That was Donald Rumsfeld’s proud claim at the height of the Iraq war in 2003. Of course it’s untrue. The Americans have always ‘done’ empire, from their very first days as a Republic, and throughout their periods of supposed ‘isolationism’, right up until what I imagine future historians will call ‘The Age of Trump’. (What a boost to his amour propre! To have an age named after him! Far more flattering than even a ‘Tower’. And Trump craves flattery…)

I’ve actually written a book about earlier US imperialism: Empire and Superempire, if you’re interested. But that only goes up to 2006. I wonder whether Yale UP would be open to issuing a new edition, with an additional chapter taking the story up to last month’s invasion of Venezuela, tomorrow’s (query?) attack on Iran, and the next day’s annexation of Greenland? These obviously qualify as ‘imperialism’, by any definition of ‘empire’ you want to use; except perhaps those that require a literal ‘Emperor’ to be at its head. Venezuela was attacked with armed force, involving scores of casualties, the abduction of its President and his wife, the seizure of its oil assets, and with Trump’s stated intention being to ‘rule’ the country afterwards. That’s imperialism, no question. The motives behind it, both overt and hidden, genuine and cynical, also closely mirror Britain’s in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Stopping drugs reminds us of the Chinese ‘Opium Wars’; ‘national strategic interests’ take us to the South African war; reforming corrupt governments was what many of Britain’s incursions into Africa and India were supposed to do; grabbing valuable natural resources was what underlay most of Britain’s African adventures; together with extending ‘free’ markets – her major excuse. If anything this latest phase of American imperialism is more overtly imperialistic than most earlier examples, with Trump’s open ambition being to seize more territory (usually that came accidentally), including the vast snowfields of neighbouring Greenland; and his very old-fashioned belief, apparently, that ‘greatness’ – ‘Make America Great Again’ – can be measured in sheer geographical size.

All this appears to be taking us back to the nineteenth century, when most ‘great’ Powers craved territorial expansion; as the three ‘greatest’ Powers in the world today – China, Russia and the USA – are doing now: China contra Taiwan, Russia seeking Ukraine, and the USA looking greedily at Greenland (for starters). The United Nations of course was supposed to put a stop to this, replacing imperial ambition and the rule of ‘might’ with a ‘new world order’, by which territorial disputes would be peacefully settled by negotiation under an international ‘rule of a law’, which all nations would respect. Trump however clearly has no truck with this internationalist and even ‘woke’ idea; maybe because it doesn’t function in the property market – of ‘deals’ over building land – whose simpler, more Hobbesian ethics clearly dominate his view of foreign relations too. So we are regressing. ‘My man’ JA Hobson, a pioneer of both anti-imperialist and internationalist theory (my first book was about him), must be turning in his grave.