The bombing of Caracas and subsequent abduction of Nicolás Maduro and his wife this past weekend seems to have taken everybody outside of a small circle around the US president by surprise. Not even most lawmakers aligned with him in Congress seem to have been in on the plan, informed of it only after the operation had begun and not long before the rest of the world found out about it from their news source of choice.

Sending American troops onto foreign soil on dubious pretexts and without legislative approval is surely something of a tradition for US presidents. None other than Barack Obama — who received his ill-deserved Nobel Peace Prize less than a year after his presidency began, a fact that surely grinds Donald Trump’s gears — was notorious for bombing other countries without receiving authorization from Congress, a practice one Democratic colleague justified by explaining that doing so would “just become a circus.” In that sense, Trump’s brazen and illegal aggression against a sovereign country was par for the course for American imperial power.

New, however, is the utter lack of effort the United States has put into convincing its NATO and EU allies of the aggression’s justification. Instead, it is leveraging the attack to exert renewed pressure on Europe to do its foreign policy bidding — meaning settle the war in Ukraine on Trump’s terms and maybe even cede Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark, to US occupation.