With an equally spectacular and successful military precision intervention in Venezuela, Donald Trump put into practice in the first days of 2026 what he talked about in 2025: the US is the boss in the Western Hemisphere. With the illegal kidnapping of a foreign head of state, Trump is sidelining the international rules-based order. Even more clearly than before, at the beginning of 2026, a world will emerge in which great powers rule their own region and imperialism becomes the norm again.
Disbelief and uncertainty prevailed in Caracas this weekend after a team of American soldiers captured the ruthless autocrat Nicolás Maduro and his wife, just before he wanted to close the steel door of a safe room in his heavily secured residence. But the Venezuelan capital is not the only place where residents have reason to worry. If Trump temporarily takes power in Venezuela, how safe is the regime in Cuba? And didn’t he also include Greenland in his sphere of influence, even though that island, which geographically belongs to North America, is part of the Danish kingdom?
The political shockwave does not stop at the Western Hemisphere. If Trump, an autocratic leader in a democratic guise, behaves like a modern-day imperialist in his part of the world, what prevents full-blooded autocrats in the rest of the world from pursuing their own dreams of expansion in their region?
There is a direct line from Caracas to Taipei and Kyiv
There is a direct line from Caracas to Taipei and Kyiv. If Trump is chasing oil in Venezuela, what argument does he have to prevent Chinese leader Xi Jinping from definitively conquering Taiwan? And how does he convince Russian leader Vladimir Putin during peace talks to settle for only twenty percent of Ukraine, approximately the area that Russia has conquered so far?
Tectonic plates
Shifts in the world order never happen in 24 hours. They are slow processes, more comparable to the shifting of tectonic plates. China’s political and economic rise has been a consciously planned process for years. Xi became president in 2013. Putin’s foreign aggression already started with the invasion of Georgia in 2008. The United States already put its own interests first in Trump’s first term (2017-2021) without reservation and without shame – even if this was at the expense of others.
After the World Wars, rules were drawn up by mutual agreement that countries had to adhere to. It became a basic norm that you do not invade another country unless the world community gives the green light to do so, in the form of a UN resolution. States are highly sovereign, citizens enjoy inalienable individual rights. It became an idealistic order, a system of norms and legal rules, complete with courts to tackle offenders.
A peaceful, safe and just world is only possible if the rule of law prevails, rather than the law of the strongest
The UN forms the core of the post-war order. It was Annalena Baerbock, the former German Foreign Minister, who, in her role as President of the UN General Assembly, chose clear words. “A peaceful, safe and just world is only possible if the rule of law prevails, rather than the law of the strongest.”
The post-war order was handicapped from birth. The norms were Western, democratic norms. The system was not only devised, but also supported by the US and Europe. As other countries such as China became more powerful, that system came under fire. Your standards are not ours, was the message from Moscow and Beijing. Moreover, the US regularly flouted its own standards, not only in its own Western Hemisphere, but also in Iraq, for example. The US not only ruined its own reputation in the world, but also undermined the post-war ideal.
Guardian of the UN
Even though the US itself did not adhere to the rules, it often did the system a favor by supporting it at least with words and money. That support is also withering. Trump made it clear in his first term that he did not aspire to the role of leader of the Western world and guardian of the UN at all. Now he is actively working against the International Criminal Court, which the US does not recognize. And he is squeezing the UN financially. The American contribution to UN humanitarian programs will drop from 17 billion in 2022 to 2 billion this year, it emerged last week.
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China said it was “deeply shocked” by the unacceptable behavior of the hegemonic power US in Venezuela and called on Washington to return to respect for the UN Charter. That sounded nice, but the same China fired missiles into the waters around Taiwan as part of an exercise last week. And Xi misses no opportunity to make it clear that foreign interference in the Taiwan issue will not be tolerated.
Russia has lost an ally with the departure of Maduro. When the US visibly increased pressure on Venezuela in recent weeks, Moscow barely lifted a finger, although Russia issued strong condemnation once Maduro was arrested. The US must recognize Venezuela’s right to self-determination, the Russian Foreign Ministry said. In the meantime, Putin appears to have no intention of making any concessions in peace talks on Ukraine. In Russian eyes, Ukraine has no right to determine its own future.
Concrete rot
Moscow has also been thinking in terms of spheres of influence for a long time. Russia expert Fiona Hill worked as an adviser in the White House during Trump’s first term. She later stated in the US Congress that Moscow had already made it clear in 2019 that if Russia was not allowed to interfere in Venezuela, the US had no business in Ukraine.
A world divided into spheres of influence, with great powers that only pay lip service to international law and multilateral consultation, is a world in which the weak are left behind. For European countries that cannot stand on their own two feet militarily, concrete rot in the international order is a serious problem. After the intervention in Venezuela, European leaders pointed out the importance of international law, but did not condemn the US in so many words. The US is simply needed to prop up Ukraine and keep Russia at bay.
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