When Dopey Left-Wing Dreams Clash With Trump's Dopey Sanctions

Last week Donald Trump announced he was imposing sanctions on the president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, as well as his wife and son. This appeared to be retaliation for Petro’s running public criticism of the military buildup Trump has ordered in the Caribbean, with the stated intent of fighting “Narco Terrorists” — at least 43 of whom have now been summarily executed. And which anyone with two brain cells knows is really about coercing regime change in Venezuela, not some drop-in-the-bucket effort at drug interdiction. After all, Trump has openly acknowledged that he’s dispatched the CIA to physically infiltrate Venezuela, and curiously refrained from denouncing the New York Times for reporting this top-secret information — a rare “leak” from inside the Administration he was happy to amplify, rather than castigate as “Fake News.”

President Petro clearly doesn’t like the US military presence rapidly building in the region, and he’s already been loudly criticizing Trump on a host of other issues. So now Trump responds in kind, with the imposition of punitive sanctions. Which is a strange power for the US to even have in the first place. Radical and limitless use of sanctions has become such a commonplace feature of US governance that hardly anyone bats an eye about it anymore, but it really is a striking historical anomaly. By the letter of “international law,” sanctions are only supposed to be applied when the UN Security Council authorizes them, otherwise they are rogue “unilateral” sanctions. But of course, this has never stopped the US from freely putting sanctions on whomever it wants, whenever it wants, by virtue of its position as untrammeled global hegemon — and the brute force it can thus bring to bear when a desired target is identified. Yet another example of why invoking “international law” is almost always a silly red herring, with little or no practical import, and mostly functions as a pointless thought-experiment for people devoid of power to busy themselves with. Separate and apart from “international law,” though, it testifies to the endurance of US supremacy that the President can just wake up one morning and decree unilateral sanctions against a foreign head of state, as well as his family, and this won’t just be a mere symbolic gesture — unlike, say, if Colombia tried to unilaterally “sanction” Trump. Petro