Strategic Culture – Jan 9, 2026

The international order is being trashed right in front of the world’s eyes. The United States under Donald Trump has become a full-fledged rogue state, blatantly operating on the maxim that might is right. This was always the modus operandi of the US hegemon. With Trump, it has become turbo-charged.

Any pretense of rules-based order has been jettisoned. Trump is openly bragging that there is no such thing as international law and that there are no limits on the unilateral exercise of U.S. power.

In the space of a week, the Trump regime has:

• Launched a deadly aggression against Venezuela, kidnapped its president and commandeered the country’s vast oil wealth;
• Seized cargo ships belonging to Russia and China in violation of maritime laws;
• Threatened military assault on several sovereign nations, including Mexico, Colombia, and Cuba;
• Threatened to forcibly annex the Arctic territory of Greenland, which is legally part of Denmark;
• Escalated bombing of Somalia, the seventh country that Trump has bombed during the first year of his second terms as president;
• Fabricated barefaced lies to excuse the extrajudicial killing of an innocent American citizen by U.S. federal agents, while warning Iran of military action if the Iranian government represses street protests, protests that many believe have been incited by American and Israeli covert agencies.

Of all the rogue conduct, arguably the worst is the multiple war crimes involved in attacking Venezuela which resulted in as many as 100 deaths. Trump’s charade of combating alleged narco-terrorism has been brazenly ditched. He is now celebrating the take over of Venezuela’s oil wealth for the benefit of U.S. Big Oil companies.

This barbarism is out-and-out imperialism with fascist arrogance. Trump has taken the world back to the early 20th century when gunboat diplomacy was openly wielded with cynical euphemism. During the 1900s, consecutive U.S. presidents routinely invaded countries in Latin America, massacring populations, installing murderous dictators, and running amok to expropriate natural resources. Trump has flagrantly touted the 1823 Monroe Doctrine as his prerogative, dictating to Venezuela and other Latin American nations to sever all ties with China and Russia.

China and Russia have vehemently condemned the United States for its aggression against Venezuela. They are warning of a global descent into chaos.

Not so the European states, who have meekly adopted a muted position or offered a snide apology for Trump’s criminal conduct. Of course, the European nations are compromised because they have assisted the U.S. aggression over many years by trying to delegitimize the Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, not recognizing his election, and by promoting Western-backed seditious figures, like Nobel laureate Maria Corina Machado.

Jeffrey Sachs, the eminent U.S. scholar of international relations, told the UN Security Council in an address this week that the issue is not what Washington and the European partners claim about the Venezuelan government, but rather the primacy of the UN Charter and respect for international law based on the inviolability of national sovereignty.

Trump’s regime has committed aggression and trashed the UN Charter with absolute contempt. The European states are complicit in this rogue state barbarism through their silence and insidious countenance.

The ridiculous irony is that the Western powers claim to be the paragons of international democracy, law and order, and moral authority. They accuse Russia, China, and others of malfeasance and malign ambitions, when in glaring reality, it is the Western states led by the top hegemon, the United States, that are making a mockery of the international order. They are hypocrites and charlatans driving the world into crisis and escalating catastrophic conflict.

Since the Second World War, and the establishment of the UN Charter in 1945, the Western powers have been playing a cynical game of duplicity and deception. While paying lip service to law and order, they have always tacitly reserved the right to subvert foreign nations with aggression and illegal wars under the guise of pretexts such as the Cold War, defending “democracy and the free world”, and so on. The Western powers were always rogue regimes who simply used the cover of virtue to perpetrate their crimes of regime change, aggression and wars of conquest.

These pseudo democratic states were always, in reality, imperialist rogues. Their audacious disguise was permitted and continues to be permitted by the Western propaganda system, otherwise known as the Western news media.

The propaganda function of the Western media is on full display over the aggression towards Venezuela. Not one of the mainstream media outlets in the U.S. or in Europe has dared to condemn the U.S. war crimes. Indeed, several of the leading American media brands, including the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal, have legitimized Trump’s aggression, despite it matching the Nuremberg standard for supreme criminality.

Prominent among all the travesties that are now out in the open is the evident vassalage of European states. Even when the Trump regime threatens to forcibly annex the nominal European territory of Greenland, there is minimal criticism or opposition. The European states, Denmark, Britain, Germany, France, and others are pathetic in their subservience to the American master.

In a bitterly ironic way, Trump’s reckless arrogance is to be welcomed. Because he is inadvertently exposing the Western system for what it is – a criminal imperialist regime with absolutely no respect for international law, human life, and peaceful coexistence. He has discarded the Western mask of duplicity and pretense, which at least makes it clear what the Western system is all about. What we see is something barbaric and ugly, like the fascism of former times. The Europeans are exposed for the flunkies they are. That, however, makes them dangerous because in their servitude, they are reinforcing impunity for imperialist violence.

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