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What happened a few days ago in Venezuela is not just a big surprise to people who are watching it. It's not just a kind of exciting foreign policy story. It is the effectively announcement by the U.S. government that our system is changing, that we are now explicitly an empire or an empire. So, of course, the argument has been made and probably there's some truth to it.

The United States has been an empire for a long time for at least the last 80 years since

1945 when we emerged victorious from World War II or maybe even 1918 when the British Empire

effectively ended, maybe even 1898 when we got Puerto Rico and then a few years later, Cuba from the Spanish Empire.

So you could argue that the United States, like all big prosperous countries, inevitably became an empire.

But the difference between the last 120 years and earlier this week is that we never

before admitted it. And now we are. So every time we've gone into foreign countries in Latin

America, but not just Latin America, really around the world, there has been a pretext for that, usually about human rights or democracy.

We're not going to put up with this or that government treating its people this way, and we have to go in to stop the tyranny because we are a force for openness and freedom.

And there's been some truth in that, of course.

But behind that has been the calculation behind every big foreign policy move made by every big country. How was this good

for us? Whether it's propping up the dollar or getting access to resources, there's always another

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