By Dedan Kimathi
Thirty-five years after the United States kidnapped or rather, extracted, Panama’s General Manuel Noriega in a daring raid to face drug-related charges, El Diablo (Satan), as many Spanish speaking leftist leaders have long branded the self-appointed Policeman of the World, has returned, bigger and brasher, to South America’s political theatre.
This time, with a masked invasion which saw Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro and the First Lady scooped and transported to the US to face drug related charges after a brief firefight with Bolivarian forces.
The development comes after Washington spent the last two decades paying bloody visits to Baghdad and Libya, and more recently Syria, where it maintains roughly 2,000 boots on the ground, ostensibly under a counter-terrorism mandate.
In the Venezuelan case, Trump set the tone by accusing Nicolás Maduro of “moving” and profiting from drugs. Same lazy cliché America deploys whenever it wants to depose a foreign leader and pillage a country.
How does a country that boasts of nearly 17 percent of the world’s oil reserve engage in such?
US military interventions
However, history tells us that these accusations are often a smokescreen, for installing puppet regimes that serve US imperial interests rather than the will of native populations.
Over the years, the Office of Strategic Services, now known as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), has perfected this playbook. In 1953, the US helped overthrow Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, after he nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.
America, the self-styled champion of democracy, also had a hand in the coup that toppled Chilean President Salvador Allende through Operation FUBELT, replacing him with General Augusto Pinochet, a soul-ripper.
The same impulse drove the ill-fated ‘Bay of Pigs invasion’ to overthrow Cuban President Fidel Castro. Yes, America was heavily involved in the removal of Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba and his subsequent ‘un-aliving’.
Therefore, America lacks the moral authority to lecture even the recently independent countries on democracy, because time has proved that control has been her mission.
The danger I see with this, is that once Trump, whom an analyst recently likened to a ‘monkey with a machine gun’, is not called to order, other countries may begin settling scores in the same fashion.
Imagine waking up and you hear that Putin hauled in Zelensky last night. Or that, a designated bunch of African Presidents, especially, those that don’t align with the West, have been netted in an overnight fishing expedition and are aboard USS Hershel Williams enroute to the US for trial over rights abuses.
Economy in decline
And there are plausible reasons for leaders, in the true meaning of the word, of the Global South to be afraid. The American economy has not been doing well for the past so many years. Data from the US Treasury Department, shows that the average Gross Domestic Product for the 2025 fiscal year was $30.36 Trillion, which was less than the U.S. debt of $37.64 Trillion.
This imbalance suggests that the federal government is facing growing difficulty in servicing its debt.
In an attempt to correct this and stimulate growth, Trump, elected last year, imposed reciprocal tariffs on 180 countries, including long-time allies such as Australia. China, which was hit with tariffs as high as 145 percent, responded in kind, slapping a 125 percent tariff on American goods.
His measures which had initially been hailed as an economic masterstroke quickly morphed into Russian roulette. Others turned elsewhere for market.
Kicks of a dying horse
Trump then rolled out mass deportations, to deny undocumented migrants a share of the much-touted ‘American Dream’. On December 10 last year, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced that since the start of the year, 605,000 migrants had been deported, while a further 1.9 million had voluntarily self-deported.
With this yanking, yielding meager returns, it appears, America’s fallback position, as has always been, is war economics.
Any developing country sitting on Uranium, rare earth, gold, oil and diamond deposits, needs to hold fast. This is going to be a rough ride. That, I can guarantee.
Standby force
So, one might ask, should we fold our hands and surrender to fate? No. What endangered societies and nations must do is embark on mass conscientization, to help citizens clearly understand the dangers embedded in certain economic systems and the ever-present threat of foreign interest driven coups and sabotage.
Such awareness is essential if people are to become enlightened enough to take a firm stand when imperial powers rear their ugly heads.
Governments, on their part, must also ramp up spending on defense and professionalization of security forces, ensuring they are capable of detecting and neutralizing threats to national security before they hatch.
Finally, the African Union (AU) and regional blocs such as the East African Community (EAC) and SADC must move beyond issuing paper tigers and accelerate the establishment of functional standby forces, units that can, when called upon, confront and dismantle foreign-instigated machinations.
The author is a law-abiding citizen.
