US President Donald Trump. Picture: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP “He is a president who can’t think properly and wants to plunge the world into a holocaust… all for oil… the US has no moral authority to play policeman of the world.” Anyone who woke up on Sunday and came across these words would be convinced that they were about Donald Trump. These were the words of former SA president Nelson Mandela over three decades ago, when then US president George W Bush defied the UN and invaded Iraq.
The truth in the words rings true today because another US president has “captured” the president of another sovereign state, President Nicolas Maduro, of Venezuela. Many have chosen to label this action a kidnapping, a sanitised “capture”, which the US prefers. These are the actions of a man who, in a short year in office since his re-election, has campaigned for the Nobel Peace Prize for having ended “seven wars”, claiming: “If my name were Obama, I would have been given the Nobel Peace prize already”.
Not only is this president beyond the levels of doing cringeworthy things like campaigning for a humanitarian award like the Nobel prize, he believes his own hype – while dropping bombs in Syria, Iran and Nigeria – that he is a peacemaker. Was Mandela correct in asserting that the United States has no moral authority to play world policeman? For more than a century, many presidents of the United States have authorised the invasions of many countries to “restore democracy” or for “peacekeeping purposes” in those countries.
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A pattern that has emerged with most of the countries that the US has invaded over the years is that they are rich in natural resources. Venezuela, the country that Donald Trump has vowed to “run temporarily” and “get the oil flowing”, owns the world’s largest oil reserves.
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