From the Editor’s Desk: “America’s Illegal War on Venezuela Is a Threat to Everyone!”
In the early hours of January 3, multiple explosions and the roar of low-flying aircraft shattered the night over Caracas, marking a dramatic escalation in U.S.–Venezuela tensions. Residents across the capital awoke to blasts that reportedly shook military installations and power infrastructure, as the Venezuelan government declared the strikes a “flagrant violation” of its sovereignty and the United Nations Charter. Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez immediately condemned what her government described as U.S. military aggression, declaring a national emergency and demanding proof of life for President Nicolás Maduro and his wife amid widespread confusion and fear on the ground.
Hours later, U.S. President Donald Trump publicly confirmed that what he characterized as a “large-scale strike” had resulted in the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores. According to the Trump administration, Maduro and Flores were taken into U.S. custody and flown out of the country to face prosecution on charges including alleged narco-terrorism. Trump further announced that the United States would “temporarily run Venezuela,” a declaration that has triggered international condemnation and raised urgent legal questions about the constitutionality of the military action and the legality of detaining a sitting head of state without any Congressional authorization for war.
The recent assault on Venezuela’s capital did not emerge in a vacuum but followed months in which the U.S. military dramatically expanded lethal operations at sea. Beginning in early September 2025, U.S. forces began striking vessels off the coasts of Venezuela in the name of counter-drug operations, with the Trump administration claiming that suspected drug smuggling justified the use of lethal force. Over that period, U.S. Southern Command announced dozens of strikes on alleged narco-trafficking boats in both the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean, resulting in at least 115 people killed in more than 35 attacks—many of them whose exact identities and affiliations have never been made public, and for whom there is scant evidence linking them to organized violence or attacks on the United States. In some cases, survivors of initial strikes who had jumped overboard were left in the water as additional strikes followed, raising grave questions among legal experts and lawmakers about whether these actions constitute extrajudicial killings under both U.S. and international law.
These flagrant disregards for human life and the rule of law are not aberrations; they are the continuation of a long and deeply entrenched pattern in U.S. foreign policy. For decades, the United States has responded to challenges to its global dominance not with diplomacy or respect for sovereignty, but with coercion, destabilization, and war. From Iraq and Libya to Iran, from Guatemala and Chile to Nicaragua and Venezuela, nations that assert independence—particularly over their own natural resources—have routinely been labeled threats, criminals, or rogue regimes. The legal justifications change, the rhetoric shifts, but the underlying logic remains the same: defiance is met with force, regardless of the civilian cost or the constitutional limits on executive power.
This war is no exception. The Trump administration’s escalation against Venezuela—its strikes, its arrests, its willingness to kill without transparency or accountability—is not about democracy, human rights, or the rule of law. It is about control. It is about oil, and it always has been. Venezuela sits atop the largest proven oil reserves in the world, and its insistence on sovereign control over that wealth has long made it a target of U.S. hostility. What we are witnessing now is the blunt expression of that hostility: war brought upon a people, leaders seized without legal authority, and lives treated as expendable obstacles to economic and geopolitical dominance. When the United States wages war for resources while abandoning its own constitutional restraints, it does not merely threaten another nation—it corrodes the very principles it claims to defend.
Years ago, long before missiles struck Caracas and Venezuelan boats were turned into graves at sea, the logic of this war was already being spoken aloud. I remember growin up in southeastern Ohio, listening to a Methodist minister tell her congregation that the United States needed to go to war with Venezuela to “get our oil back” after Hugo Chávez refused to sell it on Washington’s terms.
The bluntness of the statement was jarring not because it was extreme, but because it was honest. Stripped of diplomatic language and moral pretense, it revealed a worldview in which other nations’ resources are assumed to belong—by right, by force, or by inevitability—to the American empire, and resistance is treated as provocation.
This is the moral framework that underlies empire: resources are never truly anyone’s except the empire’s, and sovereignty is tolerated only so long as it aligns with imperial interests. When nations in Latin America or the Middle East insist on controlling their oil, gas, or mineral wealth for their own people, they are recast as threats, criminals, or enemies of “order.”
Violence then becomes permissible, framed as enforcement rather than aggression. What is unfolding in Venezuela today follows this same script—one that sacrifices law, life, and truth to preserve access to oil and the illusion of American entitlement to the world’s wealth.
Donald Trump now poses an escalating danger not only to the people of the United States but to the world. His administration’s illegal ICE raids, its open declaration of war on those it defines as “other”—immigrants, students, people of color, LGBTQ people, dissenting institutions, and entire nations—marks a governing philosophy rooted in coercion rather than law. Abroad, this same logic manifests as unilateral war, mass killing, and the arrest of foreign leaders without constitutional or international authority.
Trump’s actions increasingly mirror those of Vladimir Putin in Ukraine and Benjamin Netanyahu in Palestine: the normalization of collective punishment, the erosion of legal restraint, and the insistence that power alone confers legitimacy.
North Meridian Press condemns this war in the strongest possible terms and joins voices around the world in demanding an immediate cessation of hostilities and full criminal accountability for the U.S. president and his administration. A nation that claims to defend democracy cannot continue to tolerate lawless violence carried out in its name—at home or abroad.
Wesley R. Bishop
Founding and Managing Editor, North Meridian Press
Alabama, January 3, 2026