The US military operation in Venezuela in the early hours of January 3, rang the new year in with a bang — even by the current standards of American foreign policy. After months of military build-up and planning, US president Donald Trump gave the go-ahead for the apprehension of the president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro. Operation Absolute Resolve — the codename for this successful effort to capture and abduct a sitting head of state — has no recent precedent other than the US under President George H. W. Bush snatching Panama’s strongman Manuel Noriega some 36 years ago. This latest blatant and unashamed violation of international law confirms even for the last doubter that Trump cares little about rules and norms. As such, it also signals the continuing erosion of what is left of the rules-based international order. For all of the US president’s triumphalism at his post-operation press conference, he cannot be certain that the undoubted tactical success of capturing Maduro will equate to an enduring success of moulding the western hemisphere in his own image. As his predecessors have found in Afghanistan and Iraq, regime change is a fraught and costly business. It is also one that is deeply unpopular among Trump’s Maga base. The temptation for the White House, therefore, is to declare victory after the weekend’s operation against Maduro and quickly move on to other targets while the world is still stunned by the audacity of kidnapping a sitting foreign leader. But any expectations that other countries in the western hemisphere will fall like the proverbial dominoes that Trump’s neo-con predecessors envisioned in the Middle East after the toppling of Saddam Hussein in 2003 are deeply misplaced. And yet the people and leaders of Cuba (long an obsession for Trump’s secretary of state, Marco Rubio), Colombia (the largest supplier of cocaine to the US) and Mexico (the key route through which fentanyl gets into the US) will be deeply worried about their future prospects in a Trumpian world after they got name-checked at Trump’s press conference. The same goes for Greenlanders. Trump has, since his first term in office, repeatedly claimed that the US needs Greenland, which is legally part of EU and Nato member Denmark. And he did so again in the aftermath of the operation against Venezuela, stating over the weekend that the US “need[s] Greenland from the standpoint of national security”. Equally unsettling was the ominous tweet by Maga influencer Katie Miller — the wife of Trump’s influential deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller — showing a map of Greenland in the colours of the US flag, with the caption “SOON”. Much to the dismay of Greenlanders, the US president certainly won’t be discouraged by the meek response from many European officials to the intervention in Venezuela. This, too, is deeply disconcerting, signalling that many of the erstwhile most ardent defenders of international law have given up pretending it matters any more. The EU’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, was first out of the block, with a post that started by pointing out Maduro’s lack of legitimacy as president and ended with an expression of concern for European citizens in Venezuela. She just about managed to squeeze in that “the principles of international law and the UN charter must be respected”. But this sounded like — and almost certainly was — an afterthought. A subsequent joint statement by the EU26 (that is, all member states except Hungary) was similarly equivocal and did not explicitly condemn Washington’s breach of international law. The British prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, focused his statement on the fact that “the UK has long supported a transition of power in Venezuela”, that he “regarded Maduro as an illegitimate President” and would “shed no tears about the end of his regime”. Before closing with his desire for a “safe and peaceful transition to a legitimate government that reflects the will of the Venezuelan people”, the former human rights lawyer briefly reiterated his “support for international law”. The German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, however, wins the prize for prevarication. Not only did he make almost identical comments about Maduro’s lack of legitimacy and the importance of a transition in Venezuela, he also noted that a legal assessment of the US operation is complicated and that Germany will “take its time” to do so. While there was a mixture of enthusiasm and worry across Latin America, the strongest condemnations came from Moscow and Beijing. Russian President Vladimir Putin had signalled his support for Maduro early on in the escalating crisis at the beginning of December. A statement by the Russian foreign ministry initially merely offered support for efforts to resolve the crisis “through dialogue”. In subsequent press releases, Russia took a stronger line, demanding that Washington “release the legitimately elected president of a sovereign country and his spouse.” China similarly expressed concern about the US operation as a “clear violation of international law” and urged Washington to “ensure the personal safety of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, release them at once, stop toppling the government of Venezuela, and resolve issues through dialogue and negotiation.” The Russian position in particular is, of course, deeply ironic, but hardly surprising. To condemn the US operation as an “unacceptable violation of the sovereignty of an independent state” may be correct but it is hardly credible in light of Moscow’s war against Ukraine that has been ongoing for over a decade and involved the illegal occupation and annexation of nearly 20% of Ukraine’s territory. China, on the other hand, can now have its cake and eat it. Taiwan is not widely recognised as a sovereign and independent state, and with regime change now back on the international agenda as a seemingly legitimate endeavour, little is left, from Beijing’s point of view, of the case against reunification, if necessary by force. Trump’s actions against Venezuela may not have accelerated Chinese plans for forceful reunification, but they will have done little to curb them. And for all of China’s righteous indignation about US violations of international law, Beijing will certainly feel emboldened to push territorial claims against its neighbours in the South China Sea even harder. Yet China and Russia also will be acutely aware of their inability to do much about the US operation against Venezuela beyond condemning it publicly. All this points, yet again, to a gradual conversion of American, Chinese and Russian geopolitical interests — to have their own recognised spheres of influence in which they can do as they please. Yet without an obvious or straightforward way to delineate where one sphere of influence begins and another one ends, more instability is likely in areas where the boundaries between different spheres are contested, be that in eastern Europe, the South Caucasus, Central Asia, the Arctic, the Indo-Pacific, the Middle East or Africa. The expectation of a protracted and destabilising carve-up of the world between Washington, Moscow and Beijing also explains the lack of European outrage over Trump’s operation against Venezuela. It signals a European realisation that the days of the liberal international order are well and truly over. Europe will not take a futile stand that would only heighten yet further the risk of being abandoned by Trump and assigned to Putin’s sphere. On the contrary, European leaders will continue to do their utmost to gloss over differences with the US and try to capitalise on an almost throw-away remark by Trump at the end of his press conference on Saturday that he is “not thrilled” with Putin. What matters for Europe now are no longer the niceties of international norms but keeping the US and its mercurial president on side in defending Ukraine and deterring Russia. But such efforts to accommodate the US president are only going to work to some extent. That Trump restated his ambition to annex Greenland for reasons of American security and access to the island’s vast critical minerals resources is bad enough. That he did so in late December between launching his new national security strategy (NSS) and the operation to capture Maduro is an indication that his vision of absolute dominance in the western hemisphere does not end with regime change in Venezuela. The public rebuke of Trump’s claims by the Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, and her Greenlandic counterpart, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, correctly pointed out that annexing Greenland would be neither necessary — Greenland is covered by Nato’s Article 5 — nor legal. But in light of the EU’s general reluctance to condemn Trump’s actions in Venezuela, the Danish pleas sound helpless and smack of double standards. Trump’s latest and, so far, most egregious breach of international law further accelerates the re-ordering of the world. The Trump corollary to the Monroe doctrine, as articulated in the NSS, may have a certain logic to it. But the wider repercussions of US military action against Venezuela illustrate that this operation is unlikely to go down in history as a shining example of the “common-sense and potent restoration of American power and priorities, consistent with American security interests” that the drafters of the NSS envisaged. And beyond the western hemisphere, if the Venezuela operation, as is likely, further encourages Chinese territorial claims in the South China Sea and possibly a move on Taiwan, it will not achieve the NSS aim of preventing military confrontation with America’s most significant geopolitical rival. Nor will further destabilising the transatlantic alliance by threatening the territorial integrity of Denmark over Greenland and possibly abandoning Europe a
