So much for the Peace Prize. This is a long post, but bear with me.
Yes, I know the stock defence. It is Iran and Venezuela. Bad regimes, ugly records, easy to dislike. But that line only works if the country doing the threatening can plausibly claim the moral high ground. Trump’s America cannot.
You do not get to lecture Iran about repression while attacking judges at home, undermining elections, threatening the media, and treating constitutional limits as irritants rather than guardrails. You do not get to posture as the custodian of liberty while flirting with mass deportations and reducing foreign policy to spectacle and leverage. Liberalism is not something you clip onto an aircraft carrier when it suits you.
Venezuela does not rescue the case either. Yes, it is a corrupt petrostate hollowed out by years of misrule. That is not in dispute. What does not follow is that strikes, seizures and blockades magically become peacekeeping by virtue of the target’s unpleasantness. A US kinetic operation to seize a sitting head of state is not law enforcement with better branding. It is the deliberate use of force against sovereign leadership, and it obliterates a line that even aggressive powers have usually treated with caution.
That is why the Maduro episode matters so much. Had this been a cartel boss, there would be no argument. Indicted criminal, plane, courtroom. The unease only appears because the man wears a presidential sash. The same alleged conduct flips from criminal to geopolitical depending on status. That is not a legal principle. It is a power signal. And once you send it, you cannot control how it is read.
This is where the MAGA contradiction becomes visible. Trump’s base claims to oppose foreign wars and endless entanglements. America First, no more adventures abroad. Yet when confrontation is framed as a quick show of strength against a weak opponent, the principle evaporates. Iran, Venezuela, anyone who cannot really hit back will do. It is not war they oppose. It is risk. Bullying is acceptable so long as it looks easy.
Put that next to Ukraine and the inconsistency becomes harder to ignore.
When Russia invades Ukraine, flattening cities and attempting to erase a sovereign state, we are rightly told to tread carefully. International law is suddenly treated as something more than a talking point, borders as more than lines on a map, sovereignty as something worth defending rather than negotiating away. Restraint is framed as wisdom, escalation as danger, and patience as the price of avoiding catastrophe.
Yet those same voices recoil from confronting Putin directly. We are told he is too dangerous, too powerful, too risky. Which is odd, because Russia’s economy is a wreck, its army is bogged down, and Putin cannot even subdue Ukraine. The issue is not strength. It is convenience. Putin can still hit back, so the bravado dries up.
And then comes the deeper irony. Ukraine was falsely accused of attempting to target Putin personally, a claim used to paint Kyiv as reckless and escalatory. Targeting a head of state, we were told, crossed a red line. Now the United States crosses that very line itself. Putin responds by condemning the Venezuelan operation as an act of aggression. The irony is almost comic, but it works precisely because the rules have been made elastic. Once power decides who is arrestable, even Putin can reach for the language of restraint with a straight face.
At this point the comparison becomes unavoidable. Trump is doing what Putin does. Not in scale, and not yet in consequence, but in method. Pick a target that looks weak. Declare it beyond redemption. Assert a right to intervene because you are stronger. Treat international law as an inconvenience. Present aggression as necessity and restraint as weakness, then insist it is all being done in the name of peace.
But here is where the argument has to become uncomfortable.
Restraint has always had a moral cost. The Metternich order kept the peace by suppressing revolutions. The Cold War stayed cold by tolerating monstrous regimes on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The post-1945 settlement absorbed dictators, coups and atrocities in the name of stability. Exit ramps, exile and quiet retirement were not acts of mercy. They were pressure valves. They stopped wars from becoming total.
Removing those exit ramps feels morally satisfying. Why should criminals retire peacefully? Why should tyrants escape justice? These are not bad questions. They are the hardest ones. But history suggests that justice pursued through power, rather than law, does not civilise the system. It brutalises it. If the end of power is a cell rather than exile, leaders do not compromise. They bunker down. They fight to the last street and the last civilian. Wars become longer, nastier and harder to stop.
World orders do not collapse because villains break the rules. They collapse because the rule-makers decide the rules no longer bind them. That is what happened to the Metternich system, which decayed through selective enforcement and ended in 1914. It is what happened to Versailles, which replaced restraint with punishment and collapsed into revisionism and war. It is what the post-1945 order was designed to avoid.
That order worked better not because it was just, but because it was legible. Power was constrained by institutions. Law mattered because the strongest actors behaved as if it applied to them. NATO, the UN, Bretton Woods and the European project were not idealism. They were damage control.
What we are watching now is not the sudden arrival of chaos, but the steady erosion of restraint. Not because bad actors exist, but because good ones are signalling that restraint is optional. Once that signal is sent, imitation follows. Strongmen learn quickly.
This leaves Europe with an uncomfortable reckoning of its own. For decades it outsourced hard security to Washington and congratulated itself on norms and process. That dependency made sense when American power was predictable and self-constraining. It makes less sense when it becomes transactional and impulsive.
A NATO that can function without automatic American direction is now essential. But even that may not be enough. Europe has to confront the possibility that its long-term security cannot rest on an alliance whose keystone lies outside the continent and outside its democratic control. That points, unavoidably, to the European Union. Not as a moral project, but as the only framework capable of aligning political legitimacy, economic power and collective decision-making in the same place.
And now the pretence is gone. This is no longer erosion by drift or implication. It is erosion by announcement.
When Trump says the United States will “run” Venezuela until it is satisfied with the outcome, and openly links that custodianship to American oil companies fixing infrastructure and making money, the argument collapses into plain sight. This is not law enforcement. It is not counter-narcotics. It is not reluctant intervention. It is the assertion of governing authority over a sovereign state, justified by force and followed by resource extraction. History has a word for that, and it is not peacekeeping.
Once that is said out loud, everything else follows. Sovereignty becomes conditional. Justice becomes discretionary. Power decides who is criminal, who is legitimate, and who gets taken away by helicopter in the night. That is why even Putin can now denounce American “aggression” without irony collapsing the sentence. The language works because the behaviour fits the template.
This is the moment Europe can no longer afford to misunderstand. A system in which American power is self-constraining can be managed. A system in which American power openly declares custodianship, selects governments, and assigns economic outcomes cannot be relied upon as the backbone of order. NATO without automatic American direction is now essential. But even that may not be sufficient.
Europe has to confront a harder truth. Its long-term security cannot rest on an alliance whose keystone lies outside the continent and outside its democratic control. That points again to the European Union. Not as a sudden replacement for NATO, and not as a federalist fantasy, but as the only framework capable of aligning power, law and legitimacy in the same place. That alignment is what every durable order has required. Its absence is what every collapse has exposed.
World orders do not usually end with a bang. They end when restraint is treated as optional, when enforcement replaces consent, and when power stops pretending it is bound by the rules it wrote. We have seen this pattern before. Not as destiny, but as risk. The unsettling thing about this moment is not that the ending is inevitable. It is that the actors now appear willing to test it anyway.
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