Escalating violations of international law and a military build up telegraph US intentions for regime change, but this aggression must be resisted, argues Jonathan Maunders

Donald Trump’s latest escalation against Venezuela has laid bare the truth about his government’s ‘war on drugs’. It’s a cover for regime change.

The US has assembled its largest military force in the Caribbean since the 1989 invasion of Panama, including the USS Gerald R. Ford carrier group and around 12,700 troops off Venezuela’s coast.

This is being sold as part of ‘Operation Southern Spear’, a supposed campaign against drug trafficking, but its size and proximity to Venezuelan waters points to intimidation, not policing.

Under this anti-narcotics banner, US missiles have hit at least 22 small boats in the Caribbean and Pacific, killing more than eighty people in attacks the UN and rights groups say appear to be extrajudicial executions.

Survivors describe ‘double tap’ strikes on people already in the water, and even US allies have warned that the campaign tramples international law and normal peacetime rules of engagement.

At the same time, Trump has unilaterally declared Venezuelan airspace ‘closed’ and pushed a radar installation with marines onto Trinidad and Tobago, stoking fears that the wider Caribbean will be dragged into an assault on Caracas.

Trinidad’s government initially denied that US forces were active on its soil, before admitting that marines are installing new radar on Tobago. Local activists fear their islands are being turned into an unsinkable aircraft carrier for Washington.

This military build-up coincides with an American ultimatum demanding Nicolás Maduro’s immediate resignation. According to leaked testimony, Trump reportedly gave Maduro a week to leave the country. At a recent rally, Maduro responded that Venezuela wanted peace, but not a ‘slave’s peace’ or the ‘peace of colonies’.

The White House has also designated the so-called ‘Cartel de los Soles’ as a terrorist organisation, despite experts questioning whether such a cartel exists and US data showing that most cocaine enters via the Pacific, not Venezuela.

The drugs angle is further undermined by Trump’s promise to pardon former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, convicted in a US court of running a cocaine ‘superhighway’ to the United States, even as he offers a $50m bounty for Maduro.

You don’t free a man who turned an entire state into a narco-corridor if your real concern is cocaine reaching American streets. You do it if your real concern is keeping reliable US clients in power.

The reality is clear. This is Trump’s brazen spin on classic US regime change, staged in the shadow of events in Gaza and Ukraine. Maduro’s regime is corrupt and authoritarian, but Western imperialism is the main enemy here.

We must unconditionally demand an immediate end to sanctions, blockades and the march to war. That means rejecting any potential British involvement and opposing the use of Caribbean states as military launchpads.

A genuinely socialist, democratic Venezuela can only be won by Venezuelans themselves, not delivered by Washington bullets.