We've seen this movie before

When I was on a gap year wandering around Europe in 1980, I encountered those who demonised the USSR, convinced that the NATO missile deployments in Europe were completely justified to contain communism. The US was right, they argued, to station nuclear weapons such as the Pershing II that, when launched, could strike Moscow in minutes. Mikhail Gorbachev described these missiles as "holding a gun to our head". Cold War–era rhetoric asserted that the US had an exceptional right to hold a nuclear advantage over the Soviet Union on behalf of the 'free world'. The mutually assured destruction (MAD) doctrine was supposed to deter any 'hot war'.

The balance of missile power was, however, asymmetrical. Soviet ICBMs would take at least 30 minutes to reach the US which might theoretically provide limited warnings if governments initiated civil defence measures. However, essentially, since you couldn't stop the incoming missiles, the only way to stay safe was to ensure you could hit back just as hard and hope the enemy "loved their children too", as Sting later put it.

At the time, I argued that it was difficult to characterise the USSR as the primary aggressor, since the US had bases in Germany, close to the USSR, immediately after WW2, while the USSR had no bases anywhere near the US. And the US had shown itself willing and able to use nuclear weapons in war. But Western 'strategists' considered they had the right to surround and contain the 'threat' of communism.

Most people will not remember (since most were not yet born) the events of the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis. In line with its long tradition of attempting to bring on regime change, JFK arranged a poorly conceived invasion of Cuba in 1961, often simply referred to as the Bay of Pigs, which deployed Cuban exiles to attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro. The hope was that Cubans would welcome regime change. The invasion was an abject failure.

The US stationed Intermediate-Range Ballistic Missiles (IRBMs) in Turkey which placed Moscow and other major Soviet industrial hubs within immediate striking range. They became fully operational in March 1962, just months before the Cuban Missile Crisis began. Nikita Khrushchev was openly enraged. He reportedly looked across the Black Sea toward Turkey and remarked to an aide, "The Americans have surrounded our dacha with their missiles." To him, putting missiles in Cuba was simply "giving the Americans a taste of their own medicine."

The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 was the closest the world ever came to a full-scale nuclear war. For 13 days, the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in a silent, high-stakes standoff that began when American spy planes discovered Soviet nuclear missiles being installed in Cuba, just 145 kilometres from Florida. The events are well documented and most of the detail is undisputed.

But what matters here is that JFK was prepared to risk nuclear war to prevent missiles being stationed close to the US. Although often lionised in the US as some kind of progressive, it is clear that Kennedy held the view that most in the West held - that the US was the exception. It had some kind of divinely sanctioned right to have its border secure while most of Europe and the Middle East did not.

US exceptionalism is the core concept in US imperialism. Whereas the British Empire had felt no moral constraints or embarrassment about invading and colonising the world, the US attempted to build some kind of moral underpinning for its imperial ambitions, insisting that it was 'saving' countries from tyrants. Not until Trump have the quiet things been said out loud.

The attempts at regime change in Venezuela is completely consistent with the US imperial ambitions. In Korea, Vietnam, Lebanon, Grenada, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Iran, Chile, Guatemala, Cuba, Brazil, Bolivia and Nicaragua, the US has demonised the government or the people and used this to rationalise military or covert intervention.

The operation to remove Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela is just the latest in US imperialism. The script has not changed. The movie is the same. And it will not stop until the US finally succumbs to imperial decline.