[Diggers350] Chaos Over Law? Trump Leads World Into Geopolitical Wild West Where Might Makes Right

Tue Jan 6 13:50:54 GMT 2026

Trump leads world into geopolitical Wild West 
where might makes right, while laws and rules fall away

Ishaan Tharoor - Washington Post - and New Zealand Herald - 4 Jan, 2026

American dominance in the Western Hemisphere 
will never be questioned again, President Donald 
Trump declared after United States forces hit 
various Venezuelan targets and elite commandos 
carried out the capture and rendition of 
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife 
with an audacious raid in the dead of night.

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/trump-leads-world-into-geopolitical-wild-west-where-might-makes-right-while-laws-and-rules-fall-away 

  American dominance in the Western Hemisphere 
will never be questioned again, President Donald 
Trump declared Saturday, after U.S. forces hit 
various Venezuelan targets and elite commandos 
carried out the capture and rendition of 
Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife 
with an audacious raid in the dead of night. 
Under the Trump administration we are 
reasserting American power in a very powerful way in our home region.

The world is still digesting the consequences of 
the U.S. intervention, which the Trump 
administration has tried to characterize as a 
law enforcement mission against Maduro, 
indicted in U.S. federal court on charges of 
narco-trafficking, rather than the clear military 
operation in a foreign nation that it appeared to 
be. Some Venezuelan military positions were 
leveled by U.S. strikes, with officials reporting 
an unspecified number of casualties.

Maduro is already in New York City, awaiting an 
appearance in court. For many Venezuelans, 
especially millions of people compelled to flee 
from the country over the past decade of economic 
catastrophe under Maduros watch, his removal is 
joyous news, and the first step to a happier 
future. On that count, the U.S. operation was a 
clear tactical success in its brazen precision and efficacy.

Still, the likelihood of a strategic failure 
looms. A dark history of failed U.S. 
interventions and regime-change projects haunt 
the current action. Boosters of the move liken it 
to the capture of Panamanian dictator Manuel 
Antonio Noriega in 1989, with U.S. criminal 
investigations into money laundering and drug 
smuggling justifying the operation. But the 
analogy to the present collapses amid Trumps 
talk of open-ended control over Venezuela and its tremendous oil wealth.

By the end of the weekend, the White House had 
done little to dispel the confusion about what 
comes next in Venezuela. Trump himself suggested 
the United States would somehow run the South 
American nation until a proper transition away 
from the current dispensation could be forged. 
His lieutenants were more circumspect, 
emphasizing U.S. interests in dismantling alleged 
criminal networks within the Venezuelan state 
apparatus and reasserting American control or 
influence over Venezuelas vast oil sector.

Venezuelas pro-democracy opposition voiced fears 
that they would be cut out in a Trump-brokered 
deal with the remnants of Maduros regime. 
Speaking to the Atlantic, Trump said that he 
expected Maduros former vice president  and 
hastily installed successor  Delcy Rodriguez to 
essentially do the White Houses bidding. If she 
doesnt do whats right, he said, she is going 
to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.

The rest of the world has watched with mixed 
emotions. Many in Latin America, especially among 
the ascendant, Trump-aligned political right, 
cheered Maduros ouster and what seems a grievous 
blow to the regions remaining left-leaning autocracies.

Elsewhere, world leaders feared a grim precedent. 
The bombing of Venezuelan territory and the 
capture of its president crosses an unacceptable 
line, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da 
Silva said. The action recalls the worst moments 
of interference in Latin American and Caribbean 
politics, and threatens the regional preservation as a zone of peace.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot shed no 
tears for Maduro in a statement but said the U.S. 
action contravenes the principle of the nonuse 
of force that underpins international law. He 
warned that it was part of the steady erosion of 
international norms, worsened by countries such 
as Russia that are supposedly the guarantors of 
the rules-based order. The growing number of 
violations of this principle by nations vested 
with the primary responsibility of permanent 
membership on the United Nations Security Council 
will have grave consequences for global security, sparing no one, he said.

Trumps move into Venezuela is another nail in 
the coffin of the old postwar status quo. The 
White House reneged on commitments to receive 
authorization from Congress before deploying the 
U.S. military in Venezuela. Ahead of Mondays 
emergency U.N. Security Council session on 
Venezuela, Trumps U.N. ambassador, Mike Waltz, 
scoffed at the hand-wringing of his diplomatic 
counterparts. In a Sunday television interview, 
Secretary of State Marco Rubio waved away 
concerns about an open-ended regime change mission as a kind of phobia.

Part of whats troubling here is not just that 
the president has used force in clear violation 
of domestic law and international law but that 
its clear he couldnt care less about the fact 
that hes breaking these rules, observed Oona 
Hathaway, a leading international legal scholar 
at Yale Law School. Speaking to the New Yorker, 
she concluded that Trump is just going to do 
what he thinks is warranted based on his own kind 
of reasoning, as opposed to any kind of 
constraints or legal limits or having to seek 
advice or consent from the international community or the U.S. Congress.

The sense of a paradigm shift is overwhelming. 
Oliver Stuenkel, an analyst of international 
affairs at Fundação Getulio Vargas, a Brazilian 
university, suggested that the raid on Venezuela 
was the first concrete sign of Trump putting 
into practice the White Houses National Security 
Strategy, which declares the Western Hemisphere 
to be a U.S. sphere of influence, rekindling the 
instincts of an era of gunboat diplomacy and 
neo-imperialism from a century ago.

This is a completely new age, Stuenkel told me. 
Trump doesnt say he wants to bring democracy. 
Its petro-imperialism. Latin American policy 
elites are slowly grasping that it would be a 
mistake to believe that just because Maduro is a 
dictator, that other countries that are 
democratic would be safe from the United States.

The timid responses of most European leaders 
betrays the deepening anxiety on the continent 
about the future of the alliance with the United 
States. Maduros capture is no regional anomaly; 
it is a signal event, noted Asli Aydintasbas and 
Chris Hermann of the European Council on Foreign 
Relations. It highlights the volatility of 
Trumps foreign policy, his comfort with military 
solutions and his apparent openness to a world 
governed by spheres of influence rather than rules.

That opens the door further for a new 
geopolitical Wild West, where might makes right, 
and laws and rules fall away. In a separate 
context, C. Raja Mohan, a prominent Indian 
geopolitical analyst, saw this already in action 
in Israels recognition last month of the breakaway republic of Somaliland.

Declarations about the inviolability of borders 
ring hollow when aggression goes unpunished or is 
tacitly accepted, he wrote. With major powers 
embracing territorial revisionism  China in 
Asia, Russia in Europe, and the U.S. in the 
Western Hemisphere  it is naïve for lesser 
states to depend on the presumed protective 
shield of the rules-based international order.

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