After the US attack on Venezuela and capture and extraction of president Nicolas Maduro, one thing is for sure: spheres of influence are back. I’ve suggested before that this idea that great powers exert varying degrees of dominance over their “near abroad” never really went away. Now there’s no doubt.
There has been plenty of commentary that Washington’s move will have delighted Russian President Vladimir Putin, on the grounds that he will no longer have to justify their invasion of Ukraine (“well, you did it too”). Also, that this may spur Chinese President Xi Jinping to act more swiftly to reclaim the island of Taiwan. I don’t believe so.
First, this is because his country’s military may not quite be ready to do so by force. Second, I think a blockade may be a more probable method. Further, a top official in Beijing only recently pledged “peaceful reunification” with what China regards as a renegade province, and it also considers Taiwan’s future to be an internal matter, making comparisons with Venezuela invalid.
In any case, the signs so far are that both those countries – China in particular – are standing with all the other countries around the world who are stressing the importance of sovereignty and non-interference. On Saturday, a foreign ministry spokesman said that China “strongly condemns the US’s blatant use of force against a sovereign state and action against its president. Such hegemonic acts of the US seriously violate international law and Venezuela’s sovereignty”.
On Monday, Russia’s permanent representative to the UN Security Council stated: “We firmly condemn the act of armed aggression by the United States against Venezuela in breach of all norms of international law.” Vasily Nebenzya ended by saying he hoped the US leadership “will begin to truly recognise the sovereignty of other states, rather than deposing inconvenient regimes”.
Some have reacted to the US attack by declaring international law dead, or saying that it “does not exist”, as did Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic. “No rules are valid anymore,” he said earlier this week. That may be understandable as an immediate reaction. But taking a defeatist attitude and just accepting that might will be right from here on is not. International law is the hill on which the rest of the world must take a stand.
There are scholars who have long argued that “international law” is an unenforceable fiction, and columnists like myself have complained about the decades of double standards, whereby “American exceptionalism” has meant that the US and its allies can flout the rules whenever they want. But it is imperative that we still hold in common some normative ideals, even if they’re not always adhered to. The Danish MEP Henrik Dahl offered an analogy a couple of days ago: “Even if one does not tell the full truth at all times, the norm of truthfulness is a good thing.”
So, many countries can live with the idea of spheres of influence, not least because acknowledging their presence is just a statement of reality. But the paradigm of global governance still has to be one in which there are rules, not one dominated by “just power, stated plainly”, as The National’s Mohamad Ali Harisi wrote in a powerful column over the weekend.
This is what all the countries who condemned the US’s undoubtedly illegal actions – there was a long list – and all those associated with Brics, the Non-Aligned Movement, the G77, the Global South and the few western leaders with the spine to publicly chide US President Donald Trump need to fight for.
We can deal with a state of affairs in which rules are sometimes bent slightly, and some countries just do have far more influence than others. The world is not the UN General Assembly in which every member has the same vote. The idea that giants like India or China only have the same weight on the international stage as, say, Tonga or Laos, and should treat each other as equals, is a fantasy.
But we cannot have a world in which variants of the “Donroe Doctrine” hold sway. Even the UK’s Margaret Thatcher – a formidable Cold Warrior – would have been against that. After the US administration under then-president Ronald Reagan invaded the small Caribbean island of Grenada to topple a communist government in 1983, Mr Reagan assumed his British counterpart would be happy. She was not. Grenada’s head of state was Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II. And neither lady had been informed by the US.
As I’m grateful to the British radio host and author Iain Dale for pointing out, Thatcher then said on a BBC World phone in: “We in the western democracies use our force to defend our way of life. We do not use it to walk into other people’s countries, independent sovereign territories … If you are pronouncing a new law that wherever communism reigns against the will of the people, even though it’s happened internally, there the United States shall enter, then we are going to have really terrible wars in the world.”
In 2023, I wrote that then-US president Joe Biden had killed off the so-called “international rules-based order” that he was fond of promoting through his unconditional support for Israel while it devastated Gaza. That “order” claimed to be universal, although it was really just a cover for insisting that only western values and governance were valid. I don’t mourn its passing. Yes, we do need a new rules-based order, one in which the UN and other international institutions better reflect the globe of 2026, not 1946, when the first UN General Assembly was held.
But some fundamentals must persist. Principles of sovereignty, and no use of military force against another state without authorisation from the UN Security Council (unless in self-defence), are just two. There are many others embodied in international law that just about all states in good standing could accept, regardless of their ideologies or systems of government. The alternative would be “that the law is optional, and force is the true arbiter of international order”, as Venezuela’s UN ambassador said on Monday. I agree with him that that would be “devastating”.
