Pax Americana: Same difference

By Trump's own account, America's mission in Venezuela is to seize control of the world's largest oil reserves

- Adekeye Adebajo

The United States' abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his subsequent transfer to New York to face drug-trafficking charges has inflicted grave damage on the United Nations-centred international legal system that the US largely built.

To be sure, President Donald Trump is merely continuing a long history of US interventionism abroad. But whereas previous administrations often paid lip service to human rights or democracy, Trump has taken off the mask. By his own account, America's mission in Venezuela is to seize control of the world's largest oil reserves.

Ironically, the Monroe Doctrine that Trump has dusted off to justify expelling China (which had been buying around 80% of Venezuela's oil exports) from the Western Hemisphere was actually born of US military weakness.

In seeking to bar European colonial powers from its self-declared backyard in the 1820s, the US initially had to rely on policing by Britain's Royal Navy. Not until US President Theodore Roosevelt's 1904 "corollary" to the Monroe Doctrine did the US have the military capabilities to impose its will on the region, which it had already done by expelling Spain in 1898.

By then, Pax Americana had come to represent an expansionist project of "gunboat diplomacy" and "Yankee imperialism" in which the US annexed Hawaii, Guam, Samoa, and Puerto Rico, while occupying the Philippines and Cuba.

Prior to that, the US had waged war on Mexico in 1846-48, seizing 55% of its territory (today's California, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah).