The year 2026 began with a series of events that have set off global alarm bells and reignited a crucial debate: Is the United States entering a new expansionist phase, or is it instead experiencing the death throes of a declining empire?
Alongside the seizure of Nicolás Maduro; President Donald Trump’s statements that Greenland will be incorporated into the United States, even through the use of force; and increasingly credible threats to carry out military incursions into Mexico and Colombia to combat drug trafficking—while the administration abruptly canceled nearly $1.9 billion earmarked for mental health and addiction services—there is now Trump’s threat to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 to deploy troops against protests that erupted in Minneapolis in response to massive immigration raids carried out by federal agents, directly defying Governor Tim Walz.
Trump and his cronies are at war with everyone; his internal and external “enemies”, and under their own rules, devoid of morality, they are willing to use whatever it takes to leave their mark on human history.
His insatiable ambition seems to have developed a new obsession with transcending death and turning his “legacy” into an immortal one, reconfiguring the world map.
Last Wednesday, he declared, “We shouldn’t even have elections,” while complaining about the political risks his party faces in the 2026 midterm elections and boasting of his “achievements.”
“It’s something deeply psychological, but when you win the presidency, you don’t win the midterm elections,” said Trump, who has not, for the first time, expressed, in his view, the uselessness of elections and his desire to remain president beyond 2028.
Opinion columns and analyses abound, attempting to decipher a new enemy.
Writer Siri Hustvedt argues that the United States is living under a “new kind of fascism,” in which the president’s rallies function as rituals of collective exorcism, reminiscent of mass rallies in Fascist Italy or Nazi Germany, where social malaise is channeled toward an enemy “other.”
The rhetoric of Trump and figures such as J. D. Vance and Elon Musk—who promote natalist ideologies and discourse about “defective genes” or “low IQs”—reveals a return to dangerously regressive ideas. Even the Capitol rioters, dressed as Viking warriors on January 6, expose the symbolic dimension of this movement, which seems to hark back to the barbaric.
Hustvedt maintains that fascism creates its own hermetic reality, an alternative logic that ignores verifiable facts.
The government has become a factory of serial lies, produced at a staggering speed that hampers thoughtful and effective responses.
Perhaps this explains what is most unsettling: that Trump maintains stable support. An AP-NORC poll in January showed that about 40% of U.S. adults approve of his performance, a figure virtually unchanged since March 2025. As the saying goes, there is none so blind as those who refuse to see.
Trump himself has reinforced an autocratic vision in a recent interview with The New York Times, where he stated that his “own morality” is the only limit to his power, dismissing international law. He justified the operation to capture Maduro and the seizure of Venezuelan oil resources as a “quick and effective” act and asserted that the United States “is in charge” of Venezuela’s oil. His vision prioritizes the use of force and strategic plunder over consensus or diplomacy.
Conservative writer Andrew Sullivan has described this doctrine as a “Viking foreign policy”: a brutalist strategy based on using superior military power to dominate and strip weaker actors. It rests on a “Thucydidean” view of the international order: “the strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must.” While this approach may yield quick results producing shock, deterrence, and domestic political gains, it also erodes international cooperation, fuels global resentment, and pushes traditional allies toward China. Moreover, history shows that military force without legitimacy ultimately wears down the dominant power itself, as occurred in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
Sullivan underscores the political-psychological pattern; the author—who has been following Trump for years—links hard power with political narcissism: the leader as the sole moral yardstick, unpredictability as a tactic, hostility toward external checks (courts, treaties, the press), and disdain for the “moral cost” of using force.
The risks of strategic bullying
Overextension: “predation” requires sustained presence and shows diminishing returns of military power without legitimacy.
In Latin America, U.S. intervention and direct control of resources revive memories of the twentieth century, undermining the future of hemispheric cooperation and diversifying alliances toward China or Russia. Moreover, the message that the U.S. can “take whatever it wants” fosters new anti-American alliances and insurgencies.
Historian Alfred W. McCoy, in his recent book Cold War on Five Continents, argues that these behaviors do not herald the expansion of an empire but rather its decline. McCoy contends that the United States displays symptoms of a worn-out power: aggressive militarism, internal instability, and erosion of its global legitimacy. For him, excessive reliance on covert operations, indirect coups, and support for local elites has degraded America’s democratic prestige. Furthermore, U.S. foreign policy has shown a tendency toward strategic irrationality, which could precipitate the empire’s collapse before 2040.
He describes a logic of constant military intervention that acts as a mechanism to sustain short-term influence, but without democratic backing or long-term strategies, clandestine practices, and repression that erode soft power and democratic legitimacy.
McCoy maintains that the United States has entered an advanced phase of imperial self-sabotage. In this reading, the aggressiveness of U.S. foreign policy would be less a calculated expansion than a series of “death throes”: desperate attempts to retain influence in a world where its relative power, far from growing as the “omnipresent and omnipotent” Trump claims, may actually be diminishing.
One thing is certain: 2026 promises everything except stability and predictability—something immigrants are already accustomed to, and whose resilience will prevail.