US, Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here, after El Salvador’s civil war in the 1980s—a war Reagan once called “the front line of the battle that is really aimed … at us,” more than a quarter of that country’s population ended up living as refugees in the United States.

Which brings us to:

2. Donald Trump has no plan.

Back in November, in the midst of a fall campaign by the US military to conduct lethal strikes on what it described as drug-smuggling boats—strikes that ultimately killed more than 100 people and were by almost any international standard illegal—I interviewed Ambassador John Bolton at the Texas Tribune Festival. Bolton, the hawkish neoconservative who was Trump’s longest-serving White House national security adviser during his first term, had advocated for regime change in Venezuela for years and worked in the first term to support opposition efforts to overthrow Maduro. He told me, “I think that our failure to overthrow Maduro in the first term was our greatest failure.” (Some of those efforts were stunningly ham-handed, as a WIRED investigation by Zach Dorfman later uncovered.)

But Bolton said he nonetheless has been puzzled by how poorly Trump laid the groundwork over recent months for operations against Maduro. The boat strikes came with no effort to build support with Congress or even develop deep partnerships with the Venezuelan opposition. (Indeed, over the weekend Trump casually dismissed the Venezuelan opposition leader, María Corina Machado, who beat Trump out this fall for the Nobel Peace Prize—and, according to The Washington Post, may have been sidelined precisely because of that.) “There’s just no comprehension, I think, of what it takes to replace the Maduro regime,” Bolton said.

The problem, Bolton explained, is that Donald Trump doesn’t think past the next step. The veteran Washington operator—who was a key architect of the Iraq War—explained that the hardest thing for him to wrap his head around when he began working in the White House was that Donald Trump has no set worldview nor policy positions in the traditional sense. Everything was transactional and ephemeral.

“He doesn’t do grand strategy,” Bolton told me. “It is very hard for people to understand. It was very hard for me to understand, because you think in government that’s what it’s about—policy is what you do. That’s not what Donald Trump does. Therefore, when people talk about a Trump doctrine in international affairs, it’s a complete fantasy to think that there’s any coherence to it at all. It’s all through the prism of what benefits Donald Trump … He wanted to do what he wanted to do.”

Trump views everything as how he must win the next news cycle and rarely thinks beyond that. The fact that there doesn’t appear to be any plan for what happens today, this week, and next month in Venezuela isn’t an accident—that lack of the plan is a feature of Trump’s governing style, not a bug. Which brings us to:

3. This war, whatever happens, is about the past, not the future.

There’s a theory among some pundits that Donald Trump’s brain is stuck in the 1980s and early ’90s—that his formative years as a real estate tycoon in New York in the go-go Reagan years calcified his worldview, his politics, his icons (like when he cites Lee Iacocca as a god of business), his definition of success (gilded gold everywhere), and his policies (pro-tariffs). Even his “Make America Great Again” slogan was originally used by Ronald Reagan.

That stuck-in-’80s worldview is why Donald Trump’s operation to capture Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and topple his government makes more sense if you think of it less as a 21st-century conflict and more as a retro, nostalgic effort—the last war of the 20th century.

We know what the wars of the future look like: In Ukraine, drones are revolutionizing the battlefield, and the US military is attempting to retool to fight nimbly in the Pacific, if China ever decides to invade Taiwan. The Venezuelan operation, codenamed Absolute Resolve and which killed scores of people on the ground in Venezuela, has drawn immediate comparisons to the US invasion of Panama in 1989, Operation Just Cause, which captured dictator Manuel Noriega. Noriega—who had been backed by the CIA before the US turned on him—was, like Maduro, brought to stand trial in the US, where his detention and prosecution were led by Robert Mueller and Bill Barr, then top leaders of George H. W. Bush’s Justice Department.

But the world has changed—and Donald Trump doesn’t seem to have thought through the next steps, leading to a deep irony: The US went to war for oil that it’s not clear anyone really wants. Trump, with his 1980s mindset, continues to embrace gas-guzzling engines, throws bromides toward the coal industry, and u-turns US government policy away from supporting solar energy, while the rest of the world is moving rapidly away from needing fossil fuels at all. Renewable energy has been growing at nearly 30 percent annually in recent years, and in the first half of 2025, actually produced more energy than coal worldwide for the first time. China is adopting renewables rapidly—it added in 2025 roughly more solar and wind capacity, about 360 gigawatts, than the US has in total—such that it’s on track actually to cut its carbon emissions, even as its growth continues. Energy costs worldwide are dropping so quickly that Australia announced in November that everyone will get three free hours of electricity every day starting this year.

Invading a country for its oil at the start of 2026 may one day seem as anachronistic as the US push in the 1800s to secure dozens of tiny islands rich with bird guano, a key ingredient for early agricultural fertilizers—and yet history teaches us that the world turns and empires rise and fall on what modern gamers would call “side quests.” After all, as Daniel Immerwahr outlines in his book How to Hide an Empire, the push to claim guano-crusted rocks around the world laid the legal groundwork for the first time for the United States to expand globally beyond the North American continent. Within a few years, we were invading Latin America on the regular.

In Trump’s short-term-is-everything thinking, winning access to oil today still screams profit. One thing that should really worry Americans—and people around the world—is that Trump in his second term has been quite blunt about what he wants. After a first term where many pundits hand-waved about taking Trump “seriously but not literally,” a key point of his second term has been that Washington and the global community need to take him seriously and literally. In that sense, the fact that the podcaster wife of Trump’s key aide Stephen Miller posted on X a photo of Greenland bedecked in red, white, and blue should be seen as less a joke and more a DEFCON 1 alert for Europe.

Greenland and Venezuela, after all, share at least one troubling commonality: They possess stores of natural riches that the oligarchs around Trump want to access and profit from. It’s been centuries—since Andrew Johnson’s purchase of Alaska, really—since any US president has looked north for conquest. But Trump’s appetite is clearly larger—and won’t be satiated by merely repeating the foreign policy follies of his 20th-century predecessors.

Indeed, for an administration that is building its defining legacy around upsetting the world order for the short-term opportunity to enrich an inner circle of family, cronies, and hangers-on—what WIRED called last summer the “the enshittification of American power”—Venezuela’s oil and Greenland’s rare earths look more the same than different. And the oil companies and tech broligarchs coveting them probably have more in common with the 20th century’s United Fruit Company and sugar barons than they think.

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