The Virgin Islands sits in a hemisphere ruled by a new United States policy of a full return to the Monroe Doctrine of the 1800s: Monroe Two, if you will.
On Christmas Day, the US bombed alleged terrorists in Sokoto, a city in northeastern Nigeria. This was in relation to a demand from the Christian right in the US to stop an alleged genocide against Nigerian Christians. The evangelical right is the most powerful force in the Make America Great Again movement headed by US President Donald Trump.
The intervention shocked Nigeria’s incompetent and corrupt leaders into a series of belated actions in an attempt to appease the US strongman.
Then on Jan. 3, US forces led by commandos of the Delta Brigade entered Caracas, Venezuela and captured Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro and his wife and conveyed them to jail in New York. This shocking event revealed the extent of US logistical, technological and military power in a single action. Entering a vast land and extracting its leader is the stuff of legend.
‘A new order’
The preceding actions are a signal from the US leader that the world has a new order. Threats to annex Greenland and the Panama Canal and requests that Canada becomes a US state are not necessarily empty threats — as Venezuela has revealed. The old post-1945 order of a world ruled by the US dollar and US-created institutions appears well and truly over.
In the place of an order created at Bretton Woods after World War II is a return to the early 1900s, when world powers carved up the globe according to their capabilities and interests. “Might is right” is the cliché often used to describe the situation when powerful countries decide the what, where, when, how and who outside their borders.
The danger is that history, although not repeating itself, rhymes. The power play of the early 1900s pre-1914 and 1939 led to World Wars I and II. Authoritarian leaders in Germany, Japan and Russia unleashed forces that led to world conflict that ended 70 million lives.
A similar situation is happening today. Mr. Trump is unhinged. He is as dangerous as Adolf Hitler except that he has his finger on the nuclear button and controls a frightening military arsenal.
China, which is controlled by a dictator, is the second world power. The Chinese Communist Party — which will tolerate no dissent even though it has allowed for a market economy — decides daily existence in China.
That Chinese form of state capitalism has made China the world’s largest and most powerful trading nation.
In the West, Mr. Trump has invaded Venezuela. He then claimed he would rule the Latin American country until further notice in the interests of oil and a strong dollar. China may soon decide to do the same with Taiwan. This is a reminder of the same forces that drove the world to war in the early 1900s.