Renee Nicole Good and the Return of Empire
Renee Nicole Good was a poet, a mother, and a U.S. citizen. She was killed by ICE in Minneapolis. Her death is not an isolated tragedy but a warning sign of a political era sliding back into imperial violence, at home and abroad. Europe must respond with the power it already has.
Renee Nicole Good was not a threat
Renee Nicole Good was 37 years old.
A mother of three. A poet. A neighbor.
A United States citizen.
She was killed in Minneapolis by an ICE agent during a federal operation that escalated into lethal force. She was not the target of an investigation. She was not armed. She was not attacking anyone.
The official justification collapsed almost immediately as video footage and eyewitness accounts contradicted the federal narrative. Local authorities were sidelined. The investigation was pulled upward and sealed off.
Renee’s death was treated not as a failure, but as procedure.
Her life was reduced to a line in a press release. Her children were left with silence instead of accountability.
This matters not only because a woman was killed by the state, but because of what her death reveals.
This is not one incident. It is a pattern.
It would be comforting to believe this was an anomaly. It was not.
The killing of Renee Nicole Good sits inside a broader shift in governance where force is normalized and oversight is treated as obstruction.
At home, federal agencies operate with increasing insulation from local democratic control. Abroad, the same administration asserts dominance through threats, coercion, and unilateral action.
The logic is identical. Power no longer explains itself. It simply acts.
This is not Trump as dictator. It is an apparatus.
History does not produce dictators as solo acts. Dictatorships are systems. Ensembles.
The Trump administration does not feel bound by international law because it does not understand it and has no interest in learning. International law requires education, historical memory, and restraint. None of these qualities are present.
Donald Trump has never demonstrated the intellectual formation required to grasp law, constitutional balance, or multilateral order. What remains is impulse, surrounded by applause.
A spoiled toddler, clapped at by courtiers who mistake loyalty for thinking.
This is not governance. It is tantrum with infrastructure.
We are not in 1823. We are in the nuclear age.
Invoking the Monroe Doctrine misses the danger. Yes, it asserted hemispheric dominance. Yes, it justified intervention. But in 1823, there were no nuclear weapons.
Invoking Theodore Roosevelt and the Spanish-American War also falls short. That era was brutal and imperial, but it could not end the planet.
Today, a profoundly undereducated man, surrounded by enablers, holds the capacity to annihilate life at scale. That is the difference.
This is not a return to colonialism as history.
It is colonialism with an extinction button.
Empire always comes home
Colonial violence never stays abroad. It returns inward.
When international law becomes optional, domestic law follows. When civilians are framed as threats, lethal force becomes routine. When accountability is blocked, democracy becomes theater.
ICE did not kill Renee Nicole Good in a vacuum. She was killed in a political climate where power no longer restrains itself.
Empires do not fall because they are challenged.
They fall because they forget limits.
What Europe must understand about its own power
Europe keeps being told it is weak because it does not fetishize military force. This is a lie repeated by those who confuse violence with power.
Together, Europe is three times stronger than any so-called superpower.
Not in bombs.
In reality.
The European Union does not need tanks to exert force. Military dominance is the refuge of political illiteracy. When you cannot govern, you threaten. When you cannot negotiate, you bomb.
The tools Europe already controls
- The largest integrated market on Earth
- The Euro as a global currency
- Trade access that can include or exclude
- Regulatory power that forces even the largest corporations to comply
- The European historical proof that international law, social systems, and the welfare state are sustainable, while Hollywood is only business, not reality
Who needs tanks when you control supply chains, standards, capital flows, and market access?
Only idiots confuse destruction with strength.
Mature power structures the world. It does not scream at it.
Europe knows this because it has lived through what happens when law collapses. That knowledge is not weakness. It is intelligence.
Renee is the warning
Renee Nicole Good should still be alive.
Her death is not a footnote. It is a signal.
When a state kills its own citizens without accountability and bullies the world with threats, history does not bend forward. It snaps backward.
