Venezuela and the Myth of a Rules-Based World

The Objective, January 6, 2026

Europe is outraged by Venezuela because it still believes—or pretends to believe—that the world was once governed by rules.

Europe has reacted to the U.S. intervention in Venezuela with a flurry of indignation. Irritated lamentations over the supposed end of an international order many describe as “rules-based.” As if such an order had ever truly existed. Or, worse still, as if it had ever existed for everyone.

One can only hope that Venezuela regains a functioning democracy: free elections, separation of powers, genuine alternation in office. But wishing for a good outcome does not require swallowing false diagnoses or clinging to comforting myths.

The central myth is that, until yesterday, we lived in a “world of rules”: an international system governed by shared norms, accepted mechanisms of arbitration, and a more or less voluntary self-restraint by the great powers. Ana Palacio recently described it as a “system of shared international rules and accepted mechanisms of arbitration—though not always observed.”

It is a useful fiction—but a fiction nonetheless. And it remains so even if the word “not always” suggests an episodic flaw rather than a structural one. In reality, there has never been a rules-based international order as a guiding principle. What existed in the past, as it does today, are agreements among the truly powerful to divide spheres of influence. Rules have often served to dress those agreements in a legal and moral veneer, palatable for domestic audiences—especially in societies that have ceased to be powerful, as in much of Europe.

Europe should know this better than anyone. In 1945, half of Europe was consigned to the Soviet sphere—not by mistake or distraction, but by calculation. From the Baltic to the Black Sea, more than a hundred million Europeans were excluded from the supposed “free world” for over four decades. Where were the rules then? Which arbiter intervened? Here lies Europe’s great hypocrisy: the cherished rules-based world coexisted, without embarrassment, with the negotiated subjugation of a large part of Europe. In effect, it condemned that long hundred million Europeans to lives more confined than those endured by today’s Venezuela under Maduro.

Spain, too, should remember this. The 1953 agreements with the United States were decisive in stabilizing Franco’s regime. There was little moral anguish elsewhere in Europe. Not then either. The parallel with present-day Venezuela is uncomfortable.

Cuba offers another clear example. From 1962 onward it was frozen as a stable dictatorship within a division of spheres of influence. That same arrangement displaced real conflicts—bloody and unrestrained—to the so-called Third World. There, almost anything went.

Hence the nostalgic overvaluation of the past and the exaggeration of the present. Each of Donald Trump’s clumsy moves is cast as a historic rupture, when what is new is not the facts but the rhetoric. He did not invent the “law of the strongest”; he merely states it plainly, depriving us of the comfort of pretending it does not exist.

This self-deception was not exclusively European. It also took root across broad swathes of the United States. For decades, part of its political and intellectual elite interpreted and presented the country not as a conventional empire, but as the disinterested guarantor of a quasi-legal order. That self-image did not merely limit America’s ability to act effectively; in many cases it made its actions erratic and even harmful. By shying away from the language and the costs of power, the United States ended up exercising power less effectively.

This web of imperfect rules may have reduced uncertainty and facilitated globalization. But, at best, it did so only as long as it rested on a balance of power that no one challenged. The mistake was to treat rules as a substitute for the power needed to sustain them. When rules cease to complement power and instead become an alibi for not exercising it, they stop ordering the world and begin to disarm those who believe in them.

When that balance breaks down, not only do the rules fail; the language that once disguised their fragility collapses as well. Theodore Roosevelt advised speaking softly while carrying a big stick. Trump does not speak softly: he brandishes the stick—and often wields it clumsily.

What troubles many Europeans, however, seems to be less the substance than the tone, the manner more than the content. Perhaps because it prevents them from remaining in denial about how the world actually works. It may be Trump’s brazenness, rather than his policies, that offends most. What is obscene is not power itself, but its rhetoric stripped of euphemism. It is not so much what he does as how he says it. And that exposes the intellectual fragility of those who believed the stick had disappeared.

For decades, that hypocritical language served very concrete purposes. It provided a pretext for under-spending on defense. It allowed Europe to outsource its security to the United States while cultivating a salon-style moral superiority and an anaesthetizing welfare state. It justified self-destructive energy policies, as if scarcity did not exist. And it sustained an entire industry of international organizations, experts and commentators devoted to managing, reinterpreting and redefining rules that rarely decided anything of substance—at most, they varnished for Western public opinion decisions already taken in terms of power.

That set-piece is now collapsing, and the confusion is real. But it would be a mistake to confuse its collapse with the onset of tragedy. The world has not suddenly become brutal under Trump; it has merely become a little less hypocritical. Europe now throws up its hands as it discovers that the real world runs on power, not on rhetoric.

The uncomfortable question is different. If the world was never governed by rules, why was it so useful to believe that it was? Perhaps because it helped Europe digest its loss of relevance. Because it turned strategic errors into unavoidable fate. Because it postponed uncomfortable debates about dependence, defense and real power.

Venezuela today acts as a mirror of our illusions. It reminds us that international politics is not a legal seminar, but a contest of interests; that morality without capacity is mere literature; and that rules, when they exist, are usually the result—not the cause—of a balance of forces.

Accepting this does not mean abandoning democracy or the rule of law. It means building them on less naïve foundations: less moral rhetoric and more political responsibility. Europe can continue to shelter behind rules it is unwilling to uphold. Or it can—and must—begin to equip itself with the power that makes such rules possible.

English version prepared with ChatGPT-5.2