The military operation in Venezuela conducted by the US on the night of January 3rd – culminating in the forcible removal and transfer of President Nicolás Maduro to the United States – marks a decisive rupture in the post-1945 international order. What initially appeared as a dramatic, even shocking, episode of unilateral intervention has, within days, revealed itself to be something far more consequential: the opening move in a broader attempt by the United States, under President Donald Trump, to reassert uncontested dominance over the Western Hemisphere and beyond.
The significance of this moment lies not only in what was done, but in what followed. Within twenty-four hours of the Venezuela operation, President Trump openly threatened Colombia and Mexico with possible action, framing both in familiar terms of narcotics, migration, and “failure to cooperate.” Almost simultaneously, he reiterated his long-standing ambition to bring Greenland under US sovereignty – no longer as a speculative real-estate fantasy, but as a strategic necessity.
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Taken together, these moves outline a coherent, if deeply unsettling, vision of American power: one that abandons restraint, normalizes coercion, and revives territorial ambition as an acceptable instrument of statecraft. This is not merely a return to muscular foreign policy, but the re-emergence of empire logic.
Venezuela as precedent, not exception
For decades, US intervention in Latin America has oscillated between overt coercion and indirect pressure — in the form of sanctions, covert operations, diplomatic isolation, and the instrumentalization of economic dependence. Even at the height of the Cold War, however, a certain threshold was largely respected: the formal inviolability of sitting heads of state and the avoidance of openly declared, unilateral military removals. The seizure of a sitting president through direct military action crosses that threshold. It marks the abandonment of a long-standing, if imperfect, restraint that had survived ideological confrontation, proxy wars, and repeated crises.
The precedent this sets is profound. It signals that sovereignty within the Western Hemisphere is no longer treated as an inherent legal condition, but as a contingent status – revocable by Washington if a government is judged hostile, dysfunctional, or strategically inconvenient. In this logic, sovereignty becomes performance-based, evaluated externally and enforced coercively. The distinction between adversary and outlaw collapses, and political disagreement is reclassified as a security threat.
The legal and moral justifications advanced by the Trump administration – criminal indictments, accusations of narco-terrorism, and appeals to humanitarian necessity – are therefore secondary. Their function is not to persuade, but to justify a predetermined outcome. What matters is the structural message being sent: this was not regime change pursued through proxies, sanctions, or diplomatic attrition; it was regime removal executed through force, unilaterally and without meaningful multilateral consent. The operation bypassed not only international institutions, but the very premise that collective authorization is required to suspend another state’s sovereignty.
In doing so, the United States ceased to act as a guarantor of a rules-based order and instead asserted itself as its ultimate exception – the actor that decides when rules apply and when they do not. This is a qualitatively different posture from selective norm-breaking. It amounts to a claim of prerogative: the right to intervene, remove, and administer within its declared sphere of influence.
What makes this episode especially consequential is not only the act itself, but its immediate aftermath. The absence of restraint in rhetoric and signaling – the rapid extension of threats toward other governments in the region – made clear that Venezuela was not treated as an aberration or a singular emergency. It was presented, implicitly and explicitly, as a precedent. The message was unmistakable: compliance, not sovereignty, is now the primary currency of security in the Western Hemisphere.
Threats to Colombia and Mexico: from influence to blatant control
The logic underpinning this shift is revealing. Issues such as drug trafficking, migration flows, and internal security failures are no longer treated as structurally shared challenges – rooted in transnational demand, economic asymmetry, and historical entanglement – but as unilateral liabilities. Responsibility is localized, blame is externalized, and complex socio-political dynamics are recast as evidence of state failure. Once framed in this way, intervention appears not as escalation, but as enforcement.
Sovereignty, under this doctrine, becomes performance-based: states retain autonomy only insofar as they deliver outcomes aligned with US domestic priorities and strategic preferences. The right to self-determination is implicitly subordinated to externally defined benchmarks of effectiveness and control. This erodes the foundational distinction between internal governance and external threat, allowing domestic policy shortcomings to be securitized and internationalized.
Within this framework, the Western Hemisphere is no longer conceived as a community of sovereign states navigating shared problems through diplomacy and multilateralism. It is reconceived as a managed strategic space – a geopolitical system in which order is imposed, deviations are corrected, and authority ultimately resides in Washington. The implied claim is not merely influence, but custodianship: the asserted right to intervene directly, preemptively, and coercively to maintain a desired regional equilibrium.
Such a posture does more than destabilize individual relationships. It reshapes expectations across the hemisphere, encouraging deference, discouraging autonomy, and reinforcing the perception that alignment with the United States is not a choice but an obligation – enforced, if necessary, by force.
Greenland and the return of territorial ambition
At first glance, Trump’s renewed insistence on incorporating Greenland into the United States might appear disconnected from the dramatic events unfolding in Latin America. Yet, viewed through a structural lens, it completes the strategic and ideological picture. Greenland is more than a distant territory; it embodies strategic depth, geoeconomic leverage, and geopolitical positioning. Its Arctic location offers control over emerging sea routes, access to vast untapped resources, and a forward platform from which to project power – not only in the hemisphere, but globally, vis-à-vis Russia and China. In emphasizing acquisition as a US need, rather than a negotiated partnership or alliance, Washington is signaling that sovereignty and consent are subordinate to perceived national interest.
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What links Greenland to Venezuela, Colombia, and Mexico is not physical proximity, but a coherent worldview – a renewed logic of power that conflates capacity with legitimacy. In this vision, power itself is the arbiter of entitlement, security concerns provide moral license for territorial or political control, and international law functions not as a constraint, but as a provisional instrument to be invoked selectively. The underlying message is stark: the United States no longer positions itself as a steward of a rules-based order; it positions itself as an architect of spatial and political hierarchies.
This worldview represents a subtle yet profound intellectual shift. Where traditional US foreign policy often invoked norms, institutions, or multilateral frameworks to justify action, the new posture treats geostrategic necessity as a self-evident principle – a form of declarative realism in which the world is not merely influenced by power, but actively reshaped by it. Greenland, like Venezuela, Colombia, and Mexico, is a test case: sovereignty is instrumental, geography is a resource, and law is subordinate to strategy. Together, these episodes suggest a United States that is no longer defending an order; it is asserting the prerogative to reorder space, hierarchy, and influence in accordance with its own vision of security and advantage.
In other words, the logic is not opportunistic; it is systemic. It is an attempt to render the hemisphere, and parts of the Arctic, into a coherent stage where American agency, rather than consensus or law, determines outcomes – a return to territorial reasoning reminiscent of pre-modern great-power practice, but now cloaked in contemporary geostrategic rationale.
Project 2025 and the Architecture of Unilateralism
These actions align closely with the intellectual architecture promoted by Project 2025 and the broader ecosystem surrounding Trump’s second presidency. While not every decision can be traced to a single memorandum or policy blueprint, the underlying logic is coherent, systematic, and ideologically consistent. At its core, it represents a reorientation of US strategic thought: from a rules-based, multilateralist framework toward a posture defined by the primacy of executive will, the operationalization of power as legitimacy, and the reconceptualization of the hemisphere itself as a managed, hierarchical space.
The principles at play are unmistakable:
- A strong, unconstrained executive as the primary actor in foreign policy. Decision-making is centralized, rapid, and largely insulated from legislative or institutional checks. The executive becomes not a participant in the negotiation of norms, but the arbiter of what counts as permissible action – a form of strategic sovereignty concentrated in a single office.
- Skepticism toward multilateral institutions and international law. Global norms and legal frameworks are treated less as governing rules than as tools to be invoked selectively, or disregarded when they impede strategic objectives. Sovereignty, consent, and multilateral consent are thus subordinated to the imperatives of power and perceived national interest.
- Preemptive use of force against perceived threats. Potential risks – whether ideological, economic, or security-related – are framed as justification for immediate and decisive action. Threat perception is operationalized into policy prerogative, eliminating traditional prudential or deliberative constraints.
- Reassertion of US primacy, especially in its immediate sphere. The hemisphere is not a collection of partners but a zone of exclusive influence, a strategic core whose stability and alignment are a prerequisite for global projection. American power is no longer merely deterrent; it is constitutive — shaping political, economic, and territorial arrangements according to a unilateral vision.
Within this framework, the Western Hemisphere is transformed from a geopolitical periphery into a secured strategic hinterland – an area whose internal order is policed and whose alignments are actively engineered to sustain US dominance. The 1823 Monroe Doctrine, long a rhetorical fixture of hemispheric policy, is not simply revived; it is radicalized. Historically, the doctrine functioned as a warning to external powers seeking influence in the Americas. In this iteration, it is reinterpreted as a license for internal enforcement: a declaration that sovereignty within the hemisphere is conditional, contingent upon alignment with US strategic imperatives, and enforceable through direct action if necessary.
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In essence, Project 2025 embodies a vision of governance where authority and legitimacy derive from capacity rather than consensus, and compliance is secured through coercive capability rather than shared norms. The hemisphere becomes both a laboratory and a stage: a space in which the United States tests the extension of its power, asserts its prerogatives, and shapes a geopolitical architecture aligned to its strategic and ideological conception of order. Far from reactive or defensive, this posture is proactive, systemic, and transformative – seeking not merely to protect national interest, but to redefine the rules and geography of influence themselves.
The Collapse of the Post-War Order
For Europe and other middle powers, the most striking aspect of these developments is not their novelty, but their clarity. For decades, the liberal international order rested on a delicate tension: great powers repeatedly violated its norms, yet rarely did so with such unambiguous disregard. That ambiguity is now dissolving. The abduction of a sitting head of state, the public threats against allied governments, and the assertion of territorial ambitions all signal that restraint is no longer intrinsic to American leadership. This is not merely a weakening of international law; it is a profound delegitimization of law as a shared reference point – the conceptual glue that underpins order and expectation in global relations.
The ramifications extend well beyond the Western Hemisphere. If the United States normalizes coercive intervention in its own neighborhood, the threshold for similar behavior elsewhere is eroded. In Eastern Europe, the South China Sea, or the Middle East, great powers and regional actors alike can now cite precedent to justify unilateral assertions of control. Power, rather than law, once again becomes the dominant grammar of international affairs. Sovereignty, autonomy, and neutrality – once considered foundational principles – are increasingly contingent and fragile. States are compelled to align, to comply, or to risk coercion, while the illusion of safe distance or insulation dissolves.
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For Europe in particular, this moment carries profound implications. The erosion of norms abroad inevitably undermines confidence in their enforceability at home. A world in which borders, governments, and sovereignty are negotiable by force is a world in which European security can no longer rely on inherited assumptions, legal frameworks, or external guarantees. Strategic planning, diplomacy, and institutional safeguards now exist in a context where coercion is normalized and legitimacy is contingent on power.