It seems like the answer is simply yes.
How else to explain things like the US President casually talking about “owning” Gaza and expelling its two million inhabitants to neighbouring countries?
His recent ‘Trump Gaza’ promo video has to be seen to be believed. You will marvel. And then you might puke.
Or the same US President meeting with Russia’s mafia boss Vladimir Putin to determine the fate of Ukraine without any Ukrainian negotiators or representatives involved in the discussion?
This regressive approach to geopolitics is entirely reminiscent of the imperial or Colonial operations of the past: such as the British and the French carving up the Middle East like a roast turkey dinner a century ago.
We are still living with the consequences of those Colonialist decisions today: everywhere from Israel and the Middle East to China and the Far East. Indeed some still argue the modern State of Israel itself is, from its inception, a Colonial entity in the Middle East.
Until recently, we appeared to have learnt from history, at least on a surface level: and decided collectively in the West that such imperialist arrogance and folly was something to be ashamed of and apologetic for – something to be consigned to the more embarrassing chapters of the history books.
Modern day gangsters like Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu and others appear to have flipped the script, however – and reverted us back to the old ways.
In this paradigm, might is right, aggression is rewarded, and only the bigger powers get to decide the fate and the rights of smaller countries or peoples.
At least, that’s how things look right now.
In truth, some of the gasps and shock at Trump and co’s recent actions and statements are a little blinkered, even hypocritical – because the reality is that this isn’t quite the paradigm-shift it appears to be.
It is simply a shift in language – and appearances.
But we’ll come to that.
Whatever the pros and cons of the Ukraine-Russia conflict, why it came about or who was ultimately to blame, the idea of the defending party in a war being excluded from discussions on a settlement is extraordinary – at least by modern principles.
But not, of course, by Colonialist standards. By those old standards, the lesser peoples have no voice in the discussions – the lesser peoples don’t matter enough to get to be involved in the ‘grown-ups’ machinations.
Nowhere was this more exemplified than in Trump’s all-too-nonchalant talk of the people of Gaza being forcibly displaced from their home and pushed into Jordan and Egypt.
To people like Trump, the Palestinians in Gaza are an irrelevance or afterthought – a minor or lesser people to be shepherded around like cattle, depending on the Colonial Powers’ interests.
In the days of empire, they used to be called ‘savages’.
And like the sidelined Ukrainians, no Palestinian representation has had any voice in Trump’s Gaza solution: just as Palestinians were completely absent from the Trump/Kushner Middle East Plan or ‘Deal of the Century’ a few years ago.
The fact the same Colonialist mentality is flourishing today demonstrates the regressive effect that leaders like Trump, Netanyahu and Putin are having on how the world is being shaped.
The fact that Trump wholly expects the Jordanians and Egyptians to forego their own objections and fall in line with US/Israeli imperialist visions reveals how little even the likes of Jordan and Egypt are respected as nations – expected instead to simply accommodate the needs of their geopolitical superiors.
Israel’s recent seizure of sovereign Syrian territory, as well as its casual incursion into Lebanon, again demonstrates the disregard for those nations’ sovereign rights.
Russia’s intent to hold on to captured Ukrainian territory likewise reveals an underlying imperialist worldview – with lesser nations or peoples seen as having less right to self-determination or sovereignty.
It’s the Colonialist mindset on full display.
Of course, I’ve presented a somewhat simplified outlook here.
The Ukrainians were heavily encouraged by Western sponsors to provoke conflict with Russia: and the whole project has been a misguided disaster, guided by the same foreign policy blunderers who’ve created catastrophes in half the world since 9/11.
I was never a supporter of the West’s Ukrainian project: nor was I ever a defender of Russia’s invasion. Even though Putin was right abut Nazi militants and Western machinations, the invasion was never justified and the talk of ‘denazification’ was always just a pretext.
And there’s still something deeply problematic about a sovereign nation having its fate and its territory decided on by external parties – including its invader – without having a seat at the table.
It’s the epitome of the old Colonialist paradigm.
But what the recent Trump era geopolitics has really done is to simply reveal things as they really are – and remove the wool from over our eyes.
Because we’ve somewhat deluded ourselves into believing that ‘we’ are better than this.
In reality, the undercurrents of an enduring Colonialist or Imperialist mindset arguably never really went away.
We simply rebranded and reimagined everything in more acceptable language and terms.
The extraction of resources from various countries, often by nefarious means and often to the detriment of native populations, has continued uninterrupted since Colonial times.
We just got better at managing the optics.
And the examples of contemporary Imperialist or Colonialist operations are endless.
Ongoing American, British and Western funding and support for illegal Israeli expansionism and settlement building is just one obvious example.
Insane levels of foreign interference in places like Syria and Iraq and the Middle East in general.
The propping up of client regimes in various countries, whether in Asia, Africa, the Arab world, or Latin America, has been going on for decades.
Overthrowing governments or directly supporting rebellions or militias – according to, not the interests of the native populations but the interests of the superior foreign meddlers and often of corporations.
How has any of this been anything other than Imperialist/Colonialist activity, albeit under different pretexts?
Even the entire Cold War was arguably just two imperialist powers using or manipulating lesser nations and peoples as pawns in their supposedly ideological conflict. But neither the West nor the Soviets actually gave a crap about actual Afghans or actual Vietnamese, for example.
NATO’s destruction of Libya in 2011 was modern day imperialism/Colonialism on full, naked display. Gaddafi had even described it himself in those exact terms.
The British-American overthrow of the democratically elected leader of Iran in 1953 is yet another major example.
We’ve just had a whole controversy in the UK about the British/US-controlled Chagos Islands and the US Diego Garcia military base.
Have you looked up what everyone from the US and France to China and Russia are doing in Africa these days?
Why is Spain still in Morocco?
What were the French doing in Mali?
Have you looked up what’s going on in the Congo?
All of this and more, year after year, decade after decade, has been the continuation of Imperialist or Colonialist operations – just under different pretexts and couched in more creative language.
The difference with Trump, Putin, Netanyahu, Erdogan and the like, is simply that they’ve dropped the pretenses, lowered the masks.
Now it’s all out in the open again – as it was in previous centuries.
Where Bush and co made up a dozen false reasons for going into Iraq, Trump would’ve simply said he wanted the oil – and he was going to go get it.
We can stop talking about ‘humanitarian intervention’ (Libya), or WMDs, or ‘nation building’, or spreading democracy, or ‘de-Nazifying’ (Ukraine), or any of the other pretenses various powers have used to justify their operations… and we can just be honest.
So now Trump can just blatantly say he wants those Ukrainian minerals, or he wants the Panama Canal, or he wants Gaza as a luxury resort.
No niceties or bullshit – just plain-talking.
Putin can just say he wants this or that territory in Ukraine. Israelis can just say they want an ethnic cleansing of Gaza or that they want parts of Syria.
It’s ugly. And deplorable. But at least it’s more honest. And a more honest representation of reality.
Which is that there are Greater Powers, with all-important ‘manifest destinies’. And there are lesser peoples and nations, who are really just cattle, and who’s fates are to be decided by their superiors.
As it was back then, so it is now.
