The events of January 3 in Venezuela will have profound consequences for geopolitical stability. The illegal attack on Caracas by the US and the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife constitute a grave violation of Venezuelan sovereignty. They are also an extraordinary assault on the foundations of international law.
US President Donald Trump has always seen himself and the US as above the law. But the consequences of the raid on Caracas will reverberate more widely, and with greater force, than those that followed the January 2020 USdrone strike that killedIranian Maj-Gen Qasem Soleimani at Baghdad International Airport, or the January 2021 assault on the Capitol by supporters of Trump seeking to disrupt the certification of election results. What makes the raid on Caracas particularly egregious is its nakedly imperial character: a superpower descending on a sovereign state thousands of kilometres from its shores and overthrowing its government without even the pretence of legal justification.
What is taking shape is an openly coercive hemispheric order. What Trump has gleefully described as the “Donroe Doctrine” marks a highly personalised return to the logic of the Monroe Doctrine, in which the US claims the Americas as its exclusive sphere of control. Venezuela has never been any threat to the US, and these actions and threats by the US make a mockery of its previous condemnation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
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It can even be argued that Russia had more rationale to enter Ukraine than the US had to attack Venezuela, a country geographically distant, economically weakened and politically isolated. Trump’s claim to be acting against drug trafficking is farcical. The fentanyl that has taken so many lives in the US does not come from Venezuela, and only a tiny amount of the cocaine that moves north into the US passes through Venezuela.
The attack on Venezuela did not begin with Caracas. It began in the Caribbean Sea, where Trump deployed US forces — including warships, aircraft and an aircraft carrier — to carry out unlawful and lethal attacks on small boats in the name of a war on drugs. While claiming to act against narcotics, he simultaneouslypardonedformer Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, convicted and sentenced in the US for large-scale cocaine trafficking.
The spurious claims about narcotics are as flimsy and cynical as those about weapons of mass destruction that paved the way for the invasion of Iraq. Trump is clearly motivated by a desire to gain control of Venezuela’s vast oil wealth, thought to be the world’s largest, rather than any genuine concern about narcotics. As shocking as the raid on Caracas has been, it must be seen in a wider context.
The unlawful devastation of Gaza by Israel, with US funding, weapons and diplomatic protection, showed the world that the US and its allies understood themselves to be immune from international law, and their enemies to be outside of its protection. The same disregard for international law has been seen in Nigeria. Under the pretext of protecting Christians from Isis, the White House hasbombardedparts of the country, including areas where there is no credible evidence of an Isis presence.
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