geopolitics; united states; russia; china; conflict; defence · 10 min
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On January 3, 2026, US special forces went into Nicolás Maduro's home in Caracas, hauled 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, a run of joint strikes on Tehran, Isfahan, Qom and Kermanshah that in the first week destroyed eighty per cent of Iran's air defences and killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. According to Trump, they also left Iran without a navy, an air force or radar.
Two operations in two months, then, on different continents and against sovereign governments, which as a blunt summary of how the world works will do nicely. The international reaction went about as you'd expect. China and Russia condemned. The UN Security Council held an emergency session, as it does whenever something serious happens, and did nothing whatsoever, as it does whenever it holds an emergency session. Iran invoked the UN Charter, Europe waited until Monday, and various countries in the Global South called for "respect for sovereignty" and "diplomatic solutions". The rhetorical machinery of international law cranked into motion with its usual efficiency, and the facts stayed where they were.
You could treat Venezuela and Iran as anomalies, but to me they look like the international order working as designed. What gets called "international law" is, in practice, a set of rules (and a great deal of wasted resources) enforced when it suits the most powerful to enforce them and quietly shelved when it doesn't. There's no great mystery in that, and no special cynicism either, since that's simply the rule.
The "rules-based order" invoked by diplomats and by the editorial boards of certain newspapers is a fiction, though an operational one, and sometimes it works. It regulates trade and standardises communications, and it sets the protocols for civil aviation. On mundane matters international law is fairly effective, and nobody argues about the rules of the Universal Postal Union.
When it comes to war and peace, to who gives the orders and who takes them, things look different. The United Nations Security Council was designed in 1945 around a mechanism that tells you most of what you need to know about the system, which is the veto. The five victorious powers of the Second World War made sure no resolution could ever be enforced against them, and that was in the blueprints from day one. The great powers built an international body and the first thing they did was make sure it could never compel them to do anything.
So when the United States vetoed any chance of Security Council action after striking Iran, it was using the rules as written. China and Russia called for an emergency session and gave solemn speeches, and the session closed without a single resolution. Secretary-General António Guterres warned of "a chain of events that nobody can control". Nobody listened, and nobody had to, which is more or less the job description.
Two months earlier Venezuela had gone almost the same way. The Council convened, the same countries condemned, the same countries declined to, and Maduro stayed locked up in Brooklyn. Diplomatic theatre runs to such a predictable script that you could draft the press releases before anything had happened.
A popular story has it that what sets the United States apart from other powers is a readiness to break norms, a cynicism all its own, a contempt for other people's sovereignty, and that China and Russia refrain from doing likewise because they have more respect for the international order. It's a comfortable reading, and a false one.
The real reason is plainer and a good deal less flattering to them. China and Russia don't snatch presidents or bomb countries on the other side of the world because they can't, and that comes down to capability long before will or morality enter into it.
Over the past year the United States flew combat operations over Yemen, Iran and Venezuela without losing a single manned aircraft to enemy fire. That's three separate theatres, against adversaries with air defence systems supplied by Russia, China and Iran, and not one confirmed aerial casualty. Russia, by contrast, routinely loses combat aircraft 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 world's second-largest military budget, explicitly trains its pilots to steer clear of direct aerial combat with American aircraft.
Caracas made the point more clearly than anywhere. Venezuela had Russian air defence systems, Iranian drones and Chinese equipment, which on paper adds up to a respectable deterrent. American forces penetrated the airspace, flew over Caracas, reached the fortified presidential compound and lifted Maduro out by helicopter in a matter of hours. It went so cleanly that some analysts speculated there had been no real resistance, that Maduro's own people had handed him over in a backroom deal, a theory that says more about how poorly the military gap is understood than about what actually happened.
American tactical superiority is so overwhelming that its operations look casual, almost magical, and that produces a distortion. Because it all looks easy, people assume anyone could do it, and that if others don't, they must have chosen not to, when the truth is they haven't got the means.
There's another way the United States differs from the classical empires, and it may be the most useful one for understanding what we're seeing. America doesn't stay. It invades, intervenes, extracts and transforms, but it doesn't colonise, and at this scale it's hard to find a genuine historical precedent for hegemony on those terms.
Japan is still the best example. In 1945 the United States had utterly defeated the Japanese Empire, with total occupation, unconditional surrender and two atomic bombs. If a victor ever had the justification and the means to keep a conquered territory, that was the moment. Instead it set up a temporary occupation, drafted a democratic constitution, reformed the economy and left after 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.
Venezuela hints at something along the same lines. With no territorial occupation at all, there was a surgical extraction followed by a managed transition, in which Delcy Rodríguez took over as interim president, the oil sector was opened to private investment and diplomatic ties were restored. The calculation behind it is cold enough. A stable country that buys American products and sells its oil on the open market is worth more to the United States than an expensive colony to run.
Being intelligent doesn't make the American model benign, and understanding how something works doesn't oblige anyone to admire it. A look at how the European imperial models ended is enough to see why the United States doesn't follow that playbook.
What the United States did over these two months is plain to see. What the others didn't do says more, especially once you go back over what they'd signed. China signed a twenty-five-year cooperation agreement with Iran in 2021, Russia signed a strategic cooperation treaty, and the three powers held joint naval exercises, turned up in Beijing for military parades and projected the image of a united front against the Washington-led order. When the moment came, neither Beijing nor Moscow did anything.
Beijing's response to the bombing of Iran was a near-verbatim copy of its response to Maduro's capture: verbal condemnation, a request for a Security Council session, calls to "respect sovereignty" and "cease hostilities", and nothing operational that might have changed the facts on the ground. An analyst at American University described China as a "cautious opportunist operating within clear constraints", somewhere between Iran's patron and a passive bystander.
Russia, which had spent years billing itself as Tehran's strategic partner, made do with a statement from its Foreign Ministry, and Putin said nothing in public. Analysts in Tehran, according to several reports, were frustrated; they had expected Moscow to offer more than diplomatic manoeuvres in multilateral forums. But Russia has its own war, an economy under sanctions and a capacity to project military power decimated by three years of attrition in Ukraine, so even if it wanted to help Iran, it would have very little to help with.
The Russia-Iran treaty, what's more, was carefully drafted to leave out a mutual defence clause, and in diplomacy the omissions say more than the declarations. The agreement with North Korea does oblige Russia to step in if Pyongyang ends up in a conflict. The pact with Iran merely stipulates that each side will refrain from hostile acts if the other is at war.
None of this is new, though it's tempting to present it as a rupture, the start of a more dangerous and more cynical era. Cynicism presupposes a moment of innocence, and there never was one. The Congress of Vienna in 1815 redrew Europe to suit the victorious powers, and the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 did the same. In 1945 the United Nations institutionalised the Allied victory with a Security Council in which the winners hold a permanent veto. Each time, the powerful wrote the rules and the rules protected them.
What has changed is the scale of the asymmetry, since never in history has the gap between the dominant power and everyone else been so wide. The US military budget exceeds that of the next ten countries combined, its forces operate on every continent at once, and nobody else has anything like its electronic warfare, cyber and precision strike technology. China is the world's second-largest economy, but its ability to project military power beyond its immediate region is limited. Russia showed in Ukraine that it can't even sustain a conventional war on its own border without severe difficulties.
Given those numbers, 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, while the other two would-be rivals watched from the sidelines and issued statements.
Analysis gets mistaken for prescription far too often. The editorials that invoke the "rules-based order" as a reality that has been broken, rather than an aspiration that was never quite met, are describing the world they'd like to live in. Wanting things to be different is fair enough; the trouble starts when you write as though they already were.
Trump, Operation Epic Fury and Delta Force in Caracas are only the latest faces of the old world order, which has been the permanent structure of the international system for as long as there have been sovereign states with armies. The strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must. Thucydides said so twenty-four centuries ago, and nobody has yet come up with a convincing rebuttal.
What we're watching is not the end of an order. It is the order.