Donald Trump’s latest war

The attack by the United States on Venezuela and capture of its president, Nicolas Maduro, will go down in history as another instance of naked aggression by a superpower with a long history of dislodging regimes.

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By abducting the Venezuelan leader and his wife from Caracas, using the American armed forces, and detaining them in New York on charges of being narco-terrorists involved in a drug smuggling conspiracy, US President Donald Trump has reasserted militarist neocolonialism. If anyone looked for a deeper explanation for Maduro’s violent capture, Trump himself provided that. He declared that his regime would run Venezuela until a transition could be effected. More importantly, he would help extract from that country unspecified losses and costs that America claims by appropriating its massive oil reserves. Whatever the US president's motives, there is little doubt that he authorised an attack on a sovereign country to bring about a regime change in violation of the UN Charter, even taking into account the fact that Washington and Europe did not recognise Maduro as head of state after 2