On January 3, 2026, US special forces entered Nicolás Maduro's home in Caracas, pulled him out of bed, and put him on a helicopter. Forty minutes later, the president of Venezuela was on his way to New York to stand trial. Less than two months after that, the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury against Iran: joint strikes on Tehran, Isfahan, Qom and Kermanshah that in their first week destroyed eighty per cent of Iran's air defences, killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and, according to Trump, left Iran without a navy, an air force, or radar.
Two operations in two months, on two different continents, against two sovereign governments. If you want a blunt summary of how the world works, there it is.
The international reaction was what you'd expect. China condemned. Russia condemned. The UN Security Council held an emergency session, as it does whenever something serious happens, and did absolutely nothing, as it does whenever it holds an emergency session. Iran invoked the UN Charter. Europe waited until Monday. Various countries in the Global South called for "respect for sovereignty" and "diplomatic solutions". The rhetorical machinery of international law kicked in with its usual efficiency. And nothing changed. Because nothing can change.
What happened in Venezuela and what is happening in Iran are not anomalies. They are not violations of an international order that normally works. They are the international order working exactly as it was designed to work. What they call "international law" is, in practice, a set of rules (and a great deal of wasted resources) that are enforced when it suits the most powerful to enforce them. And when it doesn't suit them, they aren't enforced. There's no mystery, no special cynicism, no exception to the rule. It is the rule.
The useful fiction
It's worth being precise about this. The "rules-based order" invoked by diplomats and editorial boards at certain newspapers isn't exactly a lie. It's something more interesting: an operational fiction. It works, sometimes. It regulates trade, standardises communications, establishes protocols for civil aviation. In the realm of the mundane, international law is quite effective. Nobody disputes the rules of the Universal Postal Union.
But in the realm that matters, the one about war and peace, about who commands and who obeys, it's a different story. The United Nations Security Council was designed in 1945 with a mechanism that tells you everything you need to know about the system: the veto. The five victorious powers of the Second World War made sure that no resolution could ever be enforced against them. This is not a flaw in the system. It is the system. The great powers created an international body and the first thing they did was ensure that body could never compel them to do anything.
When the United States vetoed any possibility of Security Council action after striking Iran, it wasn't breaking the rules. It was using the rules exactly as they were written. China and Russia called for an emergency session, delivered solemn speeches, and the session ended without a single resolution. Secretary-General António Guterres warned of "a chain of events that nobody can control". Nobody listened, because nobody has to. That is the job description.
The same dynamic played out, almost identically, two months earlier with Venezuela. The Council convened, the same countries condemned, the same countries refrained from condemning, and Maduro remained locked up in Brooklyn. The structure of diplomatic theatre is so predictable you could write the press releases before the events take place.
Those who can't
There's a popular narrative that holds that what sets the United States apart from other powers is its willingness to break norms, its particular cynicism, its contempt for the sovereignty of others. That China and Russia abstain from doing similar things because they are more respectful of the international order. It's a comfortable reading. It's also false.
China and Russia don't capture presidents or bomb countries on the other side of the world for a much simpler reason: they can't. It's not a question of will or morality. It's a question of capability.
Over the past year, the United States conducted combat operations over Yemen, Iran and Venezuela without losing a single manned aircraft to enemy fire. You can pause on that for a moment, because it's extraordinary. Three separate theatres of operation, three adversaries equipped with air defence systems supplied by Russia, China and Iran, and not a single confirmed aerial casualty. Meanwhile, Russia loses combat aircraft routinely in Ukraine, sometimes several in a single week, against a country that doesn't even have a comparable air force. And China, which on paper has the second-largest military budget in the world, explicitly trains its pilots not to engage American aircraft in direct aerial combat.
The operation in Caracas made it particularly clear. Venezuela had Russian air defence systems, Iranian drones, Chinese equipment. In theory, a respectable deterrent package. In practice, American forces penetrated the airspace, flew over Caracas, reached the fortified presidential compound and extracted Maduro by helicopter in a matter of hours. The operation was so clean that some analysts speculated there was no real resistance, that Maduro was handed over by his own people in a backroom deal. The speculation says more about how poorly the military gap is understood than about what actually happened.
What's going on is that American tactical superiority is so overwhelming that its operations look casual. Almost magical. And that creates a distortion: because things look easy, people assume anyone could do them, and that if others don't, it's by choice. No. They don't do them because they can't.
The empire that doesn't conquer
There's another thing that distinguishes the United States from the classical empires, and it's perhaps the most relevant for understanding what we're seeing. America doesn't stay. It invades, intervenes, extracts, transforms, but it doesn't colonise. It's a model of hegemony with no true historical precedent at this scale.
The most illustrative case remains Japan. In 1945, the United States had completely defeated the Japanese Empire. Total occupation, unconditional surrender, two atomic bombs. If ever a victor had the justification and the means to keep a conquered territory, that was the moment. And what it did was install a temporary occupation, draft a democratic constitution, reform the economy, and leave in seven years. Japan went from mortal enemy to closest strategic ally in the Pacific. Today it hosts American military bases and has the world's third-largest economy. The same pattern, with variations, was repeated in West Germany and South Korea.
In Venezuela, something similar is taking shape. There was no territorial occupation. There was a surgical extraction, followed by a managed transition: Delcy Rodríguez assumed the interim presidency, the oil sector was opened to private investment, diplomatic ties were restored. It's not altruism. It's calculation. A stable country that buys American products and sells its oil on the open market is more useful to the United States than an expensive colony to administer.
This doesn't make the American model benign. It makes it intelligent. And there is a difference between admiring something and understanding how it works. One need only look at how the European imperial models ended to see why the United States doesn't follow that playbook.
The solitude of power
The most revealing thing about these two months is not what the United States did. It's what everyone else didn't do.
China signed a twenty-five-year cooperation agreement with Iran in 2021. Russia signed a strategic cooperation treaty. The three powers held joint naval exercises, gathered in Beijing for military parades, projected an image of a united front against the Washington-led order. When the moment came, they did nothing.
Beijing's reaction to the bombing of Iran was nearly a verbatim copy of its reaction to Maduro's capture: verbal condemnation, a request for a Security Council session, calls to "respect sovereignty" and "cease hostilities". Nothing operational. Nothing that changed the facts on the ground. An analyst at American University put it precisely: China is neither Iran's patron nor a passive bystander, but a "cautious opportunist operating within clear constraints".
Russia, which had spent years presenting itself as Tehran's strategic partner, limited itself to a statement from its Foreign Ministry. Putin didn't speak publicly. Analysts in Tehran, according to several reports, expressed frustration: they expected Moscow to do something beyond diplomatic manoeuvres in multilateral forums. But Russia has its own war, its economy under sanctions, and its ability to project military power decimated by three years of attrition in Ukraine. It's not that it doesn't want to help Iran. It's that it can't.
The Russia-Iran treaty, moreover, was carefully drafted to exclude a mutual defence clause. Unlike the agreement with North Korea, which does oblige Russia to intervene if Pyongyang enters a conflict, the pact with Iran merely stipulates that both parties will refrain from hostile actions if the other is at war. In diplomacy, the omissions say more than the declarations.
An old order
None of this is new. The temptation is to present what's happening as a rupture, the beginning of a more dangerous, more unstable, more cynical era. But cynicism presupposes that there was a moment of innocence, and that moment never existed. The Congress of Vienna in 1815 redesigned Europe according to the interests of the victorious powers. The Treaty of Versailles in 1919 did the same. The United Nations in 1945 institutionalised the Allied victory with a Security Council where the winners hold a permanent veto. The pattern is always the same: the powerful write the rules, and the rules protect them.
What's changed is not the logic. What's changed is the scale of the asymmetry. Never in history has there been such a wide gap between the dominant power and the rest. The US military budget exceeds that of the next ten countries combined. Its forces operate simultaneously on every continent. Its electronic warfare, cyber and precision strike technology has no equivalent. China is the world's second-largest economy, but its ability to project military power beyond its immediate region is limited. Russia demonstrated in Ukraine that it cannot even sustain a conventional war on its own border without severe difficulties.
In that context, talk of a "multipolar order" or a "post-American world" is, for now, more wish than description. The world has one pole, and that pole has just captured a president and bombed a country that has spent decades defying it. Meanwhile, the other two candidates for rival power watched from the outside and issued statements.
Confusing analysis with prescription is a mistake that gets made far too often. The editorials that invoke the "rules-based order" as though it were a reality that's been broken, rather than an aspiration that was never quite fulfilled, aren't describing the world. They're describing the world they'd like to exist. And there's a difference between wanting things to be different and pretending they already are.
The old world order is not Trump. It's not Operation Epic Fury. It's not Delta Force in Caracas. It's the permanent structure of the international system since sovereign states with armies have existed. The strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must. Thucydides said it twenty-four centuries ago, and nobody has come up with a convincing rebuttal.
What we're watching is not the end of an order. It is the order.