The New Gunboat Diplomacy

Over the last month or so, the US Navy has taken to blowing up small boats in the name of fighting “narco-terrorism.” The campaign has unfolded alongside the deployment of over ten thousand troops, eight warships, a nuclear-powered fast-attack submarine, F-35 fighter jets and the USS Gerald R. Ford, 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 Nicolás Maduro, claiming he was the leader of the so-called Cartel of the Suns — a vague shorthand employed by journalists and security analysts to refer to drug-trafficking groups within the Venezuelan military rather than an actual DTO (drug trafficking organization).

In a turn of phrase that could only have been published in the New York Times, that paper reported that “Mr. Trump has grown frustrated with Mr. Maduro’s 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.”

In what appears to be a prelude to regime change, possibly with boots on the ground, Trump has publicly declared 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 “covert operations” and seems instead to signal forthcoming overt operations; Venezuela’s government has declared 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.

The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to the far-right Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado — a longtime advocate of US military intervention who supports the extrajudicial murder at sea of her fellow Venezuelans — suggests that regime change will have support from what’s left of the “international community.” Machado joins a long line of undeserving winners of the Nobel Peace Prize that includes Henry Kissinger and Barack Obama.

Trump has also extended his saber-rattling to neighboring Colombia, declaring (without evidence) that Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, is “an illegal drug leader” who is “strongly encouraging the massive production of drugs, in big and small fields, all over Colombia.” He announced that all aid to Colombia would be cut off — a country already devastated by Washington’s decades-long “war on drugs,” itself effectively a war on peasants, leftists, and trade unions.

He followed this up by announcing sanctions against Petro and his family, along with other members of the Colombian government. In response, Petro said, “The United States has invaded our national territory, fired a missile to kill a humble fisherman, and destroyed his family, his children. This is [Simón] Bolivar’s homeland, and they are murdering his children with bombs.”

As of this writing, the routine extrajudicial killing of small-boat crews — fifty-seven people so far — 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’ national security correspondent noted in a recent op-ed, “We haven’t been told which specific drugs they seek to stop. We haven’t been told much about which specific groups they seek to destroy. We haven’t been told much about what legal authorities they are acting on.” When legal experts warned that dropping a missile on a small boat could constitute a war crime, US vice president J. D. Vance declared on Elon Musk’s website, “I don’t give a shit.”

The Trump administration has also claimed for itself the same prerogative to intervene militarily in Mexico, the United States’ largest trading partner, under the pretext of combating cartels newly designated as foreign terrorist organizations.

Decaying Soft Power

A senior US national security official told the Washington Post that after seeing an internal document on the strikes, “I immediately thought, ‘This isn’t about terrorists. This is about Venezuela and regime change.’ But there was no information about what it was really about.” Eva Golinger, an American lawyer who advised Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chávez claimed that “if there was a ‘probability of US military action in Venezuela’ radar, I would say it’s definitely leaning past the 75 percent probability at this stage, if not more, because things have never escalated to this level.”

Venezuela has never been a major drug-producing country and is not on a central route for narcotics entering the United States (and isn’t 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’s 2025 World Drug Report, only about 5 percent of Colombian drugs now transit through Venezuela.

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

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 from April stated that “it was highly unlikely” that the gang “coordinates large volumes of human trafficking or migrant smuggling.” Furthermore, there was “no 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.”

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’s 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.

It also has the convenient effect of displacing stories about the president of the United States’ friendship with the country’s most notorious nonce from the news cycle. As the historian Marilyn Young pointed out years ago, “armed 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 — quietly, behind the back of the public which funds them.”

The news of military escalation against Venezuela coincided with the announcement of a $40 billion bailout for Argentina — $5 billion more than the entire USAID budget. Argentina’s 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 reminds us, “At stake in Venezuela are the world’s largest proven oil reserves and valuable deposits of gold, diamonds and coltan.”

As has so often been the case in these increasingly morbid times, the Democratic Party has been largely silent — or outright supportive — of Trump’s 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 Politico, “We have uniformed military asking their chain of command for letters that ensure that they don’t have personal liability for any illegal action in these operations. I have no problem going after drug traffickers.”

Power as Sovereignty

As the Mexican critic Oswaldo Zavala argues in his book Drug Cartels Do Not Exist, the villain known as the “narco-terrorist” has long been established through popular culture. From films like Sicario to the operator podcasts and ex–Special Forces types that turn up on The Joe Rogan Experience every few weeks, popular media coverage has turned the figure of the cartel into an existential threat to the United States.

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’s long entanglement with the international drug trade — from alliances with Southeast Asian anti-communist warlords during the Vietnam War to the Contras flooding South Central Los Angeles with crack.

More recently, as Seth Harp shows in The Fort Bragg Cartel, elite special operation units have been implicated in drug trafficking and murder on US soil — 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 for drug-trafficking organizations as instructors and bodyguards.

In their recent book Shifting Sovereignties: A Global History of a Concept in Practice, historians Moritz Mihatsch and Michael Mulligan assert that a core reason for the enduring power of sovereignty in modern politics can be “found in Pierre Englebert’s pithy observation that ‘sovereignty is as close to magic as politics gets.’” Even if sovereignty is a mirage, they write, “it still impacts historical processes because people and politicians believe in it.” Once sovereignty loses legitimacy, it ceases to be sovereignty and becomes merely power.

Trying to fact-check the Trump administration’s narrative is beside the point. Its invocation of left-wing “terrorism” and criminality has become part of the rhetorical cover for ICE’s 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 — whether in the form of nonstate actors like Mexican cartels or the supposed “narco-terrorist state” of Venezuela. Even the older imperialist claim to territorial sovereignty over lands belonging to other people has made a comeback in Trump’s off-hand threats to annex Greenland and Canada.

In today’s attention economy, already devastated by enshittifcation 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 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’ dictum: “The strong do what they will, the weak suffer what they must.”

The Transformation of Sovereignty

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 of 1902–3, over a decade before the country’s oil reserve was discovered, the United States sent its battleships to the Southern Caribbean after Venezuela’s president Cipriano Castro refused to settle a dispute over asphalt in favor of a politically connected cartel based out of Philadelphia. When this didn’t work, the cartel funded an anti-Castro banker to launch a revolt, leading to a civil war that killed thousands and devastated Venezuela’s 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.

That earlier crisis in Venezuela exemplified the Monroe Doctrine, which held that the Americas were the United States’ primary sphere of influence and that any European interference in the region would be treated as a hostile act. The doctrine’s 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 “exercise international police power” in response to general “wrongdoing” — such as refusing to submit to US corporate interests in the asphalt trade in Venezuela.

The Trump administration’s most aggressive capo, Stephen Miller, offered his own crude update of that doctrine in a post on X: “Foreign 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.” Secretary of State “Little Marco” Rubio is open about his desire to finish the work of the Cold War by ending Venezuela and Cuba’s defiance of empire once and for all, for a start.

Recent reports indicate that Trump’s 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’s view that war in Venezuela will serve as legal and political justification for the intensification of repression at home against “the enemy within.”

The earlier Venezuela crisis culminated in the 1907 Hague peace conference, which, in Grandin’s words, was “one of the first tentative steps toward building the ‘globalist’ institutions that over the next century would expand their jurisdiction in regulating disputes.” For Grandin, this experience in part gave rise to what he terms American international law based “on sovereign equality for all, not only for those equal in power.”

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 “no ruler as wicked as Noriega deserved the protection of sovereignty.” Hundreds if not thousands of civilians were killed as the US media broadcast the affair as if it were an American football game — most infamously when the shanty town of El Chorrillo was firebombed for no real tactical reason. Latin American observers described the effects of the firebombing as a “little Hiroshima” and a “little Guernica.”

Return of the Sovereign Exception

For the United States, sovereignty now means the right of the sovereign — Donald J. Trump — 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 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’s definition of sovereignty as “the ability to decide what was an exception to the rule of law and to act accordingly.” What this represents, apart from extrajudicial murder, is a transformation of the meaning of sovereignty in today’s world.

Talk of sovereignty is everywhere these days — from Azerbaijan celebrating two years of “fully restored sovereignty” after annexing Karabakh (at the expense of Armenia and justified as an anti-terror measure) to the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change’s AI boosterism (lobbying) efforts in the UK.

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

It has even emerged as a rallying cry for “digital sovereignty,” 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.

Non-sovereign states such as South Sudan and Libya now offer themselves — or are offered — 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.

As Brazil’s president, Lula da Silva, noted after a recent BRICS meeting: “The 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.” 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 — as in the case of EU countries and the United Kingdom. Even NATO’s secretary general, Mark Rutte, has come to symbolize this deferential posture, (jokingly) referring to Trump as “daddy.”

The idea of an international order was always a matter of faith; what’s 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.

At a recent press conference, Trump claimed that Maduro had offered him “everything.” “You know why?” he asked reporters. “Because he doesn’t want to f*ck around with the United States.” The sociologist Charles Tilly famously compared the state to a protection racket, but Trump’s statecraft may provide a more explicit example than he ever imagined.

Architecture of Disorder

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–driven victimhood — they have been screwing us over — now targets even allied states.

At the same time, nonstate actors — from mafias to militias to evangelical churches and corporations — 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.

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.

Indeed, as the journalist Vincent Bevins has pointed out, disorder is Venezuela is the point: “Donald Trump is not pursuing regime change in Venezuela. He is pursuing something much worse. It would be enough if Maduro’s 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.” 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’s left from Mexico to Brazil.

The war against narco-terrorists abroad will further serve — indeed, already serves — 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. “Right now, Venezuela is not being treated as a foreign policy issue,” said Carrie Filipetti, who led Venezuela policy at the State Department under the first Trump administration. “It’s being treated as a homeland security issue, and rightfully so.”

Former State Department lawyer Brian Finucane, a specialist in counterterrorism and the wars of law, told the Intercept, “POTUS is giving himself a license to kill based on his own determinations and designations. . . . Because there’s 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.” In other words, Latin America is set to serve yet again as a setting for the empire’s workshop.

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.