Following the events of January 3rd a continuation piece from my article USA Rogue State? February 2025.
USA: Rogue State? (Part 2) – A New Precedent
The great conflicts of our time still loom. Ukraine grinds on, the Baltic states remain taut, and Taiwan sits under permanent pressure. Yet America’s sudden strike on Venezuela suggests something else is shifting first: the way power is exercised, and the ease with which it is now justified.
The world has not tipped into open war. Not yet.
Ukraine grinds on. The Baltic states remain tense but intact. The Taiwan Strait is still defined more by naval choreography than gunfire. The much-trailed great-power collisions remain, for now, on the horizon. But something else has moved, quieter perhaps, and more corrosive.
The overnight American strike on Venezuela, unilateral and justified after the fact, is not the opening act of global conflict. It is something subtler and potentially more dangerous: a precedent in search of a doctrine.
Washington insists this was exceptional. A sui generis response to criminality, corruption and national collapse. That argument would be more persuasive were it not the standard preamble to almost every intervention of the past three decades. Exceptionalism, after all, has form.
What unsettles is not simply that the United States acted, but how easily it did so, and how thin the legal and diplomatic scaffolding appeared to be. There was no UN mandate. No coalition patiently assembled. No serious attempt to clothe the operation in the rituals of multilateral consent. This was not Iraq redux. There was no effort to persuade the world. There was merely an announcement that it had been done.
For America’s adversaries, this is not hypocrisy newly discovered. Moscow and Beijing have long dismissed the so-called rules-based order as a euphemism for American latitude. But the Venezuelan operation offers them something more useful than rhetoric. Evidence.
Russia, already at war in Europe, will draw a bitter but clarifying lesson. Allies, however loyal, are expendable when they cease to be useful or defensible. Venezuela was a geopolitical bauble: oil-rich, symbolically defiant, but strategically indefensible from Moscow’s perspective. Its removal does not weaken Russia militarily, but it further narrows the map of places where Russian power can plausibly shelter its friends.
This matters not because Venezuela was ever decisive to Russia’s fortunes, but because it represented something Moscow increasingly lacks: the ability to project influence beyond its immediate neighbourhood. One by one, those outposts are disappearing. The loss tightens Russia’s isolation at precisely the moment it can least afford it.
China’s calculation is quieter, but potentially more consequential.
Beijing does not depend on Venezuelan oil to function. It has diversified too carefully for that. But Venezuela has been useful precisely because it lay outside American influence, a supplier insulated from Washington’s leverage, sanctions and electoral mood swings. Energy security is not merely about volume. It is about options.
A Venezuela governed from Washington, or by a government whose survival depends upon Washington, removes one of those options. Oil that once flowed eastward under long-term arrangements may now be repriced, redirected, or simply discouraged. No announcement is required. Markets, like diplomats, understand power when they see it.
None of this proves motive. It does not need to. Geopolitics rarely operates on confession. The point is consequence. The removal of Maduro does not merely tidy up a regional problem. It reshapes the strategic environment in which Russia and China already feel increasingly hemmed in.
For the Baltic states, the lesson is more ambiguous. On the one hand, the operation demonstrates that American power remains overwhelming and decisively usable. On the other, it underlines an uncomfortable truth: US force is increasingly discretionary. It is deployed where Washington wills, not where treaties alone demand. Deterrence depends not only on capability, but on predictability, and predictability is precisely what has been weakened.
China, watching from Beijing, will be less interested in Venezuela itself than in the method. Taiwan is not Caracas. The military, economic and reputational costs of a move across the Strait are of a different order altogether. But the Venezuelan strike sharpens two competing instincts within Chinese strategic thinking.
The first is urgency: act before American resolve hardens further. The second is caution: note how swiftly international opinion curdles when sovereignty is breached without consent.
Beijing’s preferred posture remains pressure without ignition. Encirclement without invasion. Venezuela does not alter that calculus overnight, but it adds a volatile data point to an already unstable equation.
What Ukraine, the Baltics and Taiwan share is that they are already priced into global risk. Markets, militaries and ministries have learned to live with them. Venezuela was different precisely because it was unexpected. It did not emerge from slow escalation or a frozen conflict thawing. It arrived fully formed, announced as fait accompli.
This is why the episode matters beyond Latin America. It suggests a United States increasingly comfortable with post-hoc justification, less concerned with international buy-in, and more willing to test how far its power can be exercised before resistance coheres. That is not rogue behaviour in the cartoon sense, but it is a form of strategic unilateralism that corrodes the very norms Washington claims to uphold.
Supporters will argue that the outcome justifies the method. That a malign regime has been removed. That oil markets will stabilise. That a long-suffering population may yet glimpse reform. All of this may prove true. But outcomes do not erase precedents. They entrench them.
The question, then, is not whether America is a rogue state. The term remains too blunt, too loaded, too performative. The better question is whether the United States is becoming a situational state, one that applies law, restraint and multilateralism when convenient, and dispenses with them when speed or advantage beckons.
History suggests this is not a sustainable posture. Empires can ignore rules only while they write them. The moment others begin to improvise in response, the system fractures.
The great conflicts remain on the horizon. But Venezuela reminds us that the road towards them may not be paved with grand confrontations or red-line speeches. It may instead be littered with smaller, sharper acts, each justified, each exceptional, each making the next one easier.
And that, more than any tank column or missile test, is what should give us pause.
Next. Will a rogue USA look North?
Venezuela will not be the template. It will be the permission. Once permission is granted, the question is no longer where America will act next, but how those closest in Canada and Greenland will recognise the moment when alignment begins to feel like absorption. In his peculiar way Trump has asked nicely, we are beginning to see that this USA will simply take what doesn’t capitulate easily.