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Until recently, Donald Trump was consistent about this: The time for the United States to police the world, enforcing laws and norms, was over. “We are going to take care of this country first before we worry about everybody else in the world,” he told The New York Times in 2016.
“We more and more are not wanting to be the policemen of the world,” he said during a press conference with Nigeria’s president in 2018. “We’re spending tremendous amounts of money for decades policing the world, and that shouldn’t be the priority.” During the 2020 campaign, he often included a line in his stump speech complaining that American troops had spent 19 years serving as “policemen” in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Trump also rejected the idea that the United States had any kind of moral standing to criticize, much less regulate, the behavior of other nations. When Bill O’Reilly objected to Trump’s warmth toward Vladimir Putin in 2017, the president scoffed: “There are a lot of killers. You think our country’s so innocent?”
If anyone gave the U.S. the benefit of the doubt then, Trump has squandered the possibility now. In his second term, Trump has returned the nation to its role as global policeman—but this time, it’s as the world’s dirty cop, running rackets and thumbing its nose at the law even as it cracks down on alleged criminality by other countries’ leaders. He launched air strikes on Christmas Day in Nigeria, the very country he held up eight years ago as one where the U.S. shouldn’t be involved. Days later, U.S. troops snatched the Venezuelan autocrat Nicolás Maduro and his wife in Caracas. Trump told the Times yesterday that the U.S. could spend years controlling Venezuela. This week, the Trump aide Stephen Miller all but announced plans to annex Greenland.
Although the idea of a global policeman originated as a metaphor, the White House has made it literal. Take the boat strikes in the Caribbean, where U.S. law-enforcement agencies such as the Drug Enforcement Administration have long operated. But whereas previous administrations have used law-enforcement agencies to police drug trafficking, the Trump administration has chosen to rely on the armed forces. He has instructed them to conduct lethal, extrajudicial, and likely illegal drone strikes, even as the administration argues that it need not notify Congress of the actions under the War Powers Resolution because U.S. troops are not in danger. As for the raid in Venezuela, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has also described Maduro’s capture as “a law-enforcement operation,” telling George Stephanopoulos, “We didn’t occupy a country. This was an arrest operation.”
This takes some intellectual contortions to accept. Although officials say that the Justice Department wrote a memo justifying the action legally, the administration has not publicly shared the rationale, and international-law experts have almost unanimously agreed that the U.S. violated international law to arrest Maduro this way. In domestic policing, Trump has long espoused what I call “lawless order”—the idea that those in power can break the law in order to achieve their idea of society—and the president is now extending that to the rest of the world.
This is only one of the inconsistencies that characterize Trump’s approach to law and order. A justice system depends on the idea that laws and enforcement are reasonably consistent and predictable, but Trump offers none of that. On the one hand, he has arrested Maduro and brought him to the U.S., and plans to try him for drug trafficking. On the other, he last month pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras who had been convicted and imprisoned in the United States on very similar charges. He has correctly labeled Maduro an “illegitimate dictator,” but he has made the self-described Salvadoran dictator Nayib Bukele a key ally and welcomed him to the White House. Trump isn’t the best avatar of legal probity himself: He was convicted of 34 felonies in 2024, and escaped trial on several more serious ones only by virtue of being elected president.
What Trump is doing in Venezuela and beyond isn’t enforcing norms and ensuring security. It’s finding a way to make a buck. If you listened to Trump closely when he was rejecting intervention in the past, he hinted at this possibility. Although he complained about American troops being dispatched around the world, he often added that the problem was that the U.S. didn’t receive any direct, immediate monetary compensation for it. (The Iraq War was a mistake, he argued, not because it failed to achieve geopolitical change but because the U.S. didn’t take Iraq’s oil.)
Now he’s out to get his cut. He has openly acknowledged that the U.S. got involved in Venezuela because of oil, and the administration has declared its intent to control the country’s petroleum industry “indefinitely.” In the Arctic Circle, he’s attempting to establish a protection racket, arguing that Denmark doesn’t have the means to defend Greenland. Nice island you got there. Be a shame if something happened to it.
The U.S. has, in the past, made common cause with dictators when expedient, overthrown democratically elected leaders when nervous, and stayed out of righteous causes when doubtful of the upsides of getting involved; presidents have made moves to boost the U.S. economy or their own political prospects. The war hero Smedley Butler famously accused the U.S. government of racketeering in 1935. But even purported deference to a higher principle constrained and directed the shape of global involvement. Trump has abandoned that pretense, and no one dares to stop him. He is getting his way right now, but the long-term effects may be dangerous: When a dirty cop walks the beat, he encourages bad behavior in his precinct rather than suppressing it.
Related:
- The president seems intoxicated with military power.
- Trump seizing Greenland could set off a chain reaction.
Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
- First the shooting. Then the lies.
- Alexandra Petri: I tried to be the government. It did not go well.
- George Packer: Trump is doing improv in Venezuela.
Today’s News
- Minnesota officials withdrew from the investigation into the fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good by a federal immigration agent yesterday after the FBI blocked state access to evidence, prompting Governor Tim Walz to say that it was going to be “very, very difficult” for Minnesotans to think that the investigation will be fair. The Department of Homeland Security said that the agent acted in self-defense.
- Colombian President Gustavo Petro said that he feared a possible U.S. attack after President Donald Trump said that military action against Colombia “sounds good,” but a phone call yesterday between the two leaders appeared to ease tensions. Trump later said that a White House meeting was being arranged.
- The Senate advanced a bipartisan bill to assert Congress’s authority and block further U.S. military action in Venezuela after the raid that captured Nicolás Maduro. The measure passed 52–47, with five Republicans joining Democrats; a final vote is expected next week.
Dispatches
- Time-Travel Thursdays: Jake Lundberg explores what early fights about American imperialism looked like.
Explore all of our newsletters here.
Evening Read
An Underappreciated Variable in Sports Success
By Alex Hutchinson
Chief among the burdens weighing upon the weary sports parent—worse than the endless commutes, the exorbitant fees, the obnoxious parents on the other team—is the sense that your every decision has the power to make or break your child’s future. Should your 11-year-old show up to her elementary-school holiday concert, even if it means missing a practice with the elite soccer team to which you’ve pledged 100 percent attendance? What if this turns out to be the fork in the road that consigns her to the athletic scrap heap? …
Rationally, stressing out over missing a single practice is ridiculous. Believing that it matters, though, can be strangely reassuring, because of the suggestion that the future is under your control. Forecasting athletic careers is an imperfect science: Not every top draft pick pans out; not every star was a top draft pick. Unexpected injuries aside, the imprecision of our predictions is usually seen as a measurement problem. If we could only figure out which factors mattered most—how to quantify talent, which types of practice best develop it—we would be able to plot athletic trajectories with confidence.
Unless, of course, this tidy relationship between cause and effect is an illusion. What if the real prerequisite for athletic stardom is that you have to get lucky?
More From The Atlantic
- An act of cosmic sabotage
- Quinta Jurecic: The Maduro indictment appears legally solid.
- Nick Miroff: Trump’s immigration crackdown takes a dark turn in Minneapolis.
- David H. Freedman: What having a fake disease taught me about health care
- Change may be coming to Iran.
- Bono: What peaceniks like me get wrong about peace
- A high-seas gambit humiliates Putin.
Culture Break
Explore. A theme keeps popping up in relationship advice, Julie Beck writes: Don’t vent so much.
Read. The philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s latest book explores a new understanding of human beings’ most basic desire, John Kaag writes.
PS
Over the past 15 or 20 years, I’ve watched as the Grateful Dead has gone from casually dismissed sideshow to critical touchstone, cited by even the coolest bands as an influence. I’d like to say that I was ahead of the curve, but I can’t take much credit: My parents, longtime Deadheads, indoctrinated me from an early age. I recently filmed a video as part of The Atlantic’s “Behind the Byline” series where I talk about the Dead—and get quizzed on how fast I can name that tune and identify the era. To be honest, my colleague Matteo Wong’s advice on pasta might be more useful.
— David
Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.
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