by Jacob G. Hornberger

January 6, 2026

The U.S. national-security state’s easy abduction of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro brings to mind William Graham Sumner’s essay about U.S. interventionism in the Spanish-American War in 1898. The U.S. military victory over the third-rate Spanish Empire was as easy as the recent U.S. interventionism against Venezuela. As Nock pointed out in his essay “The Conquest of the United States by Spain,” however, it was Spain that actually conquered the United States, not the other way around. Amidst all the celebrations among American statists over the easy military victory over Venezuela, what these statist fail to realize is that it actually Venezuela that has won the war against the United States.

To understand this phenomenon, we begin with John Quincy Adams’s famous Fourth of July, 1821, speech to Congress entitled “In Search of Monsters to Destroy,” where he stated what would happen to America if it were ever to abandon her foreign policy of non-interventionism:

The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. The frontlet upon her brow would no longer beam with the ineffable splendor of Freedom and Independence; but in its stead would soon be substituted an Imperial Diadem, flashing in false and tarnished lustre the murky radiance of dominion and power. She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.

Such terms as “force,” “dominion,” “power,” and “dictatress or the world” should have a very familiar ring to them for Americans living today, especially when we consider such U.S. policies as invasions, coups, economic sanctions, state-sponsored assassinations, state-sponsored piracy of oil vessels in the high seas, seizure of other nations’s natural resources, collaboration with brutal dictatorial regimes, and threats of wars of aggression, conquest, and absorption against sovereign and independent nations.

What Sumner was pointing out with his essay was that with its fateful entry into the Spanish-American War, the United States ended up abandoning its founding principles of individual freedom and limited government in favor of empire, interventionism, and centralized big government, which ended up destroying the freedom and well-being of the American people. That’s how Spain ended up winning the war against the United States — by inducing the United States to adopt its statist principles.

After all, it was only a few years later — in 1916 — that Americans were subjected to a national income tax, which effectively converted American citizens into subservient and obedient serfs of the state. The adoption of the Federal Reserve that same year, which would later lead to the destruction of America’s constitutional gold-coin, silver-coin monetary system, only reinforced the serfdom of the American people.

The new serfdom was demonstrated perfectly a couple of years later with conscription as part of U.S. interventionism into World War I. What better proof of the new relationship of master and serf than the authority of the master to order the serf to report for “service” to the master, where the “service” consists of going abroad to kill or be killed. It’s not difficult to see who is boss in that type of relationship.

Just like the Spanish-American War, many Americans are exultant over the Pentagon’s and the CIA’s recent military escapades on the high seas near South America. In their exultations, they are ignoring an important point about their own condition: the omnipotent supremacy of the national-security establishment in their own lives as serfs — the same omnipotent supremacy that the Venezuelan national-security state wields over its citizens.

For example, the message being sent by the Pentagon’s extra-judicial killings on the high seas is not just a message to South Americans. It is also a message to the American people. It’s a message that states: We can kill whoever we want, including you, and there is nothing anyone can do about. In other words, that power — the power of assassination — can be carried about against not only South Americans but also American citizens.

Be honest: When you were a kid, did you ever think for a moment that you’d be living in a country where the government could kill people with impunity and immunity?

And it’s not just assassination. We Americans also live under a governmental system in which the Pentagon and the CIA wield the authority to take any American into custody and subject him or her to brutal torture and indefinite detention without trial by jury. It’s not difficult to see who is the master and who is the serf in that type of relationship. It’s also the type of system under which Venezuelans live, even without Maduro in power.

Needless to say, this is not the type of system envisioned by our American ancestors when they approved the Constitution, which called the federal government into existence. If the Constitution had purported to call into existence the type of system under which we live today, there is no possibility whatsoever that our American ancestors would have approved it. That’s because our ancestors wanted to live as free and independent men and women, not as subservient and obedient serfs serving the state.

Sumner was right. Even though the U.S. government easily defeated Spain in the Spanish-American War, it was Spain that actually won the war by inducing the United States to adopt its statist principles. The principle is repeated with the U.S. national-security state’s easy military abduction of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro.