Maduro’s Abduction and the Future Global Order

The build-up of United States naval assets off the coast of Venezuela in the days preceding President Nicolás Maduro’s abduction was widely perceived through a logic of denial, often summed up by the reaction: “Surely they will not actually do it.” A comparable affective pattern could be observed before the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, when the massing of Russian troops near the border was repeatedly read as a bluff rather than as preparation for war. This recurring disbelief rests on a persistent, and often under-examined, trust in state elites, presidents, parties and ruling classes. It presupposes, at a minimum, that decision-makers in powerful states possess a kind of higher knowledge about what they are doing. Such an assumption is better understood as a form of psychological projection than as an inference from the structural logics of capital, military power or international politics. At most, it corresponds to the logic of political marketing, which has become increasingly difficult to sustain as global crises accumulate.

In the wake of the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the build-up to the US operation in Venezuela, Western political communication has appeared less as neutral “information” and more as self-referential marketing of “the West”. Current news cycles are dominated by statements from President Donald Trump, who justifies the attack and abduction by invoking an alleged transnational network of narcotics traffickers centred on Maduro. The same political and media actors who rejected characterisations of Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocidal now present Maduro as a singularly dangerous “narcoboss” whose removal by force and rendition to the United States is framed as the only viable option. Perhaps the liberal media would have felt more comfortable if Trump had simply used the age-old excuse of “bringing democracy to Third World countries” instead of openly stating his aims. However, regardless of the type of excuse, under the United Nations Charter, such an operation could only be lawful if the United States demonstrated that its territorial integrity or political independence faced an armed attack or comparable imminent threat – a standard that is not met by the existence of alleged Venezuelan drug networks. Alternatively, the use of crossborder force would have required an explicit mandate from the UN Security Council, which was neither sought nor obtained. In addition, the legal basis for the exercise of jurisdiction by a US federal court in New York over a sitting foreign head of state remains highly contested, given wellestablished norms on headofstate immunity and sovereign equality.

From the perspective of public international law, then, the operation is not merely a politically controversial episode or a “technical” breach, but a serious repudiation of  the international legal order . Some commentators have responded by proposing that we have entered a “postsovereignty” era, though such terminology risks obfuscating rather than clarifying the uneven ways in which sovereignty is undermined or selectively suspended. Sovereignty has never been absolute or evenly distributed; Trump’s actions do not abolish it everywhere, but rather illustrate that for certain states and actors it can be set aside without meaningful consequence, while remaining operative for others. On any plausible reading of the relevant norms, Maduro’s forcible seizure and transfer to US territory can be characterised as kidnapping at an international scale, and as such sits uneasily with both the UN Charter and basic principles of nonintervention and nonabduction.

The implications are therefore significant. A permanent member of the UN Security Council has undertaken a form of “state terrorism” and 'piracy', or, at minimum, an unlawful use of force against another sovereign state, without incurring sanctions or even serious diplomatic penalties from most of its allies. This follows closely on its diplomatic and military support for Israel’s decimation of Gaza that numerous jurists, UN officials and human rights organisations have assessed as meeting the legal criteria for genocide.

However, what is significant about US actions is the way those in power have tried to justify them, if at all. As I mentioned, the narrative of “bringing back democracy” has obviously been thrown out of the window. However, one could be forgiven for thinking that, in its wake, the “rationality of power” would finally be laid bare. Most of us would expect to see the true desires of those in power revealed as naked, fixed, and coldly calculated; yet this, too, appears to be missing.

In 2010, Venezuela was producing more than 3 million barrels per day (mb/d); by late 2025 production had fallen to roughly 0.9–1.1 mb/d, less than 1% of global output and a fraction of its historical level. In comparison, the US state of North Dakota produces more oil than Venezuela: around 1.15-1.2 mb/d. Take also into consideration the collapse in the price of oil, which is currently set at about 60 dollars per barrel, and the “oil narrative” suddenly becomes highly questionable. As Daniel Chavez already stated, the current US operation in Venezuela can’t be understood under a simple “war for oil” narrative. 

According to Chavez, “the material reality of Venezuelan crude further complicates any straightforward extraction narrative. Three-quarters of the 300 billion barrel reserve consists of extra-heavy Orinoco crude: bituminous, viscous, heavily sulphurous, and prohibitively expensive to extract and refine. Global oil majors built the US Gulf Coast’s complex refineries specifically to process this grade, but at realistic long-term prices, the economics are punishing. When oil prices peaked during 2005-2014, Venezuela inflated its “proved reserves” on paper through optimistic assumptions that have since collapsed. Today, with institutional capacity eroded by underinvestment and purges, reconstruction would demand $185 billion over 16 years and complete confidence from international capital, unlikely under any managed transition.” 

This has led Venezuela to seek outside help, and one of the countries which heeded the call was China. Externally, Venezuela is deeply entangled in creditenergy circuits structured around China. Since the mid-2000s, Beijing has extended tens of billions of dollars in “loans for oil” arrangements, under which oil revenues were pledged as collateral and payments were channelled through Chinese accounts to service debt. As Venezuela’s repayment capacity eroded, Chinese institutions repeatedly rescheduled maturities and relaxed minimum shipment requirements, effectively turning once attractive resourcebacked loans into a complex exercise in damage control. For Beijing, the US attack raises not only political questions, but also concerns about the security of this financial exposure, prompting regulators to demand detailed reporting from Chinese banks on their Venezuelan portfolios.

This combination of collapsing output, high extraction costs and entangled creditor relations suggests that the crude “oilgrab” thesis – understood in the narrow sense of a costeffective, easily monetised resource seizure – does not fully account for the timing and form of the intervention. Rather, as several observers have noted, Trump’s rhetoric about “taking the oil” appears to draw on an earlier repertoire of US imperial selfimagining, associated with the 1950s and 1960s, when military supremacy and access to strategic resources were framed as almost frictionless extensions of American power. The only thing placing limits on US power at the time was, of course, the Soviet Union. The justification of “bringing in democracy” was, among other things, meant to save oilproducing countries from falling into the hands of US enemies, Soviet communists foremost among them. Now that the threat of communism or any serious international backlash has long since faded in the eyes of US elites, no such pretext is needed, and their imagination is free to roam far more openly. In that sense, through the Venezuelan operation, what Trump and his cabinet have done is less a rational response to energy market conditions than an attempt to stage a particular vision of US hegemony that is increasingly out of step with the realities of the global political economy.

This becomes clearer if one situates the episode within a longer history of US foreign policy. The United States today does not occupy the same uncontested position it enjoyed in the early Cold War, and Venezuela’s oil is no longer a dormant prize awaiting simple transfer to US consumers and the Pentagon through a swift military intervention. Instead, what emerges is a ruling class attempting to reenact an earlier script of domination – one in which it enjoyed not only material advantages but also the perceived “freedom” to use force with limited legal or geopolitical constraint. That imagined freedom included the ability to attack other states and expropriate their resources with minimal international backlash. 

Whether or not the complete freedom to subjugate other states without any repercussions ever truly existed is beside the point. In this symbolic universe, the Venezuelan operation brings together three elements: a personalised executive, segments of the oil industry and the military apparatus. This combination exemplifies a fusion of economic and coercive power that has long been central to critical theories of ruling classes in capitalist states. One could even speak, without much exaggeration, of a "perfect ruling class". Trump’s project points toward a mode of rule in which the state is increasingly treated as an extension of corporate balance sheets – not only in the United States, but across the Western Hemisphere. What is at stake is less the classic distinction between “public” and “private” than the subordination of public authority to the priorities of a narrow coalition of firms, creditors and political entrepreneurs. The case of Venezuela thus reveals far more clearly how contemporary US elites perceive their own role in global affairs, or how they wish to perceive it: as elites capable of unilateral, exemplary action unconstrained by legal or multilateral frameworks. 

However, it is here that the fiction guiding Trump and his staff begins to generate real frictions in power relations across the Western Hemisphere, in particular in relationship to international law and military alliances such as NATO. Historically, even at moments of intense Cold War confrontation, US policymakers tended to maintain at least a minimal “surface” of legal justification – however tenuous – to shield interventions from overtly appearing as lawless aggression, partly out of concern for escalation with the Soviet Union. In contrast, the current operation is notable for the extent to which legal rationalisations appear ex post and fragmented, while the core decision to use force proceeds with open disregard for Charterbased constraints. As several legal commentators have argued, this marks not only a breach of the law but a denigration of the idea that law meaningfully binds great powers at all.

At the same time, Trump’s repeated references to Cuba, Colombia, Mexico and even Greenland – an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark, a NATO member – extend the implicit threat beyond Venezuela. For European governments, this raises uncomfortable questions. On the one hand, they are deeply integrated into USled security structures and have recently agreed, under intense US pressure, to increase military spending to a benchmark of 5% of GDP by 2035. Meeting this commitment would, according to some estimates, bring NATO’s annual military expenditure close to three trillion US dollars, requiring an extra two to three trillion dollars. On the other hand, the possibility that a US administration might openly contemplate coercive action against or around territories under European sovereignty exposes internal fractures within the alliance and highlights the asymmetry of power and vulnerability between its members.

From the standpoint of what is often termed the “collective West,” the Venezuelan intervention thus has a double effect. First, it implicates European states in a controversial and arguably unlawful use of force, whether they wish it or not, due to alliance structures and diplomatic alignments. Second, it introduces a new level of uncertainty about the reliability and intentions of the United States itself as the central pillar of the security architecture on which they rely. Public statements by European leaders, including those of Denmark and Germany, that an attack on Greenland or Denmark would trigger NATO’s collective defence commitments illustrate both their formal obligations and their latent concern that their main external threat may now originate from within the NATO alliance. As of recently, the UK has been debating the deployment of a NATO mission to Greenland in order to protect the Arctic Circle, while the European Parliament has been discussing the possibility of freezing trade deals with the US should Trump decide to materialise his claims. Thus, a major rupture in the Western Hemisphere may arise precisely from attempts by any single actor to dominate the West as a whole. However, rather than a bug, this should be seen as a feature of both US and European politics, long governed by a narrow circle of unchecked elites. Their own erratic behaviour is exactly what their system has produced. And, after Venezuela, it is a dangerous indicator of where the future of politics may lie if nothing is changed.

In this light, the US attack on Venezuela is not an isolated episode, but a lens on broader transformations of global order. Interpreted narrowly, Trump’s moves can be read as a hybrid of resource politics, domestic signalling against leftwing opponents, and strategic communication directed at rivals such as China. Interpreted more broadly, they reveal how US elites continue to act on the assumption that they can exercise “exceptional” powers –abrogating international law, abducting foreign leaders, threatening allies – without fundamentally jeopardising their own position. Yet that very assumption risks becoming selfundermining, as it erodes legal norms, alienates partners and normalises practices that other states may later emulate.

Finally, the Venezuelan case invites a reconsideration of widespread beliefs about the competence and rationality of ruling classes. The persistent idea that elites “know what they are doing,” and that they possess superior knowledge about how to manage complex crises, has long functioned as a stabilising myth in liberal and conservative political cultures alike. After all, years of neoliberal propaganda have done much to sway public opinion into presupposing that wealthy elites would simply reinvest in society and make everyone better off. Instead, from Elon Musk to Peter Thiel and Trump himself, the US millionaire (and billionaire) class has chosen to focus on building or acquiring territories where they can construct utopias in their own image. From “Praxis,” a modernday “Sparta” based on AI and blockchain that its backers want to establish in the Mediterranean, complete with a CEOking, to Musk’s dreams of colonising Mars and mining the Moon, this current strand of US elites is a striking example of what happens when state power meets unhinged private ambition.

The decision to abduct a foreign head of state in clear tension with international law, in a context where the material gains are highly uncertain and the reputational and systemic risks are substantial, calls that myth into question. It foregrounds the degree to which structural inequalities and concentrated wealth have enabled a narrow stratum of actors to make decisions with planetary consequences. Venezuela and Greenland are thus the other side of the coin: they show what happens when elite imagination is actually realised, with consequences that are visible and tangible for millions of people around the world.