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Radical Reprint: America’s ‘Just Causes’
Trump’s latest international obscenity has plenty of precedents, as this 1990 Freedom article shows
punkacademic
4 January 2026
Yesterday the United States attacked Venezuela, bombing military and civilian installations and abducting President Nicolas Maduro and his wife under “narco-terrorism” and weapons charges. Donald Trump claims the US will now “run” the country until a friendly regime is installed, but it remains unclear how either is supposed to happen.
American rhetoric around Maduro’s Venezuela has been been escalating throughout the first year of Trump’s second term. Accusing Venezuela of responsibility for fentanyl shipments to the US along with other drugs, rhetoric has also been accompanied by the murder of civilians aboard boats in the Caribbean by US forces, boats alleged by the US to be carrying drugs but whose crews have been butchered in flagrant defiance of ‘international law’.
But as we see in this month’s Radical Reprint, this is hardly the first time the US has behaved in this fashion. Indeed, as our entry from January 1990 reprinted below note, this is characteristic of US policy from way before the advent of Donald Trump. In 1989, in ‘Operation Just Cause’, the US invaded Panama to topple the government of Manuel Noriega and render him into US custody. The differences – Noriega had been a US intelligence asset, and no-one seriously thinks Maduro was – are less important than the similarities. Both were leaders who in different ways stood in the way of US interests, Noriega belatedly and Maduro throughout his tenure.
The distinctions in the Trump era are principally not of kind but of form, and of scope. To paraphrase one academic, we haven’t been “lied to well enough.” ‘America’ is still, as in 1990, perfectly happy to kill whoever it wants to get whatever it wants, but under Trump it makes less of an effort to present it in a fashion liberal hypocrites can swallow. In recent weeks, Trump has become more overt in his discussions of Venezuela’s oil reserves, which he claimed had been stolen from the US since the 1970s.
And then we come to the scope. Trump has also said he wants to seize Greenland from Denmark and annex Canada. That is different, and it is that, rather than the fate of Venezuelans, which excites the sensibilities of liberals who for eighty years have been happy to be vassal subjects of an American empire which kills ‘over there’.
YANKEE GO HOME!
The Nicaraguan Government has expelled 20 US diplomats in reprisal for the raid on the Nicaraguan ambassador’s residence in Panama City, which President Bush described as a ‘screw-up’, during the United States military invasion of Panama, which it has named ‘Operation Just Cause’. This was just a mistake, but as the Nicaraguan government told the United Nations, over the last few years the United States government has made 46 incursions into Latin America and six into Panama itself.
Bush was reported to want deposed dictator Noriega ‘dead or alive’, calling him a ‘gangster’ and a ‘common criminal’ (which he was) but distracting attention from the real issue which is that he was a crook when he was put in power by the US at the time when Bush was working for the CIA and was in charge of the war against drugs. Bush was CIA director when Noriega acted under contract as an intelligence agent, and now Noriega is claiming that he has the goods’ on Bush, including evidence about the Iran-Contra scandal.
Panama is virtually a US dependency, being carved out of Colombia in 1903 for the construction of the Canal. What worried Bush was that he would not have a stable government (that is, one which can be relied on to support US interests) to which to hand over the Canal at the end of the century. (If he abrogated the Canal Treaty, America might have its own Suez).
So, although it was popular unrest in Panama itself which finally made the US unseat Noriega, the invasion has involved an aerial bombardment with civilian casualties in the poor areas, 1400 people had their homes destroyed in the attack on Noriega’s headquarters; it is reported that more than 300 non-combatants have been killed and hundreds wounded in addition to the deaths of 21 United States servicemen and 59 Panamanian troops, but Noriega survives.
It is reported of the new Panamanian President Guillermo Endora that ‘his top priority was to organise a new police force and new armed forces to assert his authority, restore order, and set the stage for a US withdrawal’, while a businessman in the duty-free zone is quoted as saying that ‘his wish was to carry out more business in the future unhindered by political considerations’. But our businessman presumably wants the government to protect his property and his right to make profits, while the new government has been installed with US backing to protect US interests.
The United States action is typical of their policy of supporting any dictator whatever he does as long as he supports US actions overseas, and ousting him whenever his policies are no longer politically advantageous to the United States. The economies of Latin American countries are exploited to the advantage of the United States instead of their own populations. As for the drug problem, the United States government cannot even control its own Mafia, while the lot of the poor in the USA is not of interest to the government.
Panama is virtually a US dependency, being carved out of Colombia in 1903 for the construction of the Canal. What worried Bush was that he would not have a stable government (that is, one which can be relied on to support US interests) to which to hand over the Canal at the end of the century. (If he abrogated the Canal Treaty, America might have its own Suez).
So, although it was popular unrest in Panama itself which finally made the US unseat Noriega, the invasion has involved an aerial bombardment with civilian casualties in the poor areas, 1400 people had their homes destroyed in the attack on Noriega’s headquarters; it is reported that more than 300 non-combatants have been killed and hundreds wounded in addition to the deaths of 21 United States servicemen and 59 Panamanian troops, but Noriega survives.
It is reported of the new Panamanian President Guillermo Endora that ‘his top priority was to organise a new police force and new armed forces to assert his authority, restore order, and set the stage for a US withdrawal’, while a businessman in the duty-free zone is quoted as saying that ‘his wish was to carry out more business in the future unhindered by political considerations’. But our businessman presumably wants the government to protect his property and his right to make profits, while the new government has been installed with US backing to protect US interests.
The United States action is typical of their policy of supporting any dictator whatever he does as long as he supports US actions overseas, and ousting him whenever his policies are no longer politically advantageous to the United States. The economies of Latin American countries are exploited to the advantage of the United States instead of their own populations. As for the drug problem, the United States government cannot even control its own Mafia, while the lot of the poor in the USA is not of interest to the government.
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