The superpower of piracy

The international rule of law has been on life support for some time. It was battered and bludgeoned by the West’s invasion of Iraq. Israel casually ignored international law as it pursued genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank while the West, most notably the USA and the UK, enabled Netanyahu and protected him.

Now Trump has pulled the plug on what remained of the post WW2 settlement with his attack on Venezuela on the false pretext that the country was supplying drugs to the USA. The attack comes just a couple of weeks after Trump pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, the the former president of Honduras who was the key figure in a drug trafficking scheme that flooded America with over 400 tonnes of cocaine. Hernández was extradited to the USA in 2022 after leaving office and in 2024 was sentenced to 45 years in prison on charges of trafficking drugs and weapons to the USA. The BBC reports that the controversial lobbyist and long-time Trump advisor, Roger Stone, had told the US president that a pardon for Hernández would energise the right wing populist National Party ahead of the Honduran election. Drug traffickers are just fine if they are right wing populist drug traffickers who will do Trump’s bidding.

Trump has previously authorised attacks on Venezuelan ships on the pretext that they are carrying drugs. No evidence for this assertion has been presented, but even if they were smuggling drugs, the way to tackle them is to seize them and take the crew into custody, not to blow them up. In one instance US forces returned to blow up the survivors after their boat had been sunk. These attacks are extrajudicial killings, pure and simple.

With January’s attack on Venezuela, which has caused an unknown number of civilian casualties, the position of the US is that it can kidnap the president of a foreign country and try him in a US court for alleged crimes which were not carried out under US jurisdiction, but the US president cannot be tried in a US court for alleged crimes which were carried out under US jurisdiction. Trump has no effective checks on his exercise of power, Congress and the Supreme Court are controlled by his lickspittles, the United States is in the hands of a low intelligence malignant narcissist who is suffering from dementia which means his natural impulsivity is unleashed and the guard rails are off.

Despite the claims of the Trump administration, there is no real evidence that the Venezuelan regime is involved in trafficking narcotics to America. Venezuela is not a producer of cocaine and is not a significant transit country in the South American drug trade. Venezuela does not produce fentanyl. What Venezuela does have is the world’s largest proven oil reserves. This is what Trump really wants control of, everything else is window dressing, an excuse for Trump’s nakedly colonialist theft. Trump’s colonialist intentions are laid bare by his assertion that the US is “going to run” Venezuela until a Trump-friendly regime has been installed there.

I’m not going to pretend that the Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro was a paragon of democratic socialism. He was very far from that. Maduro presided over a chaotic, corrupt and authoritarian regime, but that does not justify his kidnapping on trumped up charges [pun intended] by another chaotic and corrupt authoritarian who seeks to despoil and profit from oil resources which are the rightful property of the people of Venezuela.

Over the coming days the right wing commentariat is going to try to start a debate about whether Maduro was a good guy or not as they attempt to put a veneer of respectability on Trump’s criminality, but the thing is, Maduro’s character or record in office don’t matter for the purposes of discussing whether violent kidnappings and extrajudicial murders by the US government are justified. No, they are not justified. That’s all that needs to be said. Maduro was not “arrested” he was not “taken into custody”. He and his wife were kidnapped. If Trump can do this to Venezuela, he can do it to any other country on which he has designs, Greenland, Panama, or Canada. No one anywhere is safe.

After Maduro’s kidnapping, Trump told the far right Fox News channel that the USA would be “very strongly involved” in Venezuela’s oil industry. That’s what it was always about all along.

Trump is now clearly seen to be the same as Putin, the Russian dictator he so admires. The system of international law which was put in place following the horrors of WW2 has been utterly destroyed, replaced by might is right, the philosophy of fascism.

Under Trump, the United States is a rogue state, the superpower of piracy, helping itself to the resources of other nations as it pleases, punishing those countries which refuse to kowtow to Trump’s capricious demands with punitive tariffs and threats. What Trump does abroad he will soon do domestically. He has already begun to dismantle American democracy, his masked ICE goons grab people from the streets and disappear them into a growing system of prison camps, sending some to death camps abroad without trial or a chance to make their case, often in defiance of court orders. He is attacking the media, encouraging Republicans to gerrymander voting districts to deny Democrats representation.

Meanwhile Keir Starmer has notably failed to condemn the American attack on civilian targets in Venezuela and the kidnapping of Maduro and his wife, saying he wants to speak to Trump first, as he made his bid for title of best-behaved lapdog.

Starmer’s response illustrates the weakness of post Brexit Britain, adrift and alone on the international stage, as vulnerable as a Venezuelan tanker in the sights of a US navy destroyer. Does anyone think that Starmer will resist Trump’s demands? Chlorinated chicken here we come. The Tories and the ghouls of Reform will seek to copy Trump’s destruction of democratic norms here. Both would cheerfully sell out Scotland’s interests in order to ingratiate themselves with the American autocrat.

In this uncertain world, Scotland needs friends and allies it can rely on. That has to mean independence and reintegration with Europe, the only bloc which can compete with the USA in terms of economic and political power. The alternative is to lie prostrate before the superpower of piracy.

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