Introduction: the return of an old logic
The capture of Nicolás Maduro by United States forces is not merely another episode in Venezuela’s prolonged crisis. It is a geopolitical event with continental and global implications. It marks the explicit return of military intervention as a legitimate instrument of hemispheric order, the reactivation of the Monroe Doctrine as operational practice, and a visible fracture in the post–Cold War international system.
What is at stake is not only the future of Venezuela, but the meaning of sovereignty in Latin America and the form which power takes in a world where rules are increasingly subordinated to force.
From isolationism to strategic reorientation
For years, many analysts interpreted Donald Trump’s arrival as the symptom of a new American isolationism. A crude, noisy withdrawal, but a withdrawal nonetheless: fewer wars, less institutional engineering, less of an obsession with exporting democracy. To some extent, that did occur. There were no prolonged campaigns such as Iraq or Afghanistan.
But the mistake was to confuse global retrenchment with imperial renunciation.
What we are witnessing is something else: a strategic reorientation. The United States may tolerate losing relative positions in Eurasia, competing with China in the Pacific, or managing its erosion vis-à-vis Russia in Eastern Europe. What it cannot accept is losing effective control over its immediate periphery. Latin America is not a secondary theatre, it is the structural ring of American power. When that ring cracks, the centre trembles as well.
The Monroe Doctrine, stripped of its disguise
Formulated in 1823 by John Quincy Adams, attributed to James Monroe and summarised in the famous phrase “America for the Americans,” the Monroe Doctrine was presented as a shield against European colonialism. In reality, it inaugurated a far more durable logic: no empire consolidates itself without first dominating its immediate surroundings.
“Manifest destiny” was the ideology; hemispheric subordination was the outcome.
According to the US Congressional Research Service, this doctrine resulted in at least 27 direct military interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Haiti, Nicaragua, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Panama, Chile: the list is not an anomaly but a pattern. The region served as a laboratory of domination long before similar methods were exported elsewhere.
Venezuela is the doctrine’s twenty-first-century incarnation.
Venezuela as a contemporary laboratory of power
The New York Times revelations about contacts between US officials and Venezuelan military officers seeking to overthrow Nicolás Maduro were not a scandal but a confirmation of routine practice. Washington did not deny them. The National Security Council spoke of a “peaceful and orderly transition to democracy,” the standard euphemism for regime change.
The familiar justifications followed: humanitarian disaster, economic collapse, mass migration, drug trafficking, authoritarianism. All contain elements of truth. Venezuela is experiencing a severe social catastrophe, worsened by sanctions, the structural failures of Chavismo, the collapse of oil prices, and a political leadership incapable of rebuilding consensus.
Yet one fact remains politically inconvenient: Maduro was elected, with low turnout but with millions of real votes. This is not a technicality; it is the core issue. The United States does not debate Latin American legitimacy, it manages it.
The military operation that ended with Maduro’s capture—mirroring the 1989 invasion of Panama against Manuel Noriega—marks a decisive threshold: selective bombings in Caracas, indictments in US courts, forced extradition, a domestic state of emergency. Hard power, without intermediaries.
Milei and Argentina: voluntary alignment in a fractured hemisphere
This new phase also reshapes regional alignments. Argentina under President Javier Milei offers a revealing example.
Milei has openly defined the United States and Israel as Argentina’s only strategic partners, downgraded regional integration mechanisms and embraced an ideological narrative that frames Washington not merely as an ally but as a civilisational reference point. In the context of the Venezuelan intervention, this positioning is not neutral.
It signals a return to a pattern abandoned after the early 2000s: voluntary subordination as foreign policy. Not forced alignment, but enthusiastic alignment. Not dependence disguised as pragmatism, but dependence justified as moral clarity.
In practical terms, this means Argentina renounces any aspiration to strategic autonomy in exchange for symbolic proximity to power. It also means accepting, implicitly, that sovereignty in the region is conditional: respected when convenient, but suspended when necessary.
Milei’s discourse celebrates the West as a community of values. But the events in Venezuela suggest a different reality: a community of hierarchies. Those at the centre decide; those on the margins adapt.
Decline of rules, return of empire
What has happened in Venezuela exceeds the continental dimension. It points to a deeper transformation: the erosion of the international order constructed after 1945 and reformulated after 1991.
For three decades, US hegemony was exercised through institutions, legal language, humanitarian rhetoric, selective multilateralism, and controlled interventions. Force was real but filtered through procedure.
That architecture is now collapsing.
The extraterritorial capture of a sitting head of state, the imposition of US criminal jurisdiction, and open military action in Latin America mark the return of imperial rule without legal camouflage.
This is not strength; it is fatigue. When a dominant power abandons norms and governs primarily through coercion, it reveals that its capacity to organise consent has diminished.
The emerging system is not a harmonious multipolar order but a fragmented landscape of hard centres and vulnerable peripheries. Power is redistributed at the top and concentrated downward in brutal form.
While Washington acts in Caracas, Beijing sets deadlines over Taiwan, Moscow entrenches itself in Ukraine, and the Middle East is periodically reorganised by air strikes. International law persists as vocabulary, not as restraint.
Sovereignty as exception
Venezuela is not an anomaly, it is a warning.
Maduro’s fall—regardless of any judgment about his government—signals that peripheral states possess no guaranteed sovereignty in a world of declining hegemony and rising coercion. Autonomy is temporary. Legality is ornamental. Security is externalised.
Thucydides described this logic twenty-five centuries ago: the strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must.
The Monroe Doctrine has returned not as a slogan but as practice. And with it returns an older, harsher, and more honest order—one in which power is not justified, only exercised.
Latin America has been put in its place.
The Valdai Discussion Club was established in 2004. It is named after Lake Valdai, which is located close to Veliky Novgorod, where the Club’s first meeting took place.
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