The Venezuela Precedent

Quadrant

There was something deeply satisfying about watching Nicolás Maduro being hauled from his palace and deposited in a Brooklyn jail cell.

The man was a monster. Under his rule, Venezuela’s economy contracted by roughly three-quarters – the largest peacetime economic collapse in the Western Hemisphere’s modern history. Nearly eight million Venezuelans fled, more than a quarter of the population he inherited. The country that once boasted Latin America’s highest living standards became a humanitarian catastrophe. In 2024, election observers believe he lost his bid for a third term by more than 30 points. He declared victory anyway.

So, when American special forces extracted him in a surgical operation with minimal casualties, when the dictator who had crushed Venezuelan democracy found himself facing American justice, the temptation was to cheer. One fewer tyrant in the world. What is not to like? Especially when removing Maduro may weaken other regimes that depended on him, unsettle authoritarian governments across the region, and remind America’s adversaries that power can still be used. These are not trivial gains.

But what happened in Caracas on 3 January was not simply a victory over tyranny. It was the clearest demonstration yet that the United States has abandoned the international order it built after 1945, an order designed to prevent great powers from treating smaller nations as objects to be seized, coerced, or remade at will. That order was a liberal achievement, built on the premise that even the strong should be bound by rules. When the leading liberal power abandons it, the system that protects all smaller states, including liberal democracies, begins to unravel.

The Case Against the Liberal Order

An argument now common on the right and among foreign policy realists holds that Venezuela is not a crisis but a correction. The historian Niall Ferguson, writing in The Free Press, is perhaps the most articulate exponent of this view. He described the Venezuela operation as the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, the 1823 assertion that the Western Hemisphere belongs to America’s sphere of influence. Roosevelt’s 1904 corollary went further, claiming the right to intervene wherever Washington judged a government unstable.

Ferguson characterised Donald Trump as a “nineteenth-century figure” who is “refreshingly honest” about economic motives. Where previous administrations cloaked their interventions in the language of democracy promotion, Trump openly discusses seizing Venezuelan oil. Ferguson finds this candour preferable to liberal hypocrisy.

This argument deserves serious engagement. It appeals to a weariness with liberal internationalism’s failures – from Iraq to Libya to the inability to stop Putin in Ukraine. If the rules-based order cannot deliver results, why maintain the pretence?

Ferguson’s case rests on a comparison. When America has not intervened against leftist regimes in Latin America, he argues, the results have been terrible for a very long time. Cuba has suffered under authoritarian rule for more than six decades. Venezuela endured a quarter century of Chavista misrule. By contrast, Chile under Pinochet, despite its brutality, transitioned to democracy and now boasts the strongest economy in the region. The implication: decisive American action, even when it violates international norms, produces better outcomes than hand-wringing adherence to rules that dictators ignore anyway.

There is a version of this argument with genuine intellectual pedigree. The political scientist John Mearsheimer has spent decades arguing that the liberal international order was always a delusion, “bound to fail” because great powers inevitably seek regional hegemony and because nationalism will always trump liberal universalism. In this framework, the Monroe Doctrine is not imperialism but prudent statecraft. Every great power does the same.

Ferguson and Mearsheimer are serious thinkers, and their arguments cannot be dismissed with a wave of the hand. But if their vision sounds persuasive, it is worth asking what it actually entails.

The Template Problem

Trump has made clear that Venezuela is not a one-off but a template. In the days since Maduro’s capture, he has threatened Colombia, predicted Cuba’s government would be “next to fall,” renewed his demands for Greenland, and mused about annexing the Panama Canal. Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned on Sunday that Cuba is “in a lot of trouble,” adding: “If I lived in Havana and I was in the government, I’d be concerned.” Senator Lindsey Graham said Cuba’s “days are numbered.” The administration’s National Security Strategy explicitly commits to “reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American pre-eminence in the Western Hemisphere.”

The “Donroe Doctrine,” as Trump styles it, is the announcement that the Western Hemisphere is America’s sphere of influence, where Washington decides which governments are acceptable and removes those that are not.

Consider what this means in practice. Trump has appointed a special envoy for Greenland, the Governor of Louisiana, whose state gave its name to America’s largest territorial acquisition. The envoy has stated openly that his mission is to make Greenland “part of the United States.” Denmark, a NATO ally, has pointed out that it has no intention of selling sovereign territory. Trump’s response has been to refuse to rule out military force. On Monday, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen warned that if the United States attacks Greenland, “everything stops, including NATO and thus the security that has been established since the end of the Second World War.” Greenland’s Prime Minister was blunter: “No more pressure. No more hints. No more fantasies about annexation.”

Greenland is not governed by a dictator. Its 57,000 inhabitants live under Danish constitutional democracy. If America can pressure Denmark into surrendering the island, the justification cannot be removing a tyrant or fighting drugs. It can only be that America wants Greenland’s resources and strategic position, and America is strong enough to take them.

This is where Ferguson’s “refreshing honesty” becomes something darker. What replaces liberal hypocrisy is not honesty. It is the frank assertion that might makes right.

The Symmetry Problem

Here is the difficulty that the new realism must confront. If America is entitled to a sphere of influence in the Western Hemisphere, then by the same logic Russia is entitled to one in Eastern Europe and China is entitled to one in East Asia.

This is not a hypothetical. It is precisely the argument Vladimir Putin made when he seized Crimea in 2014 and invaded Ukraine in 2022. Russia, he claimed, was simply doing what great powers do: protecting its near abroad from hostile encroachment.

Mearsheimer, to his credit, is consistent on this point. He has argued for years that the West bears responsibility for the Ukraine war because it failed to respect Russia’s legitimate security interests. This position has made him controversial, but it follows logically from his premises. If spheres of influence are how the world works, then Russia’s sphere is as valid as America’s.

Ferguson cannot have it both ways. He cannot celebrate America’s revival of the Monroe Doctrine while condemning Putin’s assertion of Russian prerogatives in Ukraine. The logic is identical. The only difference is which great power is doing the asserting.

And if spheres of influence become the organising principle of world politics, then Taiwan falls within China’s sphere. So do the South China Sea, the Philippines, and perhaps Japan and South Korea. The entire architecture of American alliances in Asia rests on the premise that China does not get to dominate its neighbours simply because it is the regional power. Abandon that premise and the alliances collapse.

The Donroe Doctrine is an invitation to Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping to press their own claims with equal vigour. If Washington no longer believes in the rules-based order, why should Beijing or Moscow? And if those rules no longer protect smaller states, those states will hedge accordingly. Some will seek new patrons. Others will seek new capabilities. The lesson drawn from Ukraine, which surrendered its nuclear arsenal in 1994 in exchange for security assurances that later failed, will not be lost on them.

The Historical Record

There is a reason the post-1945 order was built the way it was. The people who built it remembered what came before.

The politics of 1900 that Ferguson invokes with apparent nostalgia were the politics of competing great powers, spheres of influence, and the treatment of war as a normal instrument of statecraft. That world produced 1914. A regional dispute in the Balkans triggered a cascade of great-power commitments that killed more than sixteen million people. The war happened not because anyone wanted it but because the system of alliances and spheres of influence made escalation automatic.

The lesson the survivors drew was that the great-power system was too dangerous to maintain. They built the League of Nations to replace it. It collapsed within two decades, and the world learned the lesson again at the cost of sixty million more lives. And that was before nuclear proliferation.

After 1945, the architects of the post-war order tried to build something better. The United Nations Charter prohibits aggressive war. NATO and other alliance systems were designed not to carve up spheres of influence but to deter aggression through collective commitment. These were liberal achievements in the deepest sense: institutions built on the premise that even powerful nations should be bound by rules, and that smaller nations have a right to exist free from domination by their larger neighbours. The system was imperfect, often hypocritical, and frequently violated. But it rested on a principle: that the strong should not simply devour the weak.

The principle worked. As Steven Pinker and others have documented, the post-1945 era produced the longest stretch without great-power war in modern history. Deaths from interstate conflict fell by more than ninety per cent compared with the first half of the twentieth century. The number of democracies expanded dramatically. Global poverty declined faster than in any previous period. These gains were not automatic. They rested on institutions, alliances, and norms that constrained the strong and protected the weak. The system was far from perfect. But it delivered results that the politics of 1900 never could.

Trump’s Venezuela operation violated every element of this framework. He acted without congressional authorisation, without UN sanction, without consulting allies, and without any recognised legal basis. His Secretary of State called it a “law enforcement operation,” a justification so thin that it invites any future president to transform any war into an arrest.

Amnesia as Enabler

As David French observed, the ethics of restraint in warfare faces two corrosive forces: raw power and historical amnesia. He is right about both. But his concern points to a danger that extends beyond any single military action.

Restraint is easier to justify when people remember what unrestrained great-power competition actually produces. The generation that built the United Nations and NATO had lived through two world wars. They built the rules-based order not out of naive idealism but out of hard-won understanding that the alternative was worse.

We are now governed by people with no such memory. The catastrophes of the early twentieth century are historical abstractions, material for nostalgic invocations of the “politics of 1900” rather than warnings about where those politics led. This is a strange amnesia for Ferguson in particular. His own books – especially The Pity of War and Colossus – anatomise how great-power competition and imperial overreach produce catastrophe. In an earlier essay I challenged his sanguine view of Trump’s assault on American democratic institutions. I share substantial philosophical ground with Ferguson: a commitment to liberal democracy, individual freedom, and the rule of law. Which makes his enthusiasm for the “politics of 1900” all the more puzzling.

The danger is not that Trump will start a world war next week. It is that he is reconstructing a system in which world wars become possible again. He is not building a new Concert of Europe to manage great-power competition. He is simply demolishing the old structure and asserting American dominance in the rubble. Venezuela is the proof of concept: quick, successful, satisfying. The template is now established. The costs are not yet visible. But the costs of the pre-1914 system were not visible in 1900 either.

Resisting Temptation

Defenders of liberal democracy must resist the temptation to celebrate Maduro’s removal. Not because he did not deserve it. He did. Not because the operation failed. It succeeded. But because methods matter. Methods become precedents. Precedents become templates. And templates become systems.

The rules-based international order was built by people who understood that even flawed rules are better than no rules at all. It was built by people who remembered what happens when great powers compete without constraint.

The question is not whether Maduro deserved his fate. The question is what kind of world we are building when we cheer the method that delivered it.

This column first appeared in Quadrant on 10 January 2026.