The US attack on Venezuela and the global domino effect

By Adem Kılıç, Political Scientist

The Trump administration’s attack on Venezuela, which disregarded international law, and the arrest of President Nicolás Maduro were not only a move to change the regime, but also the final nail in the coffin of the rules-based global order established after the Second World War.

The military operation carried out by another country to detain a head of state within his own territory shattered the ‘immunity’ shield in international relations.

Although the UN system is based on the principle of the ‘sovereign equality’ of states, this move by the US, following Israel, was also undermined by one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, the ‘guarantor’ of the global system, declaring that international law has now been suspended.

The example of Venezuela showed that the law is only valid for weak actors, while for the powerful it has become a flexible tool.

Potential global domino effect

For China and Russia, the Maduro operation could be an excellent precedent for hardening their agendas in Taiwan and Ukraine.

The Kremlin could use this move by the US to argue that ‘if the US can arrest a “narcoterrorist” threatening its security in a neighboring region, then Russia has the same right to neutralize the “neo-Nazi” Kiev administration threatening its security.’

This situation could reduce international pressure on assassination or direct capture operations targeting Ukraine’s leadership and could lead to the war escalating to a much more advanced stage.

Similarly, China will accept this argument as a precedent in the case of Taiwan.

China views the Venezuela operation as an attempt by the US to establish absolute dominance in its ‘backyard’ and modernize the Monroe Doctrine. According to China, if the US can be so bold in an energy-rich location like Venezuela, China may wish to use the same argument for Taiwan.

Furthermore, China’s multi-billion-dollar energy investment in Venezuela has become hostage to this operation. This could turn China’s process of ending its dollar dependency (de-dollarization) in global trade into a war of survival, and the global economic war could enter a new phase.

It emboldened Israel

For Iran, this operation brought the question of ‘whose turn is it next’ to the fore in its harshest form.

Fearing that what happened to Maduro could be a ‘preview’ of what awaits its own leadership, Iran may decide to maximize its nuclear deterrence capacity.

Meanwhile, Israel announced within minutes that it interpreted this harsh use of force by the US as a ‘green light’.

Israel saw that international law was no longer taken seriously, even by the US.

Israel would now take its already illegal actions to a much more aggressive level with the support of the United States.

The new world order and the return to ‘spheres of influence’

This move was recorded as the official end of the global liberal order and the beginning of the era of ‘Great Powers’ Spheres of Influence’ or, in my words, the ‘Age of Empires’.

With this step, taken to prove its absolute supremacy in the Western Hemisphere, the US also opened up room for Russia and China to take similar steps in their own regions.

The world is no longer a community united around shared values, but has evolved into a fragmented structure where each power applies ‘its own law’ in its own region.

In this environment, where the powerful can bend the law to their own advantage, security for medium and small-scale states can now only be ensured through deterrence, not just alliances.

Consequently, Maduro’s imprisonment in New York has consigned the concepts of ‘predictability’ and ‘law’ in the global system to history, never to return.

Global geopolitics will now be written not in the meetings of international institutions or courtrooms, but directly by power on the ground.