In his epic new history of the Western Hemisphere, America, América, Greg Grandin recounts how the great Cuban revolutionary José Marti encountered Thucydides’ account of Athens’s victory in the Peloponnesian War. Athens had laid siege to Melos, a small island, much like Cuba, that could no longer meet its tribute obligations to its dominant neighbor. Melos appealed to law and justice to prevent its destruction.

Athens replied that justice applies only “between equals in power”; where power is unequal, “the strong do what they will, the weak suffer what they must.” Athens went on to destroy Melos, massacre the locals, and colonize the island. As Grandin notes, the tale’s relevance to the Americas is clear, “in the countless incidents where Washington did what it would and Latin America suffered as they must.”

Between the deployment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the National Guard across major American cities and a fragile ceasefire in Gaza, one might have missed that the Trump administration blew another small boat of what it declared “drug traffickers” out of the water off the coast of Venezuela. US aggression against Venezuela was followed by strikes on boats off the Pacific coast, in Colombian waters, killing fourteen and leaving one survivor, signaling an intensification of aggression against Colombia.