Hawzah News Agency- According to a wide range of observers, the US move should not be viewed merely as a regional or isolated incident. Rather, it signals a broader and more alarming trend: the return of naked, undisguised power politics to the center of global affairs, where coercion replaces law and force overrides norms. In practical terms, this development suggests the reassertion of the “law of the jungle,” leaving international law reduced to little more than a ceremonial label devoid of binding authority.
Some experts maintain that what is unfolding goes beyond the controversial conduct of the US President Donald Trump and reflects a deeper structural transformation in the way power is exercised within the international system. From this perspective, unilateral force, regime manipulation, and extraterritorial enforcement of domestic laws are becoming normalized tools of statecraft for dominant powers.
Following World War II, the United States—then the prevailing global power—played a central role in shaping the postwar international order through the establishment of the United Nations and a body of international legal norms. At the time, influential American policymakers emphasized that the primary objective of this framework was to restrain arbitrary uses of force and prevent the recurrence of unrestrained power politics that had led to global catastrophe.
However, recent US behavior—particularly toward Venezuela—has laid bare a different reality. As events have shown, interest and expediency, rather than law or principle, now appear to guide the actions of arrogant powers, led by Washington. The normative architecture of international law is upheld only insofar as it serves their strategic objectives.
According to Dr. Mohsen Jalilvand, professor of international relations, the world has effectively entered a phase of global disorder. He notes that for decades, academic and diplomatic circles regarded state sovereignty, the prohibition of the use of force, peaceful dispute resolution, and multilateral institutions as the pillars of international order. While these principles were often violated, they nonetheless provided a framework that constrained behavior and imposed reputational and political costs on violators.
In recent years, however, that fragile framework has steadily eroded. The Zionist regime’s relentless and devastating assaults on Gaza, US military actions against Iran, and Washington’s open support for terrorist groups seeking to seize power in Syria have all underscored the declining effectiveness of international institutions and legal norms. The warning signs have long been evident; recent US and Israeli actions amount to an open mockery of the very order these institutions were created to uphold.
The Venezuela case represents a dangerous escalation. Political experts and international legal scholars argue that the alleged kidnapping of a legitimate president through direct military means—without UN Security Council authorization and outside any recognized framework of self-defense—constitutes an unprecedented assault on the international system.
This raises a fundamental question for the global community: Has the international order entered a phase in which rules formally exist but are no longer binding? Or is the United States actively engineering a new order—one in which it alone is exempt from all constraints and laws?
At the core of the modern international system lie two interconnected principles: the sovereignty of states and the prohibition of the use of force. These principles are enshrined in the UN Charter and play a crucial role in fostering predictability and stability in international relations. Even when states violated these norms in the past, they typically sought legal or moral justifications to frame their actions within the existing order.
In the case of Venezuela, however, this pretense appears to have been abandoned. The direct targeting of a country’s sovereign leadership sends a clear and alarming message: state sovereignty is no longer inviolable, but conditional—subject to the will and power of dominant actors. Unlike previous interventions justified under dubious claims of “legitimate” or “preemptive” self-defense, this action was not even framed within a new international legal doctrine, but instead rationalized through US domestic law.
This development suggests a deeply troubling trajectory, one in which the entire world is expected to conform to the rulings of US courts and political institutions—allowing Washington to reshape political systems, seize foreign assets, and appropriate the resources of other nations with impunity.
The danger lies in the fact that sovereignty is not merely a theoretical legal concept; it is the foundation of political stability in the international system. When states can no longer trust that their borders and governing structures are protected from foreign coercion, the logic of global security fundamentally shifts. In such an environment, survival is no longer pursued through diplomacy or international law, but through deterrence and raw power.
Ultimately, if the use of force to alter the political reality of sovereign states becomes an accepted option, the entire system of legal restraint collapses. In such a world, dominant powers need only construct a narrative of threat, security, or justice to legitimize any action they choose—rendering international law obsolete in practice, if not in name.
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