In this political cartoon originally by William Allen Rogers, President Theodore Roosevelt tromps over the Caribbean using his oft-quoted “speak softly and carry a big stick” adage. This political ideology today reads more like shouting loudly to any and all—and it reigns mainly in the United States, but Russia, China, Israel, and others appear to be catching on to the bullying theme.

For those who believe history is cyclical and teaches that warlike periods cannot be averted, even in ostensibly enlightened times, here is cake and icing. This stage of this century is fast turning into a conjuring of most of the nineteenth century and part of the twentieth, a reality that bodes ill among the sane, whose numbers may well be decreasing in times seemingly at peace with colonial-style bullying.

Israel would take over Gaza as well as neighboring states if it could, and might. It would gladly play lord of the Middle East, adjoining states such as Egypt and Syria made into de facto vassals. Though this may not occur, it matters that the prevailing mood does not dislike let alone overtly resist the prospect. Restraint and diplomacy are, in this climate, ridiculous, vestiges of a prudent postwar time. Gone is that postwar, replaced by ongoing war or prewar.

Russia dropped all pretenses when it invaded Ukraine three years ago, becoming the Russia of the czarist era in a modern-day Russo-Japanese War. Russia lost that one, but national expansionism was all around and would lead to a bellicose Japan and Germany a few decades later.

China wants back Taiwan, which it considers a breakaway state, and has shown it will attack and invade if necessary, and it will be necessary. Such a war could lap over into Japan, a nation with no military to speak of since falling under the American umbrella in 1945. But that America is not the one in hand.

But this America is not the world-guardian version of America. That America and the global social responsibilities it once stood for are gone and may be gone forever.

Astonishingly — or perhaps not — that same America is propelling this back-to-the-future colonial mood. Under Donald Trump (a man versed in hostile takeovers), it is copying and making more virulent the threats of Teddy Roosevelt from some twelve decades ago. This time it is not speak softly and carry a big stick but speak loudly and demonstrate to all, including allies, that the stick is both stick and whip and all old bets are off.

America now flirts with Russia while threatening Greenland and Panama, all the while using trade sanctions to browbeat Canada and Mexico, suggesting it might enjoy annexing the former. A colonial invasion of Greenland is a realistic possibility, something kin to such film farces as “The Mouse That Roared.” But this is no farce.

Trump has made America First into a neocolonialist hymn, one in which the United States shakes free of moral leadership — imagine a wet dog — and goes about snarling and biting at will. Again, though, this is no absolute surprise. It is history rotating on its warring wheel, as it always has.

Those brought up in the bipolar world consisting of moral America and immoral Soviet Russia and schooled above all to fear a nuclear holocaust between the superpowers were, and are, entirely bewildered by this global return to big stick-ism. America threatening to neuter Canada and invade Greenland, an autonomous part of ally Denmark? Please.

But this America is not the world-guardian version of America. That America and the global social responsibilities it once stood for are gone and may be gone forever. That John Kennedy would have created the Peace Corps, intended to suggest America’s international sense of ethical purpose, would now amuse if not enrage the likes of Trump and Elon Musk, who, in the spirit of Vladimir Putin‘s vision of Russia, think in terms of a Greater America, all this as Musk ironically slashed federal institutions to the core. Not slashed, of course, is the military. How generals will respond to their refashioned colonial mission remains to be seen, but no mutiny is at hand. The military lives for such historical cycles, in which politicians or a single politician, like king or dictator, mandates strange new goals.

If you wish this gathering storm on Trump only, do so. But it’s too facile a choice. Nearly two generations have lived in partial peace, and many of those who swore by the likes of such phrases as “Never Again” are dead or dying. Now it’s time for something different, something angry and hostile in which there are winners and losers and few in between. It is time again to pledge to that most cathartic of acts, declaring war. To then march, East and West, to the sound of its tuneless and ever-righteous drummer.