Trump's new world order is being born - and Venezuela is just the start

Owen Jones

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But Trump’s great virtue, if it can be called that, is candour. Previous US presidents draped naked self-interest in the language of “democracy” and “human rights”. Trump dispenses with the costume. In 2023, he boasted: “When I left, Venezuela was ready to collapse. We would have taken it over, we would have gotten all that oil, it would have been right next door.” And this was no off-the-cuff remark. The logic of an oil grab, and much more besides, is laid out plainly in Trump’s recently published National Security Strategy.

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Violence in Latin America facilitated by Washington is hardly new. My parents took in refugees who had fled Chile’s rightwing dictatorship, installed after the socialist president Salvador Allende was overthrown in a CIA-backed coup. “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people,” declared the then US secretary of state Henry Kissinger. Similar logic underpinned US support for murderous regimes in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia, as well as across Central America and the Caribbean.

But in the last three decades, that domination has been challenged. The so-called “pink tide” of progressive governments, spearheaded by Brazil’s president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, sought to assert greater regional independence. And, crucially, China – the main US rival – has grown in power across the continent. The two-way goods trade between China and Latin America was 259 times larger in 2023 than it was in 1990. China is now the continent’s second largest trading partner, behind only the US. At the end of the cold war, it did not even make the top 10. Trump’s assault on Venezuela is just the opening move in an attempt to reverse all of this.

The experience of Trump’s first term has led too many to conclude that the strongman in the White House was all bluster. Then, he reached an accommodation with the traditional Republican elite. The unwritten bargain was simple: deliver tax cuts and deregulation, and he could vent endlessly on social media. Second-term Trump is a full-fat far-right regime.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/06/donald-trump-new-world-order-venezuela-cuba-mexico-colombia-greenland