Maduro’s ousting represents the end of an atrocious dictatorship, which has been guilty of gross human rights violations, widely documented by the UN and the International Criminal Court.

In these hours, the Venezuelan people fill the streets, celebrating the fall of a criminal regime that has oppressed and impoverished them. The attitude of those who, out of opportunism, turn the other way in the face of this, pretending that Maduro’s was a legitimate government, is hypocritical. Freedom has no political colour.

Trump is not a liberator

The problem is that Trump cares absolutely nothing about freedom, neither at home nor abroad. Emblematic of this is the fact that he launched Operation Absolute Resolve without even informing Congress in advance, acting like a man alone in command.

During the subsequent press conference, Trump does not mention democracy, but mentions oil 27 times. Trump is crystal clear about his goals: he does not mask them behind the‘export of democracy’. He has explicitly stated that his intention is to ‘manage’ Venezuela, to bring back the big US oil companies to manage the world’s largest oil fields. Indeed, Trump claims that, with nationalisations, the socialist regime has ‘stolen’ the oil industry built over time with American technology and investment.

The current President of the United States is therefore acting openly for what he is: an imperialist thirsting for wealth and power, a predator, who will stop at nothing and is actively contributing to founding the new world order on the law of the strongest. And it displaces the whole world, because it does so in broad daylight, breaking down every diplomatic canon.

Monroe Doctrine or Trump Doctrine?

President Maduro was not dismissed as a dictator, but as the head of a government not aligned with Washington’s interests, in the name of the Monroe Doctrine as applied to Trump’s hegemonic ambitions.

Because for Trump, the freedom of peoples is not the goal, but merely a temporary ‘side effect’ of unscrupulous and dangerous actions that have quite different ends.

It is serious that there are those who argue in its favour, citing US interventionism in World War II against Nazi Germany.

The problem is that the Tycoon is ready to use military force to turn any state that does not go along with him, democratic or otherwise, into an American colony, overthrowing the United Nations and the entire system of international law. And he makes it blatant, without even waiting two days: ‘the US needs Greenland for defence purposes’.

Will that be the next victim? And then what? Whose turn will it be?

In an increasingly crisis-ridden world, the only certainty is that Europe is still never in the game. We are a little goldfish in a sea of sharks, the only pacifists in a world where superpowers ruled by imperialist (or would-be) despots are the masters.

Trump’s attack on Venezuela is just yet another wake-up call: we cannot continue to ignore reality and pretend that nothing affects us, that democracy and freedom are something natural and ineradicable on our continent, that welfare can exist without spending on security, flowers as an alternative to guns.

What are we Europeans to do?

TheEuropean Union needs a single defence, a single clear voice in foreign policy, political institutions that are able to make real decisions.

It needs to be able to unanimously condemn those who violate the rules of coexistence between states, even if it is the President of the United States of America.