SOMETHING in the global atmosphere has changed. For most of the post-World War II era, great powers understood that domination required discretion. Resources could be controlled, governments destabilised and economies bent to external interests, but only if these actions were denied, disguised or morally reframed.
What is striking about the present moment is not that the United States is pursuing power in familiar ways, but that it is increasingly doing so without embarrassment. When a sitting president openly discusses taking another country’s oil or threatening territorial acquisition, it signals a collapse of the rhetorical restraints that have governed imperial behaviour since 1945.
