As someone with a 2-year-old son who likes to play pirates—and who spends a lot of time writing about the shifting maritime order under the Donroe Doctrine—I decided to take the president at his word. Let’s review what has happened over the past nine months in foreign policy through the lens of piracy.
Then, on January 3, 2026, U.S. Special Forces abducted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, in an operation that killed over 100 people, and replaced him with Delcy Rodríguez—a fellow Chavista, though presumably a more pliant one. Following negotiations in Caracas geared at opening up the country’s energy sector to foreign investment, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum flew home with $100 million in gold—for domestic refiners.
The U.S. has also been running a similar playbook in Peru, over the port of Chancay.
From what it seems, the U.S. is using a diverse and flexible set of military, legal, and political tactics, including murder, torture, abduction, coercion, and theft, to intentionally disrupt maritime trade flows—forcing rival capital out, while trapping allied capital in.
All this sounds pretty piratey and out of character for a nation state, right? In the Captain Phillips/Pirates of the Caribbean/Muppet Treasure Island sense of the term, yes. But Trump’s comparison ultimately distracts from a simple fact: This is how empires have always acted.
In those days, as today, piracy was not one thing. It could be an act of political rebellion. It could be a survival strategy. It could be directed by rival powers. (It could even be all three at once.) Another thing that hasn’t changed is that the label “pirate” has always been selectively applied within the context of great power struggle between maritime empires.
Viewed in this light, Trump’s remark wasn’t unique because of its seeming honesty. Rather, its rootedness in a common misbelief about piracy has offered us a rare insight into how an imperial power in decline rationalizes its own violent actions—which are progressively unjustifiable under international laws.
The truth is that the empire has always behaved like the “pirates” we’ve been taught to fear. Because the pirates of yore, much like the “narco-terrorists” of today, are how empire has always justified its barbarism, its murder, its torture, its abduction, its coercion, and its theft.
Pirates, of course, have a colorful way of articulating the same dog-eat-dog vision of power: “Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest, yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!” Trump has a more blunt way of characterizing his high-seas misadventures: “To the victor go the spoils.”
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