Trump’s Venezuelan siege

"HE WILL drive us into World War III,” Donald Trump claimed of Joe Biden in 2024.

“You’re gambling with World War III,” Trump told Volodymyr Zelenskyy earlier this year, in March.

But today, on the last day of 2025, if the world stands on the brink of war, it’s all this US president’s doing.

On December 26, the Republican Party leader let slip that US forces had carried out a strike inside Venezuela, saying, “We hit them very hard.”

The offhand manner in which he made this announcement on Boxing Day during a little-heard radio interview betrayed the moment’s gravity.

By December 29, Trump was adding details: “We hit all the boats and now we hit the implementation area.” He was speaking again off-the-cuff as he hosted Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House.

The apparent land strike follows the Trump administration’s recent crossing of a disturbing milestone at sea in its ongoing assault on the Maduro administration.

Days before Christmas, the US military’s campaign of summary executions reached a new high. At least 100 souls have now perished in those extrajudicial exercises.

But dead bodies continue to wash ashore, and the number continues to rise; a 30th strike earlier this week meant at least 107 may now be dead.

Alongside such travesties, an extraordinary display of military might has unfolded in the Caribbean Sea, oil tankers have been seized, a bounty on Mr Maduro’s head has been raised and an ultimatum has reportedly been issued to him by Mr Trump.

Unhinged and untethered to any semblance of reality has been Mr Trump’s justification for his actions, including his despatch of the CIA to TT's closest neighbour in October.

He said of Venezuela then, “They have emptied their prisons into the USA. They have allowed thousands and thousands of prisoners, people from mental institutions and insane asylums, to be emptied out into the US.”

But this month, Mr Trump brazenly changed his tune, suggesting the issue was really about, “All the oil, land and other assets that they previously stole from us.”

Such machinations have triggered unprecedented statements of support for Venezuela’s sovereignty from Russia and China, with Vladimir Putin ringing Mr Maduro on December 11, and Xi Jinping’s regime implicitly accusing the US of “unilateral bullying.”

The extent of possible involvement of either of these two superpowers in any military conflagration would be unclear.

Yet, that alone speaks to the extraordinary recklessness of Mr Trump. If anyone’s gambling it’s him.

Months after fears emerged that two nationals may have perished in a strike at sea, there has been no real update from the TT government, which has, instead, cheered America’s leader as the world inches closer to Mr Trump’s manufactured Armageddon.