Abandoning the pretence of exporting democracy, the Trump administration has chosen to force existing powers to comply with its rule. There’s something disingenuous about the sudden reappearance of the term ‘imperialist’ in Western media outlets which previously applied it only to Russia. This initiated a new sequence of US interventions, culminating in the invasion of Iraq in 2003 under George W Bush. These two major fiascos – Iraq in particular, since it involved far higher stakes and deployed vastly greater US resources – revived the Vietnam syndrome. His successor, Barack Obama, who prided himself on having opposed the invasion of Iraq, broke records for the use of remote strikes, especially involving drones.