Deadly strike on boat was act of war [View all]
Sept. 4, 2025, 5:11 PM EDT
By Julio Ricardo Varela, MSNBC Columnist
On Tuesday, President Donald Trump said the U.S. military blew up a vessel in the Caribbean, killing 11 people. The administration said the boat had departed from Venezuela and described the operation as a narco-trafficking bust against Tren de Aragua gang members. To anyone who knows the tragic history of U.S. interventionism in Latin America, it was an act of war.
This isn’t the first time a mysterious explosion at sea has been used to shape American public opinion and drum up pro-war sentiments. In 1898, the battleship USS Maine blew up in Havana Harbor, killing more than 260 sailors. The cause was never proven, but American newspapers exploited the ambiguity to blame Spain, stoking outrage that fueled the Spanish-American War. Within months, the United States had radically recast power in the Caribbean, a grip it has maintained ever since, even when such power was challenged during the Cold War ...
... The Trump administration quickly produced a blurry video of the explosion, but the images don’t prove who was aboard, what they were doing or whether drugs were even present. The White House has offered no hard evidence that the dead were members of a gang. “Pentagon officials were still working Wednesday on what legal authority they would tell the public was used to back up the extraordinary strike in international waters,” The New York Times reported.
But for a president who has promised to “pursue our manifest destiny,” this is part of a larger script already in motion. “In the Trump era, a new manifest destiny is here, accelerating protectionism and expansionism at the cost of the powerless,” I wrote at the start of Trump’s second term. This worldview, shaped by a 19th-century ideology that also fueled the war against Spain 127 years ago, treats the Western Hemisphere as territory still to be controlled ...
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/trump-boat-strike-caribbean-venezuela-drug-war-rcna229113
= new reply since forum marked as read