January 12, 2026
Last week, Donald Trump kidnapped Nicolás Maduro and his wife from Venezuela and them flown to New York, where they were indicted in a federal court on charges of "narco-terrorism." Trump has now seized Venezuela's oil fields and brought them under "indefinite" American control. He has threatened action against Cuba and proposes to annex Greenland. It's obvious that MAGA to Trump means "Make America Blatantly Imperialist Again!" Where will this end ? His policies will stir up a worldwide coalition against us that may well result in nuclear war. They violate the Constitution and international law. Our future is a grim one.
David Cole, a legal analyst with extensive knowledge of Latin America and international law, gives a good account of the situation: "First, and most importantly, it violates the bedrock rule of international law, which prohibits nations from attacking other sovereign states except when authorized by the UN itself or when acting in self-defense. Trump has invoked self-defense for all his aggressive actions against Venezuela, from summarily executing at least 115 people in unprovoked assaults from the air on boats alleged to be carrying drugs in international waters, to destroying a loading dock in the country itself and, now, bombing Caracas and abducting Maduro. The basis for that claim, Trump insists, is that Maduro has facilitated the smuggling of drugs into the United States, and that those drugs in turn kill thousands of Americans each year. But self-defense applies only in response to an actual or imminent armed attack, and whatever else drug smuggling might be, it is not even conceivably an armed attack. (According to US records, moreover, Venezuela is not even a source of fentanyl, the lethal drug that has been the agent of many of those overdose deaths and that Trump recently labeled a 'weapon of mass destruction.' It mostly comes from Mexico.) Quite simply, Venezuela has not attacked the United States. The only nation with a self-defense justification here is Venezuela."
As I mentioned at the start of this article, what we have here is old-fashioned imperialism. Trump wants America to take over Venezuela's oil fields, so he just came in and took them: "The fact that Maduro was indicted doesn't remotely authorize the military action. First, this was not a mere law enforcement operation; it was regime change. In a press conference earlier today, Trump admitted as much: 'We don't want to be involved with having somebody else get in and we have the same situation that we had for the last long period of years,' he said. 'So we are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition. And it has to be judicious, because that's what we're all about." He singled out one aspect of that "transition" in particular: 'As everyone knows, the oil business in Venezuela has been a bust.... We're going to have our very large United States oil companies-the biggest anywhere in the world-go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country. And we are ready to stage a second and much larger attack if we need to do so.' That is not law enforcement; it is imperialism, pure and simple."
Trump may get away for a while with his imperial venture, because Maduro is very unpopular in Venezuela and an enemy of the free market. Since Trump's seizure of the oil fields,"Venezuela's stock market is now up +73% since President Maduro was captured. Since December 23rd, as President Trump ramped up pressure on Maduro's government, Venezuela's stock market is up +148%. Venezuela's stock market is skyrocketing."
But as I indicated, Trump's policy risks nuclear war. Now, the US has seized an oil tanker flying under the Russian flag. How will Putin react?"The U.S. military seized two oil tankers on Wednesday as it tried to choke off most Venezuelan exports of crude, including a Russian-flagged tanker that had been evading American forces for weeks, escalating a confrontation with Moscow after the ouster of its ally, President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela. The military issued a statement saying that U.S. forces had 'seized' the Russian-flagged vessel in the North Atlantic, between Scotland and Iceland, for violating U.S. sanctions."What right does the U.S. have to impose"sanctions"in the first place?
The attack also violated the Constitution, which gives Congress, not the President, the power to declare war:"The attack also violated the US Constitution, which gives Congress, not the president, the power to declare war and authorize the use of military force. The only situation in which presidents can constitutionally conduct unilateral military action is, again, in self-defense against an ongoing or imminent armed attack. The Venezuelan operation also violated the War Powers Resolution, which requires the president to notify Congress before introducing troops into any situation of ongoing or imminent hostilities."In response to this, people have posted long lists of cases where the US intervened with military force without a Congressional declaration of war. But you cannot"justify"an unconstitutional act by giving other examples of unconstitutional acts, any more than you can argue that stealing doesn't violate the law because there are many thieves.
Let's take a deeper look at"narco-terrorism,"the pretext for the seizure of Maduro and his wife, As the great David Stockman points out, this doesn't make sense:"Washington's idiotic drug war generates an excess margin of $53,000 per pound of white powder owing to artificial scarcity and supply losses from law enforcement interdiction. These corpulent margins, in turn, are available to fund the most vicious and profitable black market criminal supply chains known to man. The resulting violent enterprises literally flood the zones from the cocoa farms of Columbia to the 'dime bag' pushers in Columbus Circle (New York) and all the cartels, drug lords and thugs in-between with a cornucopia of money.
"In gross dollar terms, in fact, the 635,000 pounds of cocaine that makes its way toward street level users in the US each year generates about $35 billion (at $53,000 per pound of excess margin) worth of funding for criminal enterprises--compliments of Uncle Sam and the foolish legislators who perpetuate and fund Nixon's greatest folly.
"Of course, the 'public health' rationale for this prodigious level of government subsidization of crime is that cocaine used in excess can be harmful. Well, yes, the annual fatality rate among users is about 0.1% As it happens, however, that's the same as the 0.1% fatality rate for alcohol users, while it's actually below the 0.2% fatality rate for active hang-glide pilots and far, far below the 1.7% annual death rate for tobacco smokers. And, of course, all of the latter (hazardous) pursuits are fully legal.
"So apart from the core principle that in a free society adults ought to be able to choose whatever form of stimulant and recreation they prefer (so long as it does not harm others), the War on Cocaine is batshit stupid because the amount of actual harm it reduces is hardly even measurable. And most especially it is mind-numbingly insane relative to the immense and very tangible levels of crime, mayhem and death to innocent bystanders that results from what amounts to a government-induced $35 billion annual bounty for violent criminal activity just in the case of cocaine alone.
"Needless to say, the Donald is apparently not to be outdone by Tricky Dick in the stupidity department. The stated purpose of his invasion of Venezuela during the wee hours on Saturday and the kidnapping of its pajama-clad president was the latter's alleged violation of America anti-cocaine laws. As to when, in the first place, Washington was seconded by God or the UN the right to impose and enforce its dubious domestic prohibition laws on the sovereign territory of other nations, our teetotaling president did not say.
"But in this context we did say 'anti-cocaine laws' rather than drug laws generally for a good reason. Consult the DEA, FBI and any other law enforcement authority that you choose, and you will find they have proffered no evidence whatsoever that any living soul in Venezuela, let alone its president and his wife, have ever had any role in the supply of fentanyl, heroin, meth or even marijuana to the US.
"So the Donald has started an illegal and unauthorized war to deny an estimated 5 million US adult cocaine users access to any Venezuela-based supplies of a recreational drug that-
- has a mere 0.1% chance of killing them.
- will not make a damn bit of difference as to supply and availability on the streets in the US anyway. That's because Venezuela supplies just 8% or 51,000 pounds of the total US cocaine supply of 635,000 pounds annually.
"Moreover, almost the entirety of this tiny amount of Venezuela-based cocaine is actually grown, harvested and processed into bricks in Columbia. The fact is, finished product merely passes through trans-shipment routes in Venezuela, which could be replaced by alternative routes in a heartbeat. Indeed, the DEA says that Columbia supplies 84-93% or upwards of 600,000 pounds of the total gross supply into the US. So if the Donald were even half-assed serious about the drug pretext for invading a Latin American neighbor, we'd guess he kidnapped the wrong man ! That is, you'd think that he would have sent the helicopters and Delta Force to Bogota in order to nab Columbia president Gustavo Pedro for the performative perp ride he arranged for live TV to motor a foreign 'bad guy' to the Brooklyn correctional facility. If there were such a thing as a Narco-Terrorist-State, which there isn't since it's a made-up phrase emanating from the bowels of the Washington War Machine's PR (i.e. lie) department, Bogota, not Caracas, would surely be its capital city. In sum, nobody in Venezuela sent any 'poison' to America. Period. Full Stop. The whole Narco-Terrorist-State pretext for the invasion is just flat-out hogwash."
Let's do everything we can to protest against Trump's illegal, immoral, unconstitutional, and dangerous imperialism!