Attack on Venezuela: Western barbarism on full display

Trump's attack on Venezuela points not to the end of great-power confrontation, but to a shift in how it is managed by the US: through permanent destabilisation and engineered chaos at the periphery

I was very happy to debut in The Telegraph with this piece on Trump’s aggression against Venezuela. Here’s an excerpt:

Once all the layers of propaganda are stripped away, this attack boils down to just one thing: a completely unprovoked and blatantly illegal act of aggression against a country that posed no real threat to the United States.

The objectives are transparent. First, to gain control over Venezuela’s vast oil reserves — the largest in the world. Second, to topple a key ally of the non-Western geopolitical bloc aligned with China and Russia. In short, this is yet another regime-change war, from a president that campaigned precisely on putting an end to the US’s “forever wars”.

In this sense, the attack is revealing not only for what it does, but for what it signals about the evolving nature of US foreign policy. According to several analysts, the recently published According to several analysts, the recently published US National Security Strategy — along with Trump’s efforts to negotiate a settlement in Ukraine and to scale down military commitments in Europe — signals a sober acceptance of the emerging multipolar order and a move away from Washington’s traditional reliance on direct military containment of rival great powers.

The attack on Venezuela, however, suggests a different conclusion: that the US remains determined to slow or stall the transition to multipolarity, albeit not through head-on conflict with China or Russia, but by doubling down on a globalised proxy-war strategy that targets the weaker links of the rival system. Venezuela fits this logic perfectly.

The operation marks the extension of a model already tested elsewhere, where escalation is displaced onto peripheral theatres: any vulnerable country that refuses alignment with the US and its allies becomes a potential target, especially those located in what Washington once again is claiming as its “God-given” sphere of influence: the Western Hemisphere. This amounts to a revival of the Monroe Doctrine in updated, openly militarised form.

This points not to the end of great-power confrontation, but to a shift in how it is managed by the US: through permanent destabilisation and engineered chaos, where even the most elementary rules of international coexistence are discarded.

In this sense, the attack on Venezuela is perhaps the clearest demonstration yet of the collapse of the so-called “rules-based order”. One might object that this order was always a fiction. International law, sovereignty and non-intervention were routinely violated by the US and its allies, even as they were selectively enforced against others. From covert coups to bombing campaigns to outright invasions — Grenada, Panama, Iraq — Washington has long disregarded the very rules it claimed to uphold.

Yet there is a qualitative difference today. In the past, the US at least attempted to cloak its actions in legal or moral language and to manufacture domestic and international consent, however fraudulent. That restraint is gone, reduced to lip service that few believe.

The Trump administration now openly claims the right to attack any country it deems a threat — a category expanded to include any state pursuing an independent foreign and economic policy — and to do so regardless of public opinion.

This normalisation of barbarism carries grave consequences. Ultimately, this latest assault will drive even more countries away from the Western system, even as the US responds by escalating threats against those who do. Internationally, it accelerates the descent into outright anarchy, where “might makes right” is the only remaining rule.

And the consequences will not be limited to geopolitics. As Western elites discard legal and moral restraints abroad, they will feel increasingly justified in doing so at home, accelerating the erosion of constitutional safeguards and civil liberties.

This process is already well underway. The question is no longer whether the so-called rules-based order has collapsed, but how much destruction will be wrought, abroad and at home, before Western societies are forced to reckon with consequences of the lawlessness unleashed by their elites.

Read the article here.

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Thomas Fazi

Website: thomasfazi.net

Twitter: @battleforeurope

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