COMMENT | What is unfolding around Venezuela is not an isolated crisis confined to Latin America; it is the re-emergence of an imperial script that the world was told had been retired after Iraq.

The parallels are impossible to ignore. In 2003, the United States, under George Bush, fabricated claims of weapons of mass destruction to justify the invasion of Iraq.

International law was rendered optional, the United Nations was bypassed, and a sovereign state was dismantled in the name of “security.”

The result was not democracy, but mass death, state collapse, and a region destabilised for generations.

That episode was...