The New Imperial Age | Foreign Affairs

When U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry lamented that Russian President Vladimir Putin was behaving “in a nineteenth-century fashion” after invading Crimea in 2014, Kerry probably did not anticipate how accurately his remark would describe U.S. foreign policy today. Analysts have drawn many historical parallels to the U.S. intervention in Venezuela last week—indeed, the twentieth century is replete with choices. But the period that resonates most today is the era when cyclical, heavy-handed U.S. interventions in Latin America began. That story starts in 1898.

After defeating Spain in the War of 1898 (also known as the Spanish-American War), the United States acquired former Spanish colonies in Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico and established a protectorate over Cuba. Separately, it annexed Hawaii and was exploring an isthmian canal through Nicaragua (later, Panama), as well as attempting to purchase territory from Denmark in the Caribbean. For half a century after 1898, the sun never set on the American empire.

The United States already had plenty of experience with expansionism, exploitation, and colonialism. Nevertheless, 1898 marked a turning point. In a matter of months, the United States brought down a European empire, acquired more than 7,000 islands over 7,000 miles away from the California coast, and instantly became a Pacific power. Never again would the U.S. military number fewer than 100,000. As Woodrow Wilson mused a decade before his own U.S. presidency, “No war ever transformed us quite as the war with Spain transformed us. . . . We have witnessed a new revolution.”

The 1898 era is back. The superficial parallels are many. U.S. President Donald Trump’s enthusiasm for tariffs and protectionism, his interest in reclaiming the Panama Canal, his tension with Canada, his focus on Latin America, and his pursuit of Danish territory all hark back to the turn of the century. It is no surprise that one of Trump’s idols is President William McKinley, in office from 1897 to 1901. Theodore Roosevelt, McKinley’s successor who continued and expanded McKinley’s policies, may also have Trump’s admiration: he was the first U.S. president to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Together, McKinley and Roosevelt ushered the United States into the American Century, a period of U.S. global dominance.

The historical parallels, however, go well beyond any set of policies or actions. The Trump administration is not just using an old playbook. It is also—more significantly—reviving old ways of conceptualizing power and security; it has resurrected a worldview that emphasizes wealth, geography, and civilization, a centuries-old measure of societal progress. The joint material and cultural aims of the Trump administration resemble the thinking of that earlier era of U.S. foreign policy. But in elevating and executing this vision, Trump and his advisers should heed the greatest lesson from 1898: the more the United States meddles abroad, the more every new problem it confronts will appear vital to solve, and the harder it will be for Washington to extricate itself from its entanglements.

Old World Power

A healthy economy was central to McKinley’s conception of power and security. McKinley wanted to protect Americans from uncertainty, fear, and economic struggle. And he had a well-developed sense of U.S. power, rooted in domestic prosperity, self-reliance, and industrialization. He did not worry much about a physical attack on the continental United States (save during the War of 1898 with the risk of Spanish bombardment of U.S. coasts). But he did worry about a depression causing panic and chaos. For this reason, coming into the presidency, McKinley cared much less about foreign affairs than he did about domestic renewal.

Land also figured into the mix. “The increase of our territory has added vastly to our strength and prosperity,” McKinley told a crowd in Minneapolis in 1899, when he analogized his Pacific acquisitions to the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and celebrated the new square mileage of the United States. Annexing the Philippines added a country the size of Arizona to U.S. holdings. In McKinley’s view, this won the United States prestige and respect. “One of the best things we ever did was to insist upon taking the Philippines,” he once told an adviser. “And so it has come to pass that in a few short months we have become a world power.”

Roosevelt took this thinking one step further. In his view, power and security were not just about owning land but also about a more strategic conception of geography. McKinley’s occupation of Cuba and seizure of Puerto Rico enabled Roosevelt to treat Latin America as being within the U.S. sphere of influence, inspiring Roosevelt’s famous corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, which explicitly drew on McKinley’s policy of turning Cuba into a protectorate. Roosevelt’s corollary was not so much a corollary as it was a contradiction. The Monroe Doctrine aimed to prevent European powers from establishing new colonies in the Western Hemisphere. It pitted the United States against Europe, in defense of sovereignty. By contrast, Roosevelt’s corollary asserted that the United States had an obligation to intervene to protect countries in the Western Hemisphere from internal instability and disorder—that is, protect them from themselves. It pitted the United States against the Western Hemisphere, in violation of sovereignty.

McKinley and Roosevelt ushered the United States into the American Century.

The concept of civilization was the final and perhaps most important tenet of power and security for both McKinley and Roosevelt. Elites in the 1890s understood civilization as a barometer of societal achievement that grouped different peoples in a hierarchy of progress, from so-called savages and barbarians at the low end to semicivilized and civilized societies at the high end. The many defining attributes that American elites associated with civilization included rule of law, order, self-government, innovation, morality, prosperity, Christianity, modernity, literacy, and education. These criteria were deeply informed by prevailing racial, social, and cultural prejudices, and anteceded modern terms—such as the global North and South, emerging economies, and the first and third worlds—that similarly categorize societies in a hierarchy of amorphous progress.

Civilization is where culture and security intersected. The erosion of civilization at home augured chaos, disorder, and misery. It led many elites to argue for blocking people from entering and immigrating to the United States. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, for instance, Congress introduced dozens of resolutions to exclude and punish anarchists. Leaders believed they posed a national security threat, as the historian Alexander Noonan has assiduously documented. It was true; an anarchist assassinated McKinley in 1901, just six months into his second presidential term. Others similarly deployed civilizational reasoning to argue against U.S. imperialism. McKinley’s secretary of state, William Day, for example, lobbied the president against annexing the Philippines in 1898 because he feared that the incorporation of foreign peoples in the American body politic would threaten the country’s civilization. “As I have always said to you, the acquisition of this great archipelago with eight or nine millions of absolutely ignorant and many degraded people, with a capacity for supporting a population of fifty millions, seems like a very great undertaking for a country whose pride it is to rest its Government on the consent of the governed,” Day wrote the president as the secretary of state was negotiating the final peace settlement with Spain.

International affairs would be more predictable and peaceful if more countries resembled the United States in civilizational terms, McKinley and Roosevelt believed. I have called this notion the “Civilizational Peace Theory,” which morphed into the related “Democratic Peace Theory” that became prevalent in the twentieth and early twenty-first century and that suggests that democracies do not war with one another. For Roosevelt, this theory also supported what the historian Charlie Laderman calls Roosevelt’s “second corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, which outlined a set of principles to intervene in response to “crimes against civilization,” including atrocities perpetrated by governments against their own people. The United States, Roosevelt believed, had a civilizational imperative to punish bad behavior and prevent extreme wrongdoing anywhere in the world.

These tenets drove security policy during the McKinley and Roosevelt administrations. They led to an age not just of empire but also of meddling in other countries to preserve territory, influence, and trading rights, as well as to promote what was considered civilizational progress.

New World Power

U.S. leaders today conceive of power and security in similar ways to McKinley and Roosevelt. Economics, for one, plays a major role in Trump’s national security policy. His administration’s emphasis on “re-industrialization,” protectionism, and self-reliance aims to recapture the American golden age of manufacturing of the late nineteenth century, when the U.S. economy industrialized. As I have previously written with Don Graves in Foreign Affairs, Trump’s brand of economic security also prioritizes a short-sighted mercenary logic, applied to policy on technology, alliances, development, and even gifts from foreign governments. That is why, when it comes to Venezuela, the administration will increasingly target the country’s natural resources, notably its substantial oil and mineral reserves.

Land—that is, territory—also matters to the Trump administration. If energy resources, supply chains, and economic interests were its only major priority, negotiating trade deals, building and leasing ports, and securing mining rights would be the language of the day—not annexation. And yet, so far, Trump has teased territorial acquisition in Panama, Canada, Gaza, and Greenland. After capturing Maduro in the dead of night last week, Trump promised to govern Venezuela. “We’re going to run it,” he said, “until such time as a proper transition can take place.” Some form of protectorate appears not only likely but also expressly promised. In the wake of the dramatic Venezuela raid, Trump’s deputies have also revisited threats about acquiring Greenland.

The 1898 era is back.

But what makes the past so resonant in Trump’s Venezuela policy is the degree to which notions of civilization play a major role in the president’s actions. Maduro’s capture follows the logic of both Roosevelt’s corollary to the Monroe Doctrine to stabilize the Western Hemisphere and Roosevelt’s unofficial “second corollary” to punish crimes against civilization. Maduro is unquestionably a stain on Venezuelan history, and many prominent U.S. lawmakers were calling for regime change long before Trump launched his snatch-and-grab operation. Removing Maduro fulfills two Rooseveltian obligations. Trump also believes that Venezuelans cannot govern themselves, at least not now. “We don’t mind saying it, but we’re going to make sure that that country is run properly,” he said on January 3. This distrust of Venezuela’s capacity for self-government echoes the civilizational concern McKinley had about Filipinos before the archipelago’s annexation. Only the United States, McKinley insisted, could teach them how to run their country.

Ideas about civilization feature prominently in other Trump security policies. The expansion of ICE raids, the considerable focus on U.S. borders, and the large-scale revocations of visas are clear signals of a desire to homogenize American society. In its 2025 National Security Strategy, the Trump administration warned of Europe’s “civilizational erasure” and erosion of its “Western identity.” That is precisely what the administration seems to fear is happening in the United States itself. Hence, its unusually centralized control over Smithsonian exhibits and its attacks on every level of the U.S. educational system. Much like Day’s concerns about Filipinos eventually becoming U.S. voters, many Republican leaders today consider heterogeneity a national security threat. “The era of mass migration,” the same 2025 strategy reads, “is over.”

More meddling, more problems

One line from Trump’s 2025 inaugural address stands out. “The United States will once again consider itself a growing nation—one that increases our wealth, expands our territory, builds our cities, raises our expectations, and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons.” No sentence more perfectly captures the deep connection to the conception of power and security at the end of the nineteenth century. It is hard to imagine any recent U.S. president uttering those words. Yet they would have fit perfectly in McKinley’s second inaugural address.

McKinley’s era, however, holds a cautionary tale, centering on what I have termed “the Meddler’s Trap.” As it charts its course in Venezuela, the Trump administration would be wise to put itself in the shoes of the McKinley administration in the autumn of 1898. At that point, McKinley had displaced an oppressive regime by defeating the Spanish colonial rulers of the Philippines. He distrusted the locals and believed the United States could run their country better. Since U.S. troops had defeated the Spanish and were in control of Manila, McKinley felt a sense of ownership over the archipelago, leading him to inflate how much events in the Far East mattered to core U.S. interests. He determined that an American withdrawal from the Philippines would precipitate a great-power war, so he decided to obviate such a war by annexing the entire archipelago—an intriguing rationale given that McKinley had never worried about a great-power war before. After annexation, U.S. engagement and intervention in Asia had a self-fulfilling rationale: Washington had to continue intervening because it mattered to U.S. interests, but U.S. interests were deeply premised on the original sin of annexing the Philippines. The meddling, in other words, caused McKinley—and his successors—to dig in. The Philippines did not become independent until 1946.

The Trump administration has resurrected a worldview that emphasizes wealth, geography, and civilization.

Trump must now figure out what to do next. Much as the Filipinos initially did in 1898, many Venezuelans have welcomed the removal of an oppressive leader. But welcoming change is not the same as welcoming the United States to take over. Emilio Aguinaldo, maybe the most prominent Filipino leader in 1898, was ecstatic about McKinley’s victory against the Spanish. Unfortunately, no Filipino had any say in what followed. McKinley’s decision to annex the Philippines stirred an insurgency thousands of miles away, leading to what was the United States’ longest overseas war until World War II. American forces won, but at immense cost, both material and moral. Hundreds of thousands of Filipinos died in the Philippine-American War, largely from disease and starvation, including in U.S. concentration camps. Roughly the same number of civilians died from the U.S. atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The idea of “running Venezuela” from the Defense Department, State Department, or White House might seem logical to some, or at least one, in the administration. But brazen meddling abroad risks trapping not just this administration but also future administrations into believing events in and around Venezuela are more relevant to U.S. interests than they really are. As the Trump administration attempts to oversee Venezuela, events that previously would not have mattered to the United States will begin to appear critical. And if the U.S. role in Venezuela spurs some form of insurgency or voluble opposition, the president will get involved in ways that could cause turbulence and tragedy.

As political scientist Caleb Pomeroy has recently argued in Foreign Affairs, as countries grow stronger, they often feel more insecure. When the United States annexed the Philippines, greater power led to a feeling of greater vulnerability. As Roosevelt admitted to William Howard Taft in 1907, “The Philippines form our heel of Achilles.” If Trump starts running Venezuela, he will not simply find Venezuela impossible to control; he—and his successors—will find it impossible to let go.

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