US President Donald Trump did not seek congressional approval prior to his military attack on Venezuela. AMID a week of great turmoil in geopolitics, the US Senate voted 52-47 to advance a war powers resolution aimed at limiting the use of armed forces against Venezuela. The vote followed concerns that US President Donald Trump did not seek congressional approval prior to his military attack on Venezuela.
Trump had ramped up his discomforting rhetoric with repeats of deploying “boots on the ground” as part of his control of Venezuela indefinitely. Trump has vowed to redirect 30 to 50 million barrels of Venezuelan oil to the US to sell at market value and decide how much to give to Venezuela from the profits. It has been such a cantankerous scenario that it left not only Americans, but the entire international community with more questions than answers.
At a time when the international community could do with peaceful coexistence, united in diversity, Trump is proving to be a wrecking ball. This, in my humble opinion, is a great shame. Given the stature of the US in world affairs, where the US economy is the biggest and its military unmatched, the US could be playing a more meaningful role in providing exemplary leadership.
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However, events of the past week have moved international peace and cooperation to the brink of a spectacular collapse. First, Washington’s brazen military attack on the Venezuelan capital Caracas, kidnapping the country’s President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, has killed the traditional predictability of diplomacy and caused uncertainty of significant proportions. Initially, some embedded Western media outlets shamelessly described the kidnapping and abduction of President Maduro and his wife, Celia Flores, as an “extraction”.
The subsequent news coverage also focused on the seemingly concocted charges of narcoterrorism against the pair, ignoring the blatant contravention of international law. The sovereignty of Venezuela was flatly undermined, and by extension, the UN Charter found itself in the dustbin of the White House. I have previously cited the menacing unilateralism of the US, with Europe in tow, as the singular most causal factor behind global instability. In the aftermath of the US military attack on Caracas, during which one hundred members of the protection services were mowed down by the heavy firepower of the US Delta Force operators, the absence of condemnation across the West was telling.
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