The Fall of an Ideology, not Merely an Empire

News:

On 3 January 2026, the United States captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife in a military operation in Caracas. Donald Trump announced that the US is “going to run the country”, and the US Ambassador to the UN, Michael Waltz, stated, "You cannot continue to have the largest energy reserves in the world under the control of adversaries of the United States”. Shortly thereafter, the White House reiterated its desire to “take” Greenland from Denmark and confirmed that all options are on the table, including the use of force.

Comment:

The events of the past week are by no means a deviation from the modus operandi of the colonialist USA or the West in general. However, it is also not merely a new chapter in the long series of American aggressions.

Rather, it is a desperate escalation of the use of force to enforce American hegemony—this time in the Western Hemisphere—and for a change, without ambiguity or false justifications.

The US government no longer sees any reason or basis for hiding behind false pretenses of freedom, democracy, human rights, or international law. The emperor steps onto the stage without a stitch of clothing and announces, even to his allies and loyal satellite states in Europe, ‘Might is right!’

When power becomes a justification in itself, every prize becomes a right if it can be taken by direct or indirect force—whether it is the world’s largest oil reserves in Venezuela or the world’s largest island, Greenland. And therein lies the desperate aspect of this escalation. For if you have nothing to offer the world but brutal force, what is left then but to constantly escalate?

While the reactions from Western states regarding Venezuela have been a form of subdued concern, the reactions regarding Greenland have been far sharper, not least from the Danish government.

Denmark, which for decades has contributed loyally to American invasion, plunder, and occupation of countries, particularly in the Muslim world, and has sent its citizens to their deaths for the USA in Iraq and Afghanistan, is now shouting about international order and morality.

Meanwhile, Trump’s USA goes further to test the limits of transatlantic Western cohesion.

All too often, however, the situation is analyzed based on Trump’s personality, while these analyses ignore that the American system and society itself, like the international Western order, have been eroded by internal contradictions and polarized by bitter internal power struggles and disputes. All that remains is a shell without any ideological direction to offer the world.

On top of this internal Western division, record-high mistrust in political systems across Western populations, and the ugly reality of the American-led Western world order—which the genocide in Palestine made clear to populations across the globe—liberal democracy and capitalism have gone bankrupt, and we are witnessing their fall before our eyes.

For the Muslim Ummah, which should possess a global outlook and feel a responsibility toward all of humanity, the time is ripe to once again step forward onto the world stage and lead humanity in a new direction of true justice and mercy, based on Allah’s (swt) guidance.

What we witness today of tyranny, betrayal, division, and confusion is the culmination of 105 years without a Khilafah (Caliphate) State on earth that represents Islam and the Muslims and brings people out of darkness and into the light. Only a guided Khilafah, as promised by the Prophet Muhammad (saw), will be able to fill the obvious civilizational vacuum with dignity—not merely with power—but with true values, a global civilizational project for all of humanity, and well-founded political systems that do not serve a greedy, unscrupulous capital elite.

When the Muslim Ummah adopts this as its life's mission and unwavering path to liberation, history is already set on a new course with Allah’s (swt) help.

Written for the Central Media Office of Hizb ut Tahrir by
Elias Lamrabet