What’s Really Driving Trump’s Moves In Venezuela And Greenland

Many Americans seeking to understand what drives President Donald Trump have looked back to the history of the 19th century, to when the world was carved up into spheres of influence dominated by a handful of “great powers.” But an influential new paper argues that we should cast our eyes further back, beyond the swaggering statesmen of the imperialist era to the age of absolute monarchs if we really want to understand the world Trump is shaping.

Wellesley College’s Stacie Goddard and Georgetown University’s Abraham Newman call this emerging order “neo-royalism,” and describe it as a global system dominated by rivalries between a small group of leaders and allied “hyper-elites,” all looking to gain wealth or status.

In a conversation just days after the Trump administration’s assertion of control over Venezuela and amidst the White House’s saber-rattling over Greenland, Goddard and Newman said the president’s focus on Venezuela and Greenland highlights a growing divergence between the 19th century definition of America’s national interest that many Trump critics accuse him of bringing back, and the reality of how the president is acting globally. It’s a divergence that their theory helps explain.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

The American incursion into Venezuela has caused a lot of people to say the U.S. is going back to the age of great power spheres of influence, where big countries threw their weight around and divvied up the world. But two months ago, you published a scholarly paper saying this might not be the perfect comparison. How do you describe this new American dynamic you call “neo-royalism”?

Goddard: The idea of great power competition and spheres of influence, the traditional way of understanding that era, actually doesn't make sense of what’s happening now. We understand there's all this stuff about the “Donroe Doctrine” and this Western hemispheric stance. But why it doesn't make sense is that a lot of the moves that you're actually seeing the Trump administration make aren't necessary. They're costly, and they undermine United States security.

Let me take the more recent example of Greenland. The United States already has a sphere of influence in Greenland. It can have any base it wants. Denmark has promised more influence on what is going on there. And what we argue is this has less to do with increasing spheres of influence or competing with great powers, and more to do with a Trump administration and a small clique of insiders who see themselves as exceptional and are basically demonstrating their dominance over subordinate territories. And if you understand that this is really designed to make a select group powerful, rather than the United States as a whole, it makes a lot more sense.

So let's break this down, because in the 19th century era that people seem to be citing a lot these days, there were a lot of royals in charge of a lot of countries who had cliques around them. What’s the difference between that and what you guys are arguing?

Newman: The first thing that we're trying to underscore is what happens in world politics when the leaders of the most powerful states switch from what we would think of as Weberian bureaucratic states, where foreign policy is run through decision making based on national goals and expertise, and instead move towards personalistic regimes where that system is broken down and leaders have very few checks on what they are doing, and where they're acting based on factions that are lobbying them, small groups of elites that often have very different interests.

So, in Venezuela, you have the [Secretary of State Marco] Rubio camp and the [deputy chief of staff Stephen] Miller camp and the people looking for energy resources or critical minerals. They all have very different influence, and they're looking for the moment where the leader will then approve their particular interest. And so you get, I would say, rash decision making. It leads to a very different type of politics than what we have been living, or even what we had in the 19th century, when we had the Bismarckian state that was pretty bureaucratic.

So in the age of great powers, you had these people who were by no means democrats, but who ran traditional states with bureaucracies that identified national interests and acted on them. You write that what's emerging now is “an international system structured by a small group of hyper-elites who use modern economic and military interdependencies to extract material and status resources for themselves.” In that kind of world, is there even such a thing as national interest?

Goddard: No. There isn’t such a thing as national interest. That’s in some ways the most straightforward answer. And I think, too, that this is also different than, say, the autocracy-versus-democracy framework that a lot of people have been running with. In the 19th century, even if we're talking about big names like Bismarck, we're still talking about a national state that was interested in mobilization. It built bureaucracies, standing professional militaries,professional diplomatic corps. So there was all of this infrastructure in the state in order to accomplish this mobilization, both at home and abroad. And what we're seeing here is not only the lack of a national interest, but a move from mobilization to the processes of extraction. It doesn't really matter if you're doing something to harness the power of the state. What matters is if you're finding those resources to feed those clique interests.

So how did Trump's actions in Venezuela fit into this neo-royalist framework? The administration might say the American energy companies getting access to more oil is good for the United States writ large. That’s a pretty typical assessment of national interest.

Newman: What we're trying to argue is that what the clique wants to do is put themselves at the center of both status and material resources. And that's really what you see happening here. There's all these stories about how actually Venezuelan oil is very difficult to process or how the infrastructure is so beaten down. So I don't think that the U.S. oil industry has been just waiting to take over Venezuela for all this time. Instead, it's a moment of dominance and uncertainty that Trump and his inner circle put all these spoils on the table and then say, “Who's willing to make a deal to be part of this?” And so it concentrates, whether this is threats against Greenland, or the Venezuela move. All of these things make people uncertain about what is the economic future and how they will position themselves in the spoils game. And it re-emphasizes the key role in the middle for these clique actors.

So spinning it forward, what does this neo-royalism organizing concept tell you about what we should expect from here? Because, as you've noted, there's a lot of contradictions in what they've said they're going to do in Venezuela.

Goddard: I think they're going to try to do the minimal amount possible. The Trump administration isn't interested in regime change. There have been no attempts to actually replace members of the administration, including people who worked very closely with [former Venezuelan president Nicolas] Maduro. So what we're likely to see are a series of side payments, whether in the form of oil, whether in the form of minerals, whether in the form of name your goodie, to the members of the clique. There's symbolic side payments going on as well. Rubio now gets to tout this as a success for the very vocal Cuban base. So I think that we're not going to see, actually, a lot of material changes on the ground, but a lot of processes of material extraction into the small group.

One thing about your framework, as you've noted, is it doesn't just involve the royal family, as in the old days, but these folks you call “hyper-elites” in business and politics, who you’ve been referring to as the clique. You say these folks use the system to retain a spot atop money and status hierarchies. Who is this hyper elite in the second Trump era?

Newman: One circle is the family. But then on top of that, you have the loyalist circle, the political cadre. And then you do have a series of economic elites. And this is where I think Stacie's point about extraction is important. This isn't mainline capitalism. This isn't the heads of, I don't know, Costco, Target, Walmart. These are more a group of actors who see a moment to create oligopolistic power. And so you're seeing the tech companies, many of them, at the center of this. And one of the things that Stacie and I are very concerned about is the spillover of those economic actors willing to legitimize and play in this domain. These are actors who are acclimating themselves to this order and this way of business. Right now, this order is not yet consolidated, but the more these economic actors widen, the harder it will be to reverse.

But on the narrow case of Venezuela, because their economy is so energy dominated, it seems a little further afield from the economic elites that are typically associated with the Trump administration. Exxon or Chevron are big bureaucratic corporations, and they aren’t led by the sort of dynamic single person like Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos, the tech lords from the inauguration. So how do those older economic interests factor in the decision making around Venezuela, as far as you know?

Newman: [Trump] was very clear in his press statement that we're going to control the oil, and then we're going to use this to help America. And I see that as concentrating economic resources, which he will then dole out. It's kind of similar to the NVIDIA deal, a case where “We're going to give you this market access, and we're going to take a cut of it.” Or putting himself at the center of the UAE chip negotiations. It's a way for him and his group of elites to have a new pile of economic resources that can be doled out in a patronage-like system.

According to your article, this is not just a U.S. phenomenon. Can you talk about some of the ways it manifests elsewhere?

Goddard: I think the clearest place that it manifests is the Gulf states, and the connections that have been built up there. We say this in the article: It's no surprise that the Trump administration's first stop in his second presidential term was in the Gulf states. And it wasn't just symbolic. It was about building these types of connections between venture capitalism, between technology firms and sources of wealth in the Gulf states. You see this obviously in Russia and in Hungary and in Turkey, right? It might sound odd, but we would say this is less so in China because I think that regime has so constituted its legitimacy around anti- corruption that it's been unwilling to work very visibly with these hyper elites that we've been talking about.

One place where I had some doubts about your schema is this idea that the rulers and the cliques look to maintain their status through “cultural tributes.” And I'm wondering, isn't a lot of that just garden variety butt-kissing that happens in any political system on Earth?

Newman: I think the clearest example here is the fallout between the U.S. and India over the Nobel Peace Prize. This is a case where, if you were in a spheres-of-influence, or a dueling-blocs kind of world, you would think the U.S. would be creating deeper relations with India to create a check against China. But instead, you have this really remarkable series of meetings where Trump demands that [Indian Prime Minister Narendra] Modi say that Trump solved the India-Pakistan conflict. Modi, who is also a personalist leader, can't do that, because it would be domestic political suicide for him. And so then Trump imposes these really remarkable tariffs on India, and it has really created kind of a breakdown in the U.S.-Indian relationship. For us, it's about, you have to show that this isn't a rules-based order. This isn't about WTO or whatever. This is about dominance between these different figures. Although it seems silly, these kinds of cultural tropes always have tremendous power.

You write that this tendency in media and academia to understand this new era through the prism of the 19th century and the age of great power rivalries limits people's imaginations about what might happen. Your imaginations have presumably been liberated. Tell me what you're imagining right now, about the world in the next few years.

Goddard: I'm too busy curled up in the fetal position most of the time to say anything about that! The reason that Abe and I wrote this and want to talk about it is obviously not because we're proponents of neo-royalism or because we think it is inevitable. We hope that in five years, people look at this paper and say, “Well, that was a little far out and of course, that wasn't going to happen.” But I think the problem is that the types of things that we normally think of as checks on this type of behavior are not the checks we think they are. And if I can actually point out just a few things in this conversation — why is [the Venezuela incursion] about the oil that's not profitable? It’s irrational, right? Well, that's thinking about it from a standard capitalist point of view, as opposed to this kind of patronage thinking. Or why are we doing this in Greenland,where it doesn't actually enhance U.S. security? National interest is not the story that's going on here. So I think if we don't break through those prisms, we actually lose the tools to resist, right? These types of practices then become so embedded that they’re the basic structure.

Newman: Rational depends on the system you're in. So if you're in the spheres-of-influence system, this might not appear rational, but if you're in this neo-royalist structure, it's perfectly rational.