Maroc - NEWSDAY.CO.TT - A la Une - 24/Nov 06:24

Fighting lawlessness with lawlessness in Donald’s Wild West

CAST YOUR mind back to January and you may recall some talk of the “Donroe Doctrine”: the New York Post’s spin on Donald Trump’s almost comical efforts to impose America’s will on the Western Hemisphere. Those were heady days, when Trump’s foreign-policy-by-tantrum approach to geopolitics erratically discharged madcap ideas like annexing Greenland, making Canada the 51st state of the USA, and renaming the Gulf of Mexico. It was all fun and games when the American president’s plans for this side of the world ranged from the impetuous to the impossible. It’s less amusing now. As you will have noticed, the latest manifestation of America’s plan for the region is a flotilla of warships patrolling the Caribbean Sea, gleefully bombing small boats into oblivion. We’re told this is Operation Southern Spear – the USA proactively going after the narco-terrorists who operate a thriving network of violent crime around our region. An alternative view is that the US government has decided it’s time to unseat Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, using a massive show of force and occasional summary execution as a not-remotely-subtle demonstration of American power and influence. We can reasonably infer that there’s more to America’s sudden interest in obliterating maritime traffic off Venezuelan shores than a disdain for drug dealers, because…well, mostly because firing missiles at speedboats is an insane (also probably illegal; certainly, immoral) way to try to control the drug trade. You can tell it’s an insane (and likely ineffective) method because no one is trying to copy it. Last week, Colombian authorities seized 450 pounds of cocaine from a vessel bound for Europe. Did they bomb the boat out of the water? No. A team of divers conducted an underwater inspection of the hull and found packages of contraband. Even America doesn’t seem super keen to follow America’s example. US Customs and Border Protection recently announced a massive seizure of more than 1,100 pounds of cocaine from a boat arriving in Puerto Rico. Did they fish hundreds of packets of white powder out of the sea after demolishing the suspect vessel? No. They allowed the boat to dock in San Juan, boarded it, and discovered the drugs through routine inspection. Even the Southern Caribbean’s angriest head of state, Kamla Persad-Bissessar, aka the Notorious KPB, has not instructed anyone from TT to start shooting at suspicious boats. “Kill them all violently,” says the PM to the Trump administration, but no TT citizens' hands are being volunteered to do any killing. As a region, we’re essentially just watching America do as it pleases on our collective doorsteps, more or less powerless to stop it. Some object, some stay silent, some cheer whatever pretext the US government offers as justification for its latest bout of extrajudicial killing. But no one (for now) is joining in. For its part, the US might be less than candid about its true intentions for Venezuela, but it has made little effort to conceal the larger policy at work. As US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said during a recent speech introducing Operation Southern Spear: “This is America’s neighbourhood – and we will protect it.” In other words, America asserts the right to do as it pleases in the Western Hemisphere, which it has regarded as its legitimate sphere of influence since the days of the Monroe Doctrine. Doing as it pleases currently includes renaming bodies of water, aggravating neighbours, and ignoring some basic tenets of international law and morality. Bombing small boats is dressed as proactively attacking crime, fighting fire with fire. It looks at best like fighting lawlessness with lawlessness. Perhaps that’s why TT has become America’s most vocal ally in the region. The most effective crime-fighting method in TT at present is the state of emergency (SoE), which amounts to saying the country is ungovernable unless certain constitutionally protected rights are suspended. It works so well at suppressing the murder rate that consecutive governments have pulled the same SoE lever in quick succession. By the end of the year, key elements of the TT Constitution will have been in abeyance for about ten of the last 12 months. Fighting lawlessness with lawlessness is TT’s number-one solution to confronting crime at present. It’s almost conceivable that PM Persad-Bissessar simply thinks Donald Trump is following her country’s lead. Whatever the reasoning, right now it clearly suits the TT government to back the Trump administration’s vision for our region. It’s unfortunate that vision is more Wild West than zone of peace. The post Fighting lawlessness with lawlessness in Donald’s Wild West appeared first on Trinidad and Tobago Newsday.