The most important question stemming from America's intervention in Venezuela is not whether it violated international law and norms, but what it reveals about the future of the liberal international order. Contrary to what some commentators say, that order is not collapsing, since its core pillars remain in place and the alternatives to them are still weak. But sustaining it will now involve more frequent discretionary US actions, and it will become increasingly unclear where the thresholds for future interventions lie.
When the perceived limits on state action recede, the meaning of power shifts. The question is no longer what is formally permitted, but how actions will be interpreted by others within the system. Venezuela exposes a growing tension between the American prerogative to pursue unilateral enforcement and the cooperative expectations on which US leadership ultimately depends. Global leadership is not just a state's ability to act; equally important is whether an action reinforces or erodes expectations of future prudence and restraint.
For decades, US power has rested on military and economic predominance, reinforced by dense alliance commitments. This configuration made withdrawal from US-led institutional arrangements costly, even when partners were dissatisfied. American authority, therefore, has rested not on consent alone, but on a structure of dependence created by security guarantees, alliance ties, and control over critical economic and strategic relationships.
But even if institutions can entrench advantage, they cannot offset the reputational and strategic costs of wielding discretionary power. While a single intervention against a weak or isolated state rarely alters the structure of the broader international order, the effects of such actions accumulate as others revise their expectations in response.
Venezuela is distinctive when set against earlier US interventions, such as those in Iraq, Kosovo, Libya, and Syria. These cases may have been controversial and highly contested, but each involved a clear escalation point or “red line” (even if concocted) for the United States – be it a weapons program, mass violence, or an ongoing war. By contrast, the Trump administration based its intervention in Venezuela on an array of concerns such as migration, sanctions evasion, criminal networks, and Chinese influence. At no point was it clear when restraint would give way to coercion and escalation.
Of course, material and ideological interests – oil access, regional influence, and resistance to socialism – have always shaped US policy toward Venezuela. What is new in this case is not the presence of those interests, but the absence of a clearly articulated threshold or emergency to justify coercive action.
Moreover, this uncertainty has been reinforced by parallel moves elsewhere. US President Donald Trump's public threats toward close US partners such as Canada (a NATO member) and Greenland (a territory of Denmark, also a NATO member) undercut the presumption that allied sovereignty is off limits to US bullying.
By capturing and prosecuting Maduro, a sitting foreign leader, the Trump administration is extending US jurisdiction through means short of war. By sidelining Venezuela's own opposition, it is collapsing the distinction between enabling political change and imposing it. And by marginalizing Congress, it has removed a procedural check that once forced red lines to be drawn in advance.
Taken together, these moves replace visible thresholds with discretionary judgment. Before Trump, other countries could watch for a breach and anticipate the US response to it; now they are left guessing. Such is the precedent Venezuela sets.
The US has long benefited from being seen not merely as a rule enforcer, but as the central provider of security and access within an international system that it disproportionately shapes. In this context, occasional departures from rules were tolerated because they were assumed to be one-off episodes. But that assumption is now under strain.
As striking as this US intervention is, so too is the domestic political tolerance for US assertions of discretion across the hemisphere. Casual speculation about territorial claims involving close partners, however implausible in practice, would once have been politically unthinkable in an order anchored by mutual restraint. Not anymore. The White House's public justification – framing the action as routine management against drugs, rivals, and security spillovers, rather than as an exceptional use of force – underscores how normalized the Trumpian discretion-first approach has become.
This matters. Order depends not only on outcomes, but on expectations. If more states begin to anticipate that similar US judgments could be applied against others, even if infrequently, the calculus of participation changes. Most likely, the response to the Venezuela intervention will not be mass defections or public confrontations, but rather hedging, legal insulation, institutional diversification, and quiet efforts to reduce exposure to the US. No coordination is required, and once the process begins (as indeed it already has), individual moves will reinforce one another.
This does not mean that the current order is on the verge of collapse. Systemic change requires credible alternatives, and those remain limited. Rival powers can frustrate US initiatives, but they have not replaced the institutional foundations on which global cooperation rests.
The more difficult question is whether the balance between US enforcement and the provision of global public goods can be sustained. Leadership becomes costlier when coercive tools are used more often than cooperative ones, or when enforcement expands faster than shared benefits. At that point, compliance shifts from voluntary to transactional, and authority begins to resemble domination.
Venezuela sharpens an old question rather than resolving it. The danger now is not that states will openly defect, but that they will quietly adapt to a rogue US. An order can endure under such conditions, but only at a higher cost and with diminishing returns for the dominant power.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2026.www.project-syndicate.org
