The latest war has also dealt a potentially fatal blow to our already battered democratic institutions. It’s a war neither by Congress nor by the public. Instead, it was launched by a president who refuses to submit to the law or heed the will of the people, claiming in true authoritarian fashion that he is the law, and that he alone embodies the popular will.

Such has, however, been decades in the making, a predictable result of longstanding imperial impunity. Yet we may rapidly be approaching a point of no return. Even US President George W. Bush, in launching his catastrophic of choice in the region, sought to manufacture consent and the case before the United Nations. Today, there is neither the pretense of legality nor of legitimacy.

The costs associated with this latest criminal war, measured in human lives; the misappropriation of national resources and the erosion of the rule of law will only continue to mount. Yet there is also a less visible, less immediate price tag for such wars. If the history of in the region offers any guide, the full bill will likely not become apparent for months, years or even decades. When it finally arrives, however, it will carry a familiar name: blowback.

For that reason, it’s important at this moment to recall the lessons Washington appears determined to forget. From Afghanistan to Iran, Iraq to , the record is unmistakable. Yet as long as the that grips this country’s political establishment remains unchallenged, the same cycles of escalation and reprisal will undoubtedly persist in the years to come, threatening to once again draw the United States (and much of the world) ever deeper into the abyss of forever war.

Oil and the engine of empire

While the post-September 11 “war on terror” is often invoked as the starting point of US militarism in the Middle East, the roots of conflict there stretch back nearly a century. The violence and instability unleashed after the attacks of September 11, 2001, represented less a rupture with the past than a continuation of long-established patterns of US policy. The seeds of the forever wars had, in fact, been planted decades earlier in the oil-rich soil of the region.

Direct American involvement began in the previous century, during the years between World War I and World War II. By that point, petroleum had become not merely a valuable commodity but a for sustaining a modern industrial economy. The vast oil reserves discovered in the US had propelled the American economy to global prominence and played a decisive role in fueling the Allied during World War I. Yet policymakers in Washington understood that domestic reserves were finite. As petroleum became synonymous with power, economically, militarily and politically, the US increasingly turned abroad to secure new sources.

The Middle East emerged as a critical frontier in that search, drawing the region ever more tightly into the orbit of an expanding American empire. In 1933, Company of California secured an exploratory concession with the conservative monarchy of Saudi Arabia. The agreement created the Arabian American Oil Company, laying the for the 1945 US–Saudi oil-for-security that would become central to Washington’s future influence over the region’s geopolitical order.

Over the years, the insatiable thirst for oil only drew the US ever deeper into the region. By 1953, American intervention assumed more overtly coercive forms. That year, in coordination with British intelligence, the CIA orchestrated the of Mohammad Mossadegh, Iran’s popular prime minister, who had committed a cardinal sin in the emerging Cold War years. In 1951, he presided over the nationalization of his country’s oil industry in an effort to return sovereign control of its resources to the Iranian people by wresting them from the exploitative grip of the Anglo-Iranian Oil , the precursor to .

Despite his rather than communist credentials, a fact understood in Tehran, London and Washington, Mossadegh would then be cast as, at worst, a dangerous proxy of the Soviet Union and, at best, a threat to regional stability (as in, American hegemony). The coup that followed ended Iran’s fragile democratic experiment, secured to Iranian oil for Western companies, and restored the Shah of Iran to power. His regime would then be sustained by a steady outward flow of oil and a nearly endless of US weaponry. With CIA backing, his secret police, , would terrorize and torture a generation of Iranians.

Yet Washington celebrated this new arrangement, claiming that Iran had been transformed into an “ of stability,” and a cornerstone of the “ strategy,” in which Washington would outsource regional Cold War policing to compliant authoritarian allies in Iran and Saudi Arabia. Such subversion of nationalist movements and support for despotic monarchies, as well as the increasingly unequivocal of Israel, would generate intense backlash. Among the most visible early expressions of that was the oil crisis, demonstrating how US policy in the Middle East could reverberate domestically.

But the first unmistakable case of blowback arrived in 1979 with the . In that country, discontent had been simmering beneath the seemingly stable façade of the Shah’s rule for years. When the monarchy collapsed after months of protests and repression, the Islamic Republic would fill the political vacuum, drawing on the theological language of and the political rhetoric of to the Shah, the US and Israel.

In the US, those developments were largely stripped of their historical context. Americans were instead cast as the innocent of irrational fanaticism. Why do they hate us? was the refrain that echoed across the Western media and the answers offered rarely confronted the long history of intervention and exploitation. Instead, they defaulted to a supposed with Islam, which was portrayed as inherently antagonistic to “Western values.”

Such explanations obscured an uncomfortable reality — that the US had repeatedly undermined democracy across the region (as well as in of the world) to advance its own interests. As a Pentagon commission report in 2004 , the problem was not that people “hate our freedoms,” as Bush had reductively , but that many “hate our policies.” In other words, the attacks on New York City and the Pentagon in Washington were the ultimate, if deeply disturbing, expression of blowback.

Revolution and counterrevolution in the Persian Gulf

Those widely resented policies from Washington were reinforced by its overreaction to the 1979 upheaval in Iran. That country’s new leader, , sought not only to transform Iranian society internally but envisioned the Islamic Republic as the opening move in a broader anti-imperialist struggle across the Middle East. For Washington and its reactionary regional allies, the specter of such potential revolutionary contagion posed a profound threat.

In January 1980, in an attempt to contain the Iranian regime, US President Jimmy Carter articulated a new foreign policy position that placed the US on a collision course in the region. The declared the Persian Gulf a “” of the US, warning that any attempt by an outside power to gain control would be repelled by “any means necessary, including military force.” In that fashion, Washington asserted an explicit claim to a protectorate thousands of miles from its shores. The US, Carter made clear, was prepared to send soldiers there to ensure uninterrupted access to oil.

The strategic reorientation that followed proved violent and far-reaching, while marking a shift away from and as the principal theaters of Cold War conflict. As historian Andrew Bacevich observed in his , America’s War for the Greater Middle East if you were to measure US involvement by the number of troops killed in action, the transformation was striking. From the end of World War II to 1980, almost no American soldiers were killed in the region. Since 1990, however, virtually none have been killed anywhere except in what Bacevich termed the “Greater Middle East.”

Measured in American lives alone, the subsequent costs would number in the thousands. Measured in civilians killed across the region, the toll would be . Over the past several decades US-led or -backed wars have contributed to the deaths of of people and the displacement of of millions more, producing one of the most devastating population catastrophes since the end of World War II.

Proxy wars and the escalation trap

The American shift toward the Middle East ensured that the US would become deeply entwined in a cascade of conflicts. As regional actors moved either to defend a fragile status quo or exploit the upheavals that followed, Washington began instigating new conflicts in the region.

In the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein the new government in Tehran on ideological and strategic grounds. The emergence of a revolutionary Shi’a state next door threatened his Sunni-dominated regime that ruled over a Shi’a majority in Iraq. At the same time, Saddam sought to what he perceived to be Iranian weakness, pressing longstanding revanchist claims to the oil-rich borderlands of southwestern Iran.

Saudi Arabia viewed these developments with . In the Saudi capital of Riyadh, policymakers feared that revolutionary ł§łóžąâ€™i˛őłž might threaten the of the kingdom’s Sunni Wahhabi monarchy. The call for a Shi’a revolution also raised concerns about unrest in its oil-rich Eastern Province, where Shi’a workers faced economic and near colonial conditions. Similar anxieties reverberated across the other Gulf monarchies.

The US responded by doubling down on support for the remaining pillars of its regional order, Saudi Arabia and Israel, while seeking to contain and roll back the perceived threat posed by Iran. Still interpreting regional upheaval through the prism of the Cold War, US policymakers also expanded their involvement elsewhere. In Afghanistan, the CIA launched the largest covert operation in its history, channeling weapons and to the Afghan mujahideen resisting the Soviet Union’s occupation of that country that began in December 1979.

The Soviet intervention itself was shaped by the shockwaves of the Iranian Revolution. Leaders in Moscow feared a militant Islam on their southern flank that might embolden within Muslim-majority regions of the Soviet Union.

In Iraq, the US publicly tilted toward Saddam Hussein while simultaneously engaging in illegal weapons sales to Iran, with the funds received being rerouted to bankroll another American-backed in Nicaragua. Meanwhile, the Lebanese Civil War, worsened by Israel’s 1982 of Lebanon, created the conditions for the rise of , which presented itself as a defender of marginalized Shi’a communities against Israeli military aggression and .

By 1986, after escalating regional violence and spill-over, US President Ronald Reagan took a step that paved the way for what would, in the next century, become Washington’s “War on Terror.” In April of that year, Reagan launched in the dense heart of the Libyan capital of Tripoli on the home of Libyan leader , holding him responsible for acts of non-state terrorism abroad, including support for from the Palestine Liberation Organization to the Irish Republican .

That operation marked a significant escalation in the region and its justification would later be formalized as the : the claim that Washington could wage preemptive war anywhere against any state accused of supporting terrorism inside its country or outside its borders. That doctrine was no less illegitimate, illegal or dangerous in the 1980s than it would become two decades later. As political activist Daniel Ellsberg then — a point he would continue to press throughout his life, including after President Barack Obama ordered on Libya in 2011 — it seemed that the US had “adopted a public policy of responding to state-sponsored terrorism with U.S. state-sponsored terrorism.”

In each instance, deeper involvement in the region produced deeper backlash. The US-backed Afghan jihad helped give rise to in 1988 and paved the way for the Taliban’s of power in 1996 and the 20-year American war in Afghanistan. The of the 1980s set in motion a chain of events that culminated in the of 1991, which laid the groundwork for the criminal 2003 US of Iraq. The instability that followed not only expanded Iran’s but contributed to the emergence of the . In Lebanon, the power vacuum that Hezbollah came to fill resulted in the 1983 barracks in the Lebanese capital of Beirut, the deadliest day for US Marines since Iwo Jima in World War II.

The lesson not learned

The pattern is difficult to ignore, despite our government’s persistent efforts to do so. Many of the actors Washington came to identify as its principal adversaries emerged either in direct response to US policies or had themselves once been cultivated by Washington in pursuit of short-sighted strategic aims. In case after case, conflicts initiated or intensified by the US appeared to subside, only to reemerge in new, more volatile forms. Intervention produced instability; instability served to justify further interventions; and the cycle only repeated itself thereafter.

There is little reason to believe that US President Donald Trump’s war against Iran will prove any different. By now, the historical record should make that clear, which is why we must oppose the violence being carried out in our name, as it is wrong, criminal and immoral. We must oppose it for our common humanity, but also for our own sake.

After all, history tells us one thing: When we wage unjust wars that terrorize distant populations in far-off lands, the violence rarely remains confined there. Sooner or later, in one form or another, it returns. Violence begets violence, and imperial war has a way of back upon those who initiate it. We reap what we sow; the chickens, in time, invariably come home to roost.

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A recent wave of at sea, the directing of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to launch inside Venezuela, the surge of into the Caribbean, the reopening of a long-shuttered in Puerto Rico and the deployment of the aircraft carrier in the region represent striking but not surprising developments. These are little more than the latest expression of an ideological project through which Washington has long sought to shape the hemisphere in ways that would entrench US power further and protect the profits of Western multinationals.

That formal project dates back to at least the 1823 , when the US unilaterally claimed Latin America as its exclusive sphere of influence. Its revival today is unmistakable and . As Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth , echoing the language of that two-century-old policy, “The Western Hemisphere is America’s neighborhood, and we will protect it.”

The results of that doctrine have long been : immense profits for the few and violence, political upheaval, social dislocation and economic devastation for the many. While Washington’s imperial desires in the hemisphere have long been met by movements challenging US dominance, these have repeatedly been forced back into the subordinate position assigned to them in a global capitalist order designed to benefit their not-so “good neighbor.”

It’s no accident that, by the mid-1970s, Latin America had been transformed into a hemisphere dominated by US-backed right-wing authoritarian regimes. Entire regions like the became laboratories for repression, as Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay formed a coordinated bloc of military juntas. With direct support from Washington, those regimes oversaw what came to be known as , establishing a transnational network of state terror. Its consequences were catastrophic: 50,000 killed, tens of thousands “disappeared” and hundreds of thousands tortured and imprisoned for the so-called crime of harboring real or perceived leftist sympathies.

During that earlier period, Venezuela had been largely spared the brutal excesses of direct US interventionism in the region (due in part to the repressive rule of successive US-supported strongmen and ). That changed in 1998, when , far more popular predecessor, became president and pursued policies of and aimed at ensuring the nation’s vast oil reserves (the in the world) served Venezuelans rather than being siphoned off to enrich foreign corporations. From then on, Venezuela became the of Washington’s efforts to undermine, discipline and ultimately neutralize “troublesome” progressive governments across Latin America.

To fully understand Washington’s current warpath in the region, it’s necessary to revisit earlier episodes in which the US intervened, violently and antidemocratically, to shape the political destinies of countries in the hemisphere. Three cases are especially instructive: Cuba, Guatemala and Chile. Together, they illuminate the long arc of US imperialism in Latin America and clarify the dangers of the present confrontation.

The rise of Plattismo in Cuba

Cuba had long been a crown jewel in Washington’s imperial imagination. By 1823, American political elites were already casting the island as to the future of the United States. President John Quincy Adams, for instance, , then a Spanish colony, as “indispensable” to the country’s “political and commercial interests.” He ominously that, should the island be “forcibly disjointed from its own unnatural connection with Spain and incapable of self-support,” it could “gravitate only towards the North American Union.” Thomas Jefferson that the possession of Cuba was “exactly what is wanting to round out our power as a nation.” In that spirit, during the 1840s and 1850s, Presidents James K. Polk and Franklin Pierce sought to from Spain, overtures that were repeatedly rejected.

Those efforts unfolded during a period of rapid US territorial expansionism, marking a time when Washington regarded continental conquest as both a “” and a political and economic imperative. When ostensibly legal mechanisms like could be invoked, they were embraced. When military force offered a more expedient path to territorial acquisition, as with the that stripped Mexico of half its territory and delivered what became the American Southwest to US control in 1848, it was undertaken with little hesitation.

The opportunity to pursue longstanding ambitions in Cuba and inaugurate the US as an overseas empire arrived with the of 1898. In that conflict, Washington intervened in anticolonial uprisings from Puerto Rico to the Philippines, not to champion genuine liberation but to ensure that any subsequent “independence” would be to US strategic and economic interests. What emerged was a political order deliberately engineered to keep Cuba firmly tethered to the priorities and power of the United States.

That would be codified in the 1901 , which effectively nullified Washington’s earlier assurances of Cuban sovereignty and granted Washington the right to establish military bases (including ), substantial control over the Cuban treasury and the ability to intervene whenever the US deemed it to safeguard its arbitrarily defined notion of what constituted “Cuban independence” or to defend “life, property, and individual liberty.”

In practice, Cuba emerged from the war as a dependent protectorate, not a sovereign nation. That model was soon codified for the entire hemisphere with the to the Monroe Doctrine issued in 1904, which granted the United States a self-appointed mandate to police the region to maintain “order.”

In Cuba, that arrangement would serve Washington’s interests for decades. By 1959, on the eve of the Cuban Revolution, US 90% of the island’s trade, 90% of its public services, 75% of its arable land and 40% of its sugar industry. Meanwhile, the vast majority of Cubans remained landless, disenfranchised and mired in poverty.

By breeding staggering inequality, Washington’s imperialism rendered Cuba ripe for revolution. In 1959, following years in exile, Fidel Castro to the island to overwhelmingly popular support, having launched an armed struggle after attempting to run in the 1952 elections that the Washington-backed Cuban leader Fulgencio Batista . Rather than confront the policies that had produced the revolution, US officials moved to make an example of Castro, waging an to undermine his revolutionary government and punish the population whose support had made his ascent possible.

Washington pursued everything from ill-fated invasions to assassinations, plots that, in October 1962, brought the world to the brink of a . It also imposed a punishing designed to choke the island’s economy, render socialism a stillbirth and deter other nations from challenging US hegemony. Those efforts foreclosed the possibility of constructive engagement, which Castro had initially he was open to, pushing Cuba decisively into the Soviet orbit, and creating the very outcome Washington claimed it had sought to avoid.

The fall of Guatemala

did not return to Cuba alone. He arrived alongside the Argentinian Ernesto , who would become a key ideologue of the revolution, bringing with him a commitment to constructing a global, anti-imperialist movement. The two first met in in Mexico City, where Castro was organizing in exile, and Guevara had resettled after working as a doctor in Guatemala, a country he had entered to support the democratic spring of President .

The democratic experiment in Guatemala was abruptly and violently extinguished in 1954, when a toppled Árbenz. From that experience, Guevara carried with him an indelible lesson about the reach of US power and Washington’s willingness to deploy force in defense of corporate interests, along with the profoundly antidemocratic and destabilizing consequences of US intervention across the hemisphere.

That coup in Guatemala was carried out in service to that country’s real center of authority, the Boston-based . Founded in 1899, United Fruit consolidated its foothold there through a series of preferential corporate arrangements, as successive strongmen ceded vast tracts of land and critical infrastructure to the company in exchange for personal enrichment. In the process, Guatemala was transformed into the archetypal “.”

United Fruit came to Guatemala’s agricultural and industrial sectors, transforming itself into one of the most profitable corporations in the world. It secured extraordinary returns through its monopoly power, wage suppression and the criminalization of labor organizing. Its influence extended into the of Washington. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had represented United Fruit as a senior partner at the law firm Sullivan and Cromwell, and his brother, CIA director Allen Dulles, had previously served on that company’s board.

Árbenz regarded United Fruit not just as a threat to Guatemala’s sovereignty but also as an engine of injustice. In a country where 2% of the landholders controlled of all arable land (more than half controlled by United Fruit), much of it left deliberately fallow, he sought to challenge a system that denied millions of peasants access to the land on which their survival depended. His land reform applied only to uncultivated land. The government proposed purchasing idle tracts at their declared tax value (based on the company’s own assessments). Yet because United Fruit had its vast land holdings to evade taxes, the company refused.

Árbenz’s policies, driven by the fact that he was a nationalist (not a communist), were committed to dismantling Guatemala’s imperial dependency. His objective was to , as he put it, “Guatemala from a country bound by a predominantly feudal economy into a modern capitalist state, and to make this transformation in a way that will raise the standard of living of the great mass of our people to the highest level.” Yet, in the ideologically charged climate of the early Cold War years, such New Deal-style reforms were recast by Washington as incontrovertible proof that a “” was taking root in Central America.

By 1954, US officials insisted that they had “no choice” but to intervene to prevent the country from “falling” to communism. The relied on an orchestrated propaganda campaign, the financing of a mercenary army and the aerial bombardment of Guatemala City. The combined pressure of all of that coerced Árbenz into resigning. In his , he condemned the attacks “as an act of vengeance by the United Fruit Company” and stepped down in the hope, quickly dashed, that his departure might preserve his reforms.

Power would soon be transferred to the military regime of , while US President Dwight D. Eisenhower that “the people of Guatemala, in a magnificent effort, have liberated themselves from the shackles of international Communist direction.” In reality, United Fruit had expanded its influence, while the country descended into decades of state terror. The that followed claimed more than 200,000 lives, including a against the indigenous Ixil Maya people, carried out with direct .

The crushing of Chilean socialism

If Guatemala exposed Washington’s readiness to destroy a modest social democracy in the name of communism and in defense of corporate power, Chile demonstrated the full, violent maturation of unrepentant Cold War interventionism. When the socialist physician won the presidency in 1970 in a democratic election, Washington immediately went on the , launching a covert, sustained campaign to strangle his government before it could succeed.

Allende sought to expand social welfare and the economy. His program called for the nationalization of strategic industries, the expansion of healthcare and education, the strengthening of organized labor and the dismantling of entrenched monopolistic landholdings. Those initiatives drew support from a broad, multiparty alliance rooted in Chile’s peasants as well as its working and middle classes. Above all, aimed to reclaim the nation’s mineral wealth from foreign capital, especially the US-based copper giant , whose staggering profits bore few meaningful returns for the Chilean population.

President Richard Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger found that intolerable and quickly came to regard Allende not just as a symbolic but a to US power in the region. After all, a successful socialist state achieved through the ballot box risked demonstrating that another political and economic path was indeed possible.

What followed was a coordinated campaign of economic, social and political destabilization. The CIA funneled millions to Chile’s opposition parties, business associations and media outlets. It financed strikes and disruptions designed to create and weaponize scarcity, to (in ) “make the economy scream” and erode confidence in Allende’s Popular Unity government. US officials also cultivated ties with reactionary factions in the Chilean military, encouraging coup plots and ultimately directly supporting the of Allende on September 11, 1973.

What emerged was one of the bloodiest dictatorships in the hemisphere in the twentieth century. General regime would carry out widespread torture, disappearances and extrajudicial killings, while US-trained economists radical neoliberal policies (similar to the now being implemented by Javier Milei in Argentina with the help of a US President Donald Trump ) that dismantled social protections and opened Chile’s economy to foreign capital.

Hands off Venezuela

In every instance where the United States intervened in Latin America, leaving tens of thousands dead and entire , it was never really communism that Washington feared. What alarmed policymakers and the corporate interests they served was the prospect that nations in the hemisphere might escape the economic architecture of US dominance.

When Hugo Chávez completed the nationalization of Venezuela’s oil sector in , he followed a long and perilous trajectory established by regional leaders who dared to confront US power. In doing so, they committed what Washington considered the “cardinal sin” of asserting sovereign control over national resources within a hemisphere it had long treated as its strategic preserve. These leaders demonstrated, however briefly, that it was possible to stand up to the United States, but that such defiance would ultimately be met with overwhelming force.

Independent powers in this hemisphere going their own way were the threat that Washington and Wall Street could never tolerate. It’s the same reason the United States is once again maneuvering toward open conflict in Venezuela. To proceed down such a path will, of course, mean reenacting some of the most catastrophic chapters of US foreign policy. The lesson of such imperial adventurism in Latin America is unmistakable. When Washington interferes in other nations, the outcome is never stability or democracy but their absolute negation.

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The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔšĎ’s editorial policy.

The post The Trump Corollary: US Imperialism in Latin America From the Monroe Doctrine to Maduro appeared first on 51łÔšĎ.