In 2018, two years after Donald Trump was first elected president, Vintage Books reissued Fletcher Knebel’s Night of Camp David, a political thriller published in 1965. Its renewed appeal was summed up in the stark tagline on the cover: “What would happen if the president of the USA went stark-raving mad?” In the novel, a young senator who has been chosen by the incumbent president, Mark Hollenbach, to be his running mate for reelection comes to realize that the man in the Oval Office has gone quietly crazy. In Trump’s first term, the story seemed to resonate with debates about his erratic behavior and the possibility that he could be deposed.

What attracted less attention, however, was the particular form the president’s madness takes in the novel. He shows signs of paranoia and authoritarian tendencies, hoping to introduce a law allowing him to have all phone calls recorded and stored in a giant bank of computers. But the most incontrovertible symptom of his insanity is the grand scheme confided to the young senator: “I want my second term to be a great one. A concept is forming that could reshape the world.”

Hollenbach’s plan, to be unveiled after his second inauguration, is for what he calls “an enlightened imperialism.” The US will take control of Canada and its vast mineral and carbon resources. But, as he explains,

Canada is only part of it, Jim. Canada is latent power. What this country needs almost as badly as more power is character and stability. For a perfect union, we also need Scandinavia…. Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland, to be specific. They will bring us the character and the discipline we so sadly lack. I know these people, Jim. I’m of German extraction, but many generations ago my people were Swedes who emigrated to Germany…. Your wife’s of Swedish stock, isn’t she?

Consciously or otherwise, this echoes Adolf Hitler’s insistence, in Mein Kampf, that “North America, with a population composed overwhelmingly of Germanic elements,” had so far managed to avoid “blood defilement.” The racial and genetic advantages of Hollenbach’s great northern expansion of the US are implicit in the plan. They are spelled out more clearly by an older senator, a southern Democrat:

You know, maybe Hollenbach hasn’t got such a bad idea. A union with Scandinavia would redress the racial imbalance in this country. We whites need some help. [The liberals] are about to make this a black republic.

Thus, as well as giving the US control over immense extractable riches, the new empire will restore the proper dominance of the “Germanic elements” in American society. And naturally, the creator of this new empire will be its first supreme leader. There will be “a super-union with Mark Hollenbach as the prime minister of everything from Bering Strait to the Baltic.” The plan will culminate with “Hollenbach on a dais in Stockholm, wearing robes of royal purple, and studying a military map of Europe with a cluster of generals in strange uniforms.”

How will this super-union be achieved? By military force, Hollenbach explains, but only if necessary: “There are other kinds of pressure, trade duties and barriers, financial measures, economic sanctions if you will.” The big European powers will not be included initially, because they are weak—Britain “effete, jaded,” France “flighty,” Italy cultured but powerless. Once the new empire is established they will clamor to submit to its rule—but if they do not they will be easily conquered anyway.

Knebel’s conjuring of an American president’s hallucination of imperial expansion, racial purification, resource extraction, and disdain for the old European democracies no longer reads like satirical hyperbole. What was once delirium is now the daily news. Trump, like Hollenbach, is a president of German extraction who long claimed (falsely) that his origins are really Swedish. He fantasizes about ruling from the Bering to the Baltic (admittedly with immediate designs on Canada and Greenland, which is part of the Danish kingdom, rather than directly on Scandinavia—but why stop there?). He wants to be “on a dais in Stockholm,” to accept his disgracefully overdue Nobel Peace Prize. He prefers at first to use economic sanctions but threatens military force against anyone who does not bow to his will. He despises the European Union, seeing it as effete and jaded because it has allowed its virility to be sapped by immigrants, feminists, and wokeism.

As the incursion into Venezuela, killing of dozens of people, and abduction of the country’s wretchedly incompetent and cruelly repressive president, Nicolás Maduro, have shown, Trump’s imperial vision is in fact even more grandiose than Hollenbach’s. It extends the empire south, toward the countries of the Caribbean, Central America, and South America, all of which must accept domination by the US. These are not (for obvious reasons) to be brought into the new neo-Nordic union. They are, rather, to become its vassal states, ruled in effect by puppet regimes whose economic, defense, and foreign policies will be dictated from Washington and whose oil and mineral resources will be exploited by American corporations.

It would be a mistake to assign a deep strategic coherence to the attack on Venezuela. It is telling that Trump described his own experience of the operation to snatch Maduro as entertainment: “I mean, I watched it, literally, like I was watching a television show.” It was a show produced largely by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in the manner of the extravaganzas put on by courtiers currying favor with absolute monarchs. Rubio is using military adventures as spectacular demonstrations of the triumph of his master’s will to absolute power, thus putting himself ahead of Vice President J.D. Vance in the MAGA succession stakes. Vance (who has been more skeptical of US military interventionism) was not involved in the planning of Maduro’s capture and was notably absent from Trump’s triumphant announcement of the raid’s success.

It would be equally erroneous to view the sortie into Venezuela as primarily a foreign escapade. Trump’s neoimperialism is not just America unbound—it is America unbounded. The condition of being without borders is, in Trump’s imagination, both the nightmare and the dream. On the one hand, Trump constantly suggests that the United States has been overrun and occupied by illegal migrants. “We will not,” he told an audience of soldiers, “allow an American city to be invaded and conquered by a foreign enemy. And that’s what they are.” The US border, in this dark phantasm, is a sacred boundary that has been violated and desecrated and must, at all costs, be restored.

But on the other hand, this terrifying vision has a shining counterpart in which there is no real border to the US at all because its frontiers will continue to expand over vast new territories. The border is both absolutely rigid for certain kinds of people (nonwhite immigrants) and absolutely unfixed for others (those who embody America’s true historic destiny). These apparently contradictory images are in fact two sides of the same coin: the Delta Force units that raided Venezuela are twinned with the ICE teams raiding American cities.

The capture of Maduro was intended to buttress the idea that the US president himself has no outer limits. No law, domestic or international, sets a frontier beyond which he may not go. It was also intended to reinforce his administration’s capacity to invent whatever pretexts it chooses to justify the use of armed force. Maduro is a drug kingpin; Renee Nicole Good, shot dead by an ICE agent in Minneapolis on January 7, was a domestic terrorist. In both cases, the power of naming—we can give you whatever label suits our purpose—is inextricably linked to the power to inflict violence without legal or moral restraint. Any remaining illusion that only external enemies of the US are subject to this perverse prerogative is surely banished by the news that six federal prosecutors in Minnesota have felt it necessary to resign in the face of the Justice Department’s push to launch a criminal investigation into her widow’s political activism.

When justifications are flagrant fictions, anything the president or his agents do, at home or abroad, is easily justifiable. As Trump told The New York Times on January 7, the only constraint he accepts is “my own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” Which is to say, given the stark absence of morality in his makeup and the way his mind is distorted by narcissism, nothing can stop him. This message is intended to be heard at least as clearly in Chicago as in Caracas.

It is thus highly significant that the US did not claim the obvious justification for its actions in Venezuela—that it was saving democracy. An aim of installing the opposition leader (and effectively the winner, through her proxy Edmundo González, of the most recent election), María Corina Machado, as president of Venezuela would have given the attack a rationale at least ostensibly rooted in the norms of the liberal international order. Machado could hardly have gone further to prove her loyalty, even to the point of offering to present Trump with her Nobel Peace Prize. The very deliberate decision to sideline her was thus a potent statement in its own right: upholding democracy is no longer part of the US brand. It has been deleted from the American mission statement. And if it is no longer part of what America claims to mean in the world at large, that’s because it is no longer central to the way it functions at home.

This aspect of the Venezuela episode, at least, seems well thought through. The US National Security Strategy published on December 4 uses the word “democracy” only three times. The primary context is criticism of the European democracies for daring to impose mild regulation on American social media companies or far-right movements. Trying, as European and other democratic governments are currently doing, to stop Elon Musk’s AI tool Grok from facilitating the creation and uploading of pornographic and sexually violent images of real children and women can thus be framed as a threat to democracy that validates an American policy of destabilizing the European Union, which is listed in the strategy as one of the oppressive “transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty.” Democracy is now a US value only when it can be invoked to further the interests of American oligarchs. Otherwise, as Trump showed in his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, it is either an irrelevance or an outrage.

At the heart of this anarchic authoritarianism is the fascist doctrine that the strong must prey on the weak. As Trump’s most influential adviser, Stephen Miller, told CNN’s Jake Tapper on January 5, “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.” Miller was speaking specifically about Trump’s right to seize Greenland, but the timeless and placeless iron laws of the world do not lose their jurisdiction at America’s own borders. The United States itself must, by this logic, be governed by force.

The US National Security Strategy runs to a skimpy twenty-nine pages, but after the raid on Venezuela it can be boiled down to six letters: or else. Its ethic is that of the capo di tutti capi dealing with regional sub-bosses: Make them an offer they can’t refuse. Sovereignty is replaced by sufferance. Other countries, especially those in the Western Hemisphere, are to be allowed the semblance of independence, but only so long as they do not pretend to enjoy its substance. They must accept US hegemony, or they will be subjected to the overwhelming power of the US military. Resistance is futile.

Which, to an extent, it is. The US does indeed have an irresistible military superiority in the Americas and probably also in the northern Atlantic—provided the purpose of its violence is to kill or capture foreign rulers or to inflict damage on defiant countries by aerial bombardment. It has a virtually unchecked capacity to intimidate and to punish. Apart from what he can do to countries south of the Rio Grande, Trump could, if he chooses, take out the insubordinate Danish prime minister or bomb Copenhagen until Greenland is ceded.

Miller is thus right to the extent that his capo can treat any country within reach to a visit from the goon squad. If making America great again means turning it into a giant protection racket, then this form of greatness does indeed beckon. It is a plausible future.

Trump’s problem, however, is that sending in the heavies is not the same as empire building. Tactical ascendancy is not the same as strategic mastery. Punitive raids and gunboat diplomacy were tactics successfully used by the greatest of the nineteenth-century empires, the British. But they functioned as part of a much larger and more coherent geopolitical strategy. They made sense only when implemented alongside two longer-term activities: the seizure, occupation, and governing of foreign countries, and the cultivation of soft power through the maintenance of broad alliances and the spinning of a narrative of progress. Trump has no idea how to do either of these things.

He himself understands—and this was a significant part of his electoral appeal—that the US is really terrible at governing other people’s countries. He gained power in part by giving vent to the anger most Americans feel at the catastrophic interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. He thus lacks both the ideological conviction and the political base that would be necessary to sustain “boots on the ground” in Venezuela or anywhere else. The idea that the US is, as Trump proclaimed, now running Venezuela is credible only if there is any known example of a vast country being run from an aircraft carrier off its coast and a bunch of officials in an office two thousand miles away.

Trump is driven by the megalomaniac’s hunger for acquisition. “Ownership,” he told The New York Times, in relation to Greenland, is “what I feel is psychologically needed for success.” But perhaps the reason for his obsession with that vast and scarcely populated island is that it’s the only place where this psychological need can possibly be satisfied: he could in principle achieve (almost) vacant possession. His minions, however, claim on his behalf ownership of the entire Western Hemisphere (an area, incidentally, that includes my own country, Ireland—I for one do not welcome our new orange overlord). After the Venezuela raid, Rubio’s State Department posted on X an image of Trump with the slogan “THIS IS OUR HEMISPHERE,” the “OUR” highlighted in lurid bloodred letters.

But to own a property, as Trump knows very well, you have to be able to occupy it. Intimidation can go only so far. The point of America’s hemispheric dominion was spelled out at the United Nations on January 5 by US ambassador Mike Waltz: “We’re not going to allow the Western Hemisphere to be used as a base of operation for our nation’s adversaries, and competitors, and rivals of the United States.” The denial of this space to adversaries is in line with long-standing US policy. But “competitors, and rivals” is the interesting part. It suggests a determination to root out not just Chinese investment in the hemisphere but also that of any commercial rival. In full mercantilist mode, this is to be an exclusively American economic zone.

Trump has long identified the European Union as America’s greatest enemy, ahead of China and Russia: “I think the European Union is a foe, what they do to us in trade.” In the week after the Venezuela attack, the EU moved to ratify a historic deal with the Latin American trade bloc Mercosur. The Europeans are thus clearly encroaching on “our” hemisphere as economic competitors and rivals. Is Trump therefore going to blockade Brazil or Argentina to stop this trade? And were he to do so, how would this aggression make sense in the light of his own National Security Strategy’s mission to “enlist our European and Asian allies and partners, including India, to cement and improve our joint positions in the Western Hemisphere”? Could it be that Trump and his aides are just making this all up as they go along?

When it comes to soft power, they most certainly are. The National Security Strategy states, “We want to maintain the United States’ unrivaled ‘soft power’ through which we exercise positive influence throughout the world that furthers our interests.” Soft power has two dimensions: successful diplomacy and what the strategy calls “cultural influence.” In both fields, Trump is not merely failing to maintain the United States’ existing power; he is taking a blowtorch to it. It is hard to think of any democracy that has ever done so more rapidly or more thoroughly. Bullying has replaced both alliance and admiration.

Trump’s imperial project is all gunboat and no diplomacy. He probably mistakes the flattery (sometimes the outright sycophancy) of most European leaders for esteem. In reality their deference masks a mixture of fear and short-term resignation. They do not want to attract his ire, but they are also hoping to wait him out. Their gritted teeth hold in feelings of contempt.

At an institutional level, Trump’s threat to use force against Denmark, a NATO ally, risks the collapse of the entire alliance. At an individual level, even those leaders who do admire Trump, like Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, find themselves in what one Italian commentator described in the Financial Times as “a tough spot”: “If Trump does something crazy, unpleasant or unprecedented against Europe and Italy, people are definitely going to blame that partly on her.” The right-wing populists Trump wants to encourage in Europe are, after all, also nationalists—the more imperious Trump gets, the more their loyalty to him risks being seen by their own supporters as traitorous.

The brushing off of Machado reminds them that, for Trump, loyalty is never reciprocal. He will betray them too. His wild fluctuations on Ukraine and Russia and his fuzzy vacillations on Taiwan (on January 7 he suggested that it’s “up to” Chinese president Xi Jinping to decide what to do there) make it hard even for those who wish to slavishly follow Trump to know what direction he is going in and when they might find themselves out of step.

More profoundly, the soft power of empire, its cultural might, has historically been entwined with its ability to embody the next phase of technological progress. However savage its reality, it dazzles with the allure of advancement. Its violence propels the great leap forward. Trump, however, is claiming sanction for his overlordship in the name of a great leap backward. In a world in which investment in low-carbon forms of energy, at more than $2 trillion a year, is double the $1 trillion spent on fossil fuels, Trump is fixated on the creation of (in more senses than one) a fossil empire. His seizure of Venezuela’s decrepit oil industry coincides with his withdrawal of the US from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Yesterday’s assets are being seized for an antiscientific ideology that has no tomorrow.

Again, it is hard to think of a successful empire built on boneheaded technological backwardness, the repudiation of science, and a wholesale denial of the most glaring of global realities. Empire building is an evil enterprise but a serious one. Trump is proving to be well able to meet the first requirement, but he has no purchase on the second.

—January 13, 2026