The "President of Peace" Leads Rampage Across Latin America and SWANA
Trump wants his own Iraq-Afghanistan war and will murder any amount of children to get it.
In November 2025, the citizens of Ecuador voted to reject a constitutional change that would have reopened the door to foreign military bases on Ecuadorian soil. This week, the United States military showed up anyway. If we don’t care about our own rule of law, why would we care about Ecuador’s?
The Pentagon announced on Twitter that American and Ecuadorian forces had launched joint operations against what it called “Designated Terrorist Organizations” in Ecuador. U.S. troops are embedded with Ecuadorian commandos, helping run raids, providing intelligence, and handling logistics.1 The administration wants the public to believe that this somehow stops short of direct war fighting. They just plan the missions, fly the helicopters, pick the targets, and expect everyone to pretend that means something different.
Ecuador’s own right-wing authoritarian, President Daniel Noboa, welcomed the deployment with open arms. Which makes sense when you remember that his family’s banana shipping empire, Noboa Trading, has been tied by OCCRP reporting to cocaine shipments hidden in company containers. Noboa has denied personal involvement, of course, but the conflict of interest is hard to miss. The man posing as an anti-narcotics crusader comes from a family business shadowed by narcotrafficking allegations, and now he is inviting U.S. troops in under the guise of fighting “narco-terrorism.”
All of this unfolded three days into a war with Iran. While the world watched Tehran burn, the United States quietly opened another front on another continent.
Peace, One War at a Time
The way Trump keeps invoking “peace” matters, because it tells you exactly how this administration wants all of this understood. Not as war. Not as escalation. Not as imperial expansion. It’s the ugly but necessary work of “saving” the world from chaos. Every dead child is unfortunate. Every bombing is inevitable. Every war crime is just one more price the strong are willing to pay on everyone else’s behalf. Si vis pacem, para bellum, right?
Trump’s “President of Peace” is a purpose-built apparatus meant to make unilateral, imperialist military force feel necessary. A Board of Peace.2 A FIFA Peace Prize.3 A borrowed Nobel medal that’s non-transferable.4 A whole stage set erected in front of expanding military operations across multiple continents, none of them authorized by Congress.
Since returning to office in January 2025, Donald Trump has ordered military strikes in Somalia, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Nigeria, Venezuela, and Iran.5 Alongside that, the United States has carried out a lethal maritime strike campaign across the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. Ecuador adds something new to the list: boots on the ground in a country whose citizens had already rejected the return of foreign bases.
ACLED counted more than 500 American bombings globally in 2025 alone. That was before the Iran war began.
Every single one of these operations comes wrapped in some supposedly badass codename, the kind of branding that functions as troop motivation, public relations, and recruiting material for teenagers all at once. Operation Rough Rider in Yemen. Operation Midnight Hammer in Iran. Operation Southern Spear in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific.
That last one, the maritime interdiction campaign, has sunk more than 44 vessels and killed more than 150 people since September. Families in Colombia and Trinidad and Tobago say the dead were fishermen. The administration has not provided public evidence sufficient to settle whether those killed were traffickers, civilians, or both. But once the targets are framed as terrorists, the burden of proof seems to disappear.
From Caracas to Minab
Christmas Day 2025 brought the first-ever U.S. military strike in Nigeria. Days later, Trump confirmed strikes on a docking facility in Venezuela. Then, on January 3, 2026, Operation Absolute Resolve hit Caracas itself.
Airstrikes on the capital of a sovereign country. The capture of President Nicolás Maduro. 80 to 100 people killed by U.S. strikes. Maduro now sits in a New York detention center on narco-terrorism charges, while U.N. experts warn that the operation violated international law and set a destabilizing precedent. Trump called it “one of the most stunning, effective, and powerful displays of American military might and competence in American history”
One month later, he launched the biggest one yet.
Operation Epic Fury began on February 28, 2026. In the days before the attack, nuclear talks between the United States and Iran were still active. The IAEA director general said he had been directly involved in the two most recent rounds of negotiations in Geneva, providing technical guidance as the process continued. Oman’s foreign minister described an agreement as ‘within reach.’ Trump attacked anyway.6
The Pentagon says the United States and Israel struck more than 1,700 targets in the first 72 hours. Defense Secretary, alcoholic, and wife-beater Peter Hegseth claimed that Operation Epic Fury had delivered “twice the air power of shock and awe” in Iraq in 2003, a boast the Pentagon did not substantiate in the briefing. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was reportedly killed in the initial strikes, alongside top Iranian officials. Iran retaliated with ballistic missiles across the Gulf, hitting targets in Israel, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, and Iraq. The U.S. embassy in Kuwait was struck and closed indefinitely. Casualty counts vary depending on who is speaking, which is always how this works when states start trading missiles and lies at the same rate.
The Iranian Red Crescent has reported more than 1,300 people killed since the strikes began. A near-total internet blackout has made independent verification extremely difficult, which is convenient for everyone doing the bombing. Clearly a lesson learned from the way Palestinian martyrs shined a light on true nature of Israel to the world.
On the first morning of the strikes, a Saturday, which is a school day in Iran, the United States destroyed the Shajareh Tayyebeh girl’s school in what appears to have been multiple precision kinetic strikes. Iranian authorities say up to 168 students and staff were killed. Most of the dead were girls between seven and twelve years old. NPR’s satellite analysis raised serious questions about the targeting, suggesting the strike may have relied on outdated data tied to a military base that had been closed for more than a decade. Nearby buildings included a medical clinic and a pharmacy.
Asked about the school, Hegseth said the Pentagon was “investigating.” Neither the United States nor Israel has claimed responsibility. Neither has denied it. Iran held a mass funeral soon after, with rows of small graves dug side by side.
The Marketing of Empire
Trump’s White House has a page titled “President Trump’s Peace Through Strength”, selling his foreign policy as a record of conflicts ended, threats dismantled, and order restored. He spent months angling for a Nobel. When Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado won the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize, she handed Trump her medal at the White House, even though the Nobel Institute said the prize was not transferable (note: he still would not back her to replace Maduro). A few weeks earlier, FIFA handed him its inaugural Peace Prize at the 2026 World Cup draw in Washington. None of this is accidental. The point is to make opposition to Trump look like opposition to peace itself..
In January, Trump formally ratified the Charter of the Board of Peace in Davos and installed himself as its chairman. By February, the White House was publishing photos of him chairing a Board of Peace meeting in Washington at the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace, gavel in hand, with the whole thing staged like a summit on global reconciliation instead of a presidency already expanding military operations across multiple theaters.
That language matters because it helps launder the reality. Bombing gets recast as stability. Raids become responsibility. Civilian death gets folded into the usual story about regrettable necessities and serious men making hard choices. By the time the word peace shows up, the work it is doing is not descriptive. It is political. The point is to make escalation sound disciplined, reluctant, even humane. The point is to make the public hear “order” where it should hear “war.”
You and What Army?
The peace branding would not work by itself. It works because it sits on top of a system that keeps letting Trump do what he wants.
None of the operations mentioned received congressional authorization. This week, the Senate voted 53-47 to block a resolution that would have required authorization for hostilities against Iran. Reuters also noted that Republicans have already blocked earlier attempts to rein in Trump’s war powers. That tells you what the pattern is now. The administration escalates, Democrats object, and nothing actually stops it.
As the Center for International Policy put it, Washington is building a norm in which it claims the right to use lethal force anywhere, against anyone, on terms it sets for itself.
By this point, the legal argument barely matters. The administration just needs a label flimsy enough to pass around Washington and a Congress a Congress either too useless or too complicit to stop it. Counterterrorism. Counter-narcotics. Joint security. Pick your favorite euphemism. Ecuador already showed the formula: voters say no, the operation gets rebranded, and the troops show up anyway.
President of “Peace”
By now the record is ugly enough without any extra decoration. The United States struck seven countries in 2025. It expanded a lethal maritime campaign in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. It bombed Caracas and captured Nicolás Maduro. It then joined Israel in a war on Iran that the Pentagon says hit more than 1,700 targets in the first 72 hours. Ecuador is now another front, opened after voters had already rejected the return of foreign bases.
That is what the peace branding is for. It gives the administration a way to make permanent war sound responsible, disciplined, even humane. Hold the ceremonies, hand out the medals, then tell the public the bombs are unfortunate but necessary, the dead are the cost of order, and anyone objecting is too naive to understand how the world works.
Iran makes the scale impossible to ignore. Minab strips away the euphemisms. Ecuador shows how easily the same logic travels from SWANA to Latin America. By the time officials start talking about peace, they are not describing reality. They are telling the public how to hear the bombs.
The Daily Beast, “Trump Launches Military Operation in Yet Another Country,” March 4, 2026. https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-launches-military-operation-in-yet-another-country/
U.S. Embassy in Switzerland and Liechtenstein, "President Donald J. Trump Ratified the Charter of the Board of Peace," January 26, 2026, https://ch.usembassy.gov/president-donald-j-trump-ratified-the-charter-of-the-board-of-peace/.
FIFA, “President Donald J. Trump Awarded ‘FIFA Peace Prize – Football Unites the World’,” December 5, 2025, https://inside.fifa.com/campaigns/football-unites-the-world/news/president-trump-peace-prize-football-unites-the-world.
Associated Press, “Nobel Institute Says Venezuelan Leader Machado Can’t Give Peace Prize to Trump,” AP News, January 10, 2026, https://apnews.com/article/trump-machado-nobel-peace-prize-c7f47c161edc9b719dea3d0165f32a1f.
TIME, “Countries Trump Has Ordered Strikes On in His Second Term,” March 1, 2026. https://time.com/7382074/countries-trump-has-ordered-strikes-on-second-term/
Al Jazeera Staff and AFP, “Peace ‘Within Reach’ as Iran Agrees No Nuclear Material Stockpile: Oman FM,” Al Jazeera, February 28, 2026, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/2/28/peace-within-reach-as-iran-agrees-no-nuclear-material-stockpile-oman-fm.