Only a few hours after the Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro was removed from his palace, his job and his country by US special forces, Donald Trump was still marvelling about how it felt to monitor a live feed of the raid from his Mar-a-Lago mansion.
He shared his feelings with Fox News.
If you could see the speed, the violence, they call it that... It was amazing, amazing work by these people. No one else could do something like this.
The US president wants and needs quick victories. Before he took office for the second time, he boasted that ending the Russia-Ukraine war would be a single day's work.
Venezuela, as presented in Trump's statements, is the quick, decisive victory that he has craved.
Maduro is in a prison cell in Brooklyn, the US will run Venezuela - and he has announced that the Chavista regime, now with a new president, will turn over millions of barrels of oil and that he will control the way the profits are spent...
Trump's actions show a clear intent to establish a new doctrine, which he has whimsically renamed the Donroe Doctrine. Unlike earlier US foreign policies, which were clouded in legitimacy through democracy, Trump's approach appears more aggressive and self-serving...
The risk is that, if Trump sticks to his course, he will push the world back to the way it was in the age of empires a century or more ago - a world where big powers, with spheres of influence, sought to impose their will, and where mighty authoritarian nationalists led their peoples to disaster.
