If “Trump’s court” summons you, then take the issue with the seriousness it deserves. This applies whether you are a president accused of sponsoring terrorism or of running a drug empire. It also applies if you are the leader of a faction assigned to harass the “Great Satan,” its embassies, and its interests.
Take it seriously. The era of balance is over. The Soviet Union lies in its grave. Safe havens have evaporated. The hunted no longer enjoy such immunities. Space itself is an American playground. An American aircraft know whether you shaved your beard today or not. An American drone can pay you a visit wherever you are hiding — be it a hotel, a cave, or an anonymous room in a crowded city. The owner of the court does not need to dispatch Delta Force to finish you off or drag you away in handcuffs. He can shackle your country with sanctions and drive your national currency into the ground and irrelevance.
I assume you are wise enough not to bet on international law, the sanctity of national sovereignty, and the United Nations secretary-general and his tears. You should also understand that the current owner of the court is unlike his predecessors. He is not Bill Clinton. He is not Barack Obama, who drew a red line for Bashar al-Assad and then avoided imposing decisive punishment. And he is certainly not Joe Biden, whose body has no room left for arrows in his back.
It would serve you well to pause over the new US national security strategy and the updated Monroe Doctrine. The days are gone when Fidel Castro was allowed to live for decades as a thorn in America’s side. Gone are the days when Iran was permitted to assign “Abu Zaynab” to ram a truck bomb into the Marines’ headquarters in Beirut. Gone are the days when the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine could assassinate a US ambassador in Beirut, or when another faction could kill the American ambassador in Khartoum. The world has changed, and America has changed with it.
It never required artificial intelligence to know that exporting drugs from Venezuela to the United States means importing trouble and retaliation. Nor do you have the right, when gazing at your country’s map, to invite China into America’s “backyard,” along with Russia, Iranian drones, and North Korean missiles. You should have factored in the catastrophic collapse of the national currency and the flight of millions from your rule, even though your country sits atop the largest oil reserves in the world.
You should have learned the lesson. The US military command in Iraq knew that General Qassem Soleimani was planning bombings and attacks, including by Sunni groups, against its forces,. They knew he regularly traveled to Baghdad. Yet Washington long believed that deciding to kill Soleimani was riskier than deciding to kill Osama bin Laden. No American president dared order the killing of the “number two” man in the Iranian system despite knowing he had mined entire maps with tunnels and missiles.
On January 3, 2020, the Middle East shook. The man in the White House ordered Soleimani killed near Baghdad airport. Donald Trump does not recognize the red lines drawn by his enemies, nor those vaguely suggested by his advisers. It is Iran’s misfortune that he returned to the White House to strike its nuclear facilities. And it is Nicolas Maduro’s misfortune that Trump returned to order his arrest and compel him to stand before an American court.
By dragging Maduro before a US court, Trump sent a message more brutal than the massive bombs his aircraft dropped on Iran’s nuclear facilities. How devastating it must be for Iran’s supreme leader to hear of Maduro’s abduction at the hands of American forces.
True, the distance between Caracas and Tehran is vast, as is the difference between the nature of the two regimes. But it is also true that Iran’s currency has buckled under the weight of sanctions; that the voices of protesters resound across the country; that Trump has threatened intervention if peaceful demonstrators are killed; and that Netanyahu dreams of Trump’s support to destroy the Revolutionary Guards’ missile arsenal. Added to this is the fact that Venezuelan oil falling under the custody of the “big brother” strips Tehran of its card of intimidating the West by threatening to close the Strait of Hormuz.
In his American prison, Maduro will fall prey to memories. He was once nothing more than a bus driver when revolutionary fervor swept him up — the Latin American legacy of hatred for US interventions, the clenched fists of the descendants of Simon Bolivar, Castro’s olive-green fatigues, his fiery and endless speeches, and the iron resolve of his patron Chavez, who found no better heir when cancer consumed his body.
America may appear fearful, but it becomes terrifying when the master of the Oval Office unleashes “the strongest army in history.” Vladimir Putin most likely received the news with deep resentment. His army has been fighting Zelensky for four years without killing or capturing him.
I was also reminded of what I heard from Moammar al-Gadhafi's companions about the fear that seized him when American warplanes once struck his bedroom, and how he instinctively touched his neck when he saw the noose tightening around Saddam Hussein’s. The image of the rope also haunted the late president Ali Abdullah Saleh.
This is the world. What is permitted to the strong is denied to others. International law restrains only the weak. Arresting Maduro is more dangerous than abducting Manuel Noriega. The world is a jungle. Does it ever occur to Putin to kidnap Zelensky and bring him before a Russian court on charges of corruption and the spilling of soldiers’ blood - soldiers who came to “reshape” the map of his country? And why did the master of the Kremlin not think of granting Maduro “humanitarian asylum” and an apartment in Moscow, as he did for Bashar al-Assad?
