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us imperialism
Gunboats and Drones: Trump’s Dangerous New Monroe Doctrine in the Caribbean
The United States claims to be fighting a war on drugs. But the real war is on sovereignty, on justice, and on the right of independent Latin American nations to exist without fear of destruction.
Nov 13, 2025
The United States has once again taken up its old role as the self-appointed police of the Western Hemisphere. Under the disingenuous pretext of combating “narco-terrorism,” US forces have launched a violent campaign across the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific that has already killed at least 76 people—most of them unidentified—in a series of so-called “anti-narcotics” strikes on small boats.
Washington claims these are precision military operations targeting narco-traffickers who are directly attacking the US with their illegal contraband. But in reality, they are extrajudicial, indiscriminate executions on the high seas. There is no due process, no physical threat to the United States, and no legal justification under either domestic or international law. It’s murder, plain and simple—moral, legal, and strategic failures disguised as national security policy.
The Moral and Legal Abyss
Most legal experts would agree that killing unarmed suspects in international waters—without trial, warning, or accountability—is a violation of the most basic principles of international law. The United Nations high commissioner for human rights called the attacks “unacceptable,” while Daphne Eviatar, Amnesty International USA’s director for human rights and security, went a step further in condemning these bellicose actions.
“Intentionally killing people accused of committing crimes who pose no imminent threat to life is murder, full stop,” she posted on Amnesty’s website.
Trump’s response to this “national emergency” is to pursue “gun-drone diplomacy”—the 21st-century version of the same old policy of domination, intervention, and militarism that has led to the high levels of distrust towards the United States from Latin American nations since the mid-19th century.
Even during the height of the so-called “War on Drugs” in the 1990s and 2000s, a period when I was closely following the tragic human rights toll US-led drug policies were having on places like Colombia, such unilateral actions carried out by US forces would have been considered unfathomable. The Pentagon usually relied on their proxies in the Colombian military to carry out such atrocities.
Yet President Donald Trump—backed by his reckless minions Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the self-described Secretary of War Pete Hegseth—has declared a “national emergency” that gives itself the authority to kill anyone it deems an “enemy combatant.” This irresponsible declaration has not been accompanied by any transparent, systematic policy review from those with the power to do so, from the Congress to the military’s own high command.
“It is well past time for Congress to exercise its oversight role over the administration’s unlawful behavior, put an end to these illegal air strikes, and hold those responsible for these murders accountable,” Amnesty’s Eviatar stated.
To be clear, there is no “war” here, no declaration, no battlefield—just ocean, silence, and the corpses of alleged smugglers who might have been fishermen, migrants, or civilians. This is not law enforcement. It’s execution without evidence, and it serves no legitimate purpose.
The Strategic Failure of a Militarized Drug Policy
The US claims these attacks are meant to “cut off supply.” But every serious study—from the United Nations to a wide range of independent nongovernmental organizations that monitor the international drug trade like the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA)—shows that militarization does nothing to stem the flow of narcotics. It hasn’t been successful in the past, and today seems to be doomed to repeat this failure. The speed boats being blown up in the Caribbean are not the source of America’s fentanyl crisis; that supply comes overwhelmingly from Mexico and the Pacific, not Venezuela.
If Washington were serious about addressing the drug problem, it would have to think comprehensively about the root causes of the illicit narcotics trade. They would begin to invest in economic development in the regions where the coca crop has flourished. They would have to build a public health infrastructure that seriously considers the root causes of the addiction that fuels the market. This multi-faceted policy would support impoverished coca farmers in finding alternative livelihoods, reduce demand through treatment and harm reduction, and pursue real investigations into the financiers and arms dealers who enable the drug trade in the Global North.
Instead, Trump’s response to this “national emergency” is to pursue “gun-drone diplomacy”—the 21st-century version of the same old policy of domination, intervention, and militarism that has led to the high levels of distrust towards the United States from Latin American nations since the mid-19th century.
History Repeating Itself
This lawlessness isn’t new. We mustn’t forget that the United States mined Nicaraguan harbors in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan, claiming to protect “freedom” while waging a covert war against the Sandinista government. Before that, Washington intervened militarily across Latin America on countless occasions, applying the imperial logic of the Monroe Doctrine, treating the hemisphere as its “backyard,” all in the name of defending “freedom” and the national security interests of the United States.
In recent decades, US involvement in the region has taken, at least on the surface, a softer, more bilateral form, generally through cooperation with local governments who were willing to cozy up to Washington to maintain open the spigot of generous economic and military support of their often-repressive regimes. The example of Plan Colombia at the turn of the century is perhaps the most dramatic example.
The Caribbean has become a laboratory for unchecked executive power, where legality and morality are drowned beneath the waves.
The post-9/11, anti-terrorism, militarist approach in Colombia propped up the “democratic security” strategy of the popular right-wing presidency of Alvaro Uribe Vélez for eight years. Uribe loyalists, forever entrenched in the Colombian political establishment, continue to erroneously credit him with successfully stabilizing the country after decades of guerilla war.
They conveniently erase the fact that it was at the cost of tens of thousands of civilian lives lost, countless disappeared, almost 2 million people internally displaced, and at best, mixed results in combating the illicit drug trade that, to this day, continues to bleed Colombian society. Indeed, using 20-year hindsight, it is not unfair to call this period yet another abject failure in the war on drugs. Which makes Trump’s ongoing rhetorical assault of Colombia’s current President, Gustavo Petro, even more ironic.
But that pretense of “partnership” has evaporated. Today’s strategy is unilateral, aggressive, and militarized—a message meant to remind the region who’s boss. And to justify direct military intervention in a country like Venezuela, which seems to be the dangerous direction we are heading at the current juncture.
Latin American nations have every reason to be wary. “Cooperation” has always come with strings attached. And today, as we close out 2025, with US warships like the USS Gerald Ford making itself comfortable in the Caribbean Sea this week, those strings are looking more like chains.
Venezuela in the Crosshairs
Why target Venezuela, a country that produces neither significant cocaine nor fentanyl? The answer has nothing to do with drugs. It’s about power and intimidation. By bombing “suspect” Venezuelan boats, the US sends a message to President Nicolás Maduro: We can hit you anytime, anywhere. With Cowboy Hegseth salivating over the destructive toys he has at his disposal, we have not seen this level of escalation in the region since the Panama invasion of 1989, not coincidentally a full-scale military intervention designed to liquidate a “narco-totalitarian” head-of-state in order to bring him to “justice.”
This strategy of fear mirrors Trump’s broader domestic agenda. The dehumanization of Latin Americans—whether through Immigration and Custom Enforcement raids, mass deportations, or maritime killings—is designed to condition the US public to accept violence as normal, especially directed at those dangerous brown people to our immediate south. In the same way migrants are labeled “invaders,” “criminals,” and “rapists,” fishermen and smugglers become “terrorists.” Both are treated as disposable. What’s wrong with that?
A Region Pushed Toward the Brink
The danger of this policy is not just moral, but geopolitical. These actions undermine regional stability, alienate allies, and embolden authoritarian tendencies across the hemisphere. Colombian President Gustavo Petro, who has repeatedly publicly condemned the US actions, understands that peace cannot come from bombs. Ironically, he’s now been smeared by Trump as a “narco president”—a charge as absurd as it is revealing.
Washington’s new Caribbean strategy reflects a deeper shift: the return of an imperial presidency blessed by the nation’s highest court to act with complete impunity and with hegemonic intentions. Where “emergency powers” are used to bypass an already compliant Congress and international norms altogether. This is imperialism in the age of drones—less about cocaine than control, less about law than raw dominance.
The United States claims to be fighting a war on drugs. But the real war is on sovereignty, on justice, and on the right of independent Latin American nations to exist without fear of destruction. The Caribbean has become a laboratory for unchecked executive power, where legality and morality are drowned beneath the waves.
The result is predictable: more violence, less stability, and no meaningful reduction in drug trafficking. If this administration believes that killing the poor on the high seas will solve addiction and save lives in the US, then it’s not fighting a war on drugs—it’s fighting a war on humanity.
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'Regime change' in Venezuela Is a Euphemism for US-Inflicted Carnage and Chaos
If there is one lesson from the long history of US interventions, it’s that “regime change” doesn’t bring democracy or stability.
Nov 12, 2025
For decades, Washington has sold the world a deadly lie: that “regime change” brings freedom, that US bombs and blockades can somehow deliver democracy. But every country that has lived through this euphemism knows the truth—it instead brings death, dismemberment, and despair. Now that the same playbook is being dusted off for Venezuela, the parallels with Iraq and other US interventions are an ominous warning of what could follow.
As a US armada gathers off Venezuela, a US special operations aviation unit aboard one of the warships has been flying helicopter patrols along the coast. This is the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR)—the “Nightstalkers”—the same unit that, in US-occupied Iraq, worked with the Wolf Brigade, the most feared Interior Ministry death squad.
Western media portray the 160th SOAR as an elite helicopter force for covert missions. But in 2005 an officer in the regiment blogged about joint operations with the Wolf Brigade as they swept Baghdad detaining civilians. On November 10, 2005, he described a “battalion-sized joint operation” in southern Baghdad and boasted, “As we passed vehicle after vehicle full of blindfolded detainees, my face stretched into a long wolfish smile.”
Many people seized by the Wolf Brigade and other US-trained Special Police Commandos were never seen again; others turned up in mass graves or morgues, often far from where they’d been taken. Bodies of people detained in Baghdad were found in mass graves near Badra, 70 miles away—but that was well within the combat range of the Nightstalkers’ MH-47 Chinook helicopters.
Trump’s manufactured crisis with Venezuela exposes the deep contradictions at the heart of his foreign policy.
This was how the Bush-Cheney administration responded to Iraqi resistance to an illegal invasion: catastrophic assaults on Fallujah and Najaf, followed by the training and unleashing of death squads to terrorize civilians and ethnically cleanse Baghdad. The United Nations reported over 34,000 civilians killed in 2006 alone, and epidemiological studies estimate roughly 1 million Iraqis died overall.
Iraq has never fully recovered—and the US never reaped the spoils it sought. The exiles Washington installed to rule Iraq stole at least $150 billion from its oil revenues, but the Iraqi parliament rejected US-backed efforts to grant shares of the oil industry to Western companies. Today, Iraq’s largest trading partners are China, India, the UAE, and Turkey—not the United States.
The neocon dream of “regime change” has a long, bloody history, its methods ranging from coups to full-scale invasions. But “regime change” is a euphemism: the word “change” implies improvement. A more honest term would be “government removal”—or simply the destruction of a country or society.
A coup usually involves less immediate violence than a full-scale invasion, but they pose the same question: Who or what replaces the ousted government? Time after time, US-backed coups and invasions have installed rulers who enrich themselves through embezzlement, corruption, or drug trafficking—while making life worse for ordinary people.
These so-called “military solutions” rarely resolve problems, real or imaginary, as their proponents promise. They more often leave countries plagued by decades of division, instability, and suffering.
Kosovo was carved out of Serbia by an illegal US-led war in 1999, but it is still not recognized by many nations and remains one of the poorest countries in Europe. The main US ally in the war, Hashim Thaçi, now sits in a cell at the Hague, charged with horrific crimes committed under cover of NATO’s bombing.
In Afghanistan, after 20 years of bloody war and occupation, the United States was eventually defeated by the Taliban—the very force it had invaded the country to remove.
In Haiti, the CIA and US Marines toppled the popular democratic government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004, plunging the country into an ongoing crisis of corruption, gang rule, and despair that continues to this day.
In 2006, the US militarily supported an Ethiopian invasion of Somalia to install a new government—an intervention that gave rise to Al Shabab, an Islamic resistance group that still controls large swaths of the country. US AFRICOM has conducted 89 airstrikes in Al Shabab-held territory in 2025 alone.
In Honduras, the military removed its president, Mel Zelaya, in a coup in 2009, and the US supported an election to replace him. The US-backed president Juan Orlando Hernandez turned Honduras into a narco-state, fueling mass emigration—until Xiomara Castro, Zelaya’s wife, was elected to lead a new progressive government in 2021.
Libya, a country with vast oil wealth, has never recovered from the US and allied invasion in 2011, which led to years of militia rule, the return of slave markets, the destabilizing of neighboring countries, and a 45% reduction in oil exports.
Also in 2011, the US and its allies escalated a protest movement in Syria into an armed rebellion and civil war. That spawned ISIS, which in turn led to the US-led massacres that destroyed Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria in 2017. Turkish-backed, al-Qaeda-linked rebels finally seized the capital in 2024 and formed a transitional government, but Israel, Turkey, and the US still militarily occupy other parts of the country.
The US-backed overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government in 2014 brought in a pro-Western leadership that only half the population recognized as a legitimate government. That drove Crimea and Donbas to secede and put Ukraine on a collision course with Russia, setting the stage for the Russian invasion in 2022 and the wider, still-escalating conflict between NATO and Russia.
In 2015, when the Ansar Allah (Houthi) movement assumed power in Yemen after the resignation of a US-backed transitional government, the US joined a Saudi-led air war and blockade that caused a humanitarian crisis and killed hundreds of thousands of Yemenis—yet did not defeat the Houthis.
That brings us to Venezuela. Ever since Hugo Chavez was elected in 1998, the US has been trying to overthrow the government. There was the failed 2002 coup; crippling unilateral economic sanctions; the farcical recognition of Juan Guaido as a wannabe president; and the 2020 “Bay of Piglets” mercenary fiasco.
But even if “regime change” in Venezuela were achievable, it would still be illegal under the UN Charter. US presidents are not emperors, and leaders of other sovereign nations do not serve “at the emperor’s pleasure” as if Latin America were still a continent of colonial outposts.
In Venezuela today, Trump’s opening shots—attacks on small civilian boats in the Caribbean—have been condemned as flagrantly illegal, even by US senators who routinely support America’s illegal wars.
Yet Trump still claims to be “ending the era of endless wars.” His most loyal supporters insist he means it—and that he was sabotaged in his first term by the “deep state.” This time, he has surrounded himself with loyalists and sacked National Security Council staffers he identified as neocons or warhawks, but he has still not ended America’s wars.
Alongside Trump’s piracy in the Caribbean, he is a full partner in Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the bombing of Iran. He has maintained the global empire of US military bases and deployments, and supercharged the US war machine with a trillion dollar war chest—draining desperately needed resources out of a looted domestic economy.
Trump’s appointment of Marco Rubio as secretary of state and national security adviser was an incendiary choice for Latin America, given Rubio’s open hostility to Cuba and Venezuela.
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva made that clear when he met Trump in Malaysia at the ASEAN conference, saying: “There will be no advances in negotiations with the United States if Marco Rubio is part of the team. He opposes our allies in Venezuela, Cuba, and Argentina.” At Lula’s insistence, Rubio was excluded from talks over US investments in Brazil’s rare earth metals industry, the world’s second largest after China’s.
Cuba bashing may have served Rubio well in domestic politics, but as secretary of state it renders him incapable of responsibly managing US relations with the rest of the world. Trump will have to decide whether to pursue constructive engagement with Latin America or let Rubio corner him into new conflicts with our neighbors. Rubio’s threats of sanctions against countries that welcome Cuban doctors are already alienating governments across the globe.
Trump’s manufactured crisis with Venezuela exposes the deep contradictions at the heart of his foreign policy: his disastrous choice of advisers; his conflicting ambitions to be both a war leader and a peacemaker; his worship of the military; and his surrender to the same war machine that ensnares every American president.
If there is one lesson from the long history of US interventions, it’s that “regime change” doesn’t bring democracy or stability. As the United States threatens Venezuela with the same arrogance that has wrecked so many other countries, this is the moment to end this cycle of imperial US violence once and for all.
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Trump's Reckless War Drums in Nigeria Stink of Islamophobia and Imperial Arrogance
For the sake of Nigerian lives and the American soul, we must not allow Trump to drag America into a quagmire of his own making.
Nov 07, 2025
In yet another display of the same divisive rhetoric that defined his first term, US President Donald Trump has once again pulled the United States into the crosshairs of global instability, this time by saber rattling over Nigeria’s complex ethnic and religious conflict. Trump not only threatened to slash US aid, but he also said he might order “fast and vicious” military strikes against what he calls “Islamic terrorists” slaughtering Christians. Aside from the fact that Trump is wrong, he is ranting xenophobic ideas, platforming American exceptionalism, and demonstrating a blatant disregard for the lives of millions caught in the cross fire of what is simply a resource war with colonial-era grudges.
Let’s be clear: The violence taking place today in Nigeria is heartbreaking and must end. Boko Haram’s extremism, clashes between farmers and herders, and general hooliganism have claimed over 20,000 civilian lives since 2020. It is true that Christian communities in the north-central regions have suffered unimaginable horrors as raids have left villages in ashes, children murdered in their beds, and churches reduced to rubble. The April massacre in Zike and the June bloodbath in Yelwata are prime examples of the atrocities taking place in Nigeria. These incidents are grave reminders that the international community must pay more attention to this crisis.
But Trump’s response is crude and wrong. Painting all Muslims as genocidal monsters is not the answer. Calling Nigeria a failed state ripe for American liberation is not the solution, especially since the data shows otherwise. According to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, more Muslims than Christians have been targeted in recent years. Boko Haram has massacred worshipers in mosques, torched markets in Muslim-majority areas, and threatened their own co-religionists.
The crisis in Nigeria is not a holy war against Christianity. Instead, it’s a devastating cocktail of poverty, climate-driven land disputes, and radical ideologies that prey on everyone and not just any distinct group. By framing Nigeria’s conflict as an existential threat to Christians alone, Trump is not shining a spotlight on the victims. Instead, he is weaponizing right-wing conspiracy theories to stoke Islamophobia, the same toxic playbook he used to fuel his ban on Muslims, and which left refugee families shattered at America’s borders.
Americans must reject Trump’s imperial fantasy and instead demand congressional oversight on any military action.
Nigeria’s leaders are right to be astonished and furious. Presidential spokesperson Bayo Onanuga said he was “shocked” over Trump's invasion musings, while President Bola Tinubu decried the religious intolerance label as a distortion of their "national reality." Even opposition voices, like Labour Party spokesperson Ken Eluma Asogwa, admit the government's security lapses but reject Trump's extermination narrative as baseless fearmongering.
Trump should indeed be viewed as a warmonger, seeking every opportunity to sow discord and destruction in his wake. He sees every crisis as a photo op for his machismo and self-promotion. His first term was a disaster and now, in his second term, he wants to unleash drones and troops on Africa’s most populous nation, destabilizing a key partner in counterterrorism and migration management.
Unilateral strikes will only inflame the conflict’s root causes like resource scarcity and ethnic tensions. If anything, Trump’s misguided ideas to resolve the crisis will only exacerbate it by creating new waves of refugees and sowing even more discord throughout Nigeria. The country needs real solutions, not Trump’s wrong-headed conspiracy theories. He should be saving those who are vulnerable, not bombing them into submission.
A real solution would involve surging humanitarian aid to displaced families, partnering with the United Nations and African Union for joint security training, and pressuring Nigeria’s government through incentives, not threats. Real strength is in building bridges. Trump shows his weakness by building bunkers.
The Nigerian crisis is a clarion call for the world, but especially for America. Trump’s rhetoric is not just wrong; it is a betrayal of American values. Americans must reject Trump’s imperial fantasy and instead demand congressional oversight on any military action. America must recommit to a foreign policy that heals rather than divides. The world is watching, and for the sake of Nigerian lives and the American soul, we must not allow Trump to drag America into a quagmire of his own making. Nigeria deserves better.
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