Having pardoned a former Central American president convicted in a US court of large-scale drug trafficking, Donald Trump now claims the moral authority to kidnap another head of state on narcotics charges. That contradiction is not a footnote. It is the point.
Trump’s pardon of Juan Orlando Hernandez, the former president of Honduras, was not an act of mercy in a marginal case. Hernández had been convicted by a jury of facilitating the flow of cocaine into the United States while in office. Trump swept that aside. No lectures about sovereignty. No talk of the rule of law. No urgency about drugs poisoning American communities.
Against that backdrop, the seizure of a foreign leader under the banner of narcotics enforcement stops looking like principle and starts looking like convenience.
From there, the pattern becomes familiar.
The premise is simple, and that is what makes it so bleak: when an external power intervenes in a broken country, the endgame is rarely democracy. It is order. And order usually arrives in uniform, with a metaphorical Swiss bank account already quietly in place.
That is not cynicism. It is pattern recognition.
The sequence is familiar because it works, at least briefly. A population is exhausted by corruption, repression or economic collapse. The existing regime becomes intolerable. An outside power intervenes, denouncing the incumbent and promising stability, renewal, a reset. There is a brief, intoxicating moment of exhilaration. Flags. Crowds. Relief. The sense that the worst is finally over.
Then comes the pivot. Not to pluralism or institution-building, but to control.
Control, historically, is delivered by an amenable general. Not a zealot. Not a mass demagogue. A calm figure in uniform who reassures investors, restores predictability, suppresses dissent and promises elections once things have “settled down”. That promise is seldom honoured, not only because of bad faith, but because repression closes the political space needed for a peaceful transition.
Such figures are attractive to external powers for structural reasons. They are legible. One chain of command. One set of guarantees. Markets stay open, labour stays quiet, contracts are enforced. Power at home is paired with insulation abroad. Order domestically, optional exit internationally. Corruption is not incidental. It is stabilising, until it is not.
History shows this model can work in the short term. Capital returns. Infrastructure projects resume. Violence becomes less visible. From the outside, it looks like success. From the inside, it feels like continuity under a different manager.
There is no analytical reason to assume this pattern would break if the external power involved were led by Donald Trump. In fact, the risk is higher. He has shown impatience with pluralism, courts and procedural constraint. He admires decisiveness and loyalty, not institutional balance. He prefers deals to systems. A compliant strongman who delivers order quickly and keeps business interests sweet would fit his instincts.
What makes this especially troubling is the gap between ambition and competence. Trump struggles to govern his own country coherently. His administrations have been marked by impulse, churn and institutional conflict. Running a foreign transition requires the opposite qualities: patience, discipline, institutional memory and tolerance for constraint. There is no evidence he possesses them. When he talks about “running” another country, it does not sound muscular. It sounds reckless.
And yet, Trump’s behaviour also reveals something more cynical still. He does not appear particularly troubled by authoritarian regimes as such. He is not animated by civil liberties, pluralism or democratic norms. He is comfortable with repression and patronage, provided the system is transactional, predictable and aligned with his interests. The problem, as he appears to see it, is not that a regime is authoritarian, but that it is authoritarian without answering to him.
That is the swivel.
Where earlier interventions at least gestured towards freedom before installing a strongman, Trump dispenses with the gesture altogether. He does not require a new regime if the existing one can be bent into compliance. He is not selling democracy. He is enforcing alignment. The language of freedom is invoked when useful, discarded when inconvenient. Law is not a framework. It is a lever.
This is why the Hernandez pardon matters. It shows that drugs, law and justice are not principles in Trump’s worldview. They are tools. Friendly traffickers can be absolved. Uncooperative ones become existential threats. Consistency is not the goal. Leverage is.
Seen in this light, the seizure of a foreign leader is not moral outrage. It is discipline. A signal that power flows one way, that misrouting money or influence carries personal consequences, and that obedience matters more than legitimacy. Whether the jailer wears a uniform or a suit is secondary. What matters is who holds the keys.
This makes Trump’s approach more corrosive than the old model, not less. Installing an amenable general at least acknowledged that legitimacy had to be simulated. Trump does not bother. He is content to leave the regime intact, the people unempowered, and the extraction unchanged, so long as the flows are redirected and the obedience is clear.
This is where Thomas More’s warning in A Man for All Seasons becomes unavoidable. Laws exist not to protect villains from justice, but to protect everyone from the moment when power turns and the winds begin to blow. Tear them down to act faster, and you may succeed. But you also remove the only shelter you have when strength is misjudged.
At this point, precision matters.
This model does not always end in violent reversal. Some regimes decay slowly. Some transitions are negotiated. Some societies endure repression longer than expected. History does not operate on a single rail.
But the probability structure is clear. When political opposition is crushed, when inequality deepens under enforced “stability”, and when the state is visibly aligned with foreign capital and coercion rather than consent, peaceful routes for change are systematically closed. When change finally comes, it is therefore more likely to arrive from the extremes, and more likely to be violent. That is not ideology. It is risk analysis.
From the perspective of the intervening power, this is a delayed-cost problem. The arrangement delivers a decade of control, predictability and access. The explosion comes later, often on someone else’s watch. That is why the cycle keeps being chosen. Not because it works forever, but because it works long enough.
Which brings us to the wider problem.
We are drifting into a new world order of spheres of influence. Not because anyone voted for it, but because the old universalist order is fraying and power is once again being organised geographically. The mistake is to think that abstaining from this reality preserves virtue. It does not. It merely leaves the field to those who enforce their spheres by fear.
In this context, the European Union cannot pretend it is post-power or above the logic of spheres. It must consolidate. But it must do so differently.
This is where the Hari Seldon logic matters. In Foundation, Seldon does not try to save the Empire. He accepts that it is finished. His intervention is about shaping what replaces it, shortening the period of disorder by creating a centre of gravity others can cohere around voluntarily. The Foundation is not imposed. It attracts participation because it offers stability when the wider system does not.
That is the task facing the EU.
It must become a sphere of influence, but one entered by agreement, not coercion. A sphere defined by law, market access, institutional predictability and enforceable rules. Participation must be voluntary, but once inside, obligations must be real. Exit must be possible, but costly. Stability must be earned, not imposed.
This is not imperialism in softer language. It requires no regime change, no kidnapped leaders, no generals with offshore exit plans. It requires something harder: consistency, patience, and the discipline to apply rules even when it is inconvenient.
In other words, slow power.
If the old order is collapsing and a world of spheres is returning, the choice is not whether to participate in that reality, but what kind of sphere you help create. One enforced at gunpoint, or one anchored in consent. One that accelerates barbarism, or one that shortens the dark age.
That is why all of this feels depressingly familiar. Not because history repeats exactly, but because the same shortcuts keep being taken for the same reasons, with the same blind spots.
And we keep acting surprised when it ends the same way.
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