‘It’s really a return to the rhetoric and actions of blatant imperialism’ says the Guardian’s senior correspondent Julian Borger.
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The ousted president of Venezuela Nicolás Maduro appeared in court in New York on Monday, after the US attacked Venezuela with airstrikes early on Saturday – the first direct US military attack on a South American country. Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, were seized from their bedrooms and flown to New York.
‘I think you’d be hard pressed to find a lawyer to say that this stood up under the UN charter on international law in general as a legitimate operation,’ says Borger.
Perhaps most striking was how explicit US president Donald Trump was about the reasoning behind this military action. He announced that the US would ‘run’ Venezuela for an unspecified period ‘until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition,’ – and said that the aim was for US companies to take control of Venezuela’s oil infrastructure for their own benefit.
Watch to find out more about how this action represents a move back to the ‘gunboat diplomacy of the 19th century, but this time with drones’.
And find out more about how, after a long history of interventions in South and Central America and the Caribbean, Trump’s intervention in Venezuela is a return to form for the US.
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