When a sitting president openly discusses taking another country’s oil or threatening territorial acquisition, it signals a collapse of the rhetorical restraints that have governed imperial behavior since 1945. The best glimpse of what this means for our future may lay in understanding our past.

When Donald Trump openly speaks of claiming Venezuela’s oil or muses about taking Greenland, he is not merely being provocative or reckless. He is articulating, without embarrassment or euphemism, an imperial logic that the post-1945 world order was built to suppress, disguise and deny.

The United States has long sought to shape the control of resources abroad, but only this administration no longer feels the need to pretend otherwise.

As a historian of colonialism who regularly teaches the history of the CIA and the use of subversion as foreign policy in the postwar US, what I am witnessing feels genuinely unprecedented. Since 1945, American power has depended not on innocence but on plausible deniability. Empire survived not by disappearing but by learning how to speak the language of anti-imperialism. That language is now being abandoned.

To see how unusual this moment is, it helps to step back into the longer history of empire itself. Consider Dutch imperialism in Indonesia. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the Dutch felt no need to moralize conquest. As I argue in my book Wives, Slaves, and Concubines: A History of Dutch Asia, before 1800, the Dutch pursued empire with startling candor. Violence, coercion and extraction were not cloaked in humanitarian rhetoric; they were justified by profit.

The Dutch East India Company (VOC), the world’s first joint-stock company and first multinational corporation, was explicit about its purpose. It existed to generate returns, and it used sovereign violence to do so. There was no apology, because none was required. Let’s call it imperialism 1.0.