US President Donald Trump ordered a military operation in which his Venezuelan counterpart Nicolas Maduro was captured on Saturday and taken to New York to stand trial on a number of charges, including drug trafficking. The spectacular footage sparked mixed but violent reactions around the world.
Trump has meanwhile threatened a number of other countries with similar intervention. Until recently, such operations seemed unlikely, but the US president has shown that he is not joking. For example, he supported Israel's campaign of air strikes against Iran in June.
What other countries and territories are threatened by Trump? The BBC lists Greenland, Iran, Colombia, Mexico and Cuba.
Greenland
The United States already has a military base in Greenland - a Danish autonomous territory in the Arctic. However, Trump wants the entire island, which is the largest on Earth, with an area of 2.166 million square kilometers.
The United States "needs Greenland" for its national security needs, Trump said again the day before yesterday, quoted by Agence France-Presse.
Earlier that day, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen called on the United States "to stop threatening" regarding the island.
"We need Greenland from a national security perspective, and Denmark is not going to be able to take care of it," Trump told reporters aboard his "Air Force One" plane a few hours later.
The vast Arctic island, part of the Kingdom of Denmark, is located about 3,200 kilometers northeast of the United States.
Greenland is rich in rare minerals that are key to the production of smartphones, electric vehicles and military equipment. China is currently significantly ahead of the United States in the extraction of such precious metals.
In addition, Greenland has a key strategic location in the North Atlantic, on the way to the increasingly important Arctic Circle. As the polar ice caps melt in the coming years, new sea routes are expected to open up.
Any attempt by the US to establish control over Greenland would lead to conflict with Denmark - another NATO country, which would likely put the alliance at risk, the BBC notes.
Iran
Also on Sunday, US President Donald Trump warned once again that Iran would be hit "very hard" if demonstrators protesting against the deteriorating economic situation in the Islamic Republic were killed, Agence France-Presse reported.
If Iran continues to "shoot" and "kill" demonstrators, the United States of America "will go and save them", Trump already made it clear a few days ago.
According to Iranian authorities, 12 people have been killed since the protests began, including security forces, and human rights organizations reported 35 deaths.
These are the largest protests in Iran since those sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody in 2022. However, so far the demonstrations, which began on December 28, are on a smaller scale, AFP notes.
Trump is a close ally of Israel - the sworn enemy of the Islamic Republic. The US joined the Israeli campaign of air strikes against Iran in June last year.
According to US media, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu raised the issue of new strikes on Iran this year with Trump during their meeting in Florida last week.
Colombia
After Maduro's capture, Trump threatened a military operation against neighboring Colombia.
Such an operation "sounds good to me," the US president told reporters on board his Air Force One plane on Sunday. He argued that "Colombia (like Venezuela) is also very sick (and) is run by a sick man who loves to produce cocaine and sell it to the United States".
He "will not do it for very long," Trump added, referring to his Colombian counterpart Gustavo Petro.
The first left-wing president in Colombia's modern history, Petro rejected the accusations and criticism leveled at him by his American counterpart, AFP reported.
"My name... does not appear in the drug trafficking court files. Stop slandering me, Mr. Trump", Petro wrote on the social network "Ex".
Colombia is a key military and economic ally of the United States in Latin America. However, their relations are now at their lowest point, summarizes Agence France-Presse.
Unlike Colombia, socialist Venezuela is an ideological opponent of the United States. At the same time, Colombia is the largest producer of cocaine in the world, followed by another Latin American country, Peru.
Mexico
Trump's political rise began with his call during the 2016 election campaign for a wall to be built along the US-Mexico border to stop illegal immigration, the BBC points out. Since then, he has often repeated that Mexican authorities are not doing enough to stop the flow of drugs and illegal immigrants into the United States.
On Sunday, Trump said that drugs are "pouring" into the United States from Mexico, where drug cartels "are very strong." "We're going to have to do something," he added significantly.
However, at least at this stage, a US military operation in the neighboring country, with a population of more than 130 million people and a diaspora of several tens of millions in the United States, seems highly unlikely.
Cuba
"The Island of Freedom" has been a "thorn in the side" of the United States since the Cold War, with Fidel Castro's Cuban Revolution and the subsequent Caribbean Missile Crisis, which brought the world to the brink of nuclear war, in the early 1960s. Cuba was the Soviet Union's first ally in Latin America and inspired regimes such as those in Venezuela and Nicaragua. However, since the end of the Cold War and the loss of a key ally and supplier in the face of the USSR in the early 1990s, the communist country has fallen into a severe crisis.
Trump said on Sunday that the regime in Cuba seemed "ready to fall", arguing that the communist government in Havana would have a hard time "holding on" without Venezuelan oil. "I don't think we will need to act" in Cuba, he predicted, adding that in that country, "everything seems to be falling apart".
The Cuban economy has shrunk by at least 15% in the past six years. The country is short of basic goods, inflation is high, the authorities cannot provide basic services, and power outages are a common occurrence, the French television "France 24" summarizes.
"I don't know if they will survive, but Cuba now has no income. They got all their income from Venezuela, from Venezuelan oil," Trump also said, quoted by the BBC.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, has long called for regime change in Cuba. On Saturday, he told reporters: "If I lived in Havana and was in government, I would be worried – at least a little bit."
"When the president (Trump) speaks, you have to take him seriously," Rubio added pointedly.