The recent attacks on Venezuela display a long-term imperialist aim of the U.S. to impose its legal jurisdiction globally, an agenda which was successfully fought when there was an attempt to kidnap former Workers’ Party President Seán Garland earlier this century.

The actions of the U.S. regime have now moved it far beyond that of an acceptable international partner for the Irish state in political, economic, and cultural spheres. For decades, voices which criticised an economic model that tied Ireland to the U.S., arguing that it was not in the best long-term interests of the Irish people, were condemned as purveyors of a crude form of anti-Americanism. If it hadn’t already, that position has now been clearly vindicated.

The Trump regime, while fully revealing the lawless nature of U.S. imperialist power, merely represents a crude expression of the realities of the interests which have ruled that state for decades.

In 2005, a previous iteration of the U.S. regime attempted to kidnap then-Workers’ Party President Seán Garland in Belfast. This set in motion a battle in which, after much campaigning, lobbying, networking, and defence-building, the Irish legal system eventually but clearly found that the writs of so-called U.S. grand juries do not meet civilised standards of legal practice. It is this failed judicial system which the U.S. is further attempting to globalise by kidnapping Nicolás Maduro and placing him before a kangaroo court.

The U.S. is the sponsor of the ongoing genocide in Palestine, but we should not understand this as an overly exceptional episode in U.S. history. Indeed, it is a political entity founded upon the murder, displacement and general suppression of America’s native inhabitants. This is a history which it has replayed to its population as John Wayne-style adventures. It is a view of the world which now infuses that regime’s approach to international law. Long a hostage to its military-industrial and fossil fuel corporations, the U.S. regime now has its mask off, displaying an oligarchy of drug-addled tech bosses, dry-drunk politicians, attested to by their own advisors, and others compromised by intelligence agencies which have spent decades collecting material concerning their perversions.

It must become a respectable and reasonable position within political discourse to call for the untying of Ireland from all links to all aspects of the U.S. regime, its multinational corporations, and its front organisations, including NATO and the Zionist lobby in its fundamentalist Jewish, Christian or merely mercenary forms.

While we wish the best for the U.S. left in its struggle to save its cities and people from growing tyranny, we believe their cause, as with all those who truly value human freedom, is not best served by anything other than an agenda of complete opposition to the U.S. regime.

It can be expected that the Irish government, made up of parties who long ago threw their lot in with U.S. capital, will not seek to curtail U.S. regime activities in Ireland. Therefore, the people must. Opposing the U.S. in all spheres until its people can assert dominance over a long-rogue ruling class is not anti-Americanism; it is merely what is demanded by a basic understanding of humanitarianism, democracy and the concept of international legal norms.