Even after Venezuela, West must speak softly to Donald

If anything, America’s reckless and unlawful attack on Venezuela has grown even less defensible since the first bombs landed in Caracas and US special forces captured Nicolas Maduro and his wife. We now know, beyond reasonable doubt, that it is all about oil and money. It is, thus, a nakedly neo-imperialist act of a kind that reaches back to darker chapters in American history, when invasions, seizures, assassinations, coups and general interference in the affairs of nominally independent Latin American nations by the CIA were routine, according to The Independent.

In a few short years of Trump’s ascendancy, interrupted only by a Biden presidency that felt like the last wheeze of an old order, the United States has moved from being the guarantor (albeit flawed) of Western security to isolationism, and now to a fully fledged embrace of the 19th-century doctrine of territorial conquest and plunder. Gangsterism is the new geopolitics — and Donald Trump wants to be a boss, if not the Boss.

In the first press conference given by President Trump after he sent in Delta Force, it was said that Maduro is, or was, an “outlaw dictator” and “illegitimate”, that he was “the kingpin of a vast criminal network” responsible for trafficking colossal amounts of deadly and illicit drugs into the United States, and that Venezuela had “unilaterally seized and sold American oil, American assets, and American platforms, costing us billions and billions of dollars”.

What is clear now is that President Trump and his colleagues are, in fact, far less interested in restoring Venezuela to democracy and curbing the drugs trade than they are in acquiring the rights to its vast oil reserves, and doing so to serve the interests of the United States. Trump has already contemptuously dismissed the de facto leaders of the Venezuelan opposition. The country is not heading for a rapid return to democracy. Instead, it will be “operated indefinitely” by the US through blockade and coercion. “We’re in the oil business,” as Trump puts it — not the business of nation-building. If need be, that will include “boots on the ground”.

It would be a little fanciful to say that President Trump eyes the mineral and oil reserves of Venezuela in the same manner as Vladimir Putin covets the grain, sunflower oil and mineral resources of Ukraine to help prop up Russia’s economy — but there is an uncomfortable symmetry.

Nor is Trump’s appetite sated. Aside from making threatening noises about Colombia and Cuba, he has renewed his demand to annex Greenland — also in “our hemisphere”, as the Americans see things. He says “we need Greenland from the standpoint of national security”, and he seems to be in a mood to make good on that claim. Given it is part of Denmark — and therefore a Nato territory — any US aggression towards self-governing Greenland would mark another serious, if not final, breach in what’s left of the Atlantic alliance.

How should America’s allies react? Certainly, President Trump’s actions are indefensible. In an ideal world, in which Britain and Europe were strong and the transatlantic alliance was still unconditional, other Western leaders would speak out against what America is doing. Such conditions no longer exist, and that is why Sir Keir Starmer and his colleagues feel they have to be so miserably mealy-mouthed in public.

Privately, they must be as appalled and frightened as anyone else. Throughout the weekend, the prime minister shied away from condemning the American action, confining himself to saying that he stands for international law (it would be a shock if he didn’t), and that he wanted to gather the facts (though they are obvious enough). His ministers say that they cannot offer a view, which is absurd, and that what the British government thinks doesn’t matter (which may be true, but shouldn’t be admitted).