In the months before the U.S. military snatched Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, from their home, President Trump justified his buildup of forces in the Caribbean as an extension of his “America First” domestic agenda. He was ordering deadly missile strikes against boats in the region because they were smuggling drugs at Maduro’s behest and those drugs were killing Americans, he claimed. A similar, if not necessarily coordinated, attack on Americans’ safety was being perpetrated at home by undocumented immigrants, whom Trump accused, without evidence, of all being violent criminals.

But as soon as the raid was over, leaving at least 60 people dead and Venezuela’s economic resources in U.S. hands, Trump and his top aides pivoted to bald-faced imperialism, musing openly about other countries they could soon put under American control.

“Cuba is ready to fall,” the president said dryly as anti-Trump protesters flooded Havana. “Colombia is very sick, too, run by a sick man who likes making cocaine and sending it to the United States, and he’s not going to be doing it very long” — an unambiguous threat against President Gustavo Petro. “Something’s going to have to be done with Mexico,” he later said. Stephen Miller used the occasion to rattle officials in Denmark as well as the putative NATO allies of the U.S. by declaring Greenland as good as ours. “Nobody’s going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland,” he told CNN’s Jake Tapper. The administration is so eager to assert what it sees as its natural imperialist mandate that Trump has dubbed it the “Donroe Doctrine,” a winking play on President James Monroe’s 1823 declaration that foreign powers who tried to colonize the Western Hemisphere were effectively picking a fight with the U.S., the region’s sole and rightful plunderer.

The American looting of Venezuela already seems to be underway. “We are in the midst right now........

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