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TRUMP’S WAR ON LATIN AMERICA MUST BE STOPPED  
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Branko Marcetic
January 3, 2026
Jacobin
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_ The attack on Venezuela signals a new phase of US power in Latin
America — one defined by coercion, intimidation, and open-ended
intervention. _

The move against Venezuela signals a decisive turn in US foreign
policy in the Americas. Force and coercion are becoming Washington’s
preferred tools once again., AFP via Getty Images

 

Any hope that Donald Trump would be an “antiwar” president went
out the window almost as soon as he won the 2024 election, when he
filled his administration with a coterie of warmongers. After a year
in which Trump backed Israel’s war with Iran, went on a spree of
blowing up boats in international waters, and, now, attacked Venezuela
and abducted its leader, that hope has sailed over a cliff and crashed
into the rocks below.

It hardly needs to be said that Trump’s regime change operation in
Venezuela is brutish, dangerous, and brazenly illegal, though it is
obviously all this and more. It’s illegal on multiple levels: a
clear violation of international law, of course, but also the latest
instance of Trump cheerfully wiping his shoes on the US Constitution.
Despite what Vice President J. D. Vance claims
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loophole that magically invalidates that document’s War Powers
Clause if the Justice Department indicts a foreign leader.

Those drug-trafficking indictments, by the way, have nothing to do
with what Trump just did, though we’ll no doubt hear about them
endlessly in the weeks ahead. As analysts have pointed out at length,
Venezuela has almost nothing
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to do with the flow of cocaine into the United States. And Trump has
gone almost comically out of his way to undermine his own talking
point, pardoning a convicted narco-trafficking Latin American
ex-president just weeks ago and publicly musing about how much he’d
like to get his hands on Caracas’s oil reserves. He is now
practically licking his lips
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day that “our very large United States oil companies” are going to
have as they get “very strongly involved
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in Venezuela’s oil industry.

But it’s not just about oil. As Trump helpfully made clear
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Venezuela is him making good on his administration’s new National
Security Strategy
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(NSS), which made as its highest priority reviving the Monroe Doctrine
— the “Don-Roe Doctrine,” in the president’s words today —
to “restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere,” box
China out of Latin America, and make sure the region’s left-wing
governments are replaced by ones aligned with Trump. Within hours of
toppling the Venezuelan president, Trump was threatening Colombia,
Cuba
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and Mexico [[link removed]] with a
similar attack.

God only knows what will follow from this. Once upon a time, Trump won
the GOP nomination by assailing George W. Bush for dumb regime-change
wars that blew up in Americans’ faces. Now, he’s not only moved
those wars to our doorstep, but is outdoing Bush in premature
declarations of “mission accomplished,” marveling
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the violence” of the operation that he himself compared to a TV show
set up for his personal, slack-jawed entertainment.

Yet we have no idea what comes next, either in Venezuela — go ask
Barack Obama and Libya how power vacuums tend to turn out — or
around the world. Vladimir Putin has repeatedly justified
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his own loathsome war in Ukraine and other
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interventions
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by pointing to US-led interventions. How will Trump’s precedent—
that a country, sufficiently powerful, can casually bomb its neighbors
and kidnap their leaders — be taken up by other unscrupulous
politicians in the decades to come?

Meanwhile, Trump has already set a land-speed record for mission
creep. Despite the president
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acolytes
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claiming in the run-up to this that they would take a
“break-it-and-leave” approach to Venezuela, Trump is already
saying the United States will now “run the country,” might put
boots on the ground
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there, and that he doesn’t “want to be involved with having
somebody else get in, and then we have the same situation.”

That may not be so simple in a political tinderbox like Venezuela,
where the United States’ own war games predicted
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an explosion of violence and “chaos for a sustained period of
time,” which, if it happens, will turbocharge the mass immigration
that Trump has staked his presidency on arresting. Sure enough, Trump
did not rule out [[link removed]]
administering the country for years if that’s what it takes,
offering only that “it won’t cost us anything” because of oil
revenue.

This, it turns out, is the “MAGA” foreign policy: we’ll still do
overseas quagmires and nation-building, but now we’ll do them in the
Americas, first.

All the focus and condemnation will understandably be on Trump as we
watch this unfold, but save some scrutiny for the liberal
establishment that played a key role in getting us here. Marco Rubio,
the architect of this operation who’s already angling for
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in Cuba, was confirmed to his position with the support of every
single Democrat. The Nobel Peace Prize committee gave its tacit
endorsement
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this attack. The European Union, for all its years’ worth of talk of
international law and respecting sovereignty, has not offered even a
hint of resistance to Trump’s plans, and if anything, has quietly
gone along with them
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In fact, if there’s one big loser from this that’s not Venezuela,
it is the European center, which has used Nicolás Maduro’s ouster
to highlight its own irrelevance and hypocrisy. This morning has seen
European official
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official [[link removed]]
offer non-condemnations
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actions all clearly based on the same memo, complete with an empty,
token reference to the UN Charter and international law — including,
most disgracefully, the current president of the UN General Assembly,
German liberal uber-hawk Annalena Baerbock
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four-paragraph-long master class in equivocation. Some, like French
president Emmanuel Macron
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prime minister Giorgia Meloni
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support for the Venezuelan leader’s toppling.

In either case, the statements sit awkwardly with EU officials’
furious, justified denunciation of the Russian war in Ukraine, further
cementing growing global outrage at what are widely seen as Western
governments’ double standards. Shamefully, even European far-right
figures [[link removed]] like
Marine Le Pen [[link removed]].
who ostensibly share Trump’s politics, have made more forthright
condemnations of what the US president has done than these leaders.

Trump is likely hoping, as per the NSS, that an aggressive move like
this will cement US dominance over Latin America, cowing left-wing
governments into subordination and halting the region’s drift
towards China. But the United States does not have the ability to
easily replicate what it’s done in Venezuela in countries like
Brazil and Mexico, and it is just as likely to have the opposite
effect: catalyzing deepening ties with China to counterbalance the
growing threat from an increasingly belligerent Washington. His
tariffs — in Brazil’s case, explicitly aimed at bullying the
country to influence its internal politics — have already undermined
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wider goal of making the region less economically dependent on
Beijing.

In that sense, this looks less like a confident superpower flexing its
muscles in its “backyard” and more like an exhausted one playing
the only card it has left — the bloated US military — to project
its dominance after every other attempt has fallen embarrassingly flat
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and the people around him may ultimately not succeed at advancing
their larger strategy, but that doesn’t mean they can’t still do a
lot of damage as they flail about, which they are surely about to do,
in both Venezuela and in the wider region.

We are now firmly inside an uglier, more dangerous world that may very
well make us pine for even the empty lip service to international law
of decades past. And as long as these foreign adventures continue, no
one except moneyed interests and reckless politicians will prosper —
not those in the crosshairs, like long-suffering Venezuelans, and not
ordinary working Americans, who are once again being dragged into a
wasteful foreign conflict as they struggle to make ends meet.

Branko Marcetic is a Jacobin staff writer and the author of
Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden.

_Jacobin_‘s winter issue, “Municipal Socialism,” is out now.
Follow this link to get a discounted subscription to our beautiful
print quarterly. [[link removed]]

* Venezuela
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* Trump
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