Crappy New Year
Well, that's it then; Christmas and New Year over, along with the post-war rules-based world order.
Trump's seizure of Venezuela's President, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores, in Carácas - clearly illegal under international law - and his pledge to 'run' Venezuela for an unspecified period, spells the end of the fragile consensus that survived the US/UK invasion of Iraq in 2003. Maduro is to be indicted on charges (one might call them Trumped-up) of 'conspiracy to commit narco-terrorism and to import cocaine'. Regime change is prohibited under section 2(4) of the United Nations Charter but since the US, China, Russia, the UK and France can veto any resolution they disagree with, any legal challenge via that route will be dead in the water.
Putin's illegal invasion of Ukraine is about to go into its fourth year (longer if you remember Crimea) and Trump has done nothing to stop it; on the contrary, it seems he has given Putin aid and succour ever since his re-election in 2024. But while Trump may be cock-a-hoop (and cock of the heap) for now, what will his position be should President Xi of China see this as his precedent to invade Taiwan? The answer, of course, as ever with Trump, is that he will plead US exceptionalism. Maduro (in his eyes) has turned Venezuela into a rogue/narco state directly across the Caribbean Sea (the US' mare nostrum) from Trump's 'Winter White House', Mar-a-Lago, in Florida. Having stolen the 2024 presidential election from Edmundo González and purloined US oil, Maduro has (apparently) also flooded the US with illegal drugs, putting the lives of its citizens at risk. In other words, this is a matter of self-defence. Taiwan, on the other hand, has done nothing to antagonise China (other than to exist), so the two cases are clearly not comparable.
China, though, obviously sees matters differently. For Xi, Taiwan's very existence is a challenge and taking control of the islands is a matter, and stated policy, of reunification not invasion - the very same argument, in fact, that Putin makes about Ukraine. What Trump has now done is to open the floodgates to any contentious claim over sovereignty anywhere in the world. He will bat any such claims away using the argument of force majeure, in other words: might is right when I'm exercising it but it doesn't apply to anyone else, so try stop me!
He has already cited the Monroe Doctrine, which he, ever the narcissist, is rebranding (as is his wont - think Gulf of America or Trump-Kennedy Center) the Donroe Doctrine. President James Monroe's 1823 policy of establishing the western hemisphere as a US sphere of influence, reciprocally pledging US non-interference in internal European conflicts, has proved very useful to Trump (now it has been brought to his attention) as a pretext.
However, Maduro's Venezuela had its own Doctrine in the shape of Plan Zamora, a strategy of asymmetrical guerrilla resistance to an attack by the 'forces of fascism', internal or external. Whether Maduro was popular enough with Venezuelans for them to mobilise in such a struggle now is debatable. It may be more a case of whether Trump is unpopular enough. But the prospect of triggering another Vietnam on the US' doorstep must be giving US military strategists pause for reflection.
But Trump is not the first Republican president to revive the Monroe Doctrine: Ronald Reagan and George Bush also used it, although their administrations focused on countering Soviet influence in Latin America. Reagan heavily backed the anti-communist Contras in Nicaragua and military regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala (the self-proclaimed Reagan Doctrine), whereas Bush shifted towards supporting democratic transitions and peace processes, notably in Central America, whilst not baulking at military engagements like the 1989 Panama invasion to oust Manuel Noriega. (For the sake of balance, it's worth remembering that it was a Democratic President, John F Kennedy, who was willing to risk nuclear conflict in 1962 with his Cuba blockade.)
The potential problem with such 'US back yard' excuses is that they can equally well be used by China and Russia to legitimise territorial claims in their own spheres of influence (the South China Sea and Eastern Europe respectively) which could lead to world events rapidly, and catastrophically, spiralling out of control. Meanwhile, due to the veto, the UN General Assembly stands impotently by. And that's the problem with the concept of an established world order: what happens when the establishment (and the world) changes? No eighty year-old structure can survive unchanged so why should we expect the UN to be immune?
The answer in such troubled times lies in compromise and restraint but those are not qualities held in very high regard in these days of authoritarian populism, or outright unpopular authoritarianism. With figures like Trump, Putin and Xi strutting the world stage, and with second-tier despots like Kim Jong Un, Mohdi, Erdoğan, Orbán, Lukashenko and Netanyahu jostling for position under them, it is hard to see a positive outcome. Perhaps only when all the world's finite resources have finally been exhausted will humanity, or what remains of it, focus on the collective effort of species survival.
I'm not holding my breath.