A demonstrator holds a banner during a march in Caracas on January 13, 2026, to demand the release of deposed Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores. [AFP]
If the Russian and Israeli invasions of—and military actions in—Ukraine and Gaza, respectively, partly accounted for the not-so-good quotient of global peace in the last five years, the military-led seizure and rendition by the United States of Nicolás Maduro, bus driver-turned-politician and president of Venezuela since 2013, together with his wife and son a few days ago left no doubt as to the newest, nuclear-potent threat to both global sovereignty and peace: Donald John Trump.
The US president, while ordering and, later, celebrating the arrest of Maduro for alleged drugs trafficking, revealed interest in the US-controlled extraction and sale of Venezuelan oil.
Venezuela sits on an estimated 300 billion barrels of oil—the most of any country on earth—and, previous to the rise to power in 1998 of Maduro's predecessor, Hugo Chavez, reportedly used to extract and subsequently export up to 3.5 million barrels of the same a day.
It's this unmatched mineral wealth, along with the not-so-long-ago-discovered rare earth metals in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ukraine, Greenland and elsewhere around the world, that Trump—both an admirer and a myrmidon of bullies—and his fellow MAGA anarchists have lately sought to forcibly access and profit from.
While the United States’ military invasion of Venezuela, a sovereign state, is not surprising, considering history, it is the message that Trump's not-so-implicit pretext sends to other resource-rich parts of the world that makes for danger in contradistinction to peace and territorial integrity: For interests and the cynically won trophies of expansionist activity, the US, or any other world power(s), can and will, whenever and wherever, trifle with the internationally prescribed order that's based on, and under-girded by, law and respect for jurisdictional autonomy.
In the immediate aftermath of Maduro's seizure, Trump talked up possible military action in other Latin American countries, including Colombia, Cuba and Mexico, and, once again, expressed interest in the annexation of neighbouring Greenland, a semi-autonomous colony of Denmark.
While it wouldn't be the first time the US has used force to capture territory—Mexico City became the first foreign capital ever to be captured and indefinitely vassalised by the then-President James Polk-commanded US army in 1846 over the territorial status of Texas—it sends the signal that, even in this era of all-binding laws and order, might-enabled impunity is still available to particular nations of the world as both a right and tool of expansionist and imperial predilection.
Following Washington's latest show of imperviousness to order-imposed strictures, the general impulse, including among allies in Europe, has been one of helplessness and resignation. The sovereignty of nations is now in the gift of a few powerful, whimsically tyrannical men. And world peace is the oft-brief, luck-given interlude between decisions by Washington, Moscow, Tel Aviv or Beijing to want and capture this or that resource-rich territory.
The new, Trump-evolved style of diplomacy and conflict resolution, as well as rationale for intervention, promise an incautious departure from the internationally crafted and agreed rules-based system that threatens to make the vision of a more stable world as conceived by John F Kennedy (1917-1963), America's 35th president, and supported by they United Nations' founding raison d'etre, where “the STRONG are JUST and the WEAK are SAFE”, not only a hopelessly distant reality, but also a woefully pious idea not worth testing.
If the so-called Monroe Doctrine of 1823 that first ‘ring-fenced’ the Americas as both a geographical and an administrative vassal of the United States set for its future promoters, including Trump, the precedent upon which to build expansionist impunity, the 45th and 47th POTUS—President of the United States—has, for his part, declared the globalisation of its territorial import.
Since the Spanish-American War of 1898, in the Americas alone, the US has intervened, militarily or otherwise, in, among others, Cuba, Chile, Bolivia, Mexico, Panama, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Honduras, Guatemala, Haiti, El Salvador, Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil.
Under Trump, those numbers will possibly only go up. In Venezuela, where the Trump administration has claimed Maduro led a criminal narco-trafficking ring, the White House has reneged on its own commitment to electoral justice and since refused to let the opposition coalition of Nobel laureate Maria Corina Machado and Edmundo Gonzalez—widely believed to have won the 2024 presidential elections there—assume power.
It's these prospects of whims-driven interventionism that's neither warranted nor in the interest of mutual progress that make for the danger presented by Trump, and bullies of his ilk, to states' sovereignty and global peace.