A sharp critique of Trump’s Venezuela invasion, warning it shatters international law, destabilises Nato and accelerates a dangerous era where might makes right.
AMERICAN Chinook aircraft and Apache gunship escorts clattered through the night sky over Caracas, which was splashed orange with explosions as missiles attacked military sites across the country.
A few hours later, President Donald Trump announced that Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro and his wife had been “captured” and flown out of their country.
High fives, no doubt, in the Oval Office – and more praise poems for Trump from his henchpeople, like Peter Hegseth, the secretary for defence/war, who puts more effort into public pull-ups than he does operational security, let alone strategic thought.
What no one in the White House can see is that this invasion, this apparent political decapitation, this violation of international law, is strategically mad.
Outside the White House and Magaland, the only cheering will be in the Kremlin and in Beijing.
In Nato there will be horror.
But one can be sure that the supine grovelling that has characterised the behaviour of Nato’s leadership towards Trump and Hegseth will continue.
Doing otherwise would be to acknowledge that Donald Trump has swung America first from being a friend, then to being an unreliable ally, and now, in the dawn of 2026, Trump’s America is a threat.
He said he would attack Venezuela’s mainland, and he has.
His claim to be knocking over a narco-terrorist state that has exported vast quantities of opiates to the US and killed hundreds of thousands of its citizens is nonsense.
Opiates get into the US from Mexico, not Venezuela.
As a premise for regime change and invasion, it is as false as the claims that Saddam Hussein was making a nuclear weapon.
The invasion of that nation set off decades of pain and murder, terror and mayhem, and gave birth to Isis.
It also tore at the fabric of Western democracies, as some ripped up ethics and their own laws to hunt down alleged terrorists.
Now, Trump has attacked a neighbour without any international support.
He has aped the behaviour of his great hero and friend, Vladimir Putin.
He has also, like Putin, politicised the military and intelligence services, tried to shatter judicial independence and feathered the nests of select oligarchs.
The Russian president invaded Ukraine in 2014.
He falsely claimed that Russian speakers were being oppressed in that country.
The Kremlin wants to take over all of its neighbour, and Trump is supporting its efforts to carve out the 20% it has already captured.
In his new year’s speech, China’s leader Xi Jinping renewed threats against Taiwan, saying: “The reunification of our motherland, a trend of the times, is unstoppable.”
And China held massive war games off the coast of Taiwan at the same time.
In the age of Trump, the “trend of the times” is that might is always right.
He has repeatedly said that Canada should be annexed.
He has not ruled out the use of force to take over Greenland for its mineral riches.
He has insisted that “sooner or later” it will be part of the US.
These are Nato countries (Greenland is part of Denmark).
His weird threats against his neighbours and allies could have been dismissed as the ramblings of a demented man-child or sarcastic asides from a diplomatic disruptor.
But they are no joke.
For all his lies and bluster, Trump makes good on his threats and ambitions.
His fantasy of turning Gaza into a Gaz-a-Lago seaside resort may yet be manifest.
His National Security Strategy says that four Nato nations are soon to be overwhelmed by “non-Europeans”.
Aside from being a racist trope from “Great Replacement” conspiracy theorists (latter-day Nazis), it is also flat wrong.
But he now sees the world in three spheres: the Western hemisphere is his to control; Russia can have Europe; and China the rest.
This is the moment when it is now clear that, as Yeats wrote in “The Second Coming”, “the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world”.
And the leaders of the West should heed what happens when a “blood-dimmed tide is loosed” – it happens when “the best lack all conviction”.
This is the moment that Europe needs to stand up – but it will stay sitting down as the bloody tide rises around its ankles.
Sam Kiley is the world affairs editor of The Independent. Comments: [email protected]
