Happy New Year, gentle readers! Looks like 2026 is getting a great start in the “dangerous idiocy” department, with US troops invading Venezuela and abducting the country's president, Nicolás Maduro. Wait, what?

We can probably agree that Maduro is not exactly a choir boy. He came to power in 2013 on the death of Venezuela's previous strong-man, Hugo Chávez, and has since ruled the country as an autocrat based on elections that are widely considered to have been rigged, plus violent suppression of the opposition. Having said that, being a widely-acknowledged a…hole does not give other countries the right to send troops to assault your country and kidnap you. International law calls this “aggression”, and that is a crime that could get you condemned and sanctioned by the UN Security Council and hauled in front of the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

(The USA, for reasons that should painfully obvious today, does not subscribe to the ICC, and they actually have a law on the books, the American Servicemembers' Protection Act of 2002, that gives the President the authority to invade the Netherlands – incidentally a NATO ally – in order to free any US or allied service members who somehow end up in the ICC's custody. In addition, the USA has, of course, veto power in the UN Security Council, so the probability of anything official coming out of there that chastises them about the Venezuelan invasion, let alone imposes sanctions, is effectively zero.)

So far the US government has declined to justify its actions beyond the observation that Maduro, and incidentally his wife, have been indicted as drug dealers and “narco-terrorists” by a grand jury in New York. As far as we know, the evidence for this is more than a little flimsy given that Venezuela does not play a big role in the USA's illegal-drugs problem. And even an existing indictment does not entitle the US to conduct a military invasion and, by the way, kill people while trying to apprehend a criminal suspect – especially if they also happen to be the head of state of an independent country. Needless to say, Maduro himself denies these allegations. The only situation that would justify the application of military force (apart from a UN security council resolution authorising it, which would never happen because Russia and China have veto powers and are great friends of Venezuela) would be “self-defence” – but the notion that the USA is under the immediate threat of an invasion by Venezuela is so risible as to not bear further consideration.

To add insult to injury, Donald Trump has now claimed that the USA will “run Venezuela” for the foreseeable future, until “a proper transition can take place”. It is unclear how that would work since the USA has not actually occupied the place. While the Venezuelan military would presumably not be able to stand up against the US in open battle, the US armed forces would have a problem on their hands given the existence of armed paramilitary groups established by Maduro who would be able to conduct guerilla operations against a US military presence. Hence, probably not a great idea. Also, a “proper transition” to what precisely? Even with Maduro himself gone, the rest of his political apparatus is still in place and they're not exactly happy campers. Right now his deputy, vice-president Delcy Rodriguez, has been sworn in as president, and has stressed that Venezuela “will never again be anyone's colony”. While Venezuelans in exile have already started celebrating a new era of freedom in their home country, for the person on the street in Caracas (and elsewhere in the country) nothing much seems to have changed.

It is reasonable to assume that what Trump and his friends are really after are Venezuela's oil reserves, claimed to be the largest in the world. US companies had been exploiting those until Maduro's predecessor Chávez nationalised the oil industry in the early 2000s, a step that did not meet with great enthusiasm on the American side. Trump's hope may be that he can exert enough pressure on the Venezuelans to allow US oil companies back into the country; he certainly said already that a military occupation of Venezuela wouldn't cost the US anything because they would reimburse themselves with Venezuelan oil. What could possibly go wrong??

On a geopolitical scale, the main problem with Trump's outrageous little caper is that it is functionally identical to what Russian president Putin started in Ukraine, and what Chinese dictator Xi is presumably looking forward to trying in Taiwan. It sends the message that if you have a big enough army and navy, you get to do what you please. Certainly nobody is in a position to slap the USA's wrist for its invasion of Venezuela and the abduction of that country's leader. What's next, kidnapping the king of Denmark in order to take over Greenland, or the prime minister of Canada in order to annex that country? President Lai-Ching Te of Taiwan should also be looking over his shoulder more than before, just in case (President Zelenskij of Ukraine, of course, already does). Also, China has considerable business interests in Venezuela and Russia is a Venezuelan ally of long standing, so what these countries will do in response to a US takeover of whatever kind – and it is reasonable to assume that at least China will attempt to do something – is anybody's guess.

It is difficult to find the words to describe how much this sucks. The only good thing to come out of this may be that, whatever else he does, Trump ought to have made himself effectively ineligible for a Nobel peace prize. But of course who cares about a bunch of guys in Norway now that Trump is the first (and probably only ever) holder of that much-coveted award, the peace prize sponsored by the shining beacon of transparency and independence, and valiant champion of incorruptibility, Gianni Infantino of FIFA.

Eat that, Obama.