When a bleary-eyed Trump explained the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro this past Saturday, he invoked the Monroe doctrine: while the US president sounded as if he were reading about it for the first time, historians of course recognized the idea of Washington as a kind of guardian of the western hemisphere. Together with the national security strategy published in December, the move on Venezuela can be understood as advancing a vision for carving up the world into what the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt called “great spaces”, with each in effect supervised by a great power (meaning, in today’s world, Washington, Moscow and Beijing). But more is happening than a return to such de facto imperialism: Trump’s promise to “run the country” for the sake of US oil companies signals the internationalization of one aspect of his regime – what has rightly been called the logic of the mafia state. That logic is even more obvious in his stated desire to grab Greenland.
The theory of the mafia state was first elaborated by the Hungarian sociologist Bálint Magyar in 2016. Such a state is less about corruption where envelopes change hands under the table. Instead, public procurement is rigged; large companies are brought under the control of regime-friendly oligarchs, who in turn acquire media to provide favorable coverage to the ruler. The beneficiaries are what Magyar calls the “extended political family” (which can include the ruler’s natural family). As with the mafia, unconditional loyalty is the price for being part of the system.
As so often with Trump 2.0, practices that other regimes try to veil have been unashamedly in the open: the “pausing” of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act signaled that the US is not only open for business but also bribing (be it with a jet or a fake prize from Fifa); not only do pardons appear to be for sale; and not only can companies curry favor by financing a grotesque ballroom – but also the president’s political family, which includes billionaires like Steve Witkoff and Howard Lutnick, seems poised to profit handsomely, including from foreign deals, and now foreign military adventures; according to the investigative reporter Judd Legum, the Trump oligarch Paul Singer (owner of the oil company Citgo), is to set to do very well with a Trump-controlled government in Caracas.
This does not mean that the US’s “special military operation” in Venezuela is entirely a matter of “it’s the oil, stupid”; there is an argument that it helps push back against Iran, China and Russia (even if the precedent that killing 40 people and kidnapping sets also legitimizes interventions by other powers, as those lamenting the weakening of international law have rightly pointed out). There is also the old-style neoconservative justification for removing a tyrant from power, something that the former self of Marco Rubio, before bending the knee, would have favored – though leaving a decapitated regime in place has made talk of democracy and human rights protection a tad implausible. But the point is not regime change, as long as a regime is fine with Trumpian exploitation. The alternative is extortion: if the US oil companies get “total access”, the rulers of what is also a mafia state of sorts can stay in place; if not, it’s a bigger boss talking to a minor boss along the lines of: “Nice country you have there; pity if we had to do a full-scale invasion.”
What really gives the game away is the almost immediate follow-up chatter not just about Cuba, but about Greenland. Aboard Air Force One, Trump, Lutnick and Lindsey Graham had a good – in fact, obscene – laugh about the supposed inability of Denmark to provide security in the Arctic Circle; the joke that had the sycophants in stitches consisted of saying that Denmark was now providing one more dog sled for security (the reality is that Copenhagen recently decided to send new naval vessels and surveillance drones – though an important elite dog-sled patrol does actually exist). In any case, the US has long had a base in Greenland and in many ways used the territory as it saw fit: despite a Danish policy against nuclear weapons, during the cold war, the US started flying nuclear-armed B-52s over Greenland, and they did so, it turned out, with the tacit consent of the Danish government (some footage of Dr Strangelove was filmed over Greenland). What Danish politicians are only slowly realizing is that the main issue isn’t national security, but the Trumpian euphemism of “economic security”.
Greenland holds critical minerals; but it also provides a seemingly blank slate for the kinds of settler colonial fantasies that another set of Trump allies, the tech bros, have long been cultivating: charter cities, “network states” or even “seasteading”, based on a combination of libertarian ideology and limitless AI experiments. A company called Praxis – with funds from Peter Thiel – has been pursuing the idea of starting new countries with cryptocurrency; one of its founders, Dryden Brown, went on record claiming that “Praxis would like to support Greenland’s development by coordinating talent, companies, and capital to help secure the Arctic, extract critical resources, terraform the land with advanced technology to make it more habitable, and build a mythical city in the North”.
Again, as with Latin America, there is a larger background story that matters: Pat Buchanan, the 1992 presidential candidate, already had his eyes on Greenland; plus, there is the fact that the current president is attracted to – how to put this politely – strong visuals; he once observed: “I love maps. And I always said: ‘Look at the size of this … That should be part of the United States.’” But the logic of extraction (if, necessary, preceded by extradition to a US court), exploitation and, if necessary, extortion is what most seems to be animating the quest for what one sycophant in Congress has claimed should be re-named “Red, White, and Blueland”.
Jan-Werner Müller is a Guardian US columnist and a professor of politics at Princeton University
