The unexpected abduction of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, and his wife, Cilia Fores, by the United States in an invasion on 3 January, has sent shock waves around the world. It is a grave assault on the rules-based international order and a crude display of the perverse doctrine of ‘might is right’. The world should be deeply concerned about President Donald Trump’s embrace of this malevolent act from the US’s discredited playbook.
Caracas, the Venezuelan capital, in the midnight of that Saturday, was assailed by torrential missiles and bombings, which dismantled the country’s aerial and other defence systems, thus paving the way for the 15,000 US Delta Force Commandos to break into the presidential fortress. This “criminal aggression”, state officials said on Thursday, claimed 100 lives, including Mr Maduro’s Cuban guards. Mr Maduro was handcuffed and immediately flown to the US.
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On 5 January, President Maduro and his wife (alongside their son and other state officials, in absentia) were arraigned before a New York Court, where narco-terrorism conspiracy, the importation of cocaine, and other related offences were levelled against them. However, they pleaded not guilty. “I am sir, Nicolas Maduro, President of the Republic of Venezuela. And I have been kidnapped since 3 January,” he told the presiding Judge, Alvin Hellerstein, when asked to confirm his
identity.
But Mr Trump’s utterances before and after Mr Maduro’s capture belied his real motive. The target is Venezuela’s oil resources and the forceful dominance of the petro-dollar system. Venezuela is the country with the richest oil reserves globally. “The US will run the country” on a temporary basis and “get the oil flowing,” Mr Trump said.
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Venezuela is now expected to give up about 50 million barrels of oil to the US. Mr Trump confessed that “the money will be controlled by me.” And, he ensured that when Mr Maduro’s deputy, Delcy Rodriguez, was sworn in as interim President, she got the stern warning to either cooperate with the US or be ready to get booted out. Clearly, this is brigandage, a moral albatross associated with only rogue states. This is hollowing out whatever is left of the US’ moral capital under Mr Trump’s leadership.
With the humongous oil and other mineral resources to be plundered from the South American country already within reach, a democratic transition seems to be almost impossible in the near future. A post from Mr Trump’s verified Truth Social handle on Thursday revealed that, “Venezuela is going to be purchasing only America Made Products, with the money they receive from our new Oil Deal,” therefore making the US “its main principal partner” in global business.
The kidnapping of Mr Maduro was shadowed by a fouled political firmament that reached a head with the last presidential election, which Mr Maduro was alleged to have rigged, prompting Washington’s virulent disapproval and a series of diplomatic rows. Thereafter, the American characterisation of Mr Maduro as a drug lord and Venezuela, a narco state, was more recently followed by airstrikes on boats allegedly conveying hard drugs to the US, and then the military encirclement and siege laid to the country, preparatory to an attack.
However, Mr Trump’s heist plot had in fact been long conceived. After the 22 June bombing of three nuclear facilities in Iran, he issued, in September, an Executive Order renaming the American Department of Defence as the Department of War, circling back to a 1947 state of affairs, which signalled the dangers ahead.
Interestingly, the UK Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, and Europe have been tepid in their reaction to this act of a seemingly unhinged global hegemon. However, Russia, China, France and the United Nations have strongly condemned the aggression.
A critical subtext to Mr Trump’s Venezuelan drama is a most vicious geopolitical script to undermine China, a major trade ally of Venezuela, and contain Russia’s influence in the Latin American region. In some respects, what Mr Trump cannot achieve through tariffs or trade wars, he is seeking to enforce through military might. It is an invocation of the Monroe Doctrine, with all its apocalyptic repercussions.
Enamoured of the Venezuelan triumph, Mr Trump’s focus has now shifted to Colombia, Mexico, Cuba and Greenland – an Arctic island that is an autonomous territory of Denmark, which he wants to annex for the US’ strategic defence interest. That will herald the end of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), a post-World War II defence pact, which, to a large extent, has guaranteed global peace. Article 5 of the treaty expressly states that an attack on one is an attack on all, and this protocol is complementary to Article 2 (4) of the UN Charter, which forbids the use of force against the territorial integrity of a member nation.
Today, the US parades itself as the policeman of the world. But its unhinged displays in the international arena, epitomised in the Venezuela event, set a “dangerous precedent,” as the UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, observed. Also, as President Lula da Silva of Brazil put it, Mr Trump has “crossed an unacceptable line.”
This is apt. But where will the trigger or punitive actions against the US come from?
By Trump’s acts of aggression, he has exposed the hypocrisy in his role as a peacemaker in the Russia-Ukraine conflict and the other war-ending deals he claims to have brokered. Apparently, he does not look a shade different from Vladimir Putin, who has seized Ukraine’s territories of Donetsk, Luhansk and the entire Crimea. Perhaps Mr Putin would no longer feel restrained from pursuing a regime-change plot in Kyiv, just as China might not show any scruples in swallowing up Taiwan.
Yes, the US may have behaved similarly in Panama in 1989 when it ended General Manuel Noriega’s regime and took him to America, where he was imprisoned; enabled the fall of Jean Bertrand Aristide in Haiti; and engineered regime changes in Iraq and Libya, but the Venezuelan episode dwarfs them all. Here, Mr Trump has been brazen and unabashed in his declarations to appropriate the country’s oil resources for US benefits. In Iraq’s case, its oil revenues were controlled under a UN resolution.
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Unfortunately, Mr Guterres is yet again in an uncomfortable corner, ruminating over the relevance of the UN that he leads, and always helpless in dealing with a bull in a china shop.
The message Mr Trump has very clearly sent across the world is that powerful countries can bully their weak, hapless neighbours without scruples, in a manner reminiscent of the era of gunboat diplomacy, or even unpretended colonisation.
This emergent canon of disregard for rules or mechanisms that guarantee global peace and security is one that bodes ill for humanity and serves as fertile grounds for the descent of the world into crises across several frontiers. It needs to be checkmated right now.
