By Mohamed Harees –

Lukman Harees

The stunning military operation conducted by the United States on 2 January to remove Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro sends an unmistakable message: the Monroe Doctrine is back (the European powers obligated to respect the Western Hemisphere as the United States’ sphere of interest), and the US will not tolerate external powers exerting control in Latin America. However, the consequences of the US intervention in Venezuela extend far beyond the Americas.

When the psychopath Trump celebrated the capture of the Venezuelan leader under U.S. direction, the announcement arrived like déjà vu: stern promises, moral language, and a familiar claim that the operation defended the “rule-based international order.” Yet behind the soundbites lay a harsher truth—America’s rules are not universal. They are a script written to serve American interests, revised whenever reality inconveniences power. The episode, dressed in the language of anti-corruption and counter-narcotics, is less about justice than geopolitics. The world has seen this story before. From Panama to Iraq, and from Libya to Venezuela, noble phrases cloak material motives. The question that now haunts global politics is whether “might” has again become “right,” and whether the so-called rule-based order has quietly reverted to its imperial origins.

For decades, American interventions have blended profit and piety. In the 1980s, Panama’s Manuel Noriega was captured as a “drug lord” only after defying U.S. orders. Two decades later, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein was invaded on the fabricated premise of weapons of mass destruction. When Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi sought to trade oil in euros, humanitarianism became the rationale for regime change. Today’s Venezuela fits the same pattern: moral story first, material interests concealed beneath. Energy security is the hidden grammar of U.S. foreign policy. Venezuela, like Iraq and Libya before it, sits on resources. It’s Oil in robes of law!

Washington’s officials speak of defending rules as if they were neutral laws of nature. They are, instead, instruments of hierarchy. The first rule of the system is unwritten: the United States defines the rules. The second: it may break them with impunity. From Iraq’s invasion to drone killings in countries never at war with America, Washington acts as both legislator and judge. Others must obey what it exempts itself from. That asymmetry erodes the foundation of legitimacy. If law binds only the weak, it becomes another language of force. When the most powerful state refuses accountability—rejecting the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, ignoring U.N. mandates, and threatening those who resist—it reduces the idea of universal justice to diplomatic theatre. The Venezuelan capture must be read in this light. It is not evidence of order, but of order’s collapse under the weight of exception.

The moral disguise of empire: Law alone cannot sustain hegemony; it needs the aura of righteousness. America’s power has always relied on the performance of moral purpose. Anticommunism, antiterrorism, antidrugs—each generation is offered a new moral banner under which old imperial instincts march. This moral theatre transforms domination into duty. It allows citizens to believe they are protecting global ethics rather than enforcing national privilege. “Democracy promotion” becomes humanitarian grace; sanctions become care; abductions become accountability. The narrative soothes domestic doubts while disguising the fact that the rules of the game change whenever they threaten American convenience.

America’s territory extends wherever it proclaims jurisdiction, yet no foreign authority may legally touch American officials for equivalent acts. The same government that proclaims universal justice rejects external scrutiny of its own wars and covert actions. The contradiction is not an accident—it is the structure of modern hegemony. The U.S. treats sovereignty as a privilege enjoyed by itself and its allies, withdrawn from states that resist its leadership. In this scheme, Venezuela’s crime is not drug trafficking—it is defiance.

Might and Right: “To make the world safe for democracy,” Woodrow Wilson once declared, “we must make it safe from power.” A century later, democracy has given way to the empire of exceptions. The rhetoric of universal law collapses under the practice of selective enforcement. As the boundaries between justice and dominance blur, a grim philosophy returns to prominence: might is right. This principle, once condemned as barbaric, now operates as the silent consensus of geopolitics. The United States, by affirming its own impunity, has normalised impunity as the coin of global politics. Its rivals imitate the pattern, and the dream of shared order dissolves into spheres of influence.

To believe still in a rule-based order requires extraordinary faith. The Venezuelan affair exposes the contradictions openly: coercion packaged as morality, self-interest disguised as law. The world is moving into a post-illusion age where power no longer apologizes but simply acts. The risk is that cynicism replaces accountability and survival becomes the only global ethic. Yet acknowledgement is the first step toward change. Recognizing the hypocrisy of the current system opens space for alternatives—regional institutions, plural centres of authority, and multilateral accountability not beholden to one capital. True order will require rules agreed by all and applied to all, not decreed by the strongest state.

Trump and his cohorts argued that Venezuela’s leadership is indeed corrupt, that drugs flow north, and that moral outrage is justified. Perhaps so—but even genuine wrongdoing does not license selective justice. When enforcement depends on whom a government offends rather than what it commits, justice turns political. The principle at stake is universalism. Either the same standards apply to all nations, or there is no rule-based order, only rule by the highest bidder. The American government’s insistence that its actions are exceptions “for good reason” reveals the underlying belief that morality accrues to power itself: a rebranding of empire as ethics.

Mainstream coverage of these events abets the illusion. By reproducing official language—“capture,” “kingpin,” “antinarcotics success”—without exploring deeper motives, much of the media transforms complex conflicts into crime stories. Few outlets ask why the war on drugs repeatedly aligns with resource politics, or why only anti-U.S. leaders are targeted. The spectacle of justice distracts from the continuity of the empire. This moral fatigue—where audiences grow numb to contradictions—is perhaps the greatest victory of power. When citizens cease expecting consistency, hypocrisy stops being scandalous and becomes routine.

Europe plays double standards: The tragedy extends beyond Washington. European governments, eager to protect transatlantic unity, routinely echo U.S. interpretations of legality even when these violate international norms. Human rights and humanitarian law are invoked forcefully in some crises (for example, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine) but diluted, delayed, or selectively ignored in others, notably in Palestine/Israel and parts of the Middle East.​ Take, for example, refugee protection is generous and coordinated for Ukrainians, while people fleeing wars in the Middle East and Africa face pushbacks, externalised borders, and criminalisation, despite the same legal obligations applying to all.​ October 7^th attacks by Hamas amplified while Israeli genocide in  Gaza was generally underplayed. In this instance, too, on Venezuela, Europe has often wrapped a fundamentally political and economic stance in the language of democracy, human rights, and “peaceful transition,” while still hesitating to condemn US action in Venezuela and aligning with US sanctions or regimechange narratives and protecting its own energy interests.

The collapse of moral authority: When law becomes a tool of the powerful, its moral content withers. America’s capture of foreign figures in the name of justice is the political equivalent of “might makes right.” Even allies recognise the double standard but accept it as realpolitik. Yet disillusionment spreads. International institutions weakened by selective enforcement struggle to command respect.

The damage extends beyond diplomacy. The example set by the strongest state legitimises lawbreaking by others. Russia’s annexation of Crimea, China’s actions in the South China Sea—each is rationalised domestically with the same logic America uses: defending national interest against a biased order. When Washington breaks principles, the world learns that principles are optional. The result is systemic cynicism: a planet where rules are citations of power, not constraints upon it.

What the world learns: The Venezuelan capture teaches smaller nations four enduring lessons: Firstly, sovereignty is provisional. ‘You are independent until your independence touches American assets or prestige. Secondly, resources invite guardianship. Where oil, gas, or lithium exist, noble reasons for intervention soon follow. Thirdly, the law is selective. The accused are always the weak; the exonerated, the strong. Fourthly, compliance is safer than justice. Silence buys survival; defiance invites moral indictment. These lessons extend far beyond Latin America to Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, where governments diversify alliances to avoid singular dependence on Washington. They understand that alignment with one power undercuts autonomy for all.

Conclusion: The Law of Power

The capture of a Venezuelan leader under the banner of ‘justice’ is thus a symbol of a deeper decay—the corrosion of law into an instrument of supremacy and the UN becoming a toothless tiger. The “rulebased order” so often invoked by American leaders was never neutral; it was architecture built to preserve dominance. Its first rule remains the same: the United States makes the rules and breaks them at will. Every time Washington claims to uphold global norms through unilateral power, it teaches the world that norms are meaningless without reciprocity. And every time that lesson spreads, humanity moves closer to a world where might truly becomes right—where enforcement replaces ethics, and justice becomes indistinguishable from power. If there is hope, it lies in confronting this illusion honestly. Until the powerful obey the same standards they demand of others, no amount of legal vocabulary can conceal the underlying truth: America is not defending a rulebased order; it is defending the order of its own rule.

The world is, however, not powerless against European and wider Western double standards. Governments and civil society in the Global South can publicly expose hypocrisies on issues like Gaza versus Ukraine, refugees, and Venezuela, using UN and regional platforms to erode the moral authority of “rule-based order” narratives and make space for alternative voices. At the state level, countries can pursue non-alignment or “multi-alignment,” coordinate through coalitions such as the G77, AU, CELAC, ASEAN or BRICS+, and diversify their trade, finance and security partnerships so they are less vulnerable to EU/US pressure and conditionalities.​ Change also depends on transnational civil society and a clear refusal to romanticise any big power. Humanrights groups, refugee networks, labour and climate movements, and Global South solidarity campaigns can document and publicise double standards inside Europe, making them politically costly and harder to sustain. At the same time, a more multipolar world only escapes “might is right” if all major actors are held to the same standards on sovereignty, human rights and international law.

The real alternative to “might is right” is not a different hegemon, but a more genuinely multilateral order in which rules are negotiated fairly and applied consistently—to everyone, including the strong.