Every age of empire claims its moral alibi; every act of imperial aggression cloaks itself in the lexicon of freedom. Yet history has been merciless in stripping such pretence bare. The latest American strikes on Venezuela, conducted under the unrestrained hand of President Donald Trump, mark not a rupture but a culmination, the grotesque flowering of a worldview that mistakes supremacy for destiny and violence for virtue. Imperial tragedy has long defined the American century, but under Trump it has acquired an unmistakable farcical hue, a theatre of errors where bombast replaces diplomacy, and the language of liberation masks a politics of predation.
That same script, part messianic delusion, part geopolitical opportunism, replayed itself across North Africa, leaving in its wake failed states and fractured societies. Today, as missiles rain over Venezuela and naval blockades choke its coasts, the world watches a familiar spectacle, re enacted with chilling predictability. The apprehension and exile of President Nicolás Maduro constitute an affront not only to Venezuela’s sovereignty but also to the very architecture of international law. Article 2 of the UN Charter, which enshrines the sovereign equality of nations, has once again been reduced to parchment, impotent against the will of power.
The calculus driving this drama requires little deciphering. The resurrection of the Monroe Doctrine, that nineteenth century proclamation of hemispheric dominance, signals a desperate attempt to reassert American hegemony over a region long weary of its embraces. Washington’s indignation over Caracas’s outreach to Beijing and Havana, its trade in oil beyond the petrodollar’s reach, and its inclination toward multipolar diplomacy, has inflamed old imperial reflexes. Behind the rhetoric of restoring democracy lies an unwritten truth: oil remains the catechism of empire, and Venezuela’s subterranean wealth is its most coveted scripture.
Under Trump, this imperial project has acquired an air of tragic absurdity. The administration’s claim of defending democracy rings hollow against its tangible record, courting despots, releasing convicted allies such as former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, and elevating pliant figures like Nasry Asfura to power. The language of morality, once the staple of American interventionism, now reads as parody. In place of Wilsonian idealism, Trumpism offers a cynical collage of spectacle, grievance, and militarised self interest. The empire no longer hides its intent; it revels in its unraveling.
Venezuela’s tragedy, however, is not merely one of invasion but of betrayal. The Bolivarian movement, for all its contradictions and authoritarian excesses, arose from the depths of inequality spawned by decades of U.S. backed oligarchy. To eviscerate that project under the pretext of liberation is to snuff out the very possibility of Latin American autonomy. The message resounds across the continent: the hemisphere is free only so long as it submits.
The broader global pattern is unmistakable. The post Cold War euphoria that globalisation would usher in a stable liberal order has disintegrated under the weight of renewed power politics. From Iraq to Libya, from Kyiv to Caracas, the cartography of intervention bears the same imperial signature, the conflation of might with moral clarity. Yet Trump’s belligerence signals a new mutation: an imperialism stripped of pretense, isolationist in posture yet expansionist in deed, contemptuous of institutions and corrosive to the idea of collective security itself.
If the international community continues its habitual equivocation, it risks validating a world order where sovereignty becomes contingent, extended or withdrawn at Washington’s pleasure. The silence surrounding Venezuela would not merely be complicity; it would be consent to a dispensation where the rule of law is subordinated to the law of power.
In the theatre of empire, history seldom repeats as history alone. It doubles back as irony, then decays into farce. Venezuela’s suffering is thus more than a local tragedy; it is the latest scene in the empire’s long, unending soliloquy, an elegy that once aspired to moral grandeur but now echoes only with the hollow laughter of decline.
