Rewritten

There was no dancing in the streets of Venezuela’s cities the morning after Nicolas Maduro was dragged from his home by US commandos. Everywhere else abroad, Venezuelan expatriates celebrated wildly.

There is a reason Venezuela’s streets were silent: the brutal regime Maduro personified very much exists. His partisans, his secret police and his militia were all in place. The regime Hugo Chavez put together and Maduro inherited was not uprooted.

Donald Trump did not hesitate to use a sledgehammer to kill a fly. But he appears reluctant to support transfer of power in Venezuela to the democratic opposition that overwhelming won the 2024 elections Maduro stole.

War is easy. Rebuilding a country is hard. Trump does not seem wont to do the hard part. There are reports he is ready to cut a deal with Maduro’s vice-president – now acting president – and the entire apparatus that brought misery to what was once South America’s wealthiest economy.

All Donald Trump is interested in is extracting Venezuela’s vast oil wealth – the world’s largest confirmed oil deposits.

This is what makes Trump’s military assault on Venezuela truly brutal: it was not intended to liberate an oppressed people. It was not guided by redeeming civilizational values. The pot at the end of this blatant intervention is one brimming with fossil fuels that will further enrich an industry that contributed generously to Trump’s electoral campaign.

True, Maduro is a rascal. The brutal regime he headed terrorized a whole country and mismanaged an economy that otherwise had no reason to be poor. His failed government forced millions of Venezuelans – the country’s best and brightest – to flee abroad. His legacy is runaway inflation that impoverishes his people with each passing day.

The man, accused of large-scale trafficking of illegal drugs, was captured. But the regime he headed was not deposed. This poor country will continue to be tormented.

Nevertheless, the impressive military assault by US forces will have tremendous repercussions the world over. The rules of modern warfare and diplomacy are being rewritten drastically.

We thought we saw modern warfare evolve with the extensive use of drone warfare in the Ukraine conflict. The US assault on Venezuela pushed the evolution much farther.

Although the US flotilla has been sitting off the coast of Venezuela for weeks, the assault did not lose the element of surprise. The surprise was in the new electronic armaments deployed for the attack. This impressive military operation rolled out the latest in electronic warfare.

In the preceding months, Russia sold Maduro billions worth of its most advanced air defense system, said to be capable of blunting attacks by stealth aircraft. The first stage of last Saturday’s operation used new weapons that completely blinded Maduro’s army. Communications and power were cut remotely. Coordination between radar operators, missile crews and command centers was impossible.

In the second stage, precise targeting by drones and fighter planes took out Maduro’s missile arrays. The country’s entire air defense system was neutralized. Maduro’s army did not know what hit them.

In the third stage, helicopters flew in commandos without any interference. With intelligence assembled for months, the commandos knew exactly where to strike. Maduro was found in his bedroom and captured easily.

Russia has been trying to sell its advanced missile defense systems to India, Saudi Arabia and several other wealthy countries. That missile system has now been rendered completely obsolete by new electronic warfare technologies. Billions of dollars of potential Russian weapons sales simply vanished even before the smoke of battle cleared over Caracas.

Hours before the assault, Maduro was hosting a top-level Chinese delegation to discuss a host of commercial agreements. Venezuela has been China’s closest partner in South America. Billions of dollars of loans poured in. Now much of those loans will have to be written down or written off.

The attack demonstrated that extensive commercial entanglements with China do nothing to protect an unsustainable political arrangement. Russia, China, Iran and North Korea formed a chorus denouncing the US attack. But what can these nations do beyond howling in the wilderness?

When the US and Israel mounted an attack against Iran last year, Russia and China could do nothing but watch and denounce the action. Neither had the capacity to defend a beleaguered ally. This is the reason why few nations seek mutual defense agreements with either Russia or China.

There will be long speeches about the fate of a rules-based international order and the sanctity of the Westphalian notion of sovereignty. But the fact is that a rules-based international order lacks the institutions to enforce it. Sovereignty is respected only to the extent that powerful nations agree to pay heed.

Donald Trump is crass, unsophisticated and rude. He is not impressed by soft diplomacy. He defunded USAID, withdrew contributions to WHO and pays no attention to the UN. He is immune to diplomatic niceties and insults nations whenever he feels like it. He slaps tariffs on other countries on a whim. Sovereignty is too long a word.

This is the man who is now shredding whatever illusions we might have left about building the large and competent institutions needed to give substance of a rules-based global order. To hell with climate change and all that.

We are returning to a world where the man with the gun makes the rules.