With the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, we have just witnessed yet another illegal operation carried out by the United States. What has occurred is not the result of a passing fit of temper on the part of Mr Donald Trump: it is the culmination of a long-standing project, itself embedded in an imperial logic that the American administration now brazenly assumes. The Charter of the United Nations has been trampled underfoot, without even the diplomatic embarrassment that once accompanied such actions.
For what took place in Caracas on the night of 3 January is nothing new. Since the end of the Second World War, the United States has carried out dozens of other regime-change operations. Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Chile (1973), Panama (1989), Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003), Libya (2011) are among the best-known examples. Each time, the promise of democratic renewal has given way to years of chaos, violence, and economic and social collapse. Libya, to take only that example, remains mired in civil war more than a decade after its government was overthrown. One would have to be remarkably optimistic to believe that Venezuela will escape this pattern.
In the Venezuelan case, American hostility goes back more than twenty years. As early as 2002, Washington supported a coup attempt against Mr Hugo Chávez. From 2007 onwards, when Venezuela strengthened its control over its vast oil reserves—the largest in the world, surpassing those of Saudi Arabia—the confrontation intensified. ExxonMobil, a central actor in American political power, is said to have quietly campaigned for a tightening of the sanctions regime. The logic of “maximum pressure” implemented from 2017 onward triggered an economic collapse of the country: a 75 % drop in oil production and a decline of roughly 60 % in GDP per capita.
Mr Donald Trump has merely taken this logic to its conclusion. Where his predecessors cloaked their intentions in a “human-rights” discourse (the first American punitive measures date back to the Venezuela Defense of Human Rights and Civil Society Act, adopted by Congress and signed by President Obama in 2014), he openly consults oil companies and lays claim to American domination over the entire continent.
To this American imperial drift corresponds another failure: that of the European Union. Neither Ms Ursula von der Leyen nor Ms Kaja Kallas saw fit to condemn the manifest violation of international law constituted by the abduction of a foreign head of state. No solemn indignation, no invocation of the famous “European values,” no reminder of respect for state sovereignty. Their pusillanimity comes as no surprise: it is part of a long tradition of Atlanticist followership.
Once again, the European Union applies a glaring double standard. When it comes to Russia, European leaders multiply indignant statements with bellicose overtones. With what eagerness they rush to the microphones held out to them to denounce any breach of sovereignty or of the international legal order. But when those same principles are trampled by Washington, they suddenly fall silent. In Brussels, it seems, people keep their heads down.
The consequence of this abdication is foreseeable: further violations of state sovereignty will follow, including those of European states themselves. The annexation of Greenland by the United States—once dismissed as a grotesque provocation or a presidential whim—now appears plausible. Who would still dare to laugh, upon hearing Mr Trump assert that he does not recognise Danish sovereignty over that territory? By tolerating illegality in Venezuela, the European Union enshrines the principle that force prevails over law. It will not be able to feign surprise when the same logic is applied tomorrow to one of its own territories.
