Within hours, a small American military unit landed in Caracas. By nightfall, Venezuela's elected president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife had been abducted and flown out of the country
This operation did not suddenly manifest out of thin air; it followed months of open threats, the steady erosion of International norms, and the killing of Venezuelan fishermen in Caribbean waters.
Donald Trump and Marco Rubio achieved precisely what they had long signaled they wanted: ‘regime change by force’.
If this feels familiar, it should.
Very little has changed in US foreign policy since 1989, when President George H W Bush helped inaugurate the modern era of endless intervention.
The language has shifted, the excuses have evolved, but the underlying logic remains intact.
What has changed is the posture of Trump’s MAGA coalition. For years, it denounced regime change, nation-building, and foreign wars as betrayals of the American people. Now those same policies are being embraced openly, without apology, and without disguise.
After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Washington lectured the world about a rules-based international order. Americans were told that sovereignty and territorial integrity were sacred principles violated only by America’s adversaries.
This lecture came from a government that had spent decades occupying Afghanistan, invading Iraq, bombing Libya, and carving out zones of permanent military control in Syria.
Now, with the invasion of Venezuela, the contradiction is no longer theoretical; it is operational.
CIA Coups
Throughout the 20th century, the United States engineered or supported coups across Latin America to secure access to land, labor, and resources.
Chile, where Salvador Allende was overthrown and replaced with Augusto Pinochet’s 17-year dictatorship.
Brazil, where Joao Goulart was deposed, ushering in 2 decades of military rule.
Argentina, in 1976, El Salvador, and Nicaragua in the 1980s.
Throw a dart at a map of Latin Americ,a and history suggests it will land somewhere Washington has already decided democracy was optional.
Venezuela, it turns out, is no exception.
One of Donald Trump’s justifications for abducting President Maduro was the claim that Venezuela had stolen American oil.
Venezuela is home to the largest known oil reserves in the world, over 303 billion barrels, according to OPEC.
That is 17% of global reserves, more than Saudi Arabia, more than Iran, more than Russia or the United States.
In Trump’s telling, this operation was not about drugs, not about democracy, not even about stability; it was about oil, and the market understood the message immediately.
Within days of the invasion, a former Chevron executive, Ali Moshiri, announced he was raising $2 billion for Venezuelan oil projects. “Interest in Venezuela has gone from 0 to 99 percent”, he told The Financial Times.
Step one is the stabilization of the country, we don’t want it descending into chaos.
Part of that stabilization, and the reason why we understand and believe that we have the strongest leverage possible, is our foreign team, as you have seen today two more ships were seized.
We are in the midst right now, and are about to execute on a deal to take all the oil.
Marco Rubio, US Secretary of State
Trump’s blunt rhetoric did not mark a break from American tradition; it merely stripped away the euphemisms; no talk of humanitarian intervention, no pretense of democracy building; just extraction.
At home and abroad, the United States is sliding toward a condition best described as ‘organized lawlessness’.
Domestically, special operation units are used to snatch people off American streets and send them abroad without due process.
Internationally, elite military forces are now abducting foreign heads of state and delivering them to US prisons; political kidnapping has become policy.
The justification, once again, is familiar: allegations of narco-trafficking, today's substitute for yesterday's weapons of mass destruction.
The same rhetorical device used in Iraq, Libya, and Syria; accusations designed not to prove guilt, but to preempt debate.
The invasion of Venezuela is a gross violation of international law. The same principles Washington insists must be defended in Ukraine have been discarded without hesitation in Caracas, and yet, the response from America's allies has been revealing.
When Russia invaded Ukraine, the European Union imposed 19 sanctions packages and committed nearly $200 billion in aid, insisting that sovereignty and territorial integrity were non-negotiable.
When the United States invaded Venezuela and abducted its president, Europe responded by "closely monitoring the situation".
This was not diplomacy; it was evasion.
Europe's selective outrage, already exposed by its muted response to the destruction of Gaza, has further eroded its credibility across the global south and among its own citizens.
And Venezuela may not be the end. In recent interviews, Donald Trump, once again, declared that the United States absolutely needs Greenland, reviving ambitions many hoped had been abandoned.
The message is unmistakable, sovereignty is conditional, and power decides who qualifies
If the United States would [sic] invade Greenland that would change the picture.
You know, Denmark is a member of NATO, Greenland is part of Denmark, so that would create a conflict within NATO, and that would be complicated, extreme.
So for sure, the Europeans have to finally find their own way to define their military strength and to be less dependent on the United States, that's an important point we have to see in Europe.
Edmund Duckwitz, Former German Ambassador to Venezuela
The capture of Nicolas Maduro has raised more questions than answers; Trump himself admitted that opposition leader Maria Carina Machado lacks the strength to govern.
So who rules Venezuela now? A handpicked proxy, a rotating cast of foreign advisers, or direct oversight by Washington itself. Can the country be governed at all without permanent US military forces?
The costs of all of this have been devastating through these dozens and dozens of US regime change operations, and that's why we have a UN Charter, because if powerful countries take law into their own hands without rules, we have international anarchy.
And the realists that describe the world as international anarchy freely admit that it leads to the tragedy of great power politics.
Jeffery Sachs, Columbia University Professor
Meanwhile, American corporations are lining up to exploit not only Venezuela's oil, but its vast reserves of gold, iron ore, natural gas, bauxite, nickel, and rare earth minerals. Extraction is no longer a byproduct of intervention; it is the whole point.
In the short term, the spectacle of Maduro’s abduction conveniently distracts from the Trump administration's failure to shape the outcome of the war in Ukraine.
Washington appears increasingly prepared to disengage, leaving Moscow to dictate terms on its own. What remains is the precedent.
The invasion of Venezuela was neither a mistake nor an aberration. It was a declaration that international law applies only when it is useful, that sovereignty exists only at the pleasure of the powerful, and that force, not principle, remains the currency of global order.
The danger is not only what the United States has done, but what it has now made permissible for others to do next.
No comments:
Post a Comment