Trump authorises his military to bomb Venezuela and kidnap its president, Maduro, which they have successfully done.
Trump now thinks he’s going to run Venezuela, which will include seizing its oil industry, presumably so that the mega rich US oil companies can become even richer.
Apparently gone are the days where the US used proxy wars and secret funding to depose Latin American governments it disliked. Now they show no shame in directly doing it themselves and then tweeting about it.
Gone are the days when their government at least pretended at the time that their foreign military incursions were not actually mostly about seizing their opponents natural resources.
Just two weeks ago, Trump mentioned oil as a justification for his military buildup off Venezuela’s coast.
They took our oil rights, removed our companies, and we want them back," he told reporters on the Joint Base Andrews tarmac beside Air Force One.
Trump has, for years, expressed his belief that the United States had the right to confiscate oil using the military
Maduro was a bad man, a horrible president. No one needs to venerate him as anything other than that.
Maduro was widely considered to be leading an authoritarian government characterized by electoral fraud, human rights abuses, corruption, and severe economic hardship
But one can’t just invade other countries and abduct people you don’t like. The US operation was almost certainly illegal under international law, although I have seen many of the relevant organisations look like they’re going to do anything about it so far. Given the US can veto any relevant UN decision there’s little likelihood of much happening there.
It is perhaps less mind-blowingly unprecedented than it seems. The US did something vaguely similar in Panama, at least to my recent reading, back in 1989.
The United States invaded Panama in mid-December 1989 during the presidency of George H. W. Bush. The purpose of the invasion was to depose the de facto ruler of Panama, General Manuel Noriega, who was wanted by U.S. authorities for racketeering and drug trafficking. The operation, codenamed Operation Just Cause, concluded in late January 1990 with the surrender of Noriega
Although in that case it seems like they were rather more provoked rather than it being seemingly the whim of a corrupt, criminal and at times seemingly mad, US president.
Following the declaration of a state of war between Panama and the United States passed by the Panamanian general assembly, as well as the lethal shooting of a Colombia-born U.S. Marineofficer Lt. Robert Paz at a PDF roadblock, Bush authorized the execution of the Panama invasion plan.
Nontheless, Bush’s operation was condemned as illegal by much of the global community.
The U.S. government invoked as a legal justification for the invasion. Several scholars and observers have opined that the invasion was illegal under international law, arguing that the government’s justifications were, according to these sources, factually groundless, and moreover, even if they had been true they would have provided inadequate support for the invasion under international law
So there’s little doubt that Trump’s actions were, once again, not in line with the law. The question is, can and will anyone with power do anything about it, or is this the new norm for the country formerly known as a kind of global policeman?