The US forces launched a large-scale military strike against Venezuela in the early hours of January 3 and abducted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Later that day, US President Donald Trump publicly claimed that the US would "run" Venezuela, announcing that major US oil companies would enter the country to invest billions of dollars to "fix" oil infrastructure and generate profits.
If the open and brazen use of force by the US military, carried out before the eyes of the world against a sovereign state and resulting in the seizure of its sitting head of state, already constitutes blatant hegemonic aggression, then the US president's subsequent remarks completely tore away the false mask of so-called "counter-narcotics and counter-terrorism", laying bare the true face of resource imperialism. As The Guardian has observed, the US action against Venezuela resembles the Iraq War, continuing its well-worn pattern of seizing other countries' resources.
Shifting from so-called "judicial justice" to "oil business", this familiar US playbook from "military strike," to "regime takeover," and then to "capital penetration" once again lays bare a complete logic of modern piracy: fabricating charges to justify the use of force, destroying a sovereign government, overthrowing its political authority, and then allowing domestic capital to move in unimpededly to carve up the country's natural resources. What the US has done shows utter contempt for the constraints of international law, effectively dragging the world back into a colonial era of brute plunder.
In response to the blatant violation of the United Nations Charter by the US, anger within the international community is rapidly mounting. UN Secretary-General António Guterres has warned that the US actions in Venezuela "constitute a dangerous precedent." Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva condemned it as "where the law of the strongest prevails over multilateralism." Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel denounced the move as an act of "state terrorism". Konstantin Kosachev, deputy speaker of the Russia's Federation Council, issued a stern statement, stressing that the US action has no legitimate basis and constitutes a flagrant violation of international law…
Such egregious conduct has become impossible to ignore, even within the US itself. US Senator Ruben Gallego, a Democrat from Arizona, sharply criticized Washington for having become "the world bully." US Senator Mike Lee, a Republican from Utah, questioned what constitutional basis could possibly justify the legality of this action. Benjamin Rhodes, former Deputy National Security Advisor to President Barack Obama, described it as a regime-change operation in Latin America driven by utterly absurd logic. Derek Grossman, a senior researcher at the US think tank Center for a New American Security, remarked that he never wants to hear any US president talk again about a so-called rules-based international order.
Such actions replay 19th-century colonial plunder in the 21st century and pose a grave threat to regional and global peace and security. When the "law of the jungle" replaces international norms, no sovereign country is truly safe.
The US act of aggression has made one fact increasingly clear to the world: what Washington calls a "rules-based international order" is, in reality, "an order of plunder based on the US interests."
Editor's note: Originally published on Xinhua News Agency, this article is translated from Chinese into English and edited by the China Military Online. The information and opinions in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of eng.chinamil.com.cn