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colonialism
Trump's Attack on Venezuela Would Be Wrong Even If It Were Legal
Making a a war “legal” doesn’t make it just or moral. Legal wars still kill and maim innocent people, still destroy communities, still create intense hatred that guarantees future wars.
Jan 08, 2026
Oh good. Now we have a war to focus on. Everyone’s tired of Epstein by now, and tired of the possibility that the bad guy may be, ho hum, our own national leader, aka, the commander in chief.
So the commander in chief has stepped in for the sake of the public good, bestowing on America a far more traditional enemy to hate and fear and let dominate the headlines: narco-terrorists.
I’m still trying to grasp the fact that President Donald Trump has actually invaded Venezuela. He’s no longer simply bombing boats in the ocean. The US military bombed Caracas on January 3 and broke into the home of the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife Cilia Flores. They were kidnapped and extradited to the United States, where they are now on trial for drug trafficking—as though that was the moral purpose of the invasion.
Obviously it wasn’t. As The Intercept notes:
This is a clear-cut act of military aggression, a brazen violation of international law, and a textbook example of unreconstructed 19th-century colonialism.
Donald Trump now says that the US will "run" Venezuela and "take" the country’s vast oil reserves.
I’m in sync with the enormous outrage over this invasion, both here in the US and around the world. Where I back away slightly, however, is when a critic points out that Trump’s military action was “illegal,” because he invaded Venezuela without congressional approval. When I read this kind of criticism, I feel an inner alarm go off. Making a a war “legal” doesn’t make it just or moral. Legal wars still kill and maim innocent people, still destroy communities, still create intense hatred that guarantees future wars. In other words, war itself is always the core of the wrong.
In no way am I saying I oppose self-defense, or even retaliation. I’m saying, instead, that I believe we need to rethink what self-defense actually means.
What, oh what, is power? We live in a world that is armed against itself with preposterous enormity—nuclear armed against itself, for God’s sake. Violent response is embedded in the way we think, regarded as the nature of protection. Where’s my gun? And it’s likely to be the first response to a perceived threat, especially at the national level. And anyone who dares to question this is easily belittled as crying: “Gosh, can’t we all just get along?”
I took aim, so to speak, at this cynicism in a poem I wrote some years ago, called “Can’t We All Just... Oh Forget It,” which begins:
The cynics
play with their sticks
and knives, mocking
the merciful, the naïve,
the cheek turners.
Can’t we all just . . .
oh, forget it.
But maybe the answer
is yes,
if we undo the language,
the easy smirkwords
that belittle
our evolving...
Belittle our evolving! Disagreement—conflict—is often incredibly complex. Simply “eliminating” it, shooting it out of existence, may be a tempting course of action, but it solves nothing. Instead, we have to understand it. And every time we understand the reasons for a conflict—and figure out how to rectify and transcend those reasons—we evolve.
Consider these words about the Venezuela invasion by Jordan Liz:
Ultimately, whether it’s removing Maduro or invading Cuba, Mexico, or Colombia, none of these actions will solve the drug crisis because they fail to tackle the root cause: public suffering. While there are many reasons people turn to drugs, the lack of adequate healthcare, poverty, homelessness, social stigmas about drug use, and criminalization are the leading factors. People turn to drugs when their governments and communities turn their back on them. Drug cartels, like any other capitalist enterprise, exploit these people’s hopes and desires for their own gain.
...If Trump really cared about the drug crisis, he would be working tirelessly to solve the affordability crisis—not denying its existence or spending billions on battleships.
War is not the answer, even if it’s legal.
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The Planetary Crime of a Trump Invasion of Greenland
In a rational world, the conversation about the island would be about the melting ice sheet that could easily add a foot or more to the level of the ocean before the century is out.
Jan 07, 2026
When President Donald Trump first started fantasizing about seizing Greenland for the US, it sounded farcical—a little Gilbert and Sullivan, or maybe The Mouse that Roared. In the wake of America’s attack on Caracas, however, it now seems as likely as not that we’ll soon be landing troops in Nuuk, a truly hideous prospect that we should all try to head off. Here’s my small effort:
First off, I think it’s a very real possibility.
Here’s Stephen Miller on Monday, talking with Jake Tapper:
TAPPER: Can you rule out the US is going to take Greenland by force?
MILLER: Greenland should be part of the US. By what right does Denmark assert control over Greenland? The US is the power of NATO.
TAPPER: So force is on the table?
MILLER: Nobody is gonna fight the US militarily over future of Greenland.
And here’s our leader himself, speaking to a press gaggle on Air Force One while a beaming Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-Obsequious) grinned by his side:
Trump: We need Greenland. Right now, Greenland is covered with Russian and Chinese ships.
Reporter: What would the justification be for a claim to Greenland?
Trump: The EU needs us to have it.
None of this makes any actual sense—Greenland is not covered with Chinese and Russian ships, the EU does not want us to have it (European leaders united Tuesday to say, “Greenland belongs to its people. It is for Denmark and Greenland, and them only, to decide on matters concerning Denmark and Greenland,” which seems pretty clear), and Denmark asserts control over Greenland in pretty much the same way Washington asserts control over, say, Alaska or Vermont.
In fact, though, Denmark has been slowly loosening that control over the decades—not because it wants to sell it to America, but because it recognizes that the people who live there, most of whom are Inuit, should have the greatest say in how it’s managed. Greenlanders have exercised that say in ways that would be uncongenial to the White House: for instance, civil partnerships for gay people have been standard since 1996, and gay marriage legal since 2016 when the island’s parliament approved it by a 28-0 vote. Under the Kinguaassiorsinnaajunnaarsagaaneq pillugu inatsit law, sex changes have been allowed since 1976. In other words, Trump’s claim that Greenlanders “want to be with us” is palpable nonsense—a poll last January found that 85% of the population opposed the idea.
Discerning Trump’s “real” reason for wanting Greenland is a pointless exercise; he’s a sad, ancient baby, and babies just want. He seems to think that the point of a ruler is to acquire more territory, and that he more or less owns by divine right the land masses adjacent to our country. (MAGA bloggers this week were busily talking about “vassal states” across the hemisphere). There are minerals there, but hard to get at. Oh, and there’s petroleum in and around Greenland as well, and that usually sings a siren song to this child of the oil-driven 20th century.
Really, however, there’s only one truly vital strategic asset in Greenland, one thing that could change the world. And that’s the ice that covers almost all its landmass.
I’ve been up on this ice sheet—I’ve hiked up glaciers from the tideline, climbing and climbing till the sea disappears behind you and all you can see in every direction is white. It is uncannily beautiful.
I helped organize a trip there in 2018 so that two very fine poets could record a piece from atop this ice sheet. Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner came from her home in the Marshall Islands, which is already slipping under a rising sea (and which has long known about US imperialism; part of the atoll is still radioactive and off limits, thanks to US bomb testing in the 1950s); Aka Niviana is a native Greenlander whose home has begun to melt, a melt that if it continues will guarantee the submersion of Polynesia, and much else.
They stood there on that ice, in a chill summer wind, and recited their long and majestic poem for a camera; my job was to stand just outside its range with a pair of sleeping bags that they could wrap themselves in between takes. “Rise: From One Island to Another,” as their work was called, has won both prizes and large audiences on YouTube; it will, I think, be one of the documents of this global warming era that someday people will look at in a kind of outraged awe, one more proof that we knew exactly what was coming and did nothing about it.
The stakes are so enormous that they make the Trumpian greed for this land seem all the punier and more puerile.
We were camped above the Eagle Glacier—Jason Box, the American-born climatologist now living in Denmark who helped lead the trip had named it that because of its shape when he first visited five years earlier, “but now the head and the wings of the bird have melted away. I don’t know what we should call it now, but the eagle is dead.” And that’s true of so much of the island; we watched as one iceberg after another came crashing off the head of glaciers, each one raising the level of the ocean by some infinitesimal amount.
Greenland holds 23 feet of sea-level rise, should we eventually melt it all. That will take a while, but we’re doing our best. It’s been losing mass steadily for the last quarter-century—it lost 105 billion tons of ice (billion with a b) in 2025, and the ice was melting well into September, unusual in a place where winter usually descends in late August. The people of Greenland, by the way, recognize all this: They passed a law in 2021 banning all new oil exploration and drilling—the government described it as “a natural step” because Greenland “takes the climate crisis seriously.” (More than two-thirds of their power comes from renewables, mostly hydro).
I found those Greenlanders I met to be hardy, thrifty people very much in tune with their place. I spent a memorable afternoon with Box planting trees outside the former American air base in Narsarsuaq in an effort to, among other things, soak up some carbon dioxide. And I spent an equally pleasant afternoon drinking beer with him and the rest of our party at a microbrewery in Saqqannguaq (one of several in the country) which brews “with the purest drinking water on Earth, coming from the Greenlandic ice cap” and hence “free of toxins, chemicals, and microplastics.” Highly recommend the IPA, reminder of yet another imperial adventure.
Obviously seizing Greenland would be a terrible idea because it would break up NATO and put America at loggerheads with the liberal democracies of Europe (though that may be the single biggest incentive for the administration). Obviously, it would be a gross example of modern colonization, obliterating the rights of the people who live there. Obviously, it would raise tensions around the world even higher, and send the strongest possible signal that Beijing should just go grab Taiwan. Lots of people are talking about those things, though there’s not the slightest sign that anyone in power is listening. (Stephen Miller’s wife has tweeted out a map of Greenland decked out in red and white stripes).
But in a rational world what we’d mostly be talking about is all that ice. That’s what, for the other 8 billion people on the planet, actually matters about this island. It could easily add a foot or more to the level of the ocean before the century is out, all by itself (the Antarctic, much bigger but slower to melt, will eventually add much more). A foot is a lot—on a typical beach on, say, the Jersey shore, which slopes up at about 1°, that brings the ocean about 90 feet inland.
And the fresh water pouring off Greenland seems already to be disrupting the great conveyor belt currents that bring warm water north from the equator, maintaining the climates of the surrounding continents. That too could raise—by significant amounts—the level of the sea, especially along the coast of the southeast US (and also plunge Europe into the deep freeze even as the rest of the planet warms).
The stakes are so enormous that they make the Trumpian greed for this land seem all the punier and more puerile. Here’s how Jetnil-Kijiner and Niviana put it in their poem:
We demand that the world see beyond
SUVs, ACs, their pre-package convenience
Their oil-slicked dreams, beyond the belief
That tomorrow will never happen
And yet there’s a generosity to their witness—a recognition that whoever started the trouble, we’re now in it together.
Let me bring my home to yours
Let’s watch as Miami, New York,
Shanghai, Amsterdam, London
Rio de Janeiro and Osaka
Try to breathe underwater…
None of us is immune.
Life in all forms demands
The same respect we all give to money…
So each and every one of us
Has to decide
If we
Will
Rise
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Trumpian Colonialism Is Not Freedom
Venezuela was not liberated. Overnight, it became a US-occupied colony whose lands and resources will be stolen and exploited; whose people will be subjugated to a hostile foreign power; and whose future will remain uncertain.
Jan 06, 2026
On January 3, the US launched an illegal attack in Venezuela that resulted in the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife. Attorney General Pamela Bondi wrote via Twitter-X that the couple has been indicted and will “soon face the full wrath of American justice on American soil in American courts.”
For Vice President JD Vance, because “Maduro has multiple indictments in the United States for narcoterrorism,” these military strikes were legal. This, despite the fact that these strikes were conducted without congressional approval in a clear violation of the Constitution and the separation of powers.
With Maduro out of power, President Donald Trump announced that, “We’re going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition.” The crucial detail that Trump leaves out here is that what constitutes “such time” is left entirely up to his administration.
Let us be very clear here: Venezuela was not liberated. Overnight, it became a US-occupied colony whose lands and resources will be stolen and exploited; whose people will be subjugated to a hostile foreign power; and whose future will remain uncertain.
The threat to American sovereignty is Trump himself.
Whether Maduro was a dictator is irrelevant to this equation. Even leaving aside the fraught history of US regime change in countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, the US is not the world’s judge, jury and executioner. The US does not get to invade other nations simply because it decides they are not “good neighbors.”
Latin America is not “our backyard.” This language is inherently colonialist. It symbolically reduces a region of the world that contains over 30 nations into America’s property. With this metaphor, the US gives itself the license to do as it pleases: It may trim the weeds (eliminate anti-American leaders), plant a garden (install a puppet government), and harvest what it grows (plunder their resources). The weight of this metaphor is visible when Trump causally refers to Venezuela’s natural oil reserves as “our oil.” In his mind, he is not seizing foreign resources, but rather reclaiming what Venezuela unjustly took away. After all, a backyard has no right to deny its owner access.
What Venezuela needed was a people’s revolution. The removal of Maduro and the destiny of Venezuela should have been left to the Venezuelan people to decide.
The fundamental error with the belief that invading a country will somehow "bring" freedom to it is that "freedom" is not an object that can be given. This is not to say that material conditions cannot limit the scope of one’s opportunities and freedoms—they most certainly can. But, at its core, freedom is an act of the will, not property to be transferred. The US cannot make Venezuela free. Only Venezuelans can.
Instead of freedom, Venezuela has been forcibly taken by a country that couldn’t care less about its people. Trump’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spent the bulk of 2025 arbitrarily designating Venezuelans as members of Tren de Aragua and then deporting them to the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT) in El Salvador—a literal “torture-enslavement detention center.”
For Trump, Venezuela—like any other colonized territory—is simply a resource to be exploited. Trump doesn’t even hide this. He has already announced that “we’re going to have our very large United States oil companies—the biggest anywhere in the world—go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure.” Venezuela is an investment for Trump. He and his ultra-wealthy donors will strip Venezuela of its wealth and then leave what’s left to whoever remains.
This is also not about the drug crisis as some Trump allies suggest. Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.), chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, claimed that because of this invasion, “Drug lords and terrorists will no longer operate freely in our hemisphere and drugs and illegals will not flow into our country.”
In December 2025, Trump pardoned former President of Honduras Juan Orlando Hernández. Hernández was sentenced to 45 years in prison for his role in an almost two-decades long drug-trafficking scheme that funneled over 400 tons of cocaine to the US. Apparently, this cocaine wasn’t dangerous enough for Trump and his supporters.
Ultimately, whether it’s removing Maduro or invading Cuba, Mexico, or Colombia, none of these actions will solve the drug crisis because they fail to tackle the root cause: public suffering. While there are many reasons people turn to drugs, the lack of adequate healthcare, poverty, homelessness, social stigmas about drug use, and criminalization are the leading factors. People turn to drugs when their governments and communities turn their back on them. Drug cartels, like any other capitalist enterprise, exploit these people’s hopes and desires for their own gain.
If Trump really cared about the drug crisis, then his administration would not be actively working to dismantle the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). If Trump really cared about the drug crisis, he would not withhold federal funding for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits or childcare. If Trump really cared about the drug crisis, he would be working tirelessly to solve the affordability crisis—not denying its existence or spending billions on battleships.
Trump touted that this “extremely successful operation should serve as a warning to anyone who would threaten American sovereignty or endanger American lives.” But the threat to American sovereignty is Trump himself. Trump’s decision to bypass Congress and invade Venezuela is a further attack on a crumbling system of checks and balances. While many factors have fueled this deterioration, the failure of Congress to meaningfully hold Trump accountable looms large here.
The irony of this invasion is that Trump invaded Venezuela to overthrow a “dictator and terrorist” by acting like a dictator and terrorist. A habit that Trump is becoming increasingly comfortable with. Already the Trump administration has targeted people for their political beliefs, established a secret police, sent people to prison camps (CECOT, Alligator Alcatraz), deployed the National Guard in US cities, and, of course, invaded a foreign nation at his own discretion. Like Maduro, Trump has even been accused of human right abuses by organizations like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
Substituting Maduro for Trump will not “make Venezuela great again.” It will only make Venezuelans, Americans, and the rest of the world more vulnerable to the whims of an increasingly authoritarian madman. If there is one regime that desperately needs to change, it’s Trump’s.
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