Announcing on Saturday the U.S. military incursion in Venezuela and the capture of its leader, President Donald Trump was characteristically blunt. After rattling off pretextual justifications for the raid—allusions to President Nicolás Maduro’s democratic illegitimacy, his alleged drug-trafficking ties, and the specter of ISIS, Iran, and “narco-terrorism”—Trump got to the point.

“As everyone knows, the oil business in Venezuela has been a bust, a total bust, for a long period of time,” he said. “They were pumping almost nothing by comparison to what they could have been pumping and what could’ve taken place. We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure—the oil infrastructure—and start making money for the country.”

When I was cutting my teeth as a journalist covering the Pentagon during the outbreak of the Iraq War in 2003, this would have been shocking. Back then, the suggestion that President George W. Bush had ordered the invasion and the capture of Saddam Hussein to seize the oil was considered radical; that a president might publicly admit it the stuff of a Dave Chappelle sketch. But as a student of empire, I recognized something deeper in Trump’s words. He isn’t just embarking on a dangerous new adventure in South America, nor even merely adding to the string of U.S.-backed coup attempts in Venezuela. He is turning the clock back to a long-dormant era of U.S. and European imperialism—one that proved disastrous for those in its crosshairs, and ultimately for the entire world.

Though largely forgotten today, in the decades before World War II the United States embarked on a spree of overseas territorial and resource conquests. From 1898 to roughly 1934, the U.S. military invaded, occupied, and in some cases outright colonized no fewer than 14 countries and territories in whole and in part, including Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico,........

© New Republic