Gunboat diplomacy is back in business with Donald Trump ordering the abduction of Nicolás Maduro and his declaration that the US will in future control Venezuela and its vast oil reserves.
We are returning to the world of 19th-century imperialist states with the greatest military power stripping those without the power to resist of their political independence and economic assets. Trump might equally use the allegations against Maduro – of supporting “narco-terrorism” – against Colombia and Mexico, which, unlike Venezuela, really are major producers of cocaine and fentanyl, respectively.
Trump scarcely bothers with the traditional US justifications, such as the introduction of democracy, used in the past to justify regime change in Iraq and Afghanistan. He clearly states that the US will in future rule 31 million Venezuelans directly or indirectly, but there is no doubt about who will be in charge. The one accusation that cannot be made against Trump is that he conceals his motives and intentions.
squareVENEZUELATrump promised not to attack Venezuela, senior Democrat claims
Read More
“We’re going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition,” he said during his news conference on Saturday at his Mar-a-Lago resort. “We don’t want to be involved with having somebody get in and we have the same situation that we had for the last long period of years.”
The group running the country is to include US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, though they might initially seek to operate through Venezuela’s Vice President Delcy Rodriguez, whom Trump claims is “essentially willing to do what we think is necessary”. This sounds very unlikely, given that she has been making speeches of defiance and there is no doubt that the US is looking for a total regime change.
In both Iraq and Afghanistan, local proxies whom Washington installed in power proved too weak to survive without full-scale intervention by American troops on the ground – something that Trump refuses to rule out in the case of Venezuela.
In Iraq, the White House always denied that it had invaded to seize the country’s oil resources and this was never the primary cause of the war, though it always lurked in the background as a reason why the US was so interested in the country. Venezuela possesses a massive 303 billion barrels of crude oil — about a fifth of the world’s global reserves, according to the US Energy Information Agency.
Unlike past perpetrators of foreign intervention in oil states such as Iran and Libya, Trump does not mask his predatory intentions. “As everyone knows, the oil business in Venezuela has been a bust, a total bust for a long period of time,” he said. “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure” and “start making money for the country”.
The negative impact of the US propelling regime change in Venezuela will be globally felt. Trump speaks of a reassertion of the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, supposing it to be an assertion of US monopoly power in Latin America, while in reality it was aimed at repelling European colonialists seeking to supress local nationalist movements.
In practice, Trump is extending his fake version of the doctrine, which he facetiously calls “the Donroe doctrine”, to the rest of the world. US control of the Middle East is far more advanced than in Latin America. In alliance with Israel, countries, religious sects, political movements and militias hostile to the US have come under attack over the last year. Israel and the US subjected Iran to relentless air attack last summer and threaten to do so again – Trump pledging to respond forcibly if any anti-government protesters are harmed by the Iranian government.
US air strikes are the norm from Syria to Somalia. Arab nation states that escaped from British and French imperial rule – Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Sudan – have been either destroyed or fundamentally weakened by direct US-backed foreign intervention or by civil wars in which protagonists have been armed and financed by the US or US-allied oil states in the Gulf.
Another feature of the deepening US hegemony has been accelerated by Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Russia was the great power ally of governments in Syria, Iran and Venezuela and something of a counterweight to US hostility. But Russia’s failure to defeat Ukraine and Putin’s need to cultivate Trump over the Ukraine war has meant that Russia no longer has much global reach.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine also frightened the European states belonging to the European Union and Nato into the arms of the US. Their reaction to the threat from Moscow may have been exaggerated, but it has made them frightened of alienating Trump who might cut off military supplies and intelligence to Ukraine. Consequently, the European response to what is effectively the state kidnapping of Maduro has been tepid and ineffectual.
Your next read
square VICKY SPRATTGhost flats are becoming Britain’s new housing crisis
square SARAH BAXTERThe health admission that will now plague Trump’s presidency
square ROBERT FOXVenezuela will define Trump’s presidency – this is what he actually craves
square JAMES BALLTrump promised Maga the US wouldn’t police the world – now it’s running Venezuela
It is a mistake to blame all this on Trump. US foreign policy under Biden was often heading in the same direction as Trump is now, notably in Gaza and the Middle East. But Trump’s disavowal of a law-based international order is open and unashamed and is to be replaced by a Darwinian survival of the most powerful. The UN and other international institutions are to be treated as museum pieces.
No nation feels safe and they will feel even less safe after seeing what is happening in Venezuela. They will react by desperately seeking to conciliate Trump, but also by arming up and remilitarising in case such conciliation fails.
Trump wants regime change in Caracas, but he makes no secret that that he would like to see right-wing regimes more attuned to his way of thinking in power in Berlin, Paris and London. As W B Yeats put it his poem “The Second -Coming” – “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”
Hence then, the article about no country is safe after trump s anarchy in venezuela global order has collapsed was published today ( ) and is available on inews ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( No country is safe after Trump’s anarchy in Venezuela – global order has collapsed )
Also on site :
- Dispatch centers in Marin County down, service outage reported for 911 calls
- Insilico Medicine Announce US$888 Million Multi-Year Collaboration with Servier for Drug Discovery and Development in Oncology
- CTA: Despite Tariffs and Economic Headwinds, U.S. Consumer Tech Revenue to Hit $565 Billion in 2026