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A president who thinks Nepal is part of India is now bombing boats off Venezuela. The world has every reason to be terrified.

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Is it Monroe 2.0? Or Donald Duterte Trump? The Hot Guy, “hot as a pistol” as he sees himself, is not just a pretty face, he loves to gun down suspected drug-smugglers in international waters. With an anti-tank missile.

Of course it’s all a huge joke to VP, JD Vance and Trump’s cabinet of sycophantic enablers, too.

“I wouldn’t go fishing right now in that area of the world,”

We are a witnessing a chilling normalization of extrajudicial killings as somehow “hip” and a source of political entertainment. Could it get any sicker?

The Grotesque Reality
A weapon designed to obliterate a 60-ton main battle tank with composite armor is being fired at an unarmored wooden boat.

The explosion doesn’t just kill you; it vaporizes, incinerates, and disintegrates. There’s no arrest, no trial, no chance to surrender, no verification of who you actually are or what you’re carrying. In the first strike, sources reported the boat appeared to be turning back when hit. Imagine that if you can.

You see a flash, maybe hear a sound for a split second, and then nothing. Your family gets no body to bury. No day in court. No compensation. Just a video clip posted on social media by the President claiming you were a “narco-terrorist.”

As a former international law instructor notes, there is no legal basis for this use of lethal force – “blowing the vessel out of the water and killing the entire crew is not allowed, save for a military action within the course of armed conflict against an enemy during a time of war” RAPPLER.

The overkill is the point – it’s meant to terrorize, not just interdict.

Trump’s second term has unleashed a foreign policy doctrine as dangerous as it is incoherent; a volatile cocktail of military adventurism, institutional destruction, and profound ignorance of the world beyond America’s borders. From bombing alleged drug boats off Venezuela, to gutting global health programmes, from sanctioning international courts to threatening neighbouring democracies, Trump is systematically dismantling the postwar international order.

But what makes this moment uniquely perilous isn’t simply the aggression; it’s that these sweeping interventions are being conducted by a leader who doesn’t know where countries are, can’t pronounce their names, and appears contemptuous of learning. More alarmingly, we’re witnessing the deliberate normalisation of violence; a strategy perfected in Gaza now being exported globally, where daily atrocities become mere statistics and the world learns to look away.

A Geography of Contempt

Trump’s now-infamous reference to Haiti and African nations as “shithole countries” in January 2018, confirmed by many senators, including Democrat Dick Durbin, reveals more than racism. It exposes fundamental contempt for understanding the nations he now seeks to dominate. According to the Washington Post, Trump also claimed Haitian immigrants “all have AIDS” and that Nigerian immigrants would never “go back to their huts.”

The pattern is consistent and well-documented. During a 2017 briefing before meeting India’s Prime Minister, Trump mispronounced Nepal as “nipple” and Bhutan as “button.” Two sources present said he didn’t know these were independent countries, believing them “all part of India.” When shown a map of South Asia, he reportedly asked: “What is this stuff in between and these other countries?”

Trump’s claimed he’s building a border wall in Colorado; which doesn’t border a foreign country. He told Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi that China isn’t on India’s border, despite the two nations sharing a 2,100-mile frontier. He referred to Namibia as “Nambia” in a 2017 speech to African leaders.

As foreign policy analyst Robert Kaplan observed, Trump is America’s “first post-literate president”; he “doesn’t really read” and hasn’t “immersed himself in the study of narrative history.” Operating without historical framework, he’s left with what scholars call a “dark geographical imagination”; understanding places through stereotypes, Fox infotainment and gut instinct rather than knowledge.

This would be merely embarrassing if Trump’s policies remained diplomatic. But today, he commands the world’s most powerful military whilst demonstrably unable to locate the countries he’s attacking; a Mr Magoo with the codes to Armageddon.

Venezuela: A War Built on Fiction

Trump’s current Venezuela strategy exemplifies the lethal consequences of this ignorance. The administration has deployed over 4,000 marines and sailors plus seven warships; including a nuclear-powered submarine, three missile destroyers, and cruisers; to Venezuelan waters, ostensibly to combat “terrorist” drug cartels. In mid-September, Trump announced on social media that U.S. forces had struck alleged narcotrafficking boats in the Caribbean, killing eleven people. Within days, he claimed a third boat had been struck. The tally now stands at four.

It mirrors, in its own grim way, the daily carnage in Gaza; violence administered so routinely that the world becomes inured to the shock. When “strikes” become a daily occurrence, when each new death toll is merely an increment rather than an outrage, we’ve crossed into something more sinister than war. We’ve normalised extrajudicial killing as policy.

Hannah Arendt wrote of the banality of evil, the bureaucratisation of atrocity. What we’re witnessing is the banality of bombing: strikes, the slick, surgical, euphemism favoured by our national broadcaster to sanitise the unimaginable pain and suffering inflicted by modern weaponry; “strikes” are announced on social media like weather updates, bodies counted like statistics, international law violations committed with the casual frequency of a morning coffee order.

Our world is being trained to accept that there will be a daily body count, whether in the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, or the occupied territories. This is not accident; it’s The Plan. Overwhelm the capacity for outrage. Make horror routine. Criminalise dissent.

The rationale? Trump claims Venezuela is a narco-state threatening American lives. But United Nations data contradicts this narrative entirely. Venezuela accounts for less than 2% of Latin American cocaine seizures, whilst Colombia accounts for 37%. Of the 3,700 tonnes of cocaine produced globally, over 2,500 tonnes come from Colombia. Venezuela doesn’t even appear on UN production maps. The DEA’s own annual report states that 84% of cocaine seized in the U.S. comes from Colombia. In the report’s four pages on cocaine trafficking, Venezuela isn’t mentioned.

Trump’s strikes may make headlines, but they reveal strategic incompetence. Killing smugglers doesn’t stop drug trade: it opens market opportunities for others. Cartels are resilient, decentralised, and profit-driven. When one route closes or one crew is eliminated, another fills the void. This is basic economics that Trump’s team appears unable to grasp. Worse, these extrajudicial military killings shred the rule of law and set dangerous precedents; precedents that echo from the Caribbean to the Eastern Mediterranean.

The Systematic Destruction of International Law

What distinguishes Trump’s second term from his first is the systematic, almost gleeful dismantling of international legal norms. Within his first week in office, sixteen current and former American UN human rights experts issued a statement condemning what they called “the most extensive assault on human rights and accountability by any U.S. administration in modern history.”

Legal scholars at Cambridge’s Lauterpacht Centre for International Law documented “numerous apparent breaches of international law” in Trump’s first six weeks alone, warning that “the cumulative effect of these measures appears to constitute a significant challenge to the international legal system.”

The violations are staggering:

Abandoning multilateral institutions: Trump withdrew from the UN Human Rights Council, the World Health Organization, and UNESCO, whilst reviewing U.S. membership in dozens of international organisations and treaties. He ordered a comprehensive review of “all international intergovernmental organisations of which the United States is a member” to determine which should be defunded or abandoned.

Attacking international justice: In February 2025, Trump imposed sanctions on the International Criminal Court, declaring it had “engaged in illegitimate and baseless actions targeting America and our close ally Israel” after the ICC issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Here we see the architecture of impunity being constructed brick by brick. By attacking the ICC, Trump isn’t merely protecting Israeli officials from accountability for potential war crimes in Gaza; he’s establishing a precedent that powerful nations can bomb with impunity anywhere. The message is clear: if Israel can destroy hospitals and refugee camps without reprisal, then American forces can sink boats in the Caribbean with impunity. The normalisation of atrocity in one theatre licenses it in all others.

Violating refugee obligations: By defunding UNHCR wholesale, the U.S. potentially violates the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, which commits states to “co-operate with the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.”

The Gaza plan: UN human rights experts warned in September 2025 that Trump’s proposed peace plan for Gaza; which envisions a transitional government chaired by Trump himself: “risks entrenching violations of international law.” The experts identified 15 specific ways the plan breaches international legal principles, including denying Palestinians’ right to self-determination and bypassing UN authority.

As one analyst put it: “There is no credible claim to self-defence or multilateral norms. The world is experiencing a return to the rules of 19th-century imperialism and the foreign policy norms of Mussolini and the other 1920s and 1930s fascists.”

The Banality of Bombing: From Gaza to the Caribbean

The most dangerous lesson of Gaza isn’t merely that hospitals can be bombed and schools destroyed; it’s that such destruction can become routine, accepted, barely newsworthy. When the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital was struck in October 2023, the world recoiled. By the hundredth hospital damaged or destroyed, the coverage had moved to page six. This is the strategy: overwhelm moral outrage through sheer volume.

Trump has internalised this lesson. His boat strikes off Venezuela aren’t announced with grave presidential addresses; they’re tweeted between golf rounds. There’s no pretence of solemnity, no acknowledgment that human beings have been killed without trial, without charges, without the basic protections of law. The casual brutality is the point.

It says: this is normal now. Get used to it.

Arendt observed that the greatest evil is committed not by fanatics but by bureaucrats doing their jobs with thoughtless efficiency. We might add: and by presidents announcing extrajudicial killings with the casual indifference of someone ordering lunch. The banality isn’t in the method; it’s in the complete absence of moral reckoning, the utter normalisation of violence as policy.

Gutting Humanitarian Aid Whilst Bombing Neighbours

The contradictions are darkly revealing. Whilst Trump deploys warships and bombs boats, he’s simultaneously eviscerating America’s capacity to address root causes of migration and instability. His administration slashed USAID by over 90%, terminating thousands of contracts and leaving vulnerable nations without critical support.

In the Philippines, disaster preparedness programmes were halted midstream, leaving communities exposed to deadly typhoons. In Venezuela, where millions have fled in one of the hemisphere’s largest migration crises, Trump cut aid whilst simultaneously blaming Maduro for a drug crisis he didn’t create and deporting migrants back to the chaos U.S. sanctions helped produce.

The Supreme Court on October 3, 2025 allowed Trump to strip temporary deportation protections from 300,000-350,000 Venezuelans.

UN experts warn: “The global shutdown of USAID assistance is already having immediate effects on patients in U.S.-funded facilities and on dissidents seeking protection from authoritarian regimes.”

This isn’t mere hypocrisy; it’s a deliberate choice. Military violence is amplified whilst humanitarian assistance is eliminated. The message is unmistakable: America offers bullets, not bandages. This too follows the Gaza playbook, where Israeli forces have systematically targeted humanitarian infrastructure whilst blocking aid convoys.

The lesson being taught globally is that compassion is weakness, that helping the vulnerable is naive, that the only language that matters is force.

The Signal to America’s Enemies

Harvard’s Stephen Walt describes what we’re witnessing as “the greatest voluntary liquidation of a great power’s status and geopolitical influence in modern history.” But the danger isn’t merely America’s declining influence, it’s what Trump’s combination of wilful ignorance and malignancy: his pathological aggression signals to adversaries.

A president who doesn’t know basic geography, who operates on gut instinct rather than intelligence briefings, who confuses countries and mispronounces their names, yet commands the world’s most powerful military, invites miscalculation. During Trump’s confrontation with Colombian President Gustavo Petro over deportation flights, China’s ambassador to Colombia tweeted that “we are at the best moment in our diplomatic relations,” noting Beijing will “position itself as a reliable and predictable partner” whilst Trump’s chaos creates openings for U.S. rivals across the region.

Russia and China don’t need to defeat America militarily when Trump is alienating allies, shredding treaties, and demonstrating to the world that American leadership has become erratic, uninformed, and lawless. They simply need to wait whilst America undermines itself; bombing boats it claims carry drugs, sanctioning courts it claims are illegitimate, abandoning allies it claims are ungrateful.

The Gaza conflict has already taught authoritarian regimes a crucial lesson: Western rhetoric about human rights and international law is situational, applied selectively, discarded when inconvenient. Trump has taken this lesson and universalised it. There are no rules anymore, only power. No laws, only interests. No accountability, only force.

Echoes of Reagan, Hollowed Out

Trump’s advisers style this approach as Reaganesque; evoking the Cold War president’s interventions in Nicaragua and elsewhere. But the comparison reveals how degraded American statecraft has become. Reagan, whatever his flaws, operated within a framework of alliances, international law (however selectively applied), and strategic coherence. He could locate Nicaragua on a map.

Trump operates in a world with stronger international norms but weaker American credibility. When he declared that Latin American countries “need us much more than we need them,” he fundamentally misjudged the complex dynamics of the region. Along with his accelerating mental decline, his contempt for diplomacy, multilateralism, and basic factual knowledge leaves the U.S. increasingly isolated.

Above all, the die is cast. Trump’s advisers reportedly see strikes on Iran and Venezuela as political lifelines; believing military action boosts approval ratings whilst tariffs depress growth. But polling suggests otherwise: Americans are weary of endless wars and sceptical of Trump’s justifications.

The Dangerous Convergence

The world faces something unprecedented: a superpower led by an increasingly senile, malignant narcissist who combines sweeping military ambitions with elementary geographic ignorance, humanitarian indifference with contempt for international law, and unilateral aggression with strategic incompetence. And all this is set in a global order where violence has been so thoroughly normalised that daily bombings; whether of hospitals in Gaza or boats off Venezuela; barely register as news.

This is the painful lesson we must learn: when the world accepts one stream of atrocities, it opens the door to all others. Gaza wasn’t merely a humanitarian catastrophe; it was a proof of concept. It demonstrated that systematic violence, conducted openly and daily, eventually exhausts the world’s capacity for outrage. The international community’s failure to stop the destruction of Gaza has given a green light to every other actor contemplating violence without consequences.

Trump’s vision of greatness is one where might makes right, aid is expendable, laws are optional, and knowledge is irrelevant. But this doctrine isn’t sustainable. As the UN experts warned, these actions “fail to advance any conceivable American national interest, which lies in a worldwide system founded on principles of human rights, the non-use of force, collaboration to solve global problems, and the sovereign equality of states.”

I won’t pretend this ends well. History may not remember Trump as Reagan’s heir, but as a cautionary tale: a leader who weaponised ignorance, mistook dominance for leadership, and perfected the art of making atrocity banal. And, somehow we let him. He leaves behind not just broken norms and fractured alliances, but a world more dangerous because the most powerful nation on earth demonstrated that violence, conducted routinely enough, becomes invisible.

The question isn’t whether America will survive this presidency. It’s whether the international order can withstand a superpower that has abandoned knowledge, law, and basic human decency as guides to action; and taught the world that if you commit enough atrocities, quickly enough, eventually everyone stops counting.

So let’s dispense with euphemism. Trump’s sabotage is not strategy; it’s vandalism dressed in patriot drag. His tyranny is not eccentricity; it’s the brute logic of unchecked power, cloaked in grievance and broadcast as entertainment. And every time we flinch from naming it, we grease the gears of its normalization.

But tyranny thrives on silence, and spectacle wilts under scrutiny. The antidote isn’t nostalgia, moralising or civility; it’s clarity. Call it what it is. Say it out loud. The emperor not only has no clothes, he is mad, bad and dangerous. Write it in the margins. Mock it in verse. Teach it in classrooms. Refuse its framing. Because in a world addicted to the theatre of misrule, truth is not just resistance; it’s rehearsal for repair.

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If this piece resonates, share it. If it unsettles, sit with it. If it angers, act. Tyranny thrives on silence; let’s not be complicit.