Is the US now a gangster state? That is the question Indian commentators were asking as the news broke that a US special military operation struck Caracas in the early hours of the morning on January 3.

My phone started ringing off the hook this morning as the news broke by Indian TV stations asking for commentary. The attack on Venezuela is a top story in the Global South and will have far reaching consequences. It is being universally condemned as a lawless attempt at a colonial asset grab of Venezuela’s vast oil reserves by the US. It shreds what little credibility America has left as the protector of the international rules-based order and the upholder of liberal and enlightened values.

“What is the difference between what the US has just done and what [Russia’s President Vladimir] Putin has done in Ukraine?” asked a former Indian ambassador on one of the panels.

The Global South has been watching the development of the growing East-West clash closely. Indians have been paying especially close attention. The BRICS bloc is rising and India just overtook Japan in nominal GDP terms after passing it in PPP adjusted terms two years ago. Following the invasion of Ukraine four years ago, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi was careful to sit on the fence as he tried to get caught up in the conflict.

But now the world’s largest democracy is in shock at the blatant imperialistic and unjustifiable, from Delhi’s perspective, attack on another sovereign nation in defiance of international law.

“Territorial integrity and respect for sovereignty should be fundamental, but here we simply see the implementation of the Monroe doctrine – a doctrine that the US has been following for decades,” the ambassador said. Venezuela’s defence minister Diosdado Cabello described the attack as a “terrorist attack” and “foreign aggression” has called the US attack, the India media lead with in the mid-morning reports.

At the Indian hosted G20 summit in Delhi two years ago, Modi tried to build a middle-of-the-road-coalition between the emerging world and the West. At that meeting the African Union (54 countries) were added to the “G20” and pointedly Putin and China’s president Xi Jinping stayed away. At the same time, South America, led by Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva were also steering a middle course, keeping their distance from the more militant Putin and Xi who see their clash with the West as a rivalry framed under the BRICS organisation rather than the G20. Much of the Asian and Latin America Global South members saw their block in economic, not political, terms and wanted to maintain good relations with both sides.

That good will had already evaporated long before the attack on Venezuela. Modi surprised everyone by turning up at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in China in the autumn and hobnobbing with Xi and Putin, as well as other pariahed leaders from the emerging world like North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and Belarus president Alexander Lukashenko. Since then, Putin travelled to New Delhi in December for a working trip where he signed billions of dollars of business deals with Modi, sold him arms and established what the two leaders called a new “no limits” partnership to rival Russia’s “no limits” ties with China.

IntelliNews is becoming increasingly popular in India as it focuses on business and has a non-European perspective on the intra-emerging market relations – especially the Indo-Russian relationship where we have bureaus in both Moscow and New Delhi and focus on the bilateral relations. Over the last two years, the Indian commentators on panels on which I have participated have become increasingly belligerent at India’s treatment by the US in particular.

India has been increasingly annoyed by the bullying by the State Department to cut off Russian oil imports on the one hand, and the ongoing weapons sales of things like F-16 to Pakistan, with which India briefly went to war last year. But the entire Indian political firmament was incensed by Trump’s imposition of 50% tariff rate on India last autumn when it refused to stop imports of Russian oil. The foreign ministry issues an extremely angry letter pointing out that Europe still imports more Russian oil than India and called out the Western allies for practising double standards.

 

“The nacro-trafficking is an excuse. The corruption is an excuse. This attack is a clear violation of international law. This is about energy resources and this is about the close relationship between Venezuela and China. This is a new imperialism. It goes against the UN Charter. It goes against international law. And it goes against democracy,” said a former Indian ambassador to the Latin America on another panel. “In the eyes of Trump 2.0 there is no such thing as international law. The veneer of “freedom’s champion” has been stripped away and the double standards laid bare.”

“They want us to stop importing cheap Russian oil, which is in India’s national interests, and back their sanctions, but where are they when we want help with our problems like the tensions on the Pakistan and Chinese borders?” former Indian ambassador to the EU, Bhaswati Mukherjee said on one panel. “The war in Ukraine is a European problem. It has nothing to do with us. Let the Europeans sort it out,” summing up an increasingly widespread sentiment.

The word “colonialism” comes up increasingly frequently and was at the centre of this morning’s commentary of the US attack on Venezuela.

A former Indian major general on another panel this morning noted that the Trump administration is primarily interested in getting access to Venezuela’s vast oil reserves, critical minerals and opening up its markets to the US big-pharma multinational firms. He specifically framed the US as a “declining superpower” in a global rivalry for dominance with China – in keeping with the main tenants of Trump’s new National Security Strategy that aims to “contain” China’s dominance in the Indo-Pacific region.

“The US is irked by Venezuela’s oil exports to Cuba when it is refined and sold to China. That is what the Trump administration wants to cut off,” the General said. China is heavily invested in Latin America, a market that the US has underemphasized until now. It has only been under the Trump administration that the importance of countering China’s growing influence in the continent has become more important such as the spat over China’s investments into the Panama Canal.

The attack on Venezuela will only pour fuel on this flame and bolster the Putin-Xi anti-western camp. Tellingly, after two years of dithering, last January Indonesia, the fourth most populous country in the world and the largest Muslim nation, came down off the fence and joined the BRICS+ organisation in a major coup for Xi and Putin. And while the US and Europe bicker over trade and tariffs, as bne IntelliNews has reported, the Global South have been busy building up the GEMIs (Global Emerging Markets Institutions) – a Global South network of interconnecting trade and security deals that entirely exclude the Western institutions and powers that have dominated the global economy for most of the last 500 years.

The General echoed Mukherjee by calling for Washington to end its perennial policy of seeking regime change in countries that are not friendly to the US, and criticising the US growing domestic economic problems and growing societal divisions.

“The US would be better to focus on its own economic policy and consolidate as it is only going from bad to worse instead of concentrating on fixing its own economy. Instead of 'Making America Great Again' its going to go from gasp to gasp to gasp."