United States President Donald Trump has kicked off the new year with a typically deranged bang by conducting massive air strikes on Venezuela and reportedly capturing the country’s president, Nicolas Maduro, who has apparently been spirited off to an undisclosed location.
The attack does not come entirely as a surprise, given Trump’s track record of doing whatever the hell he wants with no regard for the law – or for his own promise to, you know, stop waging war abroad.
Indeed, Trump has been chattering for months about the possibility of enhanced US military action against Venezuela, as the US has gone about bombing boats willy-nilly off the country’s coast, supposedly in the name of combatting drug trafficking.
This has entailed numerous extrajudicial killings and rampant accusations of war crimes. But, hey, it’s all in a day’s work for an administration that couldn’t care less about legal justification for its behaviour, much less human rights and other such silly concepts.
The US has also hijacked various oil tankers, with Trump unleashing blissfully ludicrous allegations that Venezuela is guilty of stealing US oil, land and assets.
This latest bout of US aggression comes on the heels of decades of US sanctions, which have crippled the Venezuelan economy and which have constituted a form of warfare unto themselves. As of 2020, former UN special rapporteur Alfred de Zayas calculated that 100,000 Venezuelans had already perished as a direct result of coercive economic measures.
According to a post earlier today on X by US Senator Mike Lee of Utah, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio informed him that Maduro has been arrested to stand trial in the United States on criminal charges, and that the air strikes on Venezuela were necessary to protect the US military personnel who were carrying out the arrest warrant.
And while the Trump administration has converted Maduro into the latest international bogeyman and existential menace, this narrative leaves much to be desired. Objectively speaking, the US itself is guilty of far more extensive and comprehensively criminal behaviour than the bumbling Maduro.
Ditto for top US ally Israel, whose leader Benjamin Netanyahu has been repeatedly feted by US presidents over the past two-plus years of Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip.
Of course, no one in Washington would ever suggest that Netanyahu be bundled off to stand trial in the US, which prefers instead to fling billions of dollars at the Israeli military in order to aid in the mass slaughter.
Oil-rich Venezuela, on the other hand, has long been a thorn in the side of the US empire, starting with Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chavez, who propagated such dangerous anti-capitalist ideas as universal healthcare.
Now, the Trump administration accuses Maduro of serving as a ringleader for “narcoterrorism”, which would be laughable if it didn’t result in such large-scale destruction and the flagrant violation of international law.
Obviously, Trump is hardly the only US president in recent history to engage in blatantly illegal action abroad – although he does manage to add a certain dramatic layer of dementedness to everything he does.
One recalls the case of the late Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega, who remained on the CIA payroll for years, despite the US government’s full knowledge of his drug trafficking activities.
When Noriega ceased to be regarded as a valuable anti-communist ally in the 1980s, the US turned on him, spontaneously converting him into the face of evil.
In December 1989, President George H W Bush launched a patently insane attack on Panama, where up to several thousand civilians were killed in the impoverished Panama City neighbourhood of El Chorrillo.
Noriega was eventually captured by US forces in 1990, after his brief stay at the Vatican embassy in the Panamanian capital was rendered unsustainable by the US tanks parked outside. The armoured vehicles’ speakers subjected him to a continuous playlist of musical torture, including singer Jon Bon Jovi’s song Wanted Dead or Alive and Lee Greenwood’s God Bless the USA.
The Panamanian was carted off to stand trial in – where else? – the United States, where the government apparently detected zero hypocrisy in holding its former buddy to judicial account for activities it had previously signed off on.
There was also the war on Iraq in 2003, which was waged on the basis of lies fabricated by Bush’s son President George W Bush and his administration. The US invaded the country, alleging it possessed weapons of mass destruction. Those were naturally nowhere to be found, but the US army nonetheless pulverised various parts of the country and killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.
Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was captured, tried and summarily executed by the US-appointed interim Iraqi government.
Indeed, wherever the US has intervened militarily, nothing good has tended to follow. This latest attack on Venezuela will hardly be the end of the story, contrary to Senator Lee’s contention that Rubio anticipates “no further action in Venezuela now that Maduro is in US custody”.
Rest assured that, as US impunity rages on, the deadly spectacle is far from over.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.