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Posted by Joshua Scheer
What one Democratic lawmaker described as “belligerent,” Sen. Bernie Sanders called something else entirely: clarity.
During a remarkable appearance on CNN Monday night, top White House adviser Stephen Miller openly articulated what Sanders said amounted to “a very good definition of imperialism,” laying out a worldview in which the United States claims the right to seize other nations—Venezuela foremost among them—whenever it decides doing so serves U.S. interests.
Speaking with Jake Tapper, Miller brushed aside questions about elections in Venezuela just days after U.S. forces bombed the country and abducted President Nicolás Maduro and his wife. Instead, he demanded airtime to explain what he framed as the administration’s unapologetic foreign-policy doctrine.
“The United States is using its military to secure our interests unapologetically in our hemisphere,” Miller said. “We’re a superpower and under President Trump we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower.”
“Sovereign countries shouldn’t be able to do what they want to do?” while Miller continued to shout, brushing past the premise of sovereignty altogether.
MILLER: The US is using its military to secure our interests unapologetically in our hemisphere. We're a superpower and under President Trump we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower. It's absurd that we would allow a nation in our backyard to become the supplier of… pic.twitter.com/wXK2UxnqUj
“This is what imperialism is all about,” Sanders said shortly afterward on CNN. “I suspect that people all over the world are saying, ‘Wow, we’re going back to where we were 100 years ago… where the big, powerful countries were exploiting poorer countries for their natural resources.’”
Oil, Power, and the End of Pretense
Miller’s comments followed weeks of escalating rhetoric from the Trump administration, which has repeatedly claimed that Venezuela somehow “stole” oil from the United States—despite the fact that the country nationalized its petroleum industry decades ago and holds the world’s largest proven oil reserves.
Rep. Seth Moulton translated Miller’s message bluntly in a social media post: sovereign countries, in this framework, do not get sovereignty if the U.S. wants their resources. Moulton called Miller’s remarks “genuinely unhinged” and “a disturbing window into how this administration thinks about the world.”
That worldview was echoed hours earlier at the United Nations Security Council, where U.S. Ambassador Michael Waltz declared that “you cannot continue to have the largest energy reserves in the world under the control of adversaries of the United States.”
From Venezuela to Greenland
Miller’s candor extended well beyond Latin America. He reaffirmed the administration’s insistence that Greenland, a semi-autonomous territory of Denmark and a NATO ally, “should be part of the United States,” calling it the formal position of the U.S. government.
With Miller asking in the same CNN show “Greenland has a population of 30,000 people. By what right does Denmark assert control over Greenland? The United States is the power of NATO. Greenland should be part of the United States.”
MILLER: The US is using its military to secure our interests unapologetically in our hemisphere. We're a superpower and under President Trump we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower. It's absurd that we would allow a nation in our backyard to become the supplier of… pic.twitter.com/wXK2UxnqUj
Though Miller dismissed the likelihood of a military operation, President Donald Trump has repeatedly refused to rule out the use of force. Greenland’s strategic location in the Arctic and its largely untapped rare-earth mineral reserves have made it an increasingly explicit target.
Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen warned this week that a U.S. attack on another NATO country would effectively collapse the alliance itself—a point underscored as Denmark convened an emergency parliamentary meeting on its deteriorating relationship with Washington.
Even Republicans have recoiled. Rep. Don Bacon criticized Miller’s comments as reckless and damaging to U.S. alliances, calling them “really dumb” in remarks reported by The Hill.
This was the first news story that appeared when typing Stephen Miller’s name—as if Greenland were more important than Venezuela, or than Miller’s bizarre role in the administration’s so-called war on drugs, which has seen some traffickers targeted while others are quietly pardoned.
“Fix the Country First”
Meanwhile, Venezuela’s political future remains deliberately undefined. Opposition figure María Corina Machado says she plans to return to Venezuela and push for elections, but Trump has dismissed any near-term vote as “unrealistic,” insisting the United States must “fix the country first.”
As Reuters reports, Trump is instead signaling a willingness to work with interim leader Delcy Rodríguez, sidelining the opposition while maintaining sweeping economic and oil leverage over the country.
Imperialism, Unfiltered
If previous administrations cloaked similar actions in the language of democracy or humanitarianism, Miller offered something closer to unvarnished honesty. As Sanders put it, the White House has abandoned even the pretense that international law, sovereignty, or democratic self-determination impose meaningful limits on U.S. power.
“Maybe instead of trying to run Venezuela,” Sanders suggested, “the president might try to do a better job running the United States of America.”
What Miller made clear—perhaps unintentionally—is that the administration no longer sees imperial ambition as a liability.
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