The North American newspaper The New York Times published this Saturday (3) an editorial stating that the United States attack on Venezuela “is illegal and reckless”. Signed by the Editorial Board and released a few hours after the action of the American Armed Forces, the text recognizes that the Venezuelan president is “anti-democratic and repressive, having rigged the presidential election in 2024”. However, according to the publication, in recent months President Donald Trump has mobilized an excessively imposing military force in the Caribbean just to threaten Venezuela.
For the newspaper, few people will feel sympathy for Maduro, due to his anti-democratic and repressive profile, in addition to having destabilized the Western Hemisphere in recent years. But the editorial highlights that if there is a fundamental lesson to be learned from American foreign policy over the last century, it is that trying to overthrow even the most deplorable regime can make the situation even worse.
“The United States spent 20 years unable to establish a stable government in Afghanistan and replaced a dictatorship in Libya with a fragmented state. The tragic consequences of the 2003 war in Iraq continue to affect the United States and the Middle East. Perhaps most significantly, the United States has sporadically destabilized countries in Latin America, including Chile, Cuba, Guatemala and Nicaragua, by attempting to overthrow governments by force,” the text says.
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Elsewhere, the text states that “Mr. Trump has not yet offered a coherent explanation for his actions in Venezuela and would be pushing the US into an international crisis without valid reasons. If Mr. Trump wants to argue otherwise, the Constitution defines what he must do: appeal to Congress. Without Congressional approval, his actions violate American law.”
According to the publication, throughout history, governments have labeled leaders of rival nations as terrorists to justify military incursions as police operations. A claim that, in this case, is particularly absurd since Venezuela is not a significant producer of fentanyl or other drugs that dominate the recent epidemic of overdoses in the US, and the cocaine it produces is mainly destined for Europe.
For The New York Times, the most plausible explanation for the attacks on Venezuela can be found in Trump’s recently released National Security Strategy: “After years of neglect, the United States will reaffirm and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American pre-eminence in the Western Hemisphere.”
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In what the document calls the “Trump Corollary,” the government promises to redeploy forces from around the world to the region, detain drug traffickers on the high seas, use lethal force against migrants and drug traffickers, and potentially deploy more American troops in the region.
