Author: Maciej Dachowski

The events unfolding in Venezuela mark more than the violent removal of an authoritarian ruler. They constitute a threshold moment in the evolution of the international system as it has functioned since the mid twentieth century. What has collapsed is not an illusion of stability, but the procedural restraint that once separated power from permission. The distinction between authority exercised and authority authorised, central to the post 1945 order, has now been openly discarded. In Venezuela, that line has been crossed deliberately rather than accidentally.

There is little analytical disagreement about the nature of the regime led by Nicolás Maduro. It was neither democratic nor accountable, and it presided over economic collapse, repression, and the systematic hollowing out of state institutions. Yet the illegitimacy of a regime does not automatically confer legitimacy on the method of its removal. The central issue raised by recent developments is therefore not whether Maduro’s rule deserved to end, but whether its externally imposed termination consolidates a doctrine whose implications extend far beyond Caracas [1].

What distinguishes Venezuela from earlier episodes is not the use of force itself. Comparable patterns of unmediated coercion have already been visible in Russia’s actions in Georgia in 2008, following the recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and later in Ukraine, where military intervention proceeded without international authorisation and in open defiance of the United Nations [2]. The qualitative shift lies elsewhere.

In the Venezuelan case, it is not a revisionist power acting at the margins of the system that dispenses with arbitration, but the system’s principal architect. There was no serious attempt to construct international authorisation, no recourse to the United Nations, and no multilateral language of exception capable of situating the operation within a shared framework of legality [3]. Power was exercised directly and justified by effectiveness and interest rather than by procedure. This marks a qualitative change in how authority is asserted in the international system. It is intervention without pretence and therefore intervention without boundary [4].

The novelty of the Venezuelan case does not lie in the behaviour itself, but in the identity of the actor performing it, it is the system’s principal guarantor rather than a revisionist challenger that openly abandons arbitration, pushing a long running erosion into a decisive new phase.

The United Nations: from arbiter to irrelevance

This shift occurs in a system already weakened by decades of institutional erosion. Established in 1945 to arbitrate the use of force and translate power into legitimacy, the United Nations no longer functions as a meaningful source of enforcement or authority [2][6]. Its paralysis has been visible for years, particularly in conflicts involving major powers, but the Venezuelan case marks a qualitative change. What we are observing is no longer paralysis caused by veto politics or institutional deadlock. It is irrelevance as a structural condition of the system. This was not merely a failure to obtain Security Council consent, but an absence of even symbolic efforts to internationalise the action through alternative multilateral pathways when the Council was predictably blocked.

When regime change and interim governance proceeds without even nominal multilateral cover, international law loses its residual authority. The logic of legitimacy gives way to hierarchy. Rules cease to function as constraints and become rhetorical artefacts invoked selectively after the fact. Power no longer seeks validation through institutional processes. It announces itself and proceeds on the basis of capacity and interest .

At the same time, it would be analytically false to claim that the United Nations ever genuinely restrained great powers. What mattered was therefore not restraint, but exclusivity. The international system functioned not because intervention was prohibited, but because legitimacy was rationed [5][7]. Only a limited number of actors could intervene without collapsing the system as a whole. The United Nations did not prevent coercion, but it structured expectations about who could exercise it with impunity and who could not. That hierarchy of legitimacy, rather than universal compliance, is what is now eroding.

Even when the United States violated the spirit of the rules, it preserved the fiction of systemic stewardship, a fiction that revisionist actors never possessed and that is now being consciously discarded.

Cold War asymmetry and the collapse of legitimacy: how precedent replaced permission

The post 1945 international order functioned not because power was restrained, but because it was asymmetrically legitimised. The United States, as the principal architect and anchor of the United Nations, retained a narrative privilege that no other actor possessed. Even when Washington violated declared norms, it could plausibly claim that it was acting in defence of the system itself [7]. Hypocrisy was not an anomaly. It was a stabilising mechanism that allowed the system to absorb violations without collapsing.

The Soviet Union, by contrast, operated as a challenger to the system’s moral centre. Behaviourally, the symmetry was clear. Both superpowers intervened repeatedly in the internal affairs of other states. The United States did so covertly and overtly from Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954 to Chile in 1973. The Soviet Union acted no less decisively from Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 to Afghanistan in 1979, as well as through sustained involvement in Cuba and Vietnam. Systemically, however, the symmetry did not exist. Soviet interventions were read as system breaking, while American interventions were more often framed as system preserving [5]. The difference lay not in conduct, but in recognised authority. What Venezuela demonstrates is the collapse of that distinction, the moment when the custodian adopts the methods and posture of the challenger.

This asymmetry limited proliferation. The system did not prohibit intervention. It rationed legitimacy. Only a small number of actors could violate norms without triggering systemic breakdown. For most states, intervention remained prohibitively costly. The United Nations did not prevent coercion, but it structured expectations about who could exercise it with impunity and who could not.

This logic had already been anticipated after the First World War. Woodrow Wilson understood that peace could not be sustained without binding institutions capable of embedding power within a collective framework. The collapse of the League of Nations was not caused by the weakness of its principles, but by the refusal of the United States to anchor itself within the system it had helped design [7]. When Washington withdrew, the order fragmented, and Europe paid the price. The post 1945 settlement was an attempt to correct that failure by institutionalising American power rather than allowing it to operate outside the system.

The erosion of this arrangement did not begin with Venezuela. It unfolded gradually after the end of the Cold War through a series of interventions that transformed exception into precedent. The NATO intervention in Kosovo in 1999 lacked explicit Security Council authorisation, yet it was framed as unique and non generalizable [4]. Crucially, it was followed by international administration under United Nations auspices. Even opponents of the intervention, including Russia, argued within the same legal grammar, invoking territorial integrity and Security Council authority. The system bent, but it did not break.

That grammar weakened with Iraq in 2003. Conducted through contested interpretations of earlier United Nations resolutions, the invasion demonstrated that bypassing the Security Council carried limited long term cost even when the legal rationale collapsed [8]. Regime change without authorisation became conceivable. Afghanistan weakened the system from the opposite direction. Beginning in 2001 with clear Security Council authorisation and broad legitimacy, it ended two decades later in institutional collapse. The implication was corrosive. Multilateral authorisation no longer guaranteed effectiveness or durable order. Legitimacy lost its functional value [8].

The decisive doctrinal shift came in 2008. Kosovo’s declaration of independence without Security Council approval was treated by Moscow not as a Balkan anomaly, but as a systemic rupture. Russia rejected Kosovo explicitly on United Nations grounds and then applied the same logic in reverse by recognising Abkhazia and South Ossetia after the war with Georgia. From that moment, permission gave way to precedent. The United Nations ceased to arbitrate outcomes and became an instrument invoked selectively after facts had been created [9].

Subsequent crises reinforced this pattern. Libya in 2011 demonstrated how a limited United Nations mandate could be expanded into regime change, permanently damaging trust in multilateral authoriszation [10]. Syria confirmed the opposite failure. When great power interests collide directly, the Security Council becomes a theatre of vetoes rather than resolution. By the time Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and launched a full scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the erosion of arbitration was already advanced. International law persisted rhetorically, but operationally it followed power [11].

What emerges from this sequence is not a collection of isolated cases, but a single process. Power moved from being arbitrated to being normalised through precedent. Legitimacy ceased to be granted ex ante and began to be claimed ex post. The system no longer asked who had permission to act. It began to ask only who had acted successfully.

Venezuela as culmination, not anomaly

Venezuela marks the culmination of the trajectory described above, not because it introduces a new form of intervention, but because it marks the moment when the architect of the system behaves as if it were a revisionist power. Unlike Kosovo in 1999, Iraq in 2003, or Libya in 2011, there is no attempt to frame the intervention as exceptional, temporary, or destined for re internationalisation. There is no language of mandate expansion, no promise of institutional follow up, and no effort to situate the action within a broader multilateral process. The United Nations is not paralysed or blocked. It is simply ignored. This is the point at which long term erosion turns into open acceptance.

What makes this moment analytically distinct is not the scale of intervention, but the absence of justification. Earlier cases operated within a residual expectation that legitimacy still mattered, even if it was stretched or contested. In Venezuela, that expectation no longer structures behaviour. Authority is asserted directly, without the performative obligation to seek international validation. The system no longer asks whether permission exists. It proceeds as if permission were irrelevant.

Once such logic is normalised, it cannot be geographically contained. If the United States asserts a discretionary right to reorder Venezuela in the name of stability and strategic interest, the normative barrier preventing similar claims elsewhere collapses. By what argument can Russia be denied a comparable right to impose its preferred order in Ukraine. On what grounds can China be told that Taiwan is categorically different rather than a question of timing capability and strategic calculation.

In a system governed by precedent rather than arbitration, plausibility is enough. Once one actor demonstrates that institutional permission is optional, others need only establish that their claims are comparable. This is how discretionary intervention proliferates. Not through formal doctrine, but through demonstrated practice.

Systemic and European consequences. Chaos as doctrine

For Europe, the implications of the Venezuelan precedent are deeply uncomfortable. Political attention is finite and strategic bandwidth limited. The emergence of a new centre of gravity in the Western Hemisphere competes directly with existing commitments and reshapes priorities in ways that are structural rather than temporary. Ukraine, already fighting a war framed as existential for European security, risks becoming one theatre among many rather than the central test of the international order [11].

This shift should not be misread as moral fatigue or political indifference. It is a process of structural reprioritisation inherent to a system no longer governed by arbitration. In an international environment shaped by discretionary power rather than rules, consistency ceases to be rewarded. What matters instead is speed visibility and the ability to impose faits accomplis. Strategic focus moves not toward the most normatively consequential conflicts but toward those that demand immediate response and offer demonstrable leverage.

The European Union is particularly exposed to this dynamic [13]. Its political identity has been built around the assumption that rules precede power and that law constrains force. As arbitration erodes, this assumption becomes increasingly difficult to sustain in practice. Europe retains economic weight and regulatory reach, but it struggles to translate these assets into strategic action in a system where legitimacy is no longer granted ex ante but claimed ex post. The result is fragmentation rather than cohesion and reactive positioning rather than agenda setting.

Historically, international orders have emerged only after profound ruptures. The settlement of 1815 followed the defeat of Napoleon. The post 1945 system emerged from the devastation of the world wars. The post Cold War order took shape after 1989 through the exhaustion of ideological confrontation. Each reset was preceded by escalation fragmentation and systemic fatigue. Today, no such cathartic moment has occurred. Instead, the system is accumulating precedents without resolution.

In this context, Venezuela should not be analysed as a regional anomaly or a temporary deviation. It is a diagnostic event. It reveals how far the international system has already shifted from hierarchised legitimacy toward proliferating discretion. The danger is not the return of power politics. These never disappeared. The danger is the disappearance of any credible answer to the question of why some actors may intervene and others may not.

The system is not collapsing into chaos. It is reorganising around a different principle. Authority no longer flows from institutions but from demonstrated capacity. Intervention no longer requires permission but only plausibility [15]. This is not disorder. It is a new doctrine shaped by precedent rather than rule.

The danger is not chaos alone.
It is chaos turned into doctrine.

Endnotes

[1] United Nations Human Rights Council. Report of the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. Geneva, 2022.
[2] Charter of the United Nations. Articles 1, 2 and 24. San Francisco, 1945.
[3] International Law Commission. Fragmentation of International Law: Difficulties Arising from the Diversification and Expansion of International Law. Report A/CN.4/L.682. United Nations, 2006.
[4] Independent International Commission on Kosovo. The Kosovo Report. Oxford University Press, 2000.
[5] Westad, Odd Arne. The Global Cold War. Cambridge University Press, 2005.
[6] Hurd, Ian. After Anarchy: Legitimacy and Power in the United Nations Security Council. Princeton University Press, 2007.
[7] Ikenberry, G. John. After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order After Major Wars. Princeton University Press, 2001.
[8] Chesterman, Simon. Just War or Just Peace: Humanitarian Intervention and International Law. Oxford University Press, 2001.
[9] Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Statement on Kosovo. February 2008.
[10] United Nations Security Council. Resolutions and Meeting Records on Libya and Syria. 2011–2014.
[11] European Council. Conclusions on Ukraine and European Security. Brussels, 2022.
[12] Nye, Joseph S. Power and Interdependence. Longman, revised edition 2011.
[13] Tocci, Nathalie. European Strategic Autonomy: What It Is, Why We Need It, How to Achieve It. Palgrave Macmillan, 2021.
[14] Buzan, Barry and Lawson, George. The Global Transformation: History, Modernity and the Making of International Relations. Cambridge University Press, 2015.
[15] Finnemore, Martha. The Purpose of Intervention: Changing Beliefs about the Use of Force. Cornell University Press, 2003.