The Trump Administration Doubles Down on Imperialism

The chief diplomat of the United States recently gave a speech explicitly celebrating colonialism at the Munich Security Conference. “For five centuries,” Marco Rubio said, “before the end of the Second World War, the West had been expanding – its missionaries, its pilgrims, its soldiers, its explorers pouring out from its shores to cross oceans, settle new continents, build vast empires extending out across the globe. But in 1945, for the first time since the age of Columbus, it was contracting… The great Western empires had entered into terminal decline, accelerated by godless communist revolutions and by anti-colonial uprisings that would transform the world.” 

The representatives of former colonial countries of Europe – overwhelmingly ‘White’ Christian men, gave this speech a standing ovation. 

There is nothing subtle or hidden about what was being said, or what was being celebrated. The United States, under the Trump administration, has declared that there are only one set of people who deserve to govern in the US, in Europe, and over the world – ‘White’ Christian straight men. It is at war with all others – at home, along its borders, and in the world. It expects and wants Europe to emulate this, something that it has explicitly stated in its National Security Strategy released in November 2025. 

It is hard to see this as anything other than a declaration of global war. We have already seen the first round of this in the US-led alliance backing of Israel in its unending war. We have seen this, too, in the US-led “Board of Peace” that seeks to govern the Gaza Strip without the consent or input of Palestinians. We have seen this in the US kidnapping of Nicolas Muduro, and its theft of Venezuelan oil.

We continue to see this with the US murdering random people on boats throughout the Caribbean. We are seeing it play out as the US moves warships and military equipment to threaten Iran in order to cripple its nuclear and missile programmes. There is no pretence of limiting the powers of the Iranian regime to kill its own citizens, or to hold such murderers to accounts, instead, as an analyst of the region notes, “What Trump (and Netanyahu) want Iran to give up are the various ways in which Iran can potentially threaten Israel.”

This is perfectly in line with Rubio’s speech, which has not one mention of human rights, and only one mention each of liberal democracy and international law. The expansion of the first is sneered at, and the second is disparaged at length. It is all about imperialism in the name of “Western civilisation,” but there is no civilisation evident in the speech, or US actions. 

In this, Rubio’s speech was true to the history of European imperialism. For all of Rubio’s invocations of art, music, and architecture, that is not what European actions wrought upon much of the world. Imperialism arrived in North America carrying ‘gifts’ of smallpox infected blankets, it arrived in China selling opium, it fostered itself across the Atlantic based on chattel slavery. In the Congo, under the stewardship of King Leopold, it survived on amputations, whippings, and the enslavement of a whole country to rubber plantations. 

Civilisation often ran the other way. Europeans arriving at the court of the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan were so overwhelmed that, to this day, the English word “mogul” means “great personage.” Even as far along as the 1800s the British learned how to shampoo their hair through the actions of the South Asian innovator Dean Mohammed, from which it spread as a fashion to the rest of Europe. And while Rubio is right to point out that missionaries and imperialists often walked hand in hand, the worship of Mammon was far more important than the worship of Christ. After the 1857 Uprising, when Britain almost lost its hold on northern India, one of the key changes that the transfer of power from the East India Company to the British Crown guaranteed, was to stop meddling in the religious affairs of locals. 

Most importantly, “Rubio’s speech indulged in a kind of brain-dead nostalgia for an imperialism that, as the sociologist W.E.B Du Bois warned over a century ago, brought the world to the brink of ruin.” The expansion of European imperialism did not stop in 1945. It had already been given a bloody nose by the Japanese during the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese war and by 1914, with the empires turning on each other, it started tearing itself apart, paused between the interwar period, and then continued anew through the horrors of Second World War.

Also read: The Logic and the Risks of Trump’s New Imperialism

By the end of this period, imperial powers were too weak to continue repressing the people that they had once conquered, but that did not mean they stopped trying, whether in Vietnam or Algeria, the latter-day defence of empire failed not because the “West” had lost its will to hold on, but because European empires had lost the power to compel people to remain colonised.

The show of force by the US – through tariffs, through bombing boats in the Caribbean, through kidnapping Mauro from Venezuela, through bombing Iran and threatening it again now in wars of choice, accompanied by the berating speech by JD Vance as Vice President at the Munich Security Conference last year, and a softer version of the same by Rubio this year – is somehow supposed to change this. How, though, is unclear.

Under the patronage of the US, Israel may be expanding its power in the region, but it is entirely unclear how long it can continue to do so. The latest scrabble by smaller wannabe imperial states has led to a cleavage among the Arab bloc with Saudi Arabia on one side and the United Arab Emirates on another. And while the US may be trying to expand in its region, no European state seems even mildly interested in extending its borders – unless we count Russia. 

Maybe most importantly, important post-colonial countries have not spoken although none of them would have missed the neo-imperial language of Rubio saying that the US and Europe should make “a unified effort to compete for market share in the economies of the Global South.” China does not need to, as it is already taking a massive bite out of the global economy, but where is India, where is South Africa, where is Brazil, or Indonesia in this calculus? Are they, once again, to be on the receiving end of imperialism – deployed through economics and technology, or can they carve an independent path? 

If anybody had any illusions about the second Trump administration, those should be long over after the actions, speeches, and strategies spelled out over the last year or so. The imperial ambitions may be unsustainable, and may backfire, but they will cause no small amount of damage until they do. What keeps us safe until they do? What strategies are post-colonial states, countries that paid a huge price for their freedom, adopting? Isn’t India one of them, and shouldn’t it say something?

Omair Ahmad has worked as a political analyst and journalist in India, the US and the UK.

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