US President Donald Trump began the new year with the usual deranged flourish, carrying out massive airstrikes against Venezuela and reportedly capturing President Nicolás Maduro spirited away in an apparently secret location.
The attack is not entirely surprising, given President Trump’s track record of ignoring the law and his pledge to end wars overseas.
Indeed, President Trump has been babbling for months about the possibility of increased U.S. military action against Venezuela, even as the U.S. bombs ships at will off the coast of Venezuela, presumably in the name of combating drug trafficking.
This led to numerous extrajudicial killings and widespread accusations of war crimes. But hey, it’s just a day’s work for a regime that doesn’t care about the legal legitimacy of its actions, much less stupid concepts like human rights.
The US has also hijacked various oil tankers, and President Trump has advanced the blissfully ridiculous claim that Venezuela is guilty of stealing US oil, land, and assets.
This latest act of US aggression follows decades of US sanctions that have crippled Venezuela’s economy and constituted a kind of war in itself. Former UN Special Rapporteur Alfredo de Zayas estimated that as of 2020, 100,000 Venezuelans had already died as a direct result of forced economic measures.
According to a post today on X by U.S. Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, Secretary of State Marco Rubio informed him that President Maduro was being arrested to stand trial in the United States on criminal charges and that the airstrikes into Venezuela were necessary to protect U.S. military personnel who were executing the arrest warrant.
And while the Trump administration has cast Maduro as the latest international bogeyman and existential threat, this narrative leaves much to be desired. Objectively speaking, the United States itself is guilty of far broader and more comprehensive crimes than the clumsy President Maduro.
So is Israel, a key US ally whose leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, has been repeatedly accused by the US president of Israel’s genocide in the Gaza Strip over the past two years.
Of course, no one in Washington would suggest that Prime Minister Netanyahu would be tied up to stand trial in the United States. The US would rather funnel billions of dollars to the Israeli military to support genocide.
Meanwhile, oil-rich Venezuela has long been a thorn in the side of the US empire, ever since Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez, promoted dangerous anti-capitalist ideas such as universal healthcare.
The Trump administration’s current accusations that Maduro is the mastermind of “narco-terrorism” would be laughable were it not for such massive destruction and flagrant violations of international law.
Clearly, Trump is not the only US president in recent history to engage in blatant illegal activity abroad, but he has managed to add a certain layer of dramatic madness to everything he does.
One is reminiscent of the case of the late Manuel Noriega, a Panamanian leader who remained a CIA employee for years even though the US government was fully aware of his drug-trafficking activities.
When Noriega was no longer seen as a valuable anti-communist ally in the 1980s, the United States turned against him, naturally turning him into the face of evil.
In December 1989, President George H.W. Bush launched an apparently insane attack on Panama that killed up to several thousand civilians in the impoverished Panama City neighborhood of El Chorrillo.
Noriega was finally captured by U.S. forces in 1990 after a brief stay at the Vatican embassy in Panama’s capital was undone by U.S. tanks parked outside. The armored vehicle’s speakers were continuously blasted with a torturous playlist of music, including Jon Bon Jovi’s “Wanted Dead or Alive” and Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA.”
The Panamanians were taken to stand trial, but where else? – In the United States, it has become clear that there is no hypocrisy in holding ex-partners judicially accountable for activities previously approved by the government.
In 2003, the Iraq War was waged on the basis of lies concocted by Bush’s son, President George W. Bush, and his administration. The United States invaded the country, claiming it had weapons of mass destruction. They were of course nowhere to be found, but US forces still crushed parts of the country and killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.
Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was arrested, tried, and summarily executed by the US-appointed Iraqi interim government.
In fact, nothing good tends to happen when the United States intervenes militarily. Contrary to Lee’s assertion that he expects Mr. Rubio to take no further action in Venezuela now that Mr. Maduro is in U.S. custody, this attack on Venezuela is by no means the end of the story.
As impunity in the United States intensifies, rest assured that this horrific spectacle is far from over.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.
