The overthrow and reported capture by invading US forces of Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela’s hardline socialist president, will send a shiver of fear and consternation around the world. The coup is illegal, unprovoked and regionally and globally destabilising. It upends international norms, ignores sovereign territorial rights, and potentially creates an anarchic situation inside Venezuela itself.

It is chaos made policy. But this is the world we now live in – the world according to Donald Trump.

The direct attack on Venezuela marks an extraordinary, dangerous assertion of unfettered US power and comes in the same week that Trump threatened military strikes against another unpopular anti-western regime: that of Iran. It follows months of escalating US military, economic and political pressure on Maduro, including lethal maritime attacks on the boats of alleged drug traffickers.

Trump claims to be acting to prevent illegal narcotics flowing into the US via Venezuela and to halt an alleged influx of “criminal” migrants. In an echo of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, he is also accused of coveting Venezuela’s huge oil and gas resources – suspicions reinforced by repeated, illegal US seizures of Venezuelan oil tankers.

But Trump’s primary motives appear to be........

© The Guardian