Well, well, what a start to the New Year it’s been! If one expected a smooth easing into 2026 from the year gone by, it was quashed by Trump’s air strikes on Venezuela and the capture of its president, Nicolas Maduro and his wife to stand trial in the US. I had written about the prospect of Trump starting a third war with his attack on Venezuela, but even I didn’t expect that he would pull off such a stunning and spectacular abduction! Stunning is how the media and international relations experts referred to it, and I suppose it describes the drama aptly.
In fact, the events of the first few days of 2026 have been more dramatic than anything we experienced in 2025 though it was a turbulent year, but those events pale into insignificance now. Now, what the world is witnessing is an emboldened and more muscular Trump exerting his will – and whim and fancy – on all the world as its most powerful leader, not just America’s. The capture of Maduro and his wife, no matter how necessary it was, is clearly an egregious violation of international law. Regime change in Venezuela is what everyone expected, and what I had written about, but this is even worse. Taking over the sovereignty of another independent country unilaterally. And while it was all about the war on drug trafficking initially, how quickly it all turned to an oil embargo and oil tankers being seized in the Atlantic and Caribbean waters. Taking over and controlling Venezuela’s vast oil reserves is what the objective seems to be for now, what with the US’s insatiable appetite for energy given its AI ambitions. Regime change may come later, or maybe not.
With Trump, one never knows. He is known to be quite unpredictable, as so many of his decisions have shown us, not merely transactional as a leader. As if the capture of Maduro and Venezuela’s oil reserves was not enough, we also have Trump asserting his right to take over Greenland in 2026. Another pet project of his, which could lead to serious tensions with Europe who have somehow been tolerating him and trying hard not to offend him until now. And of course, they need America’s military support in the ongoing war between Ukraine and Russia, if it doesn’t get resolved and doesn’t end quickly. The takeover of Greenland by the US would not only violate Denmark’s sovereignty over the territory, it could threaten the very existence of NATO, say some European leaders according to media reports. This would be music to Putin’s ears, of course.
All this looks like the rumbling of yet another conflict waiting to erupt. Trump’s recently unveiled National Security Strategy did spell out – in no uncertain terms – that the US was going to concentrate its foreign policy in the Western Hemisphere, and especially on Latin America, in order to keep the Chinese out. Unfortunately, Greenland too falls in the Western Hemisphere, and here the US is invoking national security in a big way. In the early days of Trump’s second regime last year, the US administration was already talking of insurgent groups within Greenland who sought freedom from Denmark, as justification for America’s takeover. This is mischievous meddling in the internal matters of another country, and it won’t be for the first time that the US will be fomenting internal trouble in another country if it indeed does so in peaceful Greenland.
Closer home, India could be the target of a 500% US tariff for buying Russian oil. Media reports that Trump is waiting for congressional approval on this one, even though he hasn’t needed their approval for any of his other tariffs until now. Apparently, this latest 500% tariff is part of a new legislation put forward by US senators on countries such as India, Brazil and China that continue to import Russian energy, and they hope to get bipartisan agreement on this. They seem to be learning quickly from Trump.
I think this is extreme weaponisation of trade and tariffs, not seen in centuries, and could unnecessarily threaten economic growth around the world, not merely in the targeted countries. And all because Trump and the US cannot find any other way to end the war between Russia and Ukraine; in fact, they are actually pandering to Russia’s wishes and demands.
And if all this isn’t enough, we have Trump wanting to intervene in the current turmoil in Iran, where protests against the exiting regime have spread across the country because of dire economic conditions. The regime’s crackdown on the protests and killing of thousands of protestors have prompted the US to wade into the issue, and one wonders if Trump has regime change on his mind here as well. Israel surely does, and would be delighted.
I also think that a lot of all this chaos that has been unleashed around the world for the past many years is unnecessary nonsense perpetrated by unprofessional circuses in India, and is now a global circus. I am including the wars still raging, and all the tariff nonsense as well which are all part of political shenanigans that unprofessional PR agency idiot bosses and their cronies from India have encouraged and stirred up. I wish we would forget about all this war-war, jaw-jaw, and get back to serious business and work, from which I have had a two-decade long break thanks to the very same unprofessional circuses wrecking my career. We need to get back to work, innovate and grow our economies, do trade with one another and work together to solve some of the world’s most pressing problems. We don’t need leaders who create new problems all the time, adding to those the world can barely cope with.
Like this hi-jinks January 2026 that I hope is not a harbinger of what’s to come, even though it seems very ominous.
The animated owl gif that forms the featured image and title of the Owleye column is by animatedimages.org and I am thankful to them.
Peripatetic Perch 