As Venezuela’s skyline lit up under US bombs, we were watching the morbid symptoms of a declining empire. That may sound counterintuitive. After all, the US has kidnapped a foreign leader, and Donald Trump has announced that he will “run” Venezuela. Surely this looks less like decay than intoxication: a superpower high on its own force.

But Trump’s great virtue, if it can be called that, is candour. Previous US presidents draped naked self-interest in the language of “democracy” and “human rights”. Trump dispenses with the costume. In 2023, he boasted: “When I left, Venezuela was ready to collapse. We would have taken it over, we would have gotten all that oil, it would have been right next door.” And this was no off-the-cuff remark. The logic of an oil grab, and much more besides, is laid out plainly in Trump’s recently published National Security Strategy.

The document accepts something long denied in Washington: that US global hegemony is over. “After the end of the Cold War, American foreign policy elites convinced themselves that permanent American domination of the entire world was in the best interests of our country,” it declares with barely concealed contempt. “The days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over.” These are the strategy’s unceremonious funeral rites for US superpower status.

What replaces it is a world of rival empires, each enforcing its own sphere of influence. And for the US, that sphere is the Americas. “After years of neglect,” the strategy pronounces, “the United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere.” The Monroe doctrine, formulated in the early 19th century, purported to block European colonialism. In practice, it laid the foundations for US domination over its Latin American back yard.

Violence in Latin America facilitated by Washington is hardly new. My parents took in refugees who had fled Chile’s........

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