The UK’s reported decision to restrict intelligence-sharing with the Pentagon on suspected drug-traffickers’ boats in the Caribbean is a modest yet symbolic act of resistance to Donald Trump’s imperialist revival. Britain is said to have objected to repeated, lethal US airstrikes on alleged smugglers off Venezuela’s coast – which have been widely condemned as illegal extrajudicial killings amounting to murder.

The strikes appear to foreshadow direct US attacks on Venezuela itself. Trump makes no secret of his wish to topple Nicolás Maduro’s authoritarian, ostensibly leftist regime. Most Venezuelans support this aim, but not the means. Regime change forcibly imposed by a foreign power contravenes international law, unless it is authorised by the UN or undertaken in self-defence as a last resort. Legal or not, it never ends well.

The US lacks a persuasive justification for war, despite Trump’s fanciful portrayal of Maduro, and Latin American cartel bosses, as “narco-terrorists” with whom he deems the US to be at war. But Trump doesn’t care. He believes that he and his country are above the law, that might makes right. Call it by its name: this is exactly the kind of brash, monarchic imperialism that the New World colonists famously rebelled against.

The self-aggrandising, regionally expansionist outlook of the second Trump administration is the most striking recent manifestation of the new era

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