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 The Lust for Power and Influence

In an article published a few days ago by the well-known American writer Steve Siebold, he says

“Please do not come to the United States. We are no longer the country we were four months ago. This place is no longer safe. They can pull you off the streets, detain you, and may do things to you that only God knows. They are doing this to our own citizens. Please do not support American products, do not spend your vacations here. And on behalf of all the rational Americans in this country who are fighting Trump with all their strength, we are sorry. We are doing everything we can to get rid of this man. An ignorant people handed him all the keys. Frankly, I think America has reached a dead end. I apologize to all the countries we deal with that Trump treats with contempt. He is a tyrant who wants to become a dictator very quickly. Do not trust his promises—they are worthless. I have known this man for more than thirty years, and his word is worth nothing.” — End quote.

Was the world in need of a ruler in the White House of this kind? Or is such chaos in need of such a stamp? Thuggery and the law of the jungle—call it whatever you want—there are no limits to the madness of power here. Crudeness and political senility. The world no longer changes slowly, as historians used to narrate; it fractures all at once, like a mirror falling from a height. We are living in an age of great transformations, where laws are no longer rewritten but openly broken, where the pursuit of influence is no longer managed behind a curtain but exercised with a bare fist—no gloves, no makeup. It is led by a man who sees politics as nothing more than a deal, and the world as real estate ready for resale—a logic that recognizes neither norms nor laws.

He did not come to power as a statesman, but as a new logic redefining power and alliances by the profits they generate. There is no international law—only a bad deal and a good deal, and between them the world is left hanging on the edge of the abyss. In this era, politics has turned into spectacle, threats into a negotiating tool, and blackmail into a sovereign right. Small states are no longer partners but temporary hostages; just causes are nothing more than pressure cards to be burned once their usefulness expires. This is how thuggery is managed: imposing will not through moral superiority, but in the name of the capacity for political destruction.

His first term said everything—except that the repercussions of COVID-19 did not allow him to complete the journey to its very end. The Middle East became a model laboratory for his governing approach: recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, legalizing settlement expansion, handing over the Golan Heights to Israel with a stroke of a pen. As for his second term, there is no end to what can be said—blood has become a collateral cost in the balance of interests. None of this was blind bias toward Israel as much as it was contempt for the very idea of justice itself. Seizure without right is no longer a crime; it has become declared policy, justified by the rhetoric of power and marketed as political realism.

But more dangerous than Trump himself is what Trump revealed: that the international system is weaker than it claimed to be, and that political and diplomatic ethics were often nothing more than an elegant façade for the law of the jungle. In this age of great transformations, the question is no longer who possesses the right, but who possesses the power to impose their narrative. The abyss is no longer the end of the road, but an additional pressure card in the hands of those who lead. Thus the world stands today on the edge—not merely because Trump is a reckless man, but because he brazenly exposed a truth long concealed: when power is liberated from values, it does not lead to order… but to collapse.

The developments in the Venezuelan scene—particularly the political chaos and the arrest of the head of authority there—have revived the Trumpian impulse to deal with the world as an open garden for power and influence. Trump, who sees politics as an extension of the deal-making instinct rather than the logic of international law, found in Venezuela an ideal model: an exhausted state, an internally besieged regime, vast resources waiting for whoever seizes them first—going so far as to appoint himself president of the country from afar, with members of his administration acting as its ministers. This whetted his appetite to revive the model of maximum sanctions and direct threats—not only toward Latin America (the United States’ backyard), but as a message to other adversaries that the era of gray zones is now a thing of the past.

The Venezuelan rehearsal will be a renewed appetite for recycling international law that he shattered during his first term, reducing it to a secondary detail unworthy of consideration in the face of coups, political arrests, threats, and maximum pressure. Not only that, but it also whets the appetites of others by leaving open spaces to revive dreams that had so far been unattainable—temporary neutralization in anticipation of permanent entanglement in inescapable crises. Through this model, which resurrects old colonialism in its most explicit forms, maps of power and influence are redrawn in their ugliest shapes.

The list of Trumpian appetites is crowded: from Venezuela to Colombia, Cuba, and Mexico; from Greenland to Iran and Canada. Even the Riviera of Gaza has not fallen outside this appetite—and the rope continues to unravel, all the way to its inevitable strangulation by internal and external crises, by conflicts of interest with armies of those harmed both inside and outside the United States. Until then, whoever does not read history well will find their fate no better than that of all the dictators history has known—those who suffocated from an excess of lust for power and influence.