A Mayo View: Very unsettling start to the new year likely to continue

If the threat of illicit narcotics to the future welfare of America is deemed to be justification for the US invasion of Venezuela, then the entire landscape of international law has been ripped asunder.

While US President Donald Trump is widely known for his preference for using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, he has plunged the world into a greater sense of fear and uncertainty than when his nation, with the support of the UK and other nations, invaded Iraq in 2003 in search of missiles of mass destruction that did not exist.

In one sense his unprecedented shot across the bow of a South American illegal drug trafficking regime may be long overdue, but his methods are open to serious questioning and scrutiny.

It is true that Venezuela is a proverbial basket case, its now disposed dictator Nicolás Maduro having run an authoritarian state since 2013 with the help of elections widely regarded as being rigged.

He now faces charges before a New York court of running a corrupt, illegitimate government fuelled by an extensive drug-trafficking operation that flooded the US with thousands of tons of cocaine.

But if Trump expects the world to believe that his actions are on the basis of specific drug allegations and his own personal desire to deliver democracy to the people of Venezuela, then he is completely misguided.

Delivering democracy to Venezuela is very important, of course, but the last thing it needs is a model of Trump’s democracy, which is a version of dictatorship and suppression in a different guise to which it has become accustomed.

What he has done in Venezuela is a further demonstration of his abuse of power fuelled by an ego completely and utterly out of control, a situation compounded by many once-proud nations, including our own, bowing down and placating him.

Now, like his pal Vladimir Putin in respect of Ukraine and other matters, he has gone too far this time and his running amok must be reined in before Greenland, Iran and Cuba become his next targets.

While Maduro may in time be found guilty in a US court of the charges brought against him, there is no getting away from the fact that what Trump has done is a blatant violation of international law and a further step along the path to world instability and strife, an environment which he apparently craves.

What a very unsettling beginning to the new year indeed, but further evidence that the day cannot come quickly enough when the out-of-control US president is removed from office.