{"id":17397,"date":"2025-10-30T13:17:53","date_gmt":"2025-10-30T13:17:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/alameda.institute\/?p=17397"},"modified":"2026-04-22T17:45:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-22T17:45:08","slug":"um-governo-trump-sem-lei-se-descontrola-no-caribe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alameda.institute\/pt\/type-article\/a-lawless-trump-administration-runs-amok-in-the-caribbean\/","title":{"rendered":"Uma administra\u00e7\u00e3o sem lei de Trump se descontrola no Caribe"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This article was originally published in Jacobin<\/a><\/em> and is part of Alameda ‘After Orders’ project<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n\n\n\n

In his epic new history of the Western Hemisphere, America, Am\u00e9rica<\/em><\/a>, Greg Grandin recounts how the great Cuban revolutionary Jos\u00e9 Marti encountered Thucydides\u2019 account of Athens\u2019s victory in the Peloponnesian War. Athens had laid siege to Melos, a small island, much like Cuba, that could no longer meet its tribute obligations to its dominant neighbor. Melos appealed to law and justice to prevent its destruction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Athens replied that justice applies only \u201cbetween equals in power\u201d; where power is unequal, \u201cthe strong do what they will, the weak suffer what they must.\u201d Athens went on to destroy Melos, massacre the locals, and colonize the island. As Grandin notes, the tale\u2019s relevance to the Americas is clear, \u201cin the countless incidents where Washington did what it would and Latin America suffered as they must.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Between the deployment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the National Guard across major American cities and a fragile ceasefire in Gaza, one might have missed that the Trump administration blew another small boat of what it declared \u201cdrug traffickers\u201d out of the water off the coast of Venezuela. US aggression against Venezuela was followed by strikes<\/a> on boats off the Pacific coast, in Colombian waters, killing fourteen and leaving one survivor, signaling an intensification of aggression against Colombia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These acts mark a return to a conception of sovereignty premised on \u201cthe strong do what they will,\u201d in what the young now call the \u201cmasks off\u201d era \u2014 an era in which there is not even the pretense of grounding such violence in universal principles or international law.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The New Gunboat Diplomacy<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Over the last month or so, the US Navy has taken to blowing up small boats in the name of fighting \u201cnarco-terrorism.\u201d The campaign has unfolded alongside the deployment<\/a> of over ten thousand troops, eight warships, a nuclear-powered fast-attack submarine, F-35 fighter jets and the USS Gerald R. Ford<\/em>, the largest aircraft carrier in the Navy, off the coast of South America. Donald Trump has also announced a $50 million reward for the capture of Venezuelan president Nicol\u00e1s Maduro, claiming he was the leader of the so-called Cartel of the Suns \u2014 a vague shorthand<\/a> employed by journalists and security analysts to refer to drug-trafficking groups within the Venezuelan military rather than an actual DTO (drug trafficking organization).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a turn of phrase that could only have been published in the New York Times,<\/em> that paper reported<\/a> that \u201cMr. Trump has grown frustrated with Mr. Maduro\u2019s failure to accede to American demands to give up power voluntarily and the continued insistence by Venezuelan officials that they have no part in drug trafficking.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In what appears to be a prelude to regime change, possibly with boots on the ground, Trump has publicly declared<\/a> that he has authorized the CIA to conduct covert operations inside Venezuela while B-52 bombers circled the Southern Caribbean. Announcing covert operations, of course, defeats the point of \u201ccovert operations\u201d and seems instead to signal forthcoming overt operations; Venezuela\u2019s government has declared<\/a> that it captured a group of mercenaries with CIA ties. The move followed news that Admiral Alvin Holsey, head of US Southern Command, resigned amid reports of growing tensions with the drink-sodden former TV host Pete Hegseth, currently serving as Secretary of War.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to the far-right Venezuelan opposition leader Mar\u00eda Corina Machado \u2014 a longtime advocate of US military intervention who supports<\/a> the extrajudicial murder at sea of her fellow Venezuelans \u2014 suggests that regime change will have support from what\u2019s left of the \u201cinternational community.\u201d Machado joins a long line of undeserving winners of the Nobel Peace Prize that includes Henry Kissinger and Barack Obama.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trump has also extended his saber-rattling to neighboring Colombia, declaring<\/a> (without evidence) that Colombia\u2019s president, Gustavo Petro, is \u201can illegal drug leader\u201d who is \u201cstrongly encouraging the massive production of drugs, in big and small fields, all over Colombia.\u201d He announced that all aid to Colombia would be cut off \u2014 a country already devastated by Washington\u2019s decades-long \u201cwar on drugs,\u201d itself effectively a war on peasants, leftists, and trade unions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He followed this up by announcing sanctions against Petro and his family, along with other members of the Colombian government. In response, Petro said<\/a>, \u201cThe United States has invaded our national territory, fired a missile to kill a humble fisherman, and destroyed his family, his children. This is [Sim\u00f3n] Bolivar\u2019s homeland, and they are murdering his children with bombs.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

The routine extrajudicial killing of small-boat crews \u2014 fifty-seven people so far \u2014 has become yet another normalized atrocity of the Trump administration.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

As of this writing, the routine extrajudicial killing of small-boat crews \u2014 fifty-seven<\/a> people so far \u2014 has become yet another normalized atrocity of the Trump administration, part of the ongoing deterioration of legal and moral restraint in US foreign policy. No evidence has been provided to justify the attacks. As the New York Times<\/em>\u2019 national security correspondent noted<\/a> in a recent op-ed, \u201cWe haven\u2019t been told which specific drugs they seek to stop. We haven\u2019t been told much about which specific groups<\/a> they seek to destroy. We haven\u2019t been told<\/a> much about what legal authorities they are acting on.\u201d When legal experts warned that dropping a missile on a small boat could constitute a war crime, US vice president J. D. Vance declared<\/a> on Elon Musk\u2019s website, \u201cI don\u2019t give a shit.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Trump administration has also claimed for itself the same prerogative to intervene militarily<\/a> in Mexico, the United States\u2019 largest trading partner, under the pretext of combating cartels newly designated<\/a> as foreign terrorist organizations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Decaying Soft Power<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

A senior US national security official told<\/a> the Washington Post<\/em> that after seeing an internal document on the strikes, \u201cI immediately thought, \u2018This isn\u2019t about terrorists. This is about Venezuela and regime change.\u2019 But there was no information about what it was really about.\u201d Eva Golinger, an American lawyer who advised Maduro\u2019s predecessor Hugo Ch\u00e1vez claimed<\/a> that \u201cif there was a \u2018probability of US military action in Venezuela\u2019 radar, I would say it\u2019s definitely leaning past the 75 percent probability at this stage, if not more, because things have never escalated to this level.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Venezuela has never been a major drug-producing country and is not on a central route for narcotics entering the United States (and isn\u2019t Fentanyl, not cocaine, the threat?). In fact, its importance in the global drug trade has declined significantly over the last decade. According to the UN\u2019s 2025 World Drug Report<\/a>, only about 5 percent of Colombian drugs now transit through Venezuela.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The most absurd claim<\/a> of all is that each boat blown out of the water somehow \u201csaves 25,000 American Lives.\u201d Historically, Venezuela served as a major route into Europe for Colombian cocaine, with Naples acting as a key hub for Italy\u2019s Camorra and Cosa Nostra mafias in the late 1980s and 1990s. Today Ecuador, ruled by a repressive pro-US right-wing government<\/a>, has emerged as the new hub<\/a> of the global cocaine trade, as traffickers seek to solidify routes into more profitable Europe and Asian markets rather than the United States.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even within the United States, the much-vaunted threat posed by the Tren de Aragua gang supposedly taking over cities looks considerably different on closer inspection. A National Intelligence Council assessment<\/a> from April stated that \u201cit was highly unlikely\u201d that the gang \u201ccoordinates large volumes of human trafficking or migrant smuggling.\u201d Furthermore, there was \u201cno evidence the Venezuelan government was directing Tren de Aragua, or that the gang or the government was attempting to destabilize the United States by flooding it with criminal migrants.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The crudeness of the justification for war with Venezuela reflects both the decline of US soft power, particularly after the destruction of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Trump administration\u2019s belief that it no longer needs to stage the same sorts of propaganda efforts required for past wars. Congress does what it is told, and the public no longer really needs to be won over; public opinion today can be manufactured post hoc through the algorithm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It also has the convenient effect of displacing stories about the president of the United States\u2019 friendship with the country\u2019s most notorious nonce from the news cycle. As the historian Marilyn Young pointed out years ago, \u201carmed with drones and Special Forces, an American president can fight wars more or less on his own, in countries of his own choosing. American wars do not end but continue \u2014 quietly, behind the back of the public which funds them.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The news of military escalation against Venezuela coincided with the announcement<\/a> of a $40 billion bailout for Argentina \u2014 $5 billion more than the entire USAID budget. Argentina\u2019s president, Javier Milei, now plays a buffoonish dog-cloning update of Augusto Pinochet with a worse haircut, enlisted to spread the virtues of economic liberalism in Latin America. And of course, as the Financial Times<\/em><\/a> reminds us, \u201cAt stake in Venezuela are the world\u2019s largest proven oil reserves and valuable deposits of gold, diamonds and coltan.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As has so often been the case in these increasingly morbid times, the Democratic Party has been largely silent \u2014 or outright supportive \u2014 of Trump\u2019s aggression against Venezuela. Neither Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer nor House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries have bothered to issue any formal statement on the matter. Michigan senator Elissa Slotkin, a former CIA analyst who remains an ally of the national security state told<\/a> Politico<\/em>, \u201cWe have uniformed military asking their chain of command for letters that ensure that they don\u2019t have personal liability for any illegal action in these operations. I have no problem going after drug traffickers.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Power as Sovereignty<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

As the Mexican critic Oswaldo Zavala argues in his book Drug Cartels Do Not Exist<\/em><\/a>, the villain known as the \u201cnarco-terrorist\u201d has long been established through popular culture. From films like Sicario<\/em> to the operator podcasts and ex\u2013Special Forces types that turn up on The Joe Rogan Experience<\/em> every few weeks, popular media coverage has turned the figure of the cartel into an existential threat to the United States.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

News coverage, then, reinforces and adapts this imagery to fit the political needs of the US state. Posing as hard-nosed realists, a small industry of self-styled experts and veterans indulge in fantasies of righteous violence against sovereign states in the name of defending freedom. All of this blather and boasting conveniently obscures the US military and CIA\u2019s long entanglement with the international drug trade \u2014 from alliances with Southeast Asian anti-communist warlords<\/a> during the Vietnam War to the Contras flooding<\/a> South Central Los Angeles with crack.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

More recently, as Seth Harp shows in The Fort Bragg Cartel, <\/em>elite special operation units have been implicated in drug trafficking and murder on US soil \u2014 a pattern that casts a shadow over the same military apparatus now deployed in the Caribbean. Many of these same operators go on to freelance<\/a> for drug-trafficking organizations as instructors and bodyguards.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In their recent book<\/a> Shifting Sovereignties: A Global History of a Concept in Practice<\/em>, historians Moritz Mihatsch and Michael Mulligan assert that a core reason for the enduring power of sovereignty in modern politics can be \u201cfound in Pierre Englebert\u2019s pithy observation that \u2018sovereignty is as close to magic as politics gets.\u2019\u201d Even if sovereignty is a mirage, they write, \u201cit still impacts historical processes because people and politicians believe in it.\u201d Once sovereignty loses legitimacy, it ceases to be sovereignty and becomes merely power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

As has so often been the case in these increasingly morbid times, the Democratic Party has been largely silent \u2014 or outright supportive \u2014 of Trump\u2019s aggression against Venezuela.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Trying to fact-check the Trump administration\u2019s narrative is beside the point. Its invocation of left-wing \u201cterrorism\u201d and criminality has become part of the rhetorical cover for ICE\u2019s incursion into major cities. The point is that the executive, as sovereign, can define the legitimacy of the use of coercive violence against a national security threat that emanates from other states \u2014 whether in the form of nonstate actors like Mexican cartels or the supposed \u201cnarco-terrorist state\u201d of Venezuela. Even the older imperialist claim to territorial sovereignty over lands belonging to other people has made a comeback in Trump\u2019s off-hand threats to annex Greenland and Canada.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In today\u2019s attention economy, already devastated by enshittifcation<\/a> and generative AI, the appearance of success substitutes for moral justification, just as the appearance of fitness substitutes for expertise in health and a Lamborghini stands in<\/a> for shrewd financial acumen about which memecoin to buy. The geopolitical analogue is simple: might makes right. Power now serves as its own rationale. In other words, the appeal to international law or norms is in the process of disappearing as a constitutive fiction for the international order. What remains is Thucydides\u2019 dictum: \u201cThe strong do what they will, the weak suffer what they must.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Transformation of Sovereignty<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

This is not the first time the United States has deployed its battleships off the coast of Venezuela to make a point. During the Venezuela crisis<\/a> of 1902\u20133, over a decade before the country\u2019s oil reserve was discovered, the United States sent its battleships to the Southern Caribbean after Venezuela\u2019s president Cipriano Castro refused to settle a dispute over asphalt in favor of a politically connected cartel based out of Philadelphia. When this didn\u2019t work, the cartel funded an anti-Castro banker to launch a revolt, leading to a civil war that killed thousands and devastated Venezuela\u2019s infrastructure. Germany, Britain, and Italy also deployed gunboats to Venezuela to raid the coastline when Castro threatened to default on loans owed to US and European creditors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That earlier crisis in Venezuela exemplified the Monroe Doctrine<\/a>, which held that the Americas were the United States\u2019 primary sphere of influence and that any European interference in the region would be treated as a hostile act. The doctrine\u2019s extension also asserted that it was the right of the United States to intervene in the political affairs of Latin American states if it felt its interests were threatened. This was made explicit in what was called the Roosevelt Corollary, which granted the United States the right to \u201cexercise international police power\u201d in response to general \u201cwrongdoing\u201d \u2014 such as refusing to submit to US corporate interests in the asphalt trade in Venezuela.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Trump administration\u2019s most aggressive capo, Stephen Miller, offered his own crude update of that doctrine in a post on X<\/a>: \u201cForeign terrorist enemies operating in our hemisphere will be destroyed. These organizations field armies, control territory and travel, seize commerce, violently extort judicial and political power, rape, maim, kidnap, torture, slaughter, assassinate, and mass murder Americans.\u201d Secretary of State \u201cLittle Marco\u201d Rubio is open about his desire to finish the work of the Cold War by ending Venezuela and Cuba\u2019s defiance of empire once and for all, for a start.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

This latest Venezuela crisis marks something else: a regressive transformation of sovereignty toward the rule of the strong.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The Trump administration\u2019s most aggressive capo, Stephen Miller, offered his own crude update of that doctrine in a post on X<\/a>: \u201cForeign terrorist enemies operating in our hemisphere will be destroyed. These organizations field armies, control territory and travel, seize commerce, violently extort judicial and political power, rape, maim, kidnap, torture, slaughter, assassinate, and mass murder Americans.\u201d Secretary of State \u201cLittle Marco\u201d Rubio is open about his desire to finish the work of the Cold War by ending Venezuela and Cuba\u2019s defiance of empire once and for all, for a start.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Recent reports<\/a> indicate that Trump\u2019s aggressive moves against Venezuela are the product of an alliance between Rubio, a traditional neocon hawk, and Miller, a supposed America-Firster. This alliance is at least in part guided by Miller\u2019s view that war in Venezuela will serve as legal and political justification for the intensification of repression at home against \u201cthe enemy within.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The earlier Venezuela crisis culminated in the 1907 Hague peace conference, which, in Grandin\u2019s words, was \u201cone of the first tentative steps toward building the \u2018globalist\u2019 institutions that over the next century would expand their jurisdiction in regulating disputes.\u201d For Grandin, this experience in part gave rise to what he terms American international law based \u201con sovereign equality for all, not only for those equal in power.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This latest Venezuela crisis marks something else: a regressive transformation of sovereignty toward the rule of the strong. It is hardly the first example of this transformation, as even in Latin America, we can recall, for instance, when George H. W. Bush sent 20,000 Marines into Panama to take out former ally Manuel Noriega without consulting Congress, on the premise that \u201cno ruler as wicked as Noriega deserved the protection of sovereignty.\u201d Hundreds if not thousands of civilians were killed<\/a> as the US media broadcast the affair as if it were an American football game \u2014 most infamously when the shanty town of El Chorrillo was firebombed<\/a> for no real tactical reason. Latin American observers described the effects of the firebombing as a \u201clittle Hiroshima\u201d and a \u201clittle Guernica.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Return of the Sovereign Exception<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

For the United States, sovereignty now means the right of the sovereign \u2014 Donald J. Trump \u2014 to exercise whatever forces, economic or military, he deems necessary in pursuit of what he dictates to be in the interest of the United States: from sanctioning Brazil<\/a> for daring to prosecute a former president for attempting a coup to killing what are likely Venezuelan fishermen in order to appear to be combating drug trafficking. This recalls the Nazi-supporting jurist Carl Schmitt\u2019s definition of sovereignty<\/a> as \u201cthe ability to decide what was an exception to the rule of law and to act accordingly.\u201d What this represents, apart from extrajudicial murder, is a transformation of the meaning of sovereignty in today\u2019s world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Talk of sovereignty is everywhere these days \u2014 from Azerbaijan celebrating two years of \u201cfully restored sovereignty<\/a>\u201d after annexing Karabakh (at the expense of Armenia and justified as an anti-terror measure) to the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change\u2019s AI boosterism<\/a> (lobbying) efforts in the UK.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sovereignty is invoked both by right-wing populists to justify state repression against supposed threats of migrants and left-wing leaders<\/a> of the Global South who employ it as a defense against the United States \u2014 as well as by authoritarian states who wield it as a rhetorical device to wall off criticism of human rights violations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It has even emerged as a rallying cry for \u201cdigital sovereignty<\/a>,\u201d proposed as a way to regulate the threats posed by Big Tech. On the extreme right, the concept fuses with paranoid fantasy through the sovereign citizen movement. Calls for popular sovereignty also form part of both left- and right-wing populisms. The idea of sovereignty as self-determination features in the rhetoric and demands of movements as different as indigenous peoples in Latin America to oppressed minorities in Somalia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Non-sovereign states such as South Sudan<\/a> and Libya<\/a> now offer themselves \u2014 or are offered \u2014 as opportunities, by virtue of their lack of sovereignty, for dumping the surplus population of the world: Gazans or immigrants deported from the United States.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Brazil\u2019s president, Lula da Silva, noted<\/a> after a recent BRICS meeting: \u201cThe tariff blackmail has been normalized as a tool to conquer markets and to interfere in our domestic issues. . . . The imposition of extraterritorial measures are threatening our institutions.\u201d Even advanced economies with the resources to, in theory, safeguard their sovereignty are prostrating themselves in the most humiliating fashion before Trump, rather than taking responsibility for protecting their national or collective interests \u2014 as in the case of EU countries and the United Kingdom. Even NATO\u2019s secretary general, Mark Rutte, has come to symbolize<\/a> this deferential posture, (jokingly) referring to Trump as \u201cdaddy<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The idea of an international order was always a matter of faith; what\u2019s changed is that it no longer carries much weight. International law is increasingly reduced to a collection of empty slogans, targeted by right-wing populists and ignored by liberals and centrists when violated by Israel. Even historic alliances are rendered null and void upon contact with a United States government operating according to the logic of extortion without even a diplomatic fig leaf over a naked emperor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At a recent press conference, Trump claimed<\/a> that Maduro had offered him \u201ceverything.\u201d \u201cYou know why?\u201d he asked reporters. \u201cBecause he doesn\u2019t want to f*ck around with the United States.\u201d The sociologist Charles Tilly famously compared the state to a protection racket, but Trump\u2019s statecraft may provide a more explicit example than he ever imagined.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Architecture of Disorder<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

While this transformation has long been in the making, the present moment reveals a dangerous truth: we are entering a global disorder emerging from the ashes of the old liberal international order. The new global disorder is one in which great powers barely bother to maintain even the pretense of appealing to universal ideals or law. The logic of extortion, combined with performative, social media\u2013driven victimhood \u2014 they have been screwing us over<\/em> \u2014 now targets even allied states.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the same time, nonstate actors \u2014 from mafias to militias to evangelical churches and corporations \u2014 exercise sovereign power in both non-sovereign states like Sudan and in large swathes of relatively powerful countries with major economies such as Brazil and Mexico. Disorder is not the product of chance or the accidental breakdown of institutions; it is produced by political actors who benefit from it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Regardless of the virtues or vices of Maduro and his government, US military intervention and regime change in Venezuela, if it goes forward, will almost certainly unleash the same horrors we have seen follow other imperial misadventures in the Middle East, from Libya to Iraq. Civil war, state breakdown, and the rise of vicious paramilitary warlords will ensue. The entire region will be destabilized, and any peace process in Colombia will fall apart, reopening the door to the brutal paramilitary violence that has plagued the country for decades. And the US military will likely be bogged down in the sort of bloody, chaotic, forever-war quagmire that Trump once campaigned against.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

Accurately diagnosing the new global disorder and the changing meaning of sovereignty is a key strategic task for the Left, from the Global South to the heart of empire.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Indeed, as the journalist Vincent Bevins has pointed out<\/a>, disorder is Venezuela is the point: \u201cDonald Trump is not pursuing regime change <\/em>in Venezuela. He is pursuing something much worse. It would be enough if Maduro\u2019s government were replaced by a smoking crater, and if the entire northern third of South America became a gaping, horrifying wound, making real governance of the region impossible for a generation.\u201d In other words, regime collapse. This deliberate disordering of the region will stand in contrast to the authoritarian order offered by pro-US authoritarian states favored by Trump, such as Ecuador, El Salvador, and Argentina. An attack on Venezuela would mark the opening salvo in an intensified US campaign against Latin America\u2019s left from Mexico to Brazil.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The war against narco-terrorists abroad will further serve \u2014 indeed, already serves \u2014 as justification for increased repression domestically, as ICE and the National Guard occupy and terrorize major cities while the Trump administration attempts to fabricate a left-wing terrorist threat to enable it to use the powers of the federal government against the Left. \u201cRight now, Venezuela is not being treated as a foreign policy issue,\u201d said Carrie Filipetti<\/a>, who led Venezuela policy at the State Department under the first Trump administration. \u201cIt\u2019s being treated as a homeland security issue, and rightfully so.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Former State Department lawyer Brian Finucane, a specialist in counterterrorism and the wars of law, told the Intercept<\/em><\/a>, \u201cPOTUS is giving himself a license to kill based on his own determinations and designations. . . . Because there\u2019s no articulated limiting principles, the President could simply use this prerogative to kill any people he labels as terrorists, like antifa. He could use it at home in the United States.\u201d In other words, Latin America is set to serve yet again as a setting for the empire\u2019s workshop<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Accurately diagnosing the new global disorder and the changing meaning of sovereignty is a key strategic task for the Left, from the Global South to the heart of empire. Only by understanding the transformations of sovereignty can we form the strategies and identify the forces capable of producing a more just order. These same transformations create openings not only for the forces of reaction but for those committed to building a better world. Before that, however, there is an urgent need to oppose US intervention in Venezuela and prevent another round of destruction and chaos from being unleashed by the rapacious forces of empire and capital.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This article was originally published in Jacobin and is part of Alameda ‘After Orders’ project ___ As great powers abandon even the pretense of law, the undeclared war on Venezuela exposes a world ruled by extortion, collapse, and the redefinition of sovereignty. ___ In his epic new history of the Western Hemisphere, America, Am\u00e9rica, Greg Grandin […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":28360,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"author-name":"Benjamin Fogel","choose-language":"EN","wds_primary_category":36,"wds_primary_alameda-themes":0,"wds_primary_projects":0,"wds_primary_dynamic-publications-cat":0,"wds_primary_type-tax":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[84,107,22,173],"alameda-themes":[166],"projects":[104],"dynamic-publications-cat":[],"type-tax":[],"class_list":["post-17397","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-type-article","tag-after-orders","tag-benjamin-fogel","tag-en","tag-politics-of-disorder","alameda-themes-development-and-de-development","projects-after-order"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alameda.institute\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17397","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alameda.institute\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alameda.institute\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alameda.institute\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alameda.institute\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17397"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/alameda.institute\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17397\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28362,"href":"https:\/\/alameda.institute\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17397\/revisions\/28362"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alameda.institute\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28360"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alameda.institute\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17397"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alameda.institute\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17397"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alameda.institute\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17397"},{"taxonomy":"alameda-themes","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alameda.institute\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/alameda-themes?post=17397"},{"taxonomy":"projects","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alameda.institute\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/projects?post=17397"},{"taxonomy":"dynamic-publications-cat","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alameda.institute\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/dynamic-publications-cat?post=17397"},{"taxonomy":"type-tax","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alameda.institute\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/type-tax?post=17397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}