US President Donald Trump (Flickr)
You will readily note that this week we focus our attention on Venezuela. This is no accident. We believe the world’s eyes should be on Caracas, especially the violations of international law wrought by
US President Donald Trump’s disdain for peace.
The gung-ho US action to seize the elected president of a sovereign country flies against every tenet of respect for the law among the community of nations.
This should be condemned in the strongest possible terms, words we are unable to use in this family publication.
Trump must be reined in.
Enough. This far. No further.
Trump must surely draw his inspiration from Hollywood, where the Black Hawk can descend on any world capital to wreak havoc — with no repercussions.
In real life, the world is ruled by other laws, by détente – not wanton hostility.
If he is allowed to prevail, common decency and diplomacy will fly out the window.
Whatever crimes Nicolás Maduro is guilty of, there are relevant global bodies sufficiently capacitated to remedy his foibles, like the International Crimes Court.
No one nation should arrogate to itself the role of the policeman of the world.
The Caracas Moment should rightly serve as the biggest gap in world peace, when we let our collective guard down.
The sight of President Maduro and his wife being whisked out of Venezuela, like common criminals, should serve as a wake-up call to the real world that the Rambo tactics of Uncle Sam should be discouraged for they do not bode well for world-wide peace.
This must be a low moment for the United Nations and its secretary-general, Antonio Guterres, who, at the stroke of one re-grettable US action, were rendered toothless.
Venezuela’s only crime is its natural endowment with critical minerals that America wants to take control of. Elsewhere on these pages, one of our analysts frames this as Trump’s “Mercantilist quest for rare-earth minerals”.
Everything else Trump advances as justification for Maduro’s arrest is puerile.
Under the incumbent in the Oval Office, America has transmogrified from world policeman to a despicable common thief.
Everything he says — about Greenland, the Somalians, Nigeria, and the drug cartels in Venezuela, ostensibly the reason for Maduro’s seizure — the POTUS sounds more tragi-comical as its alter ego on The Apprentice.
The real world should not allow this reel version to triumph. Failure to do so portends for WWIII, a spectre too ghastly to contemplate.