People in Caracas, Venezuela, rip an American flag in half during a protest on Jan. 3.Ariana Cubillos/The Associated Press
“You can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else. But we live in a world, in the real world ... that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.”
– Deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller, in an interview on CNN
At some point almost every young person comes to one of two startling realizations, that seem to upend everything they have ever been taught. The first: We’re the bad guys. America, Canada, the West: We’ve done all sorts of terrible things! All that rot about democracy and freedom, fighting dictatorships and all that, when it’s our leaders who are the real dictators. Only everyone else is too brainwashed to see it. But I, a second-year sociology major, have seen through the official lies …
And the other? There are no bad guys. Or good guys, for that matter. There is no such thing as right or wrong, or truth and falsehood: These are merely masks for the powerful to rationalize their grip on power, or for others to take it away from them. In such a dog-eat-dog world the only real sin is hypocrisy, and the only virtue is to be authentically what one is: selfish and amoral. As it says here on page 375 of my Collected Works of Nietzsche …
At some later point most people grow out of these sophisms. The intoxicating rush that comes with rejecting all conventional wisdom, or being released from all moral constraints, gives way before the twin realities that democracy, for all its faults, is superior to dictatorship, and that adhering to some sort of ethics, for all its tedium, is indispensable, not only to a functioning society, but to a decent life.
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Only Donald Trump, and the people around him, never grew up. Mr. Trump himself often sounds like the worst sort of whatabouting campus lefty when it comes to world affairs. Has Russia committed atrocities in Ukraine? Hey, we’re no angels, knowhatimean? Which may sound like “we’re the bad guys,” but as is often the way, turns out to mean “there are no bad guys.” There is only strength, and force, and power. Which is how you get to Venezuela. And Greenland. And beyond.
They are drunk on power, the Trump boys, but more than that, drunk on amorality. Why, in the end, did they invade Venezuela? Because they can. They may like to tell themselves it’s about the oil – the world’s most expensive oil, at a time when there is an international glut of the cheaper stuff – but their boyish excitement betrays them. They did it because they could get away with it. Because no one could stop them. Because the law is for suckers and morals are for losers, and this is how they would show the world what they thought of either.
It is useless to cite law to such people, let alone international law. That does not mean that international law itself is useless. It is true that international law, in a world of nation-states, is a delicate, fragile thing, a latticework of treaties of varying and uncertain adherence without a supranational government to enforce it – the more so when the only country in a position to act as the world’s policeman has chosen instead to throw in its lot with the mafia.
It is true, also, that international law, as such, is less a set of statutes or a codification of precedents than an evolving sense of what the international community will or will not put up with. It is inherently situational, the point at which broad principles run into necessary exceptions. Thus: international borders are inviolable; nation-states are not to invade one another. Unless … unless what?
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It can’t be absolute, as if the German invasion of France in 1940 were no different than America’s in 1944. The simple answer is: it should be a very high bar, indeed. To stop a genocide, for example. To prevent another invasion, or roll back a previous one. To prevent a rogue state from acquiring weapons of mass destruction. The bar has to be high because the consequences, not only for the states involved, but for the international order generally, are so great.
Whatever the argument, it should be one that, finally, enjoys the support of a substantial part of the international community. It cannot be a simple matter of one country seizing another’s territory, on its own recognizance. That way lies a world of unceasing warfare, “a new Dark Age,” as Churchill warned, “made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.”
Are any of these defences in evident in the case of Venezuela? No. The regime of Nicolás Maduro is an odious gang of criminals and thugs, who hold power only by virtue of having stolen the last two elections. They have rented themselves out as suppliers of oil to other odious regimes, from Cuba to China. They have terrorized and impoverished their own nation and destabilized others via the resulting flow of migrants.
But they are not engaged in genocide. They have not invaded their neighbours, nor seriously threaten to (a 2023 episode in which Mr. Maduro made vague threats to annex Guyana’s oilfields came to nothing). They do not have, or threaten to possess, WMDs.
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The entire invasion was at best an ill-conceived plan to “[steal] Venezuelan oil at gunpoint for a period of time undefined as leverage to micromanage the country,” as the Democratic Senator Chris Murphy has put it. More likely, it was because Mr. Maduro irritated Mr. Trump. But in either event, it enjoys the support (as opposed to acquiescence) of virtually no other government.
It is difficult to find parallels for this in the recent history of democratic states. This was not the sort of covert operation for which the U.S. was infamous during the Cold War, which usually amounted to more of a nod of the head to domestic actors than direct U.S. involvement, and which might have sought at least some justification in the dire struggle, in which not only the United States but the democratic West was then involved, with a totalitarian state bent on world domination.
This was not Grenada in 1983, which was undertaken in response to a military coup, at the invitation of the country’s Governor-General, and with the support of a number of Caribbean states. It wasn’t even Panama in 1989, where there was at least the fig leaf of treaty interests at stake. It certainly wasn’t anything like Afghanistan, which had served as the base for the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States. Nor was it like Iraq – Saddam Hussein had invaded or attacked five of his neighbours; had possessed WMDs in the past and was believed by his own generals to have acquired them in the present; and was in flagrant violation of the terms of the ceasefire in the first Gulf War, the subject of 16 UN Security Council resolutions under the force provision of the UN Charter.
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All of these interventions were controversial, to say the least. But none was the same kind of wholly unilateral, explicitly military, nakedly mercenary operation that we have just witnessed in Venezuela – a resource grab made more blatant by the fact that the Maduro regime has been left in place. And none was followed by the same barrage of threats to do the same to other countries: Cuba, Mexico, Colombia, Iran, and of course, that den of iniquity, Greenland.
Well, so what? So the U.S. is operating outside of international law. Every state does what is in its own interests. Maybe the U.S. doesn’t need the law on its side. Maybe it doesn’t need friends. Maybe it’s true that the world is governed by strength, and force, and power alone, the kind that only the U.S., and maybe a handful of other countries, possess. Maybe the rest of us should just accept it, and move on.
But this is an adolescent vision of how the world – the real world – works. It parades itself as hard-headed realism. In fact, it is almost childishly naive. In the real world, even great powers need allies, and alliances, with which to project their interests globally. In the real world, military power depends on its backing in popular will – how willing the people of one state are to carry the fight to another, and how willing the people of another state are to defend it. “Hearts and minds,” as they say.
And popular will, in the real world, is intimately connected with the uses to which that power is put, and how legitimate these are seen to be. Which is affected by, among other things, whether these are seen to comply with international norms, if not international law, for which the support of other countries is a useful proxy. This isn’t just a matter of public opinion in other countries, or the willingness of other countries to fight alongside the U.S., as important as that most often proves to be. Even a unilaterally minded U.S. administration has to pay attention to how its own public feels about things, and how Americans feel is intimately bound up in how they are perceived by other countries, and how they believe they are perceived.
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This is the point of worries about the “precedent” set by the United States invading or attacking nearby states, much as Russia has done in Ukraine and China threatens to do in Taiwan. No, Russia and China are unlikely to be affected by the U.S. moral example, one way or the other: their actions will be governed by their perceptions of their own self-interest, not by appeals to universal principle.
But – assuming for the moment that the Trump administration wishes to restrain Russian and Chinese imperial ambitions, and not, as seems more likely, to emulate them – then it matters how the U.S. behaves: if not to its adversaries, then to its allies. Other countries may be willing to line up beside an America they see as defending their own interests and values, including the principle that countries do not invade each other without cause. They will not do so on behalf of a rogue state.
Popular support in other lands for the postwar Pax Americana (notwithstanding its occasional lapses) was a crucial part of its extraordinary success: an 80-year period in which American influence and prosperity rose to heights never before attained by any other country in the world. Perhaps the most astonishing part of the Trumpian world view, as expressed by Mr. Trump, Mr. Miller and others, is their apparent belief that the same period marked an epoch of unrelenting decay and decline.
Hard power, in other words, cannot easily be divorced from soft power. If the U.S. continues to throw its weight around in such a crude fashion, to such base ends, it will soon find itself confronted with the limits to military might: not merely lacking the support of the democracies, but facing their united opposition.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article incorrectly referred to Nicolás Maduro's comments regarding oilfields in Ghana. The Venezuelan president commented on the oilfields of Guyana. (Jan. 20, 2026) This article has been updated to remove an incorrect reference to Cuban sponsorship of the 1983 coup of Grenada.