No dentist ever extracted a troublesome molar as cleanly and swiftly as Trump has extracted poor Maduro from Caracas.

There are reports that not mere military might but very canny spy and money power operating over a long period made this extraction possible – a throwback, if you like, to the treachery of old world princely palace guards who saw their own main chance in betraying their boss.

A cry has gone up from an old world post-Bretton Woods elite that a gruesome wound has been inflicted on the international rules based order which has, ostensibly, thus far helped to ensure global sanity and accountability in the matter of national transgressions.

That this elite view may not in fact stand the test of political scrutiny is another matter, nowhere more evident than in the way the state of Israel has succeeded in rubbishing that order and its premier institutions in its crusade to grab land from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean sea, proof against all the punitive determinations of even the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, not to speak of the decrepit Security council whose umpteen “binding” resolutions bearing on the transgressions committed by Israel make a big pile in the United Nations’ dustbin.

Whatever appearances nonetheless that may have thus far been maintained now stand formally jettisoned by the new American National Security Strategy propounded by the Trump regime in November, 2025.

Driven by a cannibalistic nationalism, the charmingly forthright document makes no bones about saying good bye to America’s “forever global burden” dear to previous liberal dispensations, not that that so-called burden was ever operated with the least regard for the sovereign and democratic rights of other nations.

Adding a “Trump corollary” to the old Monroe Doctrine, the new strategy explicitly lays out a foreign policy restricted henceforth primarily to the “western hemisphere”, and to the rest of the world only to the extent that such entanglement bears on American national interests in the western hemisphere.

This crucially involves deterring the material resources of Latin American countries being made available to a China or a Russia, now that the document declares the United States to be the sole proprietor of that wealth. Venezuela’s oil and mineral reserves have thus been the chief cause of the despicable aggression, although all in the name of preventing drugs from entering the United States,

Thus the new Security Strategy document states that this hemisphere must first and foremost be vassal to American economic, military, even cultural needs and objectives, and place its material resources at the explicit service of MAGA commandments. What better evidence that this new strategy is already underway than that Trump should say that Venezuela will be “run” by the United States, in a sort of twenty first century colonialism, if you like, and that if the new government there does not see this point, it will be driven home by another kinetically persuasive strike.

Both in America and elsewhere, there still remain in existence some old fashioned liberals and socialists who are outraged no end by this turn of events, and shocked that a Russia or a China should seem to be so quiescent, barring those correct diplomatic averments for the record. These well-meaning children of a lost world argue that if a Mamdani is possible, why not a global movement against Trump’s kidnapping of the head of a sovereign state.

To note: the atavistic rules based international order grants “immunity” to Heads of State such as the abducted Maduro.

Also, if he indeed is now a prisoner of war, those rules accord to him privileges that the abductor power is obliged to obey – reason why Trump maintains that this was not war but a law-and-order grab of a felon awaiting legal justice in American courts.

Considerations that may now only be grist to the dark humour of the new American strategy.

But, hello, would you please give some thought also to what might best suit a Putin or a Xi Jinping post the new American doctrine?

Should they rather do more than cry foul or just attempt to mount a global barricade and outcry designed to force Trump to walk back his so-audacious thuggery, or should they see in what he has achieved an example they might follow with great profit to their own national interests of long?

If Trump has pronounced his new Monroe Doctrine bearing on the “western hemisphere”, how about Putin and Xi proffering one of their own bearing on Eastern Europe, the Baltic, South and South-East Asia etc.?

If Trump has so sweetly extracted Maduro why may Putin not extract Zelenskyy? And why may not Xi give rest to repeating trial runs of his forces over and around Taipei, and make bold finally to go in and extract whoever believes himself to be in charge of that territory?

And if this happened, there may be little that Trump could now say or do, barring perhaps boasting, ha ha, how such lesser dictators have after all found in him their great inspiration. And even our own Modi, given that the historic “Operation Sindoor” we are told everyday is still active, may take a deep breath and send our heroes to extract that upstart blusterer in Rawalpindi who imagines himself proof against the might and genius of the Bharatiya establishment?

The ravages wrought among the global haves by pretentious movements for equality, fraternity, liberty, rule of universal laws, the securing of national and people’s sovereign or human rights could thus be mended in ways in which only the puissant dinosaurs could return in unfettered sway to once again rule the earth which god had bequeathed to those who could best survive.

Time for the Trumpean asteroid to cancel all lesser mortals.

Tailpiece

During his campaign for the American Presidency, Donald Trump had said: I will not start but stop wars; my measure of success will be not how many battles I start but how many I stop.

Little did the world know what heavy price it would pay for the denial of the Nobel Peace Prize to dear Donald.

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