Fellow Americans. Today we must finally confront a reality that we, as a nation, have been avoiding with all of our collective concentration. I refer to a country that sits on the brink of failure. A nation whose unravelling will produce untold devastation far and wide, the repercussions of which will threaten our livelihoods, those of our children and even our children’s children. No longer can we look away. We must step up and ask: what is our duty, as the most powerful nation on the planet, not only to ourselves but to all good men and women around the world?

The crisis in Venezuela shows us how important properly run elections are to global stability, but Venezuela is not the country to which I refer. I cite it only because, like this failing country, Venezuela’s recent elections have also been damaged by gerrymandering, leading our brave UN ambassador, Nikki Haley, to call those elections “a step toward dictatorship”. She should know, for the same could be said about this failing state.

There are strong indications that this failing state’s elections were further marred by the subterranean interventions of a foreign power. Fellow Americans, I need not remind you that this is completely unacceptable. Only Americans are permitted to meddle in foreign elections.

And yet on every day, and with every tweet, the leader of this country is determined to undermine the rule of law and the rules of grammar. Not only has this tyrant repeatedly threatened to jail his opponents, he also openly incites his state security forces to wanton violence.

This ruler’s power is premised on exacerbating the sectarian tensions that have festered in the country since even before its founding. And he constantly threatens his neighbours, particularly his southern neighbour, which he menaces with a bill of sale for something the neighbour never offered to purchase. Such dangerous and erratic behaviour has no place among civilised nations.

My fellow Americans. The failures of this nation exceed the bizarre affectations of its would-be autocrat. Years of mismanagement and theft by the country’s ruling families have produced a situation where this wealthy nation steals from its poor to line the pockets of its rich. Other nations would be mortified by the scale of its wealth and income inequality. Meanwhile, this country stubbornly refuses to provide healthcare for all of its citizens, while its sham legislature accomplishes virtually nothing, all the while broadcasting its ineptitude live on quasi-official state TV.

Every day, with every tweet, this country's leader undermines the rule of law and the rules of grammar

We will not be fooled. The world knows when it witnesses democracy in action just as it knows when it sees a pantomime of democracy in action. This regime promises jobs for its citizens, and then fires them after 10 days.

Time is running out. We must not let the madmen of this regime continue to threaten not only our allies, but also our globally shared climate. As we did with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, we must make a decision, a decision dictated by the cause of peace but one that may lead us down the path of war. The security of the world requires it.

That is why, today, the United States of America has been left with no choice but to invade the United States of America.

God Bless America

• Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of How Does It Feel To Be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America; and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror. He is Professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York.