By Ussiju Medaner
If last week’s argument was that the collapse of the global order is no longer a theoretical concern but an unfolding reality, then recent statements and actions by the United States regarding Venezuela have provided chilling confirmation. President Donald Trump’s casual remark that Venezuela has now sent tens of millions of barrels of crude oil to America, accompanied by his public gratitude and declaration that the country is now “cooperating,” exposes the naked truth behind what has been dressed up for years as a moral, legal, or humanitarian crusade.
The question that must now be asked, without fear or diplomatic hesitation, is whether Venezuela was ever about democracy, drugs, or human rights at all, or whether it was always about oil, power, and strategic domination.
Trump’s assertion that Venezuela supplied between 30 and 50 million barrels of crude oil to the United States, which he valued in the region of a few million dollars, is itself revealing. It is revealing not only because the valuation is grossly inconsistent with prevailing global oil prices, where even discounted heavy crude trades at tens of dollars per barrel, but also because of the triumphalist tone with which it was delivered. He spoke not as a partner engaging an equal sovereign state, but as a victor acknowledging the spoils of conquest. He framed Venezuela’s action as cooperation, implying that resistance had finally been broken. Yet this so called cooperation follows the arrest and removal of Venezuela’s president to face trial in the United States. In what universe does the capture of a sitting leader of a sovereign nation and the redirection of that nation’s primary resource constitute voluntary cooperation? What Trump described, with astonishing nonchalance, was not diplomacy but submission enforced by power.
Once this is understood, the entire narrative around Venezuela collapses under its own contradictions. For years, the United States justified its hostility toward Caracas by citing authoritarianism, electoral irregularities, corruption, and narcotics trafficking. Yet history is littered with regimes far worse in all these respects that have enjoyed warm relations with Washington simply because they served American interests. What changed in Venezuela was not morality but alignment. Venezuela possesses the world’s largest proven oil reserves, estimated by the OPEC Secretariat and the U.S. Energy Information Administration at over 300 billion barrels, and it chose to trade extensively with China, Russia, and other non Western powers, thereby weakening America’s grip on global energy flows. That choice, more than any internal Venezuelan failing, sealed its fate.
Seen through this lens, Trump’s rhetoric appears less like inconsistency and more like candour. The moment oil began flowing in America’s direction, Venezuela was no longer a pariah but a “cooperating” entity. The moment resistance ended, virtue was suddenly discovered. This is not foreign policy guided by law or ethics. It is transactional imperialism, where sovereignty is conditional and obedience is rewarded with temporary recognition.
This brings us to the more uncomfortable and far more consequential question. Is Venezuela merely a theatre in a much larger strategic confrontation, particularly with China? The evidence increasingly suggests that it is. China has for years been one of the largest buyers of Venezuelan oil, relying on it to fuel its vast industrial base and support its rapid technological and military expansion. Prior to intensified U.S. sanctions, China imported hundreds of thousands of barrels per day from Venezuela, often through state backed arrangements. By destabilizing Venezuela, seizing control of its oil flows, and redirecting them away from Beijing, the United States does not merely punish a defiant Latin American state. It strikes at a critical artery of Chinese economic power.
At the same time, American pressure on Iran follows the same pattern. Iran, like Venezuela, is energy rich, geopolitically strategic, and aligned against U.S. dominance. By constraining Iranian oil exports through sanctions and disrupting Venezuelan supply chains, Washington effectively tightens the global energy tap available to China without firing a shot. This is leverage without war, a form of economic and strategic strangulation designed to slow China’s growth, weaken its industrial output, undermine its technological ambitions, and complicate its capacity to sustain long term pressure over Taiwan. If China cannot reliably fuel its factories, power its data centres, or secure stable energy supplies, its challenge to American hegemony becomes exponentially harder.
If this interpretation is correct, then Venezuela is not the target but the message. The message is that no region is off limits, no sovereignty is sacrosanct, and no resource is beyond American reach if higher strategic interests are at stake. It is also a warning to other nations that economic independence and alternative alliances come at a price that may include destabilization, sanctions, or outright force.
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the Venezuelan episode is how casually the line between law enforcement and warfare has been erased. Imagine, even for a moment, the reverse scenario. Imagine a foreign power blockading American shores, deploying military assets into U.S. territory, and apprehending an American president or former president on American soil, claiming jurisdiction under its domestic laws. Would the United States treat such an act as a legal procedure or as an act of war? The answer is self evident. Yet when America does precisely this to another country, it is framed as justice, counter narcotics, or the defence of international norms.
This double standard lies at the heart of the crisis of world order. International law, once presented as a neutral framework governing all states, now increasingly resembles an instrument selectively enforced against the weak while the powerful operate above it. The Venezuelan case establishes a precedent that should alarm every nation, particularly those outside America’s alliance system. If a sitting head of state can be arrested, removed, and tried abroad without a clear international mandate from bodies such as the United Nations Security Council, then no leader of a strategically inconvenient country is truly safe.
This pattern does not end in Latin America. It extends ominously into Africa, including Nigeria. Trump’s rhetoric about alleged Christian genocide in Nigeria, accompanied by threats and insinuations of possible military involvement, fits disturbingly well into the same template. Complex internal security challenges rooted in history, governance failures, climate pressures, and criminality are flattened into a simplistic religious narrative that conveniently justifies external intervention. Such rhetoric does not help Nigerians solve their problems. It inflames tensions, distorts realities, and provides extremist groups with propaganda fuel.
By framing African conflicts through a civilizational or religious lens, America inadvertently validates the long standing claims of groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda that the West is engaged in a coordinated assault on Islam. Even when such claims are false or exaggerated, repetition by powerful Western leaders lends them credibility among susceptible populations. The result is not peace but radicalization, not stability but deeper mistrust. If humanitarian concern were truly the driving force, then similar outrage would be expressed consistently across regions and religions. Selectivity once again betrays motive.
The Venezuelan affair also compels a frank examination of global justice. Nicolás Maduro sits in American custody, facing charges in a U.S. court. Whether one admires or despises Maduro is irrelevant. The principle at stake is universal jurisdiction applied selectively. This raises an unavoidable question. Would the same standards apply to leaders allied with the United States? If an Israeli prime minister, for example, were accused of grave international crimes, would he face arrest on American soil? Or does the architecture of international justice implicitly exclude certain states and leaders from accountability?
The uncomfortable answer is that institutions like the International Criminal Court were never designed to apply equally to all. Major powers either refuse to recognize its jurisdiction or actively shield their allies from its reach. Justice, in this system, flows downward, not upward. The strong judge the weak. The weak do not judge the strong. Venezuela’s experience exposes this reality with brutal clarity.
At this point, it becomes impossible to avoid a broader moral judgment about America’s role in the world. There is a tendency, particularly in liberal discourse, to treat American power as flawed but ultimately benevolent, restrained by democratic values and good intentions. History tells a far more troubling story. From Latin America to Southeast Asia, from the Middle East to Africa, American interventions have repeatedly left trails of death, instability, and long term trauma. These actions were almost always justified at the time as necessary, defensive, or humanitarian.
Nelson Mandela, who understood both oppression and resistance intimately, warned about the destructive impact of American foreign policy long before it became fashionable to do so. He spoke not from ideology but from experience, having watched powerful nations preach freedom while undermining it elsewhere. Hiroshima and Nagasaki remain the most extreme symbols of this mindset, entire cities annihilated not solely to end a war, but to send a message of dominance to a rival power. That message still echoes today, now delivered through sanctions, regime change, and resource control rather than atomic fire.
To say that America is a terrible country is not to deny the achievements, creativity, or aspirations of its people. It is to indict a state apparatus that has repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice foreign lives for strategic gain. It is to challenge a myth of exceptionalism that excuses actions abroad which would be considered monstrous if directed inward. Venezuela today stands where many others once stood, confronted with the reality that global order is not governed by rules but by force disguised as law.
The tragedy is that this approach ultimately undermines even American interests. A world that no longer believes in the neutrality of international norms becomes more dangerous, more fragmented, and more prone to conflict. When power alone determines legitimacy, smaller states seek protection through alliances, arms, and defiance, not cooperation. The very stability America claims to defend erodes under the weight of its contradictions.
What is unfolding in Venezuela is therefore not an isolated incident but a signal event. It marks a transition from a world where power at least pretended to obey rules to one where the pretense is increasingly abandoned. Trump’s bluntness has merely stripped away the diplomatic language that once softened these realities. Oil flows, leaders fall, and narratives shift overnight, revealing what has always been at the core of global politics.
The end of world order does not arrive with an announcement or a treaty’s collapse. It arrives when actions speak so loudly that principles can no longer be heard. Venezuela has become the stage on which this truth is being acted out, and the rest of the world would be dangerously naive to believe it is merely an audience.
What is unfolding under Trump is not regime change within states, but a struggle over who controls the global regime itself. The world is already in a new Cold War, with China, Russia, and Iran consolidating an alternative axis of power that challenges Western led institutions. Trump’s strategy is to counter this shift without triggering a hot war. Rather than relying on multilateral platforms and liberal globalist frameworks, he is building parallel assets, bilateral deals, economic leverage, energy dominance, sanctions, currency power, and military posturing, to reassert American primacy on his own terms. “America First” is not isolationism. It is a reordering of global power that sidelines institutions he views as constraints and replaces them with direct U.S. control and influence. This is a contest for the command centre of the world system, where economics, coercion, and strategic pressure replace tanks and missiles, and where global leadership is rewritten without firing the first shot.
Those calling for President Trump and the United States to “come and liberate” them should pause and examine what American liberation has historically meant in practice. From Vietnam to Haiti, from Afghanistan to Iraq, and across more than eighty countries touched by U.S. military intervention over the last century, the promised language of freedom has too often translated into shattered societies, prolonged instability, mass civilian suffering, and generations condemned to rebuild from ruins they did not create. Liberation, in reality, has frequently arrived with bombs before bread, occupation before sovereignty, and trauma before peace. As if this record were not damning enough, the same familiar justifications are once again being recycled to legitimize new excesses, even as the United States openly funds and shields mass civilian destruction on the global stage. The moral contradiction is staggering. One cannot preach human rights while enabling their systematic violation. The question therefore remains unavoidable and urgent. In the face of this legacy, what exactly are Americans being taught to celebrate, and what, precisely, are they so proud of?
