“The early hours of January 3, 2026, will be remembered as one of the most shocking nights Venezuelans have experienced in recent history. Many remember the intense red flashes, or how the walls of their homes shook, while others recall the loud noises of helicopters and bombs ringing through the streets as the United States attacked Venezuela and captured long-time leader Nicolás Maduro.” Latin America Reports

Trump’s attack on Caracas slaughters global innocence, all haste and bloodshed, a modern, manic Macbeth. The 2:00am raid on the presidential fortress at Fuerte Tiuna, sees eighty guards butchered in the illegal abduction of Nicolás Maduro. Forget “rendition with surgical precision”; it is more Charles Manson than Saudi bone-saw: a blood-soaked coronation. The rape of Venezuela and the predatory eyeing-off of Greenland are not merely “policy shifts.” They are the final acts in a century-long poker game where the United States has finally stopped pretending it isn’t holding a gun under the table.

Jonathan Freedland’s vaunted “New World Order” was never a cathedral of law; it was a traveling tent of convenience, kept aloft by the hot air of leaders who preached sovereignty while practicing subversion. The empire’s mask has slipped, and beneath it stands not strategy, but raw, ravenous appetite.

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The Motley Crew of Bad Faith

To understand this moment, we must first stop romanticising the past. Trump is the grotesque, unmasked heir to a lineage of American duplicity. He is the logical conclusion of a “motley crew” of presidents who treated international law as a guide for others and a nuisance for themselves.

John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson spoke of the “Alliance for Progress” while green-lighting coups in Brazil and napalming Southeast Asia. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger refined “Realpolitik” into a license for scorched-earth policies in Cambodia and Chile. The Georges Bush Father and son Duo, (such remarkable harmony), perfected the “pre-emptive strike,” manufacturing consent for invasions that hollowed out the Middle East.

The only difference is that these scurrilous rogues felt the moral obligation to lie. Trump has simply fired the speechwriters. He has looked at the keys to the global candy store and realised that the only thing stopping him from taking it all, as he says, dead-pan, is his sense of morality. Nothing is safe, then.

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The Anatomy of Megalomania

At the heart of this “Donroe Doctrine” lies a toxic, malignant narcissism. This is a framework where the “other”, whether a Venezuelan citizen or a Danish diplomat, exists only as a prop in a personal drama of dominance. When Trump brags about the oil wealth of Venezuela or the “national security” necessity of seizing Greenland, he isn’t articulating a wish-list; he is reading from a veteran hit-lister’s hit-list.

Stephen Miller, the Trump regime’s ideas guy, provides the intellectual scaffolding for this pathology. By declaring that “might is right” and that the woke West must stop apologising for its imperialist past, Miller has rebranded a psychological disorder as a geopolitical necessity. This is the “new fascism”: a system where the state’s only purpose is to mirror the fathomless appetites of its petty, despotic, needy, leader.

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The Annexation Agenda: Rare Earths and the “51st State”

The Donald’s appetites are increasingly material. And specific. Greenland is not a whim; it is a repository of the future. With reserves of neodymium, dysprosium, and praseodymium; the rare earth elements essential for everything from cruise missiles to the magnets in Tesla motors, Greenland represents the ultimate prize in a resource war against China.  By framing it as a “national security” imperative, the administration is treating a NATO ally’s territory as a quarry.

But Trump’s hunger doesn’t stop at the Arctic. The “51st state” megaphone diplomacy directed at Canada has shifted from addled campaign rambling to a chilling geopolitical threat. By suggesting that Canada should simply “join our country” to receive the protection of the “Golden Dome” missile shield for free, Trump has signalled that America’s vast and complex northern neighbour is no longer a sovereign partner, but is on his wish-list of acquisition by force. He will bed her yet.

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NATO’s Darkest Hour and the Carney Counter-Move

Global reaction has not been encouraging. There has been a desperate scramble; a flivver of shivers all over the world to find a spine to run down. Prime Minister Mark Carney, leading a Canada that has moved from reliance to resilience, jets to Beijing to forge a “dense web of new connections” in a bid to diversify trade away from a deluded rooster who thinks he can still tread any hen he fancies in Carney’s chook-house.  

Standing with Danish PM Mette Frederiksen, the message has been clear: Greenland and Canada belong to their people. A copyright sign, in other words. As if team Trump respects anything but brute force.

All words feel thin. When the leading member of NATO threatens to annex a founding ally, the treaty isn’t just broken, it is dead, buried and cremated. We have let the “transactional” label distract us from an immoral, unstable psychopath with the world’s largest nuclear arsenal. Realpolitik, as Miller correctly identifies, is on his side. The international community is too toothless and too fractured to lift a finger.

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The Weight of the Crown

However, every manic despotism contains the seeds of its own undoing. The “monster” Trump is building may be wrought undone by the sheer, crushing workload of its own ambition. Administering a stolen empire; from the oil fields of Maracaibo to the mineral-rich permafrost of Nuuk, requires a level of competence and bureaucratic discipline that a chaotic, personalist regime of sycophants cannot sustain.

The American people remain the final check. This international kleptocracy falls when they realise that border lines are not “imaginary” and that “manifest destiny” is just another word for theft. No-one can wait for him to be in the “right mood.” Dictators never leave because they want to; they leave because the cost of staying becomes higher than the cost of falling.

The “New World Order” is gone. “Wild West 2.0” is here. The question is whether we have the spine to tame it. We could start by asking everyone to call it for what it. Stop framing the chief kleptomaniac and fascist-in-chief as eccentric but harmless and turn to Act 3, Scene 4 of Macbeth. It is the moment where Macbeth realises that the path of violence he has chosen is irreversible. As does Trump.

“I am in blood Stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more, Returning were as tedious as go o’er.” .

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