While many elements of the War on Terror shape Trump’s actions, the significance of the backlash against American power that the War on Terror inspired has, dangerously, not sunk in. After Trump demanded that Denmark cede Greenland to the US as imperial tribute, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney drew a rare ovation at the World Economic Forum in Davos for a speech abandoning the “pleasant fiction” that the “rules-based international order” was anything other than a vehicle for US prerogatives. Carney told Europeans horrified at being treated as the sort of foreign possession they themselves used to seize, “We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.” But with an insurgency yet to develop in Venezuela, and with NATO hustling to secure a deal to prevent a US move on Greenland, Trump has encountered little to deter him from his mode of imperialism before it reached Tehran. That’s ominous for Havana—and beyond.
Historians will spend decades debating the exact moment when the US empire discredited itself and irrevocably hobbled the international law that it masquerades as. Carney marked it at the Greenland crisis. Many others mark it at the beginning of Israel’s US-sponsored genocide in Gaza in October 2023. I would offer that it’s the War on Terror—corresponding as it does with all but the first 10 years of US global dominance—that defines American power during its period of supremacy. It is an era in which the United States inflicted sustained violence throughout the Global South and called it “order.” But the waves of resistance that US actions generated exposed American weakness. Resentment over the agonies of the War on Terror played an enormous role in Trump’s rise to power.
Every historical era is shaped by its predecessor. The War on Terror was shaped by the Cold War, and it now shapes the empire Trump is constructing. That makes the path of resistance to this new era of imperialism clear: The tools of the War on Terror must be destroyed before Trump uses them to finish building his world order, at home and abroad.