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THE WAR ALWAYS COMES HOME  
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Daniel Brito
February 10, 2026
The Border Chronicle
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_ While menacing Venezuela and Greenland, an “unbound” Trump has
unleashed the empire on itself in Minneapolis. _

Border Patrol agent in Minneapolis in January., Michael
Siluk/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

 

IN HIS BOOK _The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall
in the Mind of America_
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Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Greg Grandin argues that Donald
Trump’s border wall symbolizes the end of the “frontier,” a
central concept in Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous thesis on the
essence of U.S. history. “All nations have nations and many today
even have walls,” Grandin writes. “But only the United States has
had a frontier.”

The loss of the frontier, a process of “endless becoming and
ceaseless unfurling,” as Grandin describes it, threatens the United
States’ fundamental sense of self and purpose—a significant risk
for a country uniquely preoccupied with its own identity. Grandin’s
book was published near the end of Trump’s first term, when the U.S.
still appeared to be meandering in the historical dead end Grandin so
insightfully describes, fenced in by the narrowness of the ideas now
animating its politics.

Now an “unbound” Trump is trying to provide a more dynamic answer
to the question of American purpose in a world already dominated by
the U.S. war machine and the state’s control
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over global capital flows.

Like any good gangster looking for a new racket, Trump has turned the
greedy eye of the U.S. empire toward its former European henchmen.

A sign from a protest in Nuuk, Greenland in March 2025. (Photo credit:
Ahmet Gurhan Kartal/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Trump’s turn toward European-claimed territory in Greenland,
supposedly for critical minerals and strategic locations—there will
always be some resource that capital’s enforcers claim they need to
liberate—straddles the fine line
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between clever and stupid.

The grab for Greenland occurred shortly after Trump employed more
conventional methods of U.S. foreign policy, notably the kidnapping of
Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, in the predawn hours of
January 3. While Trump officials openly acknowledged their
petroleum-based motivations, the pretext was weaker
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than usual, and the hypocrisy
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surrounding the “drug war” was even more egregious; it was just
the latest of many similar episodes of U.S. intervention.

The action also culminated a bipartisan U.S. imperial strategy dating
back to the Obama administration
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aimed at economically strangling Venezuela through sanctions,
isolating it from the systems governing global capital movements,
which the United States effectively controls
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By contrast, Trump’s cartoonishly crude grasping at Greenland
shocked the same European leaders who either silently accepted or even
cheered Trump’s illegal action against Venezuela, after having
participated in Washington’s bipartisan policy of sanctions
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A protest in front of the U.S. consulate in Madrid, Spain in January.
(Photo credit: Marcos del Mazo/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Nevertheless, the combination of this familiar U.S. tactic in Latin
America with the outrage from Europe when Trump reached for
Greenland’s territory and resources reminded me of a leftist adage
frequently cited by Grandin: “The war always comes home.” Grandin
also aptly described Latin America as “empire’s workshop,”
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where U.S. imperial methods are perfected.

Events in Minneapolis seemed to punctuate Trump’s grab for
Venezuela’s oil and Greenland’s minerals with an exclamation mark.
The methods and technologies of political surveillance, repression,
and counterinsurgency developed by the U.S. abroad—in the
Philippines and Vietnam
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and in Palestine
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by Israel—are inevitably turned against the U.S. domestic population
by its ruling class.

In one glaring echo of past U.S. terror tactics, ICE agents placed ace
of spades playing cards printed
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with “ICE Denver Field Office” inside cars left behind
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after abducting their drivers, known as “ghost cars.” As noted
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by author Nick Turse in _The Intercept_, U.S. forces in Vietnam
“regularly adorned Vietnamese corpses with ‘death
cards’—either an ace of spades or a custom-printed business card
claiming credit for their kills.” These cards were produced in 1966
by the Bicycle playing card company at the request
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of Lieutenant Charles Brown of Company C in Pleiku, who stated, “In
Vietnam, the ace of spades and pictures of women are symbols of bad
luck.”

While the death cards may have been used only in Colorado, the problem
of “ghost cars” is prevalent almost everywhere ICE operates. It
has become so widespread in the Twin Cities that authorities
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in St. Paul have stopped towing them, while Minneapolis is now waiving
impound fees resulting from ICE abductions.

A protest in New York City in January. (Photo credit: Lev
Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images)

If fascism is imperialism turned inward, then it is in Minneapolis
that this aphorism has come alive. A force created to manage
population flows generated by imperialist interventions—most notably
in Central America—is being visibly redirected toward domestic
racial policing and political repression, possibly including
interference with U.S. midterm elections.

Similarly, Trump has merely turned the rapacious eye of Uncle Sam
“inward,” within the West. The West’s war on the world is coming
home, just as the U.S.’s war on the Western Hemisphere is reaching
the mainland.

In his haste and hubris, Trump seems to have fundamentally disoriented
the very concept of the “frontier.” It could be posited anywhere
based on his whims, but it feels more like it has receded farther
beyond the horizon.

As we try to follow that long, distant curve from our viewpoint here
in the U.S.—past Venezuela, past Greenland—our vision seems to
spiral around the other side of the earth, dizzy with vertigo, until
Minneapolis appears.

The American mind and its war machine, lacking a frontier, turns back
on itself like an ouroboros, perhaps sealing a terminal cycle. The
United States seems determined to reconquer itself.

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_Daniel Brito is a Tucsonan in exile, as well as a former broadcast
journalist and congressional staffer whose issues included U.S.
foreign policy in Latin America._

* Trump's Frontierism; US Borders; Minneapolis;
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