Venezuela: When Might Makes Right
To keep Latin America divided, the US plans to erect a new architecture of forever war from the rubble of the ‘Zone of Peace’.
Since the beginning of September, the United States has conducted 23 aerial attacks on small boats in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean. At least 90 people have been killed in what the Trump administration considers a targeted campaign against “narco terrorists” trafficking fentanyl into the US from Venezuela. Washington, however, has yet to provide a shred of evidence in defence of this claim.
These are not ‘war crimes’. The US, after all, is yet to invade Venezuela. They are extrajudicial executions conducted in brazen defiance of international law to violently reassert American hegemony in Latin America. The killing of dozens of Venezuelan and one Colombian fisherman is just one means by which Washington seeks to achieve this objective. ‘Operation Southern Spear’ constitutes the largest display of US military might in the Western Hemisphere since American soldiers turned Panama City into a “little Hiroshima” as they sought to topple former CIA asset General Manuel Noriega in 1989. Having cancelled all diplomatic outreach to Venezuela in October, the Trump Administration promptly deployed the world’s largest aircraft carrier to the Caribbean. The USS Gerald R Ford has more than 4,000 sailors, numerous fighter jets and a fleet of accompanying warships. After B-52 long-range bombers flew along the Venezuelan coast in mid-November, a pair of US Navy F/A-18 Super Hornets circled the Gulf of Venezuela, just north of the country’s most populous city, for 40 minutes on 9 December.
The following day, the US seized an oil tanker transporting vital fuel from Venezuela to Cuba. When asked what would become of the stolen resources, Trump grinned: “Well, we keep it, I guess.” Piracy, it would seem, is now the official White House approach – but that’s far from new. In 1962, while attempting to undermine the fledgling revolution, President Kennedy’s Joint Chiefs of Staff proposed sinking “a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida (real or simulated).” Sixty-three years later, their proposal has become policy in the Caribbean Sea. The sinister logic of the Cuban blockade, which the State Department designed “to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government”, is set to be transplanted to Venezuela. On 17 December, as he designated Nicolás Maduro’s government a “foreign terrorist organisation”, Trump announced a “total and complete blockade” of all US-sanctioned oil tankers entering or leaving Venezuela.
Such economic sanctions imposed by the US and Europe contributed to 38 million deaths between 1971 and 2021. That is why Woodrow Wilson considered them “something more tremendous than war.” Washington brazenly acknowledges these consequences. In 2019, as the first Trump Administration ratcheted up its sanctions against Venezuela, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo admitted that “the humanitarian crisis is increasing by the hour.” Now, this crisis will intensify once again.
While the Venezuelan people are collectively punished by Washington’s economic warfare, the country’s coast is patrolled by what Trump has labelled “the largest Armada ever assembled in the history of South America.” This is the brutal reality of imperial violence in a world where might is right: Murder proudly advertised on our timelines, starvation as strategy and good old-fashioned colonial theft in service of regional domination.
If such performative violence sounds familiar, that’s because it has dominated our television screens since October 2023. The Gaza genocide has desensitised barbarism and normalised impunity. If hundreds of thousands of Palestinians can be killed in one of the 21st century’s gravest crimes and Benjamin Netanyahu still rubs shoulders with European leaders, then what hope is there that Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth will face accountability for ordering a double-tap boat strike? The political West has destroyed its own ‘rules-based international order’. Today, the wreckage of fishing boats in the Caribbean Sea offers a glimpse of what Washington hopes will replace it.
On 5 December, the US codified the return of gunboat diplomacy. “We will enforce a ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine,” stated the new National Security Strategy. In practice, this expands the 200-year-old maxim to include the entire Western hemisphere, which will be kept “free of hostile foreign incursion”. This will ensure Washington’s “continued access to key strategic locations” and “critical supply chains”.
Trump is not the first President to amend the Monroe Doctrine. In 1904, Theodore Roosevelt reinterpreted it to confer an “international police power” on “civilized society” in Latin America. Five years later, US warships sailed south to occupy Nicaragua and overthrow the nation’s president, whose sovereigntist agenda challenged Washington’s local influence. Major Smedley D. Butler of the invading force later confessed to the reality of his role: “I was a high-class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers…a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.” Today, Butler’s role is fulfilled by the 4,000 sailors of the USS Gerald R Ford.
The “Trump Corollary” is an admission that US power is not what it once was. At the height of unipolarity in 1992, the Pentagon sought to “prevent the reemergence of a new rival… from dominating a region whose resources would… be sufficient to generate global power.” The US has comprehensively failed to meet this stated objective. For evidence, one need look no further than China’s $1.08 trillion 2025 trade surplus, which itself accounts for more than 1% of global GDP. Hegseth has himself confessed that the Chinese could sink even America’s newest aircraft carriers in minutes. Gripped by domestic decline, Washington’s horizons have shifted toward hemispheric retrenchment as the “New World Order” gradually gives way to multipolarity.
In Latin America, this requires destabilising the ‘Zone of Peace’ established by CELAC in 2014. That historic declaration, which represented the collective will of the continent to resolve differences through dialogue and cooperation rather than violence and intervention, is incompatible with Trump’s newly updated Monroe Doctrine. To this end, in addition to its escalated assault on the Bolivarian and Cuban revolutions, the Trump administration has spent $20 billion rescuing Javier Meili’s collapsing “anarcho-capitalist” experiment in Argentina. The President has intervened directly in the Honduran General Election, endorsing the likely victor Nasry “Tito” Asfura. He signed a pardon for the former president Juan Orlando Hernández too. The convicted trafficker – who once promised to “stuff drugs right up the noses of the gringos” – walked free just as the Trump administration assassinated another boatload of fishermen in the Caribbean.
To keep the region divided, Washington plans to erect a new architecture of forever war from the rubble of the ‘Zone of Peace’. The US military, for example, has already secured use of Trinidad and Tobago’s airports “in the coming weeks” in case President Trump deigns to strike neighbouring Venezuela. Puerto Rico is another possible staging post for intervention. In early December, the Air Force deployed a number of F-35As, capable of dropping 2,000-pound bombs, to Roosevelt Roads base – one of more than 70 US military installations across Latin America.
In this climate, Europe is totally impotent – and Washington knows it. The continent, said Donald Trump earlier this month, is a group of “decaying” nations with “weak” leaders. Keir Starmer’s spokesperson refused to criticise his remarks. Asked repeatedly about Trump calling the Mayor of London “disgusting”, the same spokesperson responded by highlighting his boss’s “strong relationship” with the President. Britain, consequently, is entirely compliant with the “Trump Corollary”. Along with Canada, France, the Netherlands, and others, the UK government remains a willing participant in Operation Martillo, a multinational counternarcotics campaign that ensures British maritime cooperation with the US Navy as it conducts dozens of strikes on small boats.
The ‘international community’ will not check Washington’s crimes. However, popular forces in Latin America might. In a national referendum on 16 November, the people of Ecuador voted to reject the return of US military bases to their sovereign soil. 60% of the electorate roundly opposed President Daniel Noboa’s proposals to lift a longstanding ban on foreign military installations, dealing a heavy blow to his Trump-aligned government. The result will prevent US soldiers from returning to the Manta airbase – closed in 2009 amidst Rafael Correa’s “Citizens’ Revolution” – on the Pacific coast, once a hub for Washington’s anti-drug operations. Such examples of mass-democratic resistance should serve as motivation to movements across the Western hemisphere as they seek to resist the “Trump Corollary” in 2026.
This article was written for Conter and was published on 24 December 2025.