Over the past week, the lawless Trump regime has managed to proliferate the instances of international criminality that have been on full display through the grotesque extrajudicial executions of seafarers in the Caribbean. The latest addition to its reign of terror in Latin America was the illegal incursion into a sovereign country that posed no imminent threat to the US and the summary abduction of Venezuela’s president and his wife. Their removal was accompanied by declared intentions of usurping governmental countrol of a foreign nation while also seizing its oil reserves, both of which constitute clear contraventions of long-standing international law and commonly practiced norms.
To be clear, the US practice of enacting regime change and/or illegal foreign interventions has a long and sordid history. Just to name a few examples under past administrations representing both major political establishments: 1)the CIA’s orchestrated overthrow of the democratically elected Prime Minister of the Republic of Iran (Mohammad Mosaddegh) and the insertion of the Shah in 1953, admittedly to protect western oil interests from perceived threat 2)the US sponsored coup etat in Guatemala the following year resulting in the outster of its democratically elected president….both actions taken during the Eisenhower years. 3)the 1961 US backed invasion of Cuba (during the Kennedy administration) by paramilitary units of Cuban exiles in a failed attempt to overthrow the Castro regime, an operation known as the Bay of Pigs. 4) military escalation of the Viet Nam War based upon the lie that US naval vessels were subject to unprovoked attacks in the Gulf of Tonkin during the Johnson/McNamara regime, an action resulting in the subsequent death of tens of thousands Americans as well as Vietnamese casualties numbering well over a million. 5)the CIA enabling of democratically elected Chilean President Salvador Allende’s assassination and the subsequent installation of the brutal fascist dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, under the auspices of the Nixon/Kissinger regime. 6)the invasion of Iraq (a country with whom we were not at war) based upon the pretext/falsehood of its possession of weapons of mass destruction, orchestrated and manufactured by the Bush/Chaney cabal resulting in the deaths of thousands of Americans and millions of Iraqi civilians. 7)the active complicity by the Obama/Clinton regime in the 2009 overthrow of the democratically elected Honduran President Zelaya, resulting in the installation of yet another authoritarian ruler and 8)the same administration’s relentless and largely covert campaign of drone warfare in the continuation of the so-called ‘war on terror’, especially in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen without a declaration of war by Congress as prescribed by law.
While the above instances of American regime change and applications of imperial ambition were largely carried out covertly, perhaps the Trumpian iteration of this time-honored practice is differentiated by its overtly brazen, open, and ostentatious display of entitlement in the violation of international law and the blatant assault on the concept of world order. It is imperative that he and his current accomplices be made accountable for their misdeeds while we also remain conscious of our past behavior as a nation as a necessary precursor to changing the paradigm/arc of history toward a more just world. In so doing, we might then send an authentic message to the likes of Trump, Putin, Xi JinPing, and all others with nefarious imperial designs: the day of the international bully is fading and that the principles of national sovereignty, universal human rights, the rule of law, and an embrace of our common humanity are now to be the celebrated hallmarks of a new civilized world.
