Well, the New Year started out with a literal bang, as US President Donald Trump unilaterally committed an act of war against Venezuela in order to arrest its president, the unpopular Nicolas Maduro. The USA essentially invaded a foreign country to seize its president and first lady, all without Congressional approval. The extent of the damage caused by the invasion, along with the number of Venezuelan lives lost, is not yet clear, but Maduro has been arrested and has already been whisked away to New York City, where he will face narco-terrorism and drug trafficking charges in an apparently great again American courtroom.
Maduro may be a brutal dictator who has held on to power using illegal and immoral means, but in the previous world order, even that cannot justify the USA invading a sovereign country and spiriting away its president and first lady. Now that Trump has taken the USA down the same dangerous and deadly path that Russia took against Ukraine and Israel against Palestine, our world as we know it could be irreversibly changed and leaders who have been itching to wage war or invade other countries now have even more reason to pull the proverbial trigger.
Trump may have done Venezuelans a favor by unceremoniously taking Maduro out of their country, but because of that act of war, which wasn’t even approved by the US Congress, the world is now a more dangerous place. By joining the ranks of war criminals Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu, frustrated Nobel Peace Prize wannabee Donald Trump has proven to the world that it doesn’t take much to go to war anymore. Latin American countries do not know if they will be the next targets of the America that is great again. China now knows that it can use the same twisted logic to wage war against Taiwan, and if it is not content with its occupation of the South China Sea, there is now nothing to stop it from invading the Philippines.
It was already scary when Russia invaded Ukraine, where the war is still waging, after hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost from both sides of the unjustified conflict. It showed us that safeguards against nations waging war have fallen, and the United Nations is effectively useless on that end. When Israel waged war against Palestine, exacting a wildly disproportionate death toll and level of destruction on a civilian population, compared to what had been inflicted on it by the terrorism of Hamas, the threat of even more wars breaking out became even more clear.
Now that the supposed bastion of democracy and freedom has gone to war to oust a dictator and also forcibly and conveniently take control of a country with the world’s largest oil reserves, there is now nothing to stop all countries, great or small, from waging their own wars for their own selfish reasons.
Whatever sense of collective peace and security that humans have been able achieve after the horrors of World War II, capped by the two atomic bombs dropped by the Americans on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is now effectively gone after the UN showed us just how toothless it has become and now that the USA under Donald Trump has welcomed the new world order where might is once again right.
After removing Maduro, Trump said the US will ‘manage’ Venezuela “until such time that we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition,” which doesn’t really say anything. Notably, Trump also said Venezuela’s vice president, who is now the country’s interim leader, could hold power as long as she “does what we want.” It is also worth noting that Trump also declined to support the accession of Venezuela’s opposition leader, María Corina Machado, who in October won the Nobel Peace Prize that he had been openly coveting.
What has essentially happened is that Venezuela and its vast oil reserves are now under Trump’s control, and there is nothing anyone can do about it, especially the so-called United Nations. Other greedy world leaders must now be salivating at the prospect of waging their own wars to further their own selfish ends. Filipinos can only hope and pray that China’s Xi Jinping continues to play the ‘sane world leader’ card, despite eyeing the war-mongering exploits of his peers, Valdimir, Bibi, and Donnie.
This new world order is particularly terrifying for countries that have valuable natural resources or strategic value. If Venezuela has its oil reserves, Taiwan and the Philippines have their location. If Trump called Maduro a narco, Putin claimed Zelensky is a Nazi, and Bibi took advantage of the Hamas attack to respond with genocide, any world leader by now knows that they should be able to easily find reasons to stake their claim on any territory they desire.
At this point we can only hope that the USA joining the warmonger club is the peak or end of the trend, and not the beginning of an age of armed conflict among nations.
Happy New Year!*
