A US air strike has eliminated the leadership of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, and the British government, ever the loyal poodle, has offered its backing. One can almost hear the champagne corks popping in Whitehall. But before we indulge in this orgy of self-congratulation, let us pause to consider what this really signifies. We are witnessing not a triumph of order, but a further coarsening of the geopolitical landscape. The American empire, like its Roman predecessor, now treats foreign soil as a firing range. And we, the British, applaud from the sidelines, mistaking jurisdiction for justice.
Tren de Aragua is a criminal enterprise, to be sure. It deals in extortion, murder, and human trafficking. Its leader was no Che Guevara. But the method of his removal—a drone strike, a missile from the sky—raises troubling questions. When did the United States become the world’s executioner? When did we decide that due process is optional for those who do not wear our uniform? The War on Terror metastasised into a war on anyone we deem a threat. And now a gang leader in Venezuela meets the same fate as a terrorist in Yemen.
What the UK’s endorsement signals is a disturbing acceptance of this new normal. We are no longer a nation that argues for the primacy of law; we are a nation that nods along to the logic of the killer drone. The Foreign Office statement, no doubt drafted by some Oxbridge-educated apparatchik, is a masterclass in moral cowardice. It speaks of “shared security interests” and “targeted operations,” as if precision explosives could ever be surgical. They are not. They are blunt instruments that turn cities into graves and populations into suspects.
Consider the historical parallel. In the late Roman Empire, the state increasingly relied on extrajudicial killings—assassins, private militias, and the occasional legionary gone rogue—to maintain order. The result was not stability but paranoia. Every corner hid a conspirator. Every powerful man was a target. The empire rotted from within because it abandoned the very principles that had made it great: law, process, and the belief that even the guilty deserve a trial.
Now we see the same pattern. The United States, and by extension its vassals, have declared open season on any criminal or insurgent who cannot be easily captured. But is this not an admission of failure? If you cannot police the world, if you cannot win hearts and minds, then you simply bomb. It is the tactic of a declining power, not a confident one.
And what of Venezuela? The Maduro regime is a catastrophe. But a US strike on its soil, even against a gang, strengthens his hand. He can now wrap himself in the flag, denounce Yankee imperialism, and rally the faithful. The gang’s leader is dead; the state’s enemies, real and imagined, multiply. We have, in short, made the same mistake the British made in Ireland, in Kenya, in Malaya. We believed that killing the head of the hydra would kill the beast. It does not. It only makes the hydra grow more heads.
The UK’s support is therefore not a sign of resolve but of intellectual and moral bankruptcy. We have forgotten what it means to be a civilised nation. We have swapped the rule of law for the rule of the bomb. And we cheer when the bomb finds its mark, because it saves us the trouble of thinking about the underlying rot.
But the rot is there. In the favelas of Caracas, in the prisons of Latin America, in the failing states that produce these criminal armies. A drone strike does not reform a broken society. It does not heal the wounds of colonialism and exploitation. It merely delays the reckoning.
So let us not celebrate. Let us not mistake a targeted killing for a victory. The enemy is not a single man. The enemy is the chaos that our own empires have sown. And until we realise that, we will keep firing missiles into the dark, hoping to hit something that makes us feel safe. We will not. We will only make the night deeper.
