On Monday, 4 January 2026, US vice president JD Vance tweeted issued a lengthy missive on Elon Musk’s X Dot Com, The Everything App (Blaze Your Glory!™):
You see a lot claims that Venezuela has nothing to do with drugs because most of the fentanyl comes from elsewhere. I want to address this:
First off, fentanyl isn’t the only drug in the world and there is still fentanyl coming from Venezuela (or at least there was).
Second, cocaine, which is the main drug trafficked out of Venezuela, is a profit center for all of the Latin America cartels. If you cut out the money from cocaine (or even reduce it) you substantially weaken the cartels overall. Also, cocaine is bad too!
Third, yes, a lot of fentanyl is coming out of Mexico. That continues to be a focus of our policy in Mexico and is a reason why President Trump shut the border on day one.
Fourth, I see a lot of criticism about oil. About 20 years ago, Venezuela expropriated American oil property and until recently used that stolen property to get rich and fund their narcoterrorist activities. I understand the anxiety over the use of military force, but are we just supposed to allow a communist to steal our stuff in our hemisphere and do nothing? Great powers don’t act like that.
The United States, thanks to President Trump’s leadership, is a great power again. Everyone should take note.
The executive has made it clear that it’s all-in on making this The Posting Presidency. Rich texts like this one are being pumped out of the White House at a truly un-keep-upwithable rate. Dissecting Vance’s extremely-online argot is thankfully far beyond my remit; instead, I would like to examine the portion of the tweet that I have emphasised.
“Great power” is a term of art that means something specific to scholars of international relations. Since I’m trying to write here for a general audience, and I do not think this casual blog post is an appropriate site for a full recapitulation of IR theory, I’ll be brief: great powers are countries who predominate in a particular geographic sphere of influence and tend to compete with other aspiring great powers for influence over nearby countries who have less capacity to assert themselves economically/militarily/culturally.
If you’re reading this, you have probably never known a world when the United States was not Number One in the international order. If you’re in your forties or fifties, or older, you will have some memory of the Cold War, a time when the US was one of two Numbers One. The point being: for the better part of a century, America aspired to a position of global primacy. The era of global great power politics came to a decisive and unambiguous end in 1945. America has been a superpower – a state whose reach and integration far eclipses and overrides all regionally influential sovereign states – for generations.
I’m not going to declare categorically that we are seeing the end of that order, but we are certainly seeing a credible attempt to end it.
President Trump has gestured towards a vision of a multipolar order before. In his unprecedented invasion of Venezuela and abduction of President Maduro, he has made good on his desire for a global order of discrete spheres of influence. Together with the defunding of USAID and the broader winding-down of the American liberal-internationalist soft power strategy, this executive’s project for a great American retreat is well underway.
My desire here is to provide all the necessary context to interpret a particular reading of the vice president’s post. Where Trump asserts his international posture in a raw, reactive, almost libidinal fashion, Vance speaks tactically. “Great power” here is a double-dogwhistle: to those literate in the language of statecraft and geopolitics, it’s a gloating taunt (“yes, we are recusing ourselves from the world stage, and there’s nothing you ivory-tower fancy lads can do about it!”), and to his base…
Well, isn’t it just great to be great again?
S.