For the first 15 years of my life, until roughly 1990, the world had two legitimate superpowers: the United States of America and the Soviet Union. We know this not because anyone told us so, but because both nations could empower and protect their client states across the globe.
With the collapse of the Soviet empire, the United States became, arguably for the first time in human history, the planet's only major superpower. But over the past two decades, experts have insisted this is changing, and that we are moving to trilateral power sharing with Russia and China.
On Saturday, with the successful operation to depose and arrest Venezuela's illegitimate and Kremlin-backed leader Nicolas Maduro, President Donald Trump sent the world a crystal clear message: "Not so fast."
About a month ago, I ran a column in these pages with the title "Trump's aggression toward Venezuela a warning to Putin," and within an hour, Trump posted it on Truth Social. A presidential share is always great for clicks, but in this case it also proved the theory.
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On Saturday, with the stunning and perfectly executed operation to seize Maduro, Trump left no more doubt. The United States is still the world's only superpower, and he just proved it.
The basic metric on display here is that neither Russian dictator Vladimir Putin nor Chinese dictator Xi Jinping were able to do anything to protect their close ally Maduro and maintain control of their proxy in our hemisphere.
In fact, Trump's embrace of the Monroe Doctrine, which he now comically dubs the 'Donroe Doctrine," a centuries-old American idea that we have the right and responsibility to control our neck of the geopolitical woods, is proving a raging success, leaving our enemies flaccid in their response.
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Let's compare this to Russia's recent attempts to control what it views as its geographical sphere of influence, namely Ukraine. With American support, Putin's attempts to oust (or kill) President Volodymyr Zelenskyy have failed for over three years, with hundreds of thousands dead and dire economic consequences to Moscow.
Meanwhile, it took the U.S. all of 25 minutes to wipe Maduro off the board forever.
Similarly, China has ambitions to take Taiwan that the Communist Party there has not been shy about, and some scaredy-cat Western critics argue the Venezuela action will give the green light for such an operation.
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This analysis once again misses the key point that if China were to invade Taiwan, America is in a position to support the small nation, just as with Ukraine, and make the operation, even if successful, very painful for the CCP.
That is the math of the superpower. We can do anything we want in our region, and nobody outside of it can stop us. Meanwhile, we can reach into any corner of the globe and act, even the backyards of other pretenders to superpower status.
More than anyone else, it was former President Barack Obama and his "lead from behind" foreign policy style that seemed to open the door to an end of hegemonic American power, to sharing the globe with Russia and China. Thankfully, Trump has rejected and reversed this dangerous and feckless approach.
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Now, Obama's former advisors are whining about international law, which is a completely made-up thing, by the way. We know this because no American has ever voted for an international law, and taxation without representation is kind of America's whole point.
Democrats in Congress are complaining that the United States had no right to take this action. But in real geopolitics, power is its own authority. Crass though it may sound, we took out Maduro because we could, and Russia and China would both do the same if they were also superpowers.
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The ultimate question at stake in all of this for the American people is, "Who do we want running the world?" Should it be an international consortium like the United Nations? Should it be a trilateral group including us, Russia and China?
Trump has wisely rejected these cowardly and pie-in-the-sky concepts for a return to good old-fashioned, hard American power setting the guardrails and direction of the globe.
Trump is fond of saying that "America is back," and while it may be true in many different ways, none is more important than this one. Once again, and for the good of all mankind, the United States of America is the only superpower on the planet.
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