#us-foreign-policy

#us-foreign-policy

The American abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is undoubtedly a massive and significant historical moment. Yet, despite the headlines it has generated and the victories the US government is touting, it is being simultaneously treated as something of a banal event-an expected move for the American government to undertake. The news of the seizure by American law enforcement of the leader of a sovereign state was met with some pro forma concern from the leaders of many European countries.

W hen Hitler swallowed Czechoslovakia in 1938 and then divided Poland with Stalin in 1939, my parents' generation decided, coming home from the war, to place the sovereignty of nation states at the heart of the United Nations Charter. With the operation in Venezuela, our generation has to ask, and not for the first time, whether anything now survives of a legal doctrine designed to protect the weak from the strong.

The White House said in a statement in response to queries from Reuters that Trump sees acquiring Greenland as a US national security priority necessary to "deter our adversaries in the Arctic region." "The president and his team are discussing a range of options to pursue this important foreign policy goal, and of course, utilising the US military is always an option at the commander-in-chief's disposal," the White House said.

"Belligerent" was how one Democratic lawmaker described a diatribe given by top White House adviser Stephen Miller on CNN Monday evening regarding the Trump administration's right to take over Venezuela - or any other country - if doing so is in the supposed interest of the US. To Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), however, Miller was simply providing viewers with "a very good definition of imperialism" as he described the worldview the administration is operating under as it takes control of Venezuela and eyes other countries, including Greenland, that it believes it can and should invade.

I think longer term though, a revival of Venezuela's oil production may lead to additional world supply and probably would result in lower volatility and energy prices.

The leaders of the UK, France, Germany, Denmark and Canada are all in Paris today for a meet that was scheduled last week to aid Ukraine, in the wake of Zelenskyy's end-of-year talks with the US president, Donald Trump, to negotiate peace. However, that was all planned before the US's attack on Venezuela and abduction of its leader, which has upended the geopolitical calculus to say the least.

The document was widely condemned in Europe as representing a seismic shift in the 70-year transatlantic alliance with its dark references to a purported threat of civilisational erasure with migration and censorship creating strife, cratering birthrates and loss of national identities. Its threat to interfere in European politics and oppose what it termed as elite-driven, anti-democratic restrictions on core liberties in Europe was condemned as unacceptable by the president of the European Council of leaders, Antonio Costa.

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging. At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground.

There was a time when American power at least felt obligated to explain itself. Even when U.S. military interventions were legally dubious or strategically incoherent, they arrived wrapped in language: humanitarian necessity, international norms, shared security. The explanations were often thin and sometimes cynical, but they served a purpose. They preserved the idea that power was supposed to answer to something beyond itself.

Since taking office, he has bombed Houthi positions in Yemen and ISIS positions in Syria, and has attacked Iran and Nigerian territory. But his intervention in Venezuela without congressional authorization, in the style of the coups that Washington perpetrated for decades in Latin America, isbecause of its ambition, its scope, and its disregard for international rulesthe most representative of the