It is Walmart warmongering, Bargain City blitzkrieg, the Kmart coup. Donald Trump’s kidnapping of the Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro is immensely serious. But it is also an attempt to do imperialism on the cheap. As such, it speaks much more of senile bewilderment than of muscular empire-building.

First, let’s not pretend there is anything shocking or unprecedented about what Trump has done. Violent US interventions in its southern backyard are, to use a metaphor that Trump would approve, par for the course. They are as American as the Grand Ole Opry or Dunkin’ Donuts.

Democracy has always stopped at the Rio Grande. The US has generally preferred its proxy Latin American and Caribbean rulers to wear a fig leaf of legitimacy. But if necessary it has enabled and sanctioned naked fascism and brutal dictatorship. Mass murderers such as Papa Doc Duvalier in Haiti, Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Carlos Castillo Armas in Guatemala, Alfredo Stroessner in Paraguay, Jorge Rafael Videla in Argentina, Emílio Médici in Brazil and Augusto Pinochet in Chile are good guys, so long as they are our guys.

Historically, there are three ways of using US power to effect regime change. One is for the CIA to encourage and help organise an internal putsch. Democratically elected leaders such as Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala (1954) and Salvador Allende in Chile (1973) were overthrown by well-planned coups.

This........

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