What happened in Venezuela should not be interpreted as an accident, nor as a single isolated operation.
It is more plausibly a fracture in the system.
To understand it, we need to shift our gaze from the tactical to the structural level: what emerges is not a contingent decision, but a possible implicit reformulation of the way the United States conceives the use of force, sovereignty, and the relationship between power and international order.
In this sense, the action against Nicolás Maduro’s regime should be placed within the broader global strategy of the Donald Trump administration and viewed in continuity with other recent, rapid, and limited US military operations that have largely remained under the radar in Western public debate: the December 13 bombings of ISIS positions in Syria, and those of December 24–25 against terrorist infrastructure in Nigeria, conducted in coordination with the local government to stop kidnappings and massacres against Christian minorities.
The chronological sequence of these episodes is not accidental. It suggests that, in the view of the current US administration, the use of military force is not being normalized, but rather reduced to a selective function: concrete objectives, realistic goals, compressed timelines, minimization of systemic fallout.
From this perspective, US foreign policy is an explicit exercise of sovereignty, in which the assertion of national interests is not separated from the defense of democracy, the fight against terrorism, and opposition to regimes that oppress fundamental human rights.
The discontinuity with the past lies in the fact that these principles are no longer delegated to abstract international law or automatic humanitarian interventionism, but are subordinated to the existence of concrete conditions of feasibility.
These conditions imply, first and foremost, an effective and non-ideological understanding of local societies, and therefore the rejection of universalistic schemes applied mechanically.
Recalibration of deterrence: the return of will
We are not facing a proxy war.
The action in Venezuela—as it is presented and narrated—is intended to be a political and symbolic decapitation, not a prolonged management of the conflict. In this sense, the message is not regional, but systemic.
It is a way of reaffirming that deterrence does not live only on abstract balances, but also on demonstrated will, and that certain red lines exist only if someone is willing to enforce them.
Here we see the crossing of a threshold that for years had upheld the implicit international order: one in which force was systematically concealed behind procedure, and sovereignty translated into multilateral language.
The signal that emerges today is more direct and less ambiguous – and precisely for this reason more destabilizing for the previous architecture.
Concrete sovereignty vs. global proceduralism
A second level of interpretation concerns the relationship between power and institutions.
For years, part of the international order has functioned as a mechanism for suspending responsibility: illegitimate regimes, criminal networks, and apparatuses hostile to the West have learned to use international law as a shield, not as a constraint.
In this light, what we are seeing can be interpreted as the overcoming of the procedural illusion:
not everything that is formally legal is substantially just; not everything that is multilateral is neutral.
Here, the distinction between abstract law and concrete sovereignty emerges strongly: not a denial of the rules as such, but a rejection of a system that has progressively transformed them into instruments of impunity.
Latin America: Milei, Kast, and the end of ideological misunderstanding
If this reading is correct, the main effect of the operation in Venezuela is not military, but political.
Latin America is today one of the theaters in which the crisis of the globalist paradigm is most clearly manifested.
The political statements of Javier Milei in Argentina and José Antonio Kast in Chile do not represent simple electoral alternations, but ideological ruptures: an explicit rejection of 21st-century socialism, authoritarian populism, and anti-Western ambiguity masked as strategic autonomy.
This context also includes the positions taken by former Colombian presidents such as Álvaro Uribe Vélez and Iván Duque Márquez, who have openly called for Maduro’s removal manu militari.
The political reality is clear: ideological authoritarianism is no longer perceived as a factor of stability, but as a source of vulnerability. Strategic ambiguity, long tolerated, is losing its protective function.
The immediate test will be the management of the post-Maduro transition and the role of Venezuelan citizens; in the medium term, it will be the impact on Cuba and Nicaragua and the results in the fight against drug trafficking.
Anti-globalism as a cultural framework
Finally, there is an ideological and cultural dimension that cannot be ignored.
For years, a certain globalist interpretation has argued that the West should limit itself so as not to appear hegemonic, accepting increasing compromises on legality, borders, security, and responsibility. In the name of procedural stability, the substantial erosion of order has often been tolerated. What we are seeing today can be interpreted as a reaction to that phase: not a rejection of rules, but a rejection of a normative globalism detached from power, incapable of distinguishing between legitimate sovereignty and predatory power. In this sense, the resurgence of anti-globalism is not isolation, but the re-politicization of sovereignty.
Why Venezuela is not an imperial precedent
It is therefore an analytical error to believe that the operation against Maduro constitutes a green light for the ambitions of Russia in Ukraine or China in Taiwan. In Venezuela, the United States is not pursuing territorial annexation. Moscow and Beijing, on the contrary, openly claim imperial conquest.
The difference is not one of form but of substance: between limited intervention and imperial ambition, between concrete sovereignty and the denial of the political existence of others.
We are not yet in a new Cold War
We are in a phase of reflective shift, in which the great powers are reconsidering what they are willing to tolerate and what they are not. The trajectory is neither guaranteed nor risk-free. But one thing is clear: an order based exclusively on abstract norms, disconnected from the ability to enforce them, is showing obvious cracks.
Whether Europe recognizes it or not, history has accelerated.
And interpreting it correctly is already a form of power.