by Richard Balzano
2026 will mark a steep drop-off in functioning American adults who still believe in American exceptionalism, American innocence, and the altruistic fairytales and moral gymnastics used to justify U.S. foreign policy for the last 100+ years. It’s been standard practice for the U.S. to disregard international law with impunity, but U.S. and Western imperialism at large has historically been framed in moral packaging. The troglodytic brazenness with which the Trump regime violates international law and projects towards the international community has exposed a dark imperial wizard behind the moral curtain, amplifying the chasm between feel-good myth and reality.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney lamented in January 2026 to the World Economic Forum at Davos that the allegedly benevolent Western–led rules-based order had always been a cultish myth, a self-serving collective lie that provided post-colonial Western hegemony with the moral cover needed to justify its continuity. The jig is up for neo-colonialism and imperial bullying, international finance is a scam, international law is a selectively applied farce, and we in the West should no longer pretend otherwise. “You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration,” per Carney, “when integration becomes the source of your subordination.” Western adversaries and the Global South have known this all along.
Team Trump doesn’t bother pretending. They changed the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War. Secretary of State Marco Rubio called to revive Western colonialism at the February 2026 Munich Security Conference. The Iraq and Afghanistan quagmires were marketed with what was once considered obligatory liberation-speak and pre-emptive pageantry to leverage the international community’s begrudging support, though the wars’ emphatic American supporters championed an Orientalist cultish revenge fetish that sought no moral high ground for violence, and war jockey Pete Hegseth carries this energy into the present with self-aggrandizing and near-erotic descriptions of military operations. Trump is quite candid about the role of extractive resources in U.S. foreign policy. He boasted of Venezuela’s oil wealth, denied oil to Cuba, and he is currently being brought to heel by Iranian resource sovereignty. “No blood for oil” was an anti-war mantra that State Departments countered with claims of high-minded idealism. It was just a coincidence that nations with vast resource wealth and anti-imperialist leadership had populations in need of liberation. America the innocent, reluctant hero would do the job, but it was never about the oil; it was always about toppling dictators and liberating peoples, and when that was difficult to sell the White House could always fall back on the great alibi of upholding U.S. national security. Trump said what resource-rich countries always knew—if there’s oil in the ground, then its about the oil.
Early Cold War realists and idealists bickered over whether the American public could handle the ugly realities and political economy of American dominance, but the idealists won, and Americans got their foreign policy delivered in G-rated fairy tale form. When radical revisionists were driven from print by the politics of publication, surviving diplomatic historians’ disdain for political economy enabled the mythical security-centered Cold War history steeped in moral principles to survive into the 21st century, but that doesn’t change the reality in the ground—it’s always about oil.
Oil was rapidly integrated into the world economy at the start of the 20th century, and the World Wars demonstrated oil’s pertinent security value. At the dawn of the Cold War, the U.S. Paley Commission(s) outlined a host of critical resources essential to U.S. national security, and determined that controlling the global flow of key resources was essential to American hegemony. Procuring oil = national security. When Nixon abandoned the gold standard and oil states agreed to trade oil on the U.S. dollar, the petro-dollar became the lifeline for American economic primacy. Yes, the United States produces plenty of oil, but should other nations go trading energy in Yuan, Pesos, or Rubles, the American dollar’s value would crumble. It’s resource hegemony or bust.
If resource hegemony is essential to U.S. national security, then Global South resource sovereignty has the capacity to be antithetical to U.S. national security. To what extent does the nation that allegedly worships free market capitalism actually believe in free markets? It turns out, not much when it comes to key resources. We like Global South extractive economies of the Western-subservient variety. When nations exert resource sovereignty or consider trading oil off the U.S. dollar, they paint large targets on their backs. Cases in point: Venezuela, Iran, Libya, etc.
The U.S. embodies hypercapitalism and privatization, and in the absence of state extractive companies, the relationship between the U.S. government and oil companies and other extractive industries is intrinsic. If controlling the global flow of critical resources is essential to U.S. national security, then the health and wellbeing of private American extractive corporations is essential to U.S. national security, as it is defined.
When Trump moves on, Americans will love nothing more than to go back to sleep pretending that our global antagonistic interventionism has a higher moral purpose, and any Western allies still lingering in the wake of the rules-based cult and fading American hegemony will be happy to believe the lie. Our memory of the political economy of U.S. national security will fall out of focus.
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Richard M. Balzano is an historian and political analyst peddling truths at several institutions of higher learning, quietly devoted to the art of sedition and comfortably resigned to the peripheral left.