[Trump] has refused to rule out using military force to take control of Greenland and repeatedly floated the idea of making Canada the 51st state. He threatened to seize the Panama canal. He has imposed swingeing tariffs on key partners, and says he might abandon the Canada-Mexico trade pact signed in his first term. He has meddled outrageously in elections in Honduras and Argentina, and sought to interfere with Brazilian justice. He imposed sanctions on Colombia’s president in October. He has launched deadly attacks on alleged drug boats in international waters – extrajudicial killings that the administration has sought to legitimise by arbitrarily designating traffickers as terrorists – and threatened military strikes on Mexico, Venezuela and any other country he blames for drugs consumed in the US.

The US has in the past carried out war games to simulate a scenario where Venezuelan leadership was “decapitated”. The simulations predicted prolonged chaos, with refugees pouring out of Venezuela and rival groups fighting one another for control of the country.

“You’d have prolonged chaos … with no clear way out,” Douglas Farah, a Latin America expert who helped run the war games, said.

In early December, the Trump administration published what it called the “Trump corollary”, which said that the western hemisphere must be controlled by the US politically, economically, commercially and militarily. As part of the new Trump doctrine, the US military can be used to gain access to energy and mineral resources in the area.

Only a fool would take all of Mr Trump’s comments literally – but they should certainly be taken seriously.