We will regret the dawn of a ‘might makes right’ world
Trump’s raid on Venezuela will drive even more countries away from the Western system
It has finally happened. After months of military build-up in the Caribbean, the illegal killing of more than a hundred people on Venezuelan fishing boats – many of them civilians – and the equally illegal seizure of Venezuelan oil tankers, the Trump administration has dramatically escalated its aggression against Venezuela.
In the early hours of Saturday morning, US forces launched a large-scale military attack on several sites, including the capital Caracas, that resulted in the capture – or more accurately, the kidnapping – of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro.
The groundwork for this operation has been laid for months. Chief among the justifications was the claim that Venezuela is a “narco-terrorist” state at the centre of the fentanyl trade responsible for the US overdose crisis, an accusation that has been thoroughly debunked.
Other allegations were quickly added to the mix: that the country hosts “Iran-backed terrorists” (another unsubstantiated claim) and, inevitably, the assertion that regime change is about bringing “democracy” and “freedom” to the Venezuelan people.
But ultimately, once all the layers of propaganda are stripped away, this attack boils down to just one thing: a completely unprovoked and blatantly illegal act of aggression against a country that posed no real threat to the United States.
The real objectives are transparent. First, to gain control over Venezuela’s vast oil reserves – the largest in the world. Second, to topple a key ally of the non-Western geopolitical bloc aligned with China and Russia. In short, this is yet another regime-change war, from a president that campaigned precisely on putting an end to the US’s “forever wars”.
In this sense, the attack is revealing not only for what it does, but for what it signals about the evolving nature of US foreign policy. According to several analysts, the recently published US National Security Strategy – along with Trump’s efforts to negotiate a settlement in Ukraine and to scale down military commitments in Europe – signals a sober acceptance of the emerging multipolar order and a move away from Washington’s traditional reliance on direct military containment of rival great powers.
The attack on Venezuela, however, suggests a different conclusion: that the US remains determined to slow or stall the transition to multipolarity, albeit not through head-on conflict with China or Russia, but by doubling down on a globalised proxy-war strategy that targets the weaker links of the rival system. Venezuela fits this logic perfectly.
The operation marks the extension of a model already tested elsewhere, where escalation is displaced onto peripheral theatres: any vulnerable country that refuses alignment with the US and its allies becomes a potential target, especially those located in what Washington once again is claiming as its “God-given” sphere of influence: the Western Hemisphere. This amounts to a revival of the Monroe Doctrine in updated, openly militarised form.
This points not to the end of great-power confrontation, but to a shift in how it is managed by the US: through permanent destabilisation and engineered chaos, where even the most elementary rules of international coexistence are discarded.
In this sense, the attack on Venezuela is perhaps the clearest demonstration yet of the collapse of the so-called “rules-based order”. One might object that this order was always a fiction. International law, sovereignty and non-intervention were routinely violated by the US and its allies, even as they were selectively enforced against others. From covert coups to bombing campaigns to outright invasions – Grenada, Panama, Iraq – Washington has long disregarded the very rules it claimed to uphold.
Yet there is a qualitative difference today. In the past, the US at least attempted to cloak its actions in legal or moral language and to manufacture domestic and international consent, however fraudulent. That restraint is gone, reduced to lip service that few believe.
The Trump administration also acts regardless of public opinion. Recent polls show overwhelming US opposition to military action against Venezuela, just as there was strong opposition to the bombing of Iran and to Western complicity in Israeli mass killing in Gaza. None of this has mattered.
This normalisation of barbarism carries grave consequences. Internationally, it accelerates the descent into outright anarchy, where “might makes right” is the only remaining rule. This is especially dangerous in a world where the United States no longer holds the monopoly on global violence, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine demonstrated. Indeed, the attack on Venezuela – and the EU’s silence about it – lays bare the hypocrisy of Western narratives on Ukraine, further undermining them in the eyes of much of the world.
It also raises an obvious question: on what moral or legal basis could, for example, the West oppose Chinese action against Taiwan, when Washington has just applied the same logic to Venezuela – pre-emptive violence within a self-declared sphere of influence?
That China is unlikely to follow this path only underscores the contrast: Beijing’s global appeal rests in part precisely on its commitment to building a new world order based on non-intervention and sovereign equality, the very principles the West is in the process of demolishing.
Ultimately, this latest assault will drive even more countries away from the Western system, even as the US responds by escalating threats against those who do.
And the consequences will not be limited to geopolitics. As Western elites discard legal and moral restraints abroad, they will feel increasingly justified in doing so at home, accelerating the erosion of constitutional safeguards and civil liberties.
This process is already well underway. The question is no longer whether the so-called rules-based order has collapsed, but how much destruction will be wrought, abroad and at home, before Western societies are forced to reckon with consequences of the lawlessness unleashed by their elites.
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