The recent U.S. bombing of Iran appears to be part and parcel of a larger colonial project under the Trump administration.
With high-profile efforts to colonize Canada and Greenland effectively serving as distractions, the United States appears to be engaged in the recolonization of the Global South. It is using military interventions, tariffs, and travel bans to reassert U.S. power and neocolonial subjugation.
For centuries, and increasingly in the post-Cold War era, the United States has sought to shape geopolitical outcomes and exploit resources and markets in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Central and South America, and the Middle East, according to Sidita Kushi, an incoming politics professor at Mount Holyoke College. Kushi co-authored a data analysis published by the Military Intervention Project, which studied U.S. military intervention since the country’s founding.
“Some of these interventions are framed in humanitarian terms, yet this rhetoric can obscure underlying interests and lower the costs of an intervention,” Kushi told The Emancipator. She added that such approaches “expose identity-based hierarchies in the international system as well as Eurocentric standards of statehood and good governance.”
Out of nearly 400 military interventions by the U.S. since its founding, 34% have been against countries in the Caribbean and Latin America, 23% in the Pacific and East Asia, and 14% in the Middle East and North Africa, the study found.
Comparatively, according to the study, only 13% have been against countries in Europe and Central Asia.
Between the late 1700s and mid-1800s, the U.S. mainly intervened in North America, the Pacific, and Latin America. Caribbean and Latin American countries were primarily targeted from the mid-1800s to the early 1900s, Kushi said. The U.S. decreased military interventions between World Wars I and II. But still, the majority of the interventions targeted the Caribbean, East Asia, the Pacific, and Latin America.
U.S. authorities fanned fears that “communists” would “erode” American values, as well as propaganda that anti-colonial and antiracist leaders were all “communists.” Both set up U.S. military interventions to overthrow anti-colonial governments in Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Caribbean to be justified as containing “anti-American” communism, according to scholars.
“During the Cold War, U.S. foreign policy elites and the public tightly linked anti-colonialism and civil rights movements throughout the globe to the perceived threat of communist expansion,” said Kushi, author of the upcoming book, “From Kosovo to Darfur: The Regional Biases within Humanitarian Military Interventionism.” America’s foreign policy initiatives and actions during the Cold War left a “racialized legacy across the world.”
This racialized legacy remains ever present today.
The U.S. has targeted some Black and Brown countries because they have been traditionally viewed as “dangerous, unstable, undemocratic,” Andrew Rosenberg, a political science professor at the University of Florida, told The Emancipator.
“What happened is that the Global North White countries intervened throughout the Global South in Brown and Black parts of the world. And those interventions had important consequences that led to violence, destabilized political institutions, led to extractive economic relations that left these parts of the world poorer and worse off,” Rosenberg said. “Now, the modern consequence of that is that these places seem sort of inherently in danger or poor or undemocratic or unstable and that is used to justify these supposedly objective foreign policy measures.”
The U.S. will never show its hand and directly say it’s trying to exert and maintain a neocolonial hold over a nation. It will instead try to justify its aims in the name of national interests or spreading democracy, international relations scholars also say.
These means include U.S. military intervention in Vietnam, Iraq, Somalia, and democratically elected regimes in Central America to “prop up undemocratically elected dictatorial regimes in the name of fighting communism and securing freedom,” Rosenberg said.
Today, the Trump administration is openly trying to assert influence and control over countries, particularly in Africa, Asia, South America, and the Middle East, not only through military force, but also by withholding foreign aid and by imposing disproportionately steep tariffs.
For example, Lesotho faced a 50% tariff on goods and Botswana faced 37%.
In order to feel economic relief and, in some cases, be considered an equitable partner of the U.S., some of these countries have been told they must meet a set of demands that benefit the U.S.
During colonialism, colonial subjects in the Global South were usually restricted in their international travel to so-called mother countries in the Global North.
The majority of nations facing travel bans and visa restrictions over purported “national security and public safety threats” are Black and Brown. There are reports that the administration may add more African countries to the list if they do not meet U.S. requirements on how they should vet citizens in their own countries.
These actions further codify a U.S. colonial relationship with the Global South in all but name.
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