Might is right

By Artchil B. Fernandez

United States (US) invasion of Venezuela on the 3^rd day of 2026 is the last nail in the coffin of the rules-based international order.  Vladimir Putin accelerated its demise with the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.  Donald Trump sealed its fate with the latest US adventurism in Latin America.

“Operation Absolute Resolve” was launched by the US at dawn of January 3^rd to abduct Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores.  They were taken to the US on fabricated charges of cocaine importation conspiracy, possession of machine guns and destructive devices, and conspiracy to possess machine guns and destructive devices.  The couple are held in Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC), a federal jail in Brooklyn, New York City.

The Trump administration was blunt and candid about the purpose of the abduction.  They are after Venezuelan oil while at the same time demonstrating how Trump’s 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) works.  The new NSS is a rehash of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, renamed “Donroe Doctrine” to tickle Donald Trump’s fragile ego.  It is basically a return to 19^th century naked and brutal imperialism.

Right after reassuming the US presidency in 2025, Trump immediately worked to dismantle the present global order.  He started in the economic sphere by attacking and undermining the neo-liberal economic arrangement created by the US.  The neo-liberal economic order is anchored on the unhampered global flow of capital, goods, and services.  Trade barriers like tariffs and other protectionist measures are anathema.

Among the first major acts of Trump was waging a trade war with the biggest trading partners of the US – Canada, China, and Mexico as well as with the rest of the world.  He unilaterally imposed prohibitive tariffs on everyone, including penguins of an uninhabited and remote Heard and McDonald Islands in the Antarctic locale.

Return of tariffs and similar protectionist measures severely damaged, perhaps irreparably the neo-liberal global trade which the US carefully built since 1947 with the Geneva Round. The 8^th and last multilateral trade negotiations, the 1986 Uruguay Round replaced the General Agreement on Tariff and Trade (GATT) with the World Trade Organization (WTO) to accelerate international trade liberalization and eliminate tariffs.

Trump’s single act of imposing tariff with other protectionist measures torpedoed the neo-liberal global trade rendering the WTO irrelevant and insignificant.  WTO has disappeared from the headlines and tariff is back with vengeance.

After upending the neo-liberal economic system, Trump turned his attention to the political sphere.  The present rules-based international political system rose from the ashes of the Second World War.  To ensure that another global war will not happen again, nations led by the United States and allies victorious in the World War II created the United Nations (UN).  The UN Charter, Article 2(4) explicitly prohibits member-nations from using “the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state…”  This is to put an end to the “might is right” thinking.

World War II and the Great War (World War I) happened because powerful countries resort to force and violence in resolving conflict.  Weaker nations are crushed and victimized by powerful nations.  This is what the current rules-based world order enshrined by the UN prevents until Putin and Trump entered the scene.

Putin invaded Ukraine ignoring the UN Charter. The US under the Biden administration castigated Russia for breaking the rules-based international norms.  But under Trump, the US is now in league with Russia in destroying the current international political order.  Both the US and Russia have shown that the UN Charter does not matter anymore. Powerful nations can invent any pretext to invade and conquer other nations.

Trump boasted the US is now running Venezuela.  He also issued threats to Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, and Greenland (a Danish territory) warning they are next.  His fascist acolyte Stephen Miller maniacally bragged on CNN that the US is “a superpower and under President Trump, we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower.”  The racist Miller sounds like a swaggering Nazi apparatchik, a Joseph Goebbels incarnate.

What the Trump administration did in Venezuela lately was an incineration of the rules-based international order and the return of the “might is right” mentality in global politics.  Countries with powerful military can invade and take over weaker countries and plunder their resources.  The world has lurch into an illiberal world order where the only rule that rules is the “rule of the jungle.”

Humanity is facing a terrifying future.  The spectre of another global war is rising on the horizon.  Trump’s new NSS reduced the US from a global superpower to a regional warlord with the Western Hemisphere as its playground.  He has a tripolar view of world where three great powers co-exist – China, Russia, and the US.  China and Russia can do anything in their backyards as long as they leave the US alone in its sphere.

In this tripolar world, the rules-based system has no place.  Raw power and might replace rules and order.  It is a hostile world where small and weak nations are at the mercy of superpowers who wield their might arbitrarily, arrogantly, and brutally.

Trump has set a dangerous precedent by abducting Maduro and attacking Venezuela.  Other superpowers could follow his template.  What would prevent China from invading Taiwan and forcing its way in the West Philippine Sea?  There are no rules that govern the behaviour of nations.  Might is right.  The world returns to barbarity, inaugurating a new Age of Empires.  But there can only be one superpower in the end.  Why did Rome wage war on the Parthian Empire or Egypt with the Hittites?  The tripolar world of Trump will eventually dissolve into a conflict between empires – a global war.