On the 3rd of September, the United States launched a naval strike off the coast of Venezuela, killing eleven individuals whom Washington had identified as drug traffickers. Concurrently, President Donald Trump also announced a $50 million bounty on President Nicolás Maduro and ordered an additional naval surge in the region, presenting the move as part of an anti-narcotics campaign. But this framing conceals a much deeper reality: this is the most dramatic demonstration yet of Washington’s return to unilateral military coercion—occurring at a time when the liberal international order lies in disarray.
This attack is not an isolated episode. It represents the culmination of overlapping trends: Venezuela’s internal collapse, the erosion of multilateral constraints on U.S. power, and the resurgence of a worldview that equates might with right. Indeed, it signals that the norms that shaped international politics after 1945 now hang by a thread.
A Crisis of Venezuela’s Own Making
To be sure, Venezuela’s situation is largely self-inflicted. Once a showcase of Latin American prosperity, the country fell victim to its own overdependence on hydrocarbons. When oil prices plummeted during the 2010s and production faltered under severe mismanagement, economic fundamentals collapsed. Hyperinflation reached astronomical levels, and essential goods vanished.
The humanitarian consequences have been catastrophic. More than seven million Venezuelans have fled since 2015, and today, Venezuela remains in a twilight zone. Neither a failed state nor a functional one, it is a petrostate in freefall, caught between great power rivalries and criminal networks.
Why Force Remains a Mirage
In this context, Trump’s resort to military action may seem decisive, but history warns otherwise. Regime change by force has proven to be a dangerous illusion. From Iraq in 2003 to Libya in 2011, interventions launched with promises of quick success ended in state collapse and prolonged chaos. The lesson is unequivocal: dismantling regimes is far easier than rebuilding nation-states.
Venezuela is no exception. Its dense forests, rugged terrain, and porous borders provide ideal ground for guerrilla warfare. Armed groups—from remnants of Colombia’s civil war to regime-aligned militias—would thrive in an insurgency, evoking the Vietnam analogy: a technologically superior power mired in the swamps of asymmetric conflict.
Beyond battlefield risks lies a structural vacuum. Venezuela’s bureaucracy has been decimated. Technocrats and civil servants have fled. The opposition, fragmented and discredited, lacks both credibility and institutional capacity. Removing Maduro without a credible plan for postwar governance would ignite civil war, deepen anarchy and require prolonged foreign occupation—likely funded by Venezuela’s oil reserves—perpetuating the resource curse under a new guise.
This is precisely the nightmare outlined by analysts such as Sean Burges and Fabrício Bastos, who warned back in 2018 that intervention would “waste valuable time” while worsening institutional fragility. They emphasized that Maduro’s survival rests on elite-military pacts—disrupting these could plunge Venezuela into even deeper violence. And even if regime change were to succeed, the absence of institutions implies that reconstruction would necessitate decades of sustained external control.
The Sovereignty Taboo and Regional Backlash
Moreover, Latin America’s diplomatic DNA is steeped in the principle of non-intervention. This is not an abstract ideal—it reflects a collective historical memory of U.S. occupations, from early 20th-century interventions in the Caribbean to covert operations throughout the Cold War. The Organization of American States (OAS) has repeatedly rejected endorsing regime change driven from abroad, to avoid setting a precedent that could justify interference elsewhere.
Even if Washington sought to project a façade of regional leadership, the reality is clear—no Latin American state possesses the logistical depth or strategic expertise to spearhead a mission of that scale. The United States would retain operational control and bear responsibility for the inevitable quagmire.
The Putin Parallel and Trump’s Contradictions
Talk of military intervention also lays bare a glaring hypocrisy. Washington condemned Vladimir Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine as a violation of national sovereignty, yet now replicates the same logic. The rhetorical parallels are inescapable—Trump frames Venezuela as an existential “narcoterrorist” threat—chillingly similar to Putin’s February 2022 speech describing Ukraine as an artificial entity and a danger to Russian security. Both narratives dress raw power and neo-imperialism in the garb of necessity.
The irony deepens with Trump and Putin’s recent meeting in Alaska. Far from signaling firmness against authoritarian revanchism, the summit leaned towards a position of accommodation toward Moscow internationally. This, as Washington resorts to aggression in its own hemisphere. Trump’s flirtation with Putin in his first term—along with his attacks on NATO and delays in supplying military aid—cruelly undermined Ukraine. Today he risks imposing a Kremlin-dictated peace on Kyiv while violently intervening in Venezuela—and possibly soon, as he has ominously hinted at in recent months, in Panama.
The Great Dismantling
The belligerent strikes of the 3rd of September merely exemplify Trump’s systematic dismantling of liberal internationalism. Over two terms, multilateral partnerships have been destroyed, human rights offices shuttered and governance turned into a blunt instrument of coercion. Diplomacy has given way to arbitrary deals and tariffs. Persuasion, to open force.
What emerges is a world unmoored from the normative anchors of the post-1945 order—a world where sovereignty is negotiable, law is malleable, and might is right. In this sense, Venezuela may now stand as the gravestone of that old order—an era in which the United States, once its chief architect, embraces the ethos of revisionism it once claimed to oppose. The future is not anarchic but hierarchical—a system of spheres of influence ruled by brute force, transactional bargains, and fading ideals of human rights and collective security.
The art of the deal? No—an age of impunity.
Autor
Associate Research Fellow at ICAEPA, based in Sheffield, UK. Econometrician. Consultant in risk analysis, business intelligence, value chain analysis, and transfer pricing.
