The Nave Photon crude oil tanker, carrying a shipment of Venezuelan oil, docked at the Enterprise Marine Terminal in Freeport, Texas. Oil traders and US refiners are rushing to position for access to Venezuelan crude after the Trump administration said it would take control of as much as 50 million barrels, one of the largest unexpected supply flows in years. — Bloomberg
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.
The best glimpse of what this means for our future may lay in understanding our past.
When Donald Trump openly speaks of claiming Venezuela’s oil or muses about taking Greenland, he is not merely being provocative or reckless. He is articulating, without embarrassment or euphemism, an imperial logic that the post-1945 world order was built to suppress, disguise and deny.
The United States has long sought to shape the control of resources abroad, but only this administration no longer feels the need to pretend otherwise.
As a historian of colonialism who regularly teaches the history of the CIA and the use of subversion as foreign policy in the postwar US, what I am witnessing feels genuinely unprecedented.
Since 1945, American power has depended not on innocence but on plausible deniability. Empire survived not by disappearing but by learning how to speak the language of anti-imperialism. That language is now being abandoned.
To see how unusual this moment is, it helps to step back into the longer history of empire itself. Consider Dutch imperialism in Indonesia. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the Dutch felt no need to moralise conquest. As I argue in my book Wives, Slaves, and Concubines: A History of Dutch Asia, before 1800, the Dutch pursued empire with startling candour. Violence, coercion and extraction were not cloaked in humanitarian rhetoric; they were justified by profit.
The Dutch East India Company (VOC), the world’s first joint-stock company and first multinational corporation, was explicit about its purpose. It existed to generate returns, and it used sovereign violence to do so. There was no apology, because none was required. Let’s call it imperialism 1.0. That changed in the 19th century. The same global shifts in moral sentiment that helped bring an end to the transatlantic slave trade also made naked imperialism increasingly illegible. Conquest had to be rebranded. European powers began to justify domination, not as exploitation but as uplift.
Empire was recast as a civilising mission, as the imposition of order and good governance, as humanitarian intervention, as benevolent tutelage over supposedly unready peoples.
By the early 20th century, the Dutch formalised this rhetorical transformation through the Ethical Policy, a self-proclaimed effort to “give back” to Indonesians through schools, public health and infrastructure.
This ethical turn did not end exploitation. At its height, the Dutch colonial state was siphoning off roughly 40 percent of its total government revenue from Indonesia.
The difference was not material, but moral: Roads and schools became the spoonful of sugar meant to help the brutal medicine of empire go down; imperialism 2.0. World War II shattered even this arrangement. In the aftermath of fascism and global war, old-fashioned empire became politically radioactive.
National liberation movements swept Asia, Africa and the Middle East. In this new environment, open conquest was no longer viable. Empire survived by changing form.
Evidence of this is in the Dutch “classic colonial” attempt to take back Indonesia by force from 1945-1949. After a stiff throttling from the Indonesians, the US came down against the Netherlands because it knew that open imperialism was passé. This is the world that Indonesia’s first president Sukarno understood clearly. The problem, he argued, was no longer colonialism in its classical form but neocolonialism: a system in which newly independent states retained formal sovereignty while real power was exercised through economic pressure, intelligence operations, proxy forces and covert regime change; imperialism 3.0.
The US mastered this system. From Iran and Guatemala to Indonesia, Congo, Chile and beyond, Washington learned how to bend governments without appearing to rule them.
The CIA became a central instrument of foreign policy, not because American leaders were squeamish but because overt domination would have contradicted the values the US claimed to embody.
Democracy, self-determination and national sovereignty had to be proclaimed even as they were quietly undermined. This pattern held across administrations. Wars were never sold as wars for oil, even when oil was central.
The Gulf War, the invasion of Iraq, Cold War interventions across the Global South, all were framed as security imperatives, humanitarian interventions or defences of freedom.
The heavy hand of American power was meant to be unseen. That is what has now changed. The Trump administration is not merely exercising power; it is announcing ownership.
Venezuelan oil is discussed openly as a resource to be controlled, sold and leveraged indefinitely. Greenland is no longer treated as an allied territory within a security framework, but as a strategic asset that could be taken.
Trump’s deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller articulated it clearly: “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world ... that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”
These are not slips of the tongue. They are statements that signal a deeper collapse of restraint.
This matters because the postwar order depended on hypocrisy. It depended on the shared understanding that even when great powers acted brutally, they would at least pretend to respect certain norms, aka “international niceties”.
Hypocrisy, in international politics, is not a moral failure; it is a stabilising mechanism. When states stop pretending, they stop signalling limits.
We are now watching a return to something closer to the 18th century: imperial ambition stated plainly, stripped of moral camouflage. No civilising mission. No ethical policy. No development discourse. Just resources, territory and force.
The danger is not only that this emboldens other powers to behave similarly. It is also that this erodes the very language that once made resistance possible.
Anti-imperial movements in the 20th century succeeded in part because empires had already conceded the moral argument.
When domination is declared openly, the fight becomes starker, and often bloodier. Historians are trained to be cautious about claims of rupture. Continuities matter. But this moment deserves to be named for what it is: the end of an era in which empire survived by pretending not to exist.
What is replacing it is not new. Unapologetic empire is older, cruder and far more dangerous. — The Jakarta Post/ANN
Eric Jones is a professor of Indonesian history at Northern Illinois University.
