I was delivering care early one morning when the radio cut through the routine. The BBC was reporting that Donald Trump had authorised direct military action in Venezuela, framing it as a decisive move to remove the tyrant Nicolás Maduro from power.
I won’t pretend to shed tears for Maduro. He has spent years hollowing out democracy, crushing opposition, and driving millions of Venezuelans into poverty and exile. But geopolitics isn’t a boxing ring where the loudest punch wins. It’s more like a line of dominoes: once the first falls, you don’t get to choose how the rest collapse.
When the world’s hegemon decides it can cross borders using “security threats” as justification, it lowers the bar for everyone else. If Washington can point to Venezuelan cartels near its borders, what stops Beijing pointing to “anti-CCP agitation” in Taiwan? What stops Moscow, again, from insisting Ukraine is merely a defensive necessity?
This is how small justifications become big wars. History is littered with leaders who said, “Just this once.”
Trump presents himself as a peacemaker. He boasts of being the “peace president”, even claiming credit for preventing nuclear war between India and Pakistan. But that reveals a shallow understanding of reality. India and Pakistan have been nuclear powers since the late 1990s. They endured an eight-month military standoff in 2002, the Mumbai attacks in 2008, and repeated border crises since none escalated to nuclear war because both sides understand what mutual annihilation actually means. Nuclear deterrence is not Trump’s personal achievement; it’s grim arithmetic.
And the optics matter, because Trump is not governing from a position of strength. His approval rating sits in the low-to-mid 40% range, with disapproval consistently higher. When domestic legitimacy weakens, foreign “strength” often becomes political theatre the strongman equivalent of waving a flag to distract from cracks at home.
That theatre has consequences. In September 2025, the US Navy struck and sank a speedboat it claimed was smuggling drugs from Venezuela, killing 11 people as part of Operation Southern Spear. The administration called it a blow against organised crime. But strip away the press release and ask a simple question: what is the moral difference between indiscriminate violence by a terrorist organisation and a state acting as judge, jury, and executioner without due process?
Once you convince yourself you are righteous, restraint becomes optional. And history shows that leaders who believe they alone define justice rarely end well they don’t just fall, they take institutions with them.
Trump is not dragging America away from conflict; he is sleepwalking it toward one. In doing so, he nudges the US closer to the authoritarian habits it claims to oppose, while handing green lights to every tin-pot dictator watching closely.
Around the world, democracy is being slowly strangled. Free speech is marched toward the gallows. Women’s rights are pushed back behind closed doors. And instead of serious leadership, we are left with cosplay presidents playing at history while real people pay the price.
* Mo Waqas is a vice chair of the Liberal Democrats' Racial Diversity Campaign and was the PPC for Middlesbrough and Thornaby East.
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4 Comments
What does serious leadership look like ?
Repeating the word salads of condemnation – meaningless diplomatic rhetoric that hardly anybody takes seriously anymore.
If “international law” is being used to protect regimes then it’s law without justice.
The one person it would be legitimate to arrest in this way of course would be Netanyahu who should then be delivered to The Hague in response to the arrest warrant for war crimes charges. But in fact he seems to have been allowed to fly over European air space in recent days following another visit to his friend and ally Donald Trump. Meanwhile the Venezuelan adventure is distracting attention from Israel’s ban on 37 foreign aid organisations whose support is vital to the survival of Palestinians in Gaza especially. The British Government is just doing its usual ineffectual handwringing and seems as reluctant to take steps against Netanyahu as it is to criticise Trump.
I think in almost every case, it is oil, gas, strategic interests, power base building and economics that count. Humanity, international law, human rights and security issues are all used as justifications for almost anything.
Trump’s actions are wrong as they continue to destabilise world order and undermine international law. How can we condemn Putin, Netanyahu or anyone else and fail to condemn Trump? Sadly, however, when it comes to Israel we fail to take the sort of actions that we do against Russia, Iran and others. The key is in my first paragraph. What matter’s more to Trump or Starmer? For Starmer it may be partially second-hand by being in thrall to Trump.
As a Party we need to be seen as being our own people and not to be afraid to stand up for our own values in every situation and not to find we are using third-hand values in the shadow of Starmer and others with selective responses.
The Venezuelan crisis of 1902-1903 was a naval blockade by European powers against Venezuela due to its failure to pay foreign debts Lessons from a Previous Venezuela Crisis
Theodore Roosevelt’s corollary to the Monroe Doctrine came in the wake of the 1902-03 crisis – “Chronic wrongdoing…may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation,” he announced in his annual message to Congress in December 1904, “and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.”
This corollary to the Monroe Doctrine contained a great irony. The Monroe Doctrine had been sought to prevent European intervention in the Western Hemisphere, but now the Roosevelt Corollary justified American intervention throughout the Western Hemisphere. In 1934, Franklin D. Roosevelt renounced interventionism and established his Good Neighbor policy within the Western Hemisphere.
That policy of non-intervention did not survive the death of FDR. The Truman doctrine had the primary goal of countering the growth of the Soviet bloc during the Cold War. Truman’s policy saw frequent covert operations in ensuing decades to overthrow left leaning governments in central and South America with brutal repression including the widespread use of fascist death squads to suppress dissident movements, trade unionists etc.
Trumps new national security policy is an abandonment of both US constitutional safeguards and the post-war rules based International order (such as it was) centered on the United Nations with a brazen return to the Roosevelt corollary based on great power spheres of influence. A dangerous development in a nuclear armed world to say the least.