Afrasianet - Dr. Hisham Okal - In international politics, earthquakes are not measured by the number of casualties or the noise of headlines, but by their ability to reveal what was hidden behind the language of law and custom. The return of Donald Trump to the White House in early 2025 was not just the return of a former president, but the return of a complete logic. The logic of naked power, where geography is reduced to resources, sovereignty is reduced to pretexts, and justice is presented in a live television scene.
From the first days, it was clear that Trump's mind does not see the world as a system of states, but as a map of interests in the North.
But the real earthquake did not occur in the ice, but in the heat of the south. In January 2026, the United States carried out a lightning military operation that ended with the arrest of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, the charge was ready, drugs, gang terrorism, and the message was clearer than any statement by a head of state who could be abducted by force outside any UN framework and without trial or international mandate.
This is where the question that the Western media clearly avoids asking.
You could be the same judge and executioner.
Is it right for one country to indict, sentence and execute the head of a sovereign state and then ask the world to respect the "rule of law"?
This is not a precedent in modern American history. More than two decades ago, the invasion of Iraq was built on the lie of "weapons of mass destruction." It destroyed an entire country, crushed its institutions, and then it turned out that the weapons did not exist at all. In Libya, the title changed and the content remained. It intervened in the name of protection and collapsed in the name of liberation. In Somalia, "fighting chaos" was used to justify a longer and deeper chaos all the way to Afghanistan, and when the lie of weapons of mass destruction fell morally, the machine did not stop, but changed its language.
Today, we no longer hear about nuclear and chemical weapons, but about drugs, terrorism and transnational networks.
The charge shifts, but the function is the same.
In the Venezuelan case, the link is even more pronounced when looking at the oil-rich province of Eskipo disputed with Guyana, where Washington's interests intersect with major energy companies. Maduro's arrest here appears not just as a security measure but as a link in a broader strategy to redraw control of the Western Hemisphere's energy resources, just as Greenland is used to tighten its grip on the North's resources.
From the perspective of international law, there has been a clear violation of the principle of the sovereignty of States and a clear departure from the Charter of the United Nations. From the perspective of geopolitics, it is a new test of the extent to which the world is silent and unable or unable to protect the most basic rules of the international order.
This is where the ambiguous European position emerges, as if it were tacit acceptance of the logic of landing commandos and kidnapping presidents. The message is more serious. There is no immunity anymore. Bolivia is a candidate. Mexico and Brazil are incoming. Far from it, this precedent may tempt Russia and China to follow the same model in Latin America or even in Western Europe.
A sharp angle asking?
What happened with Maduro was not a trial. It was a show of force.
It was not international justice, but the logic of the jungle in the suit of law.
When international law becomes a decoration and "crime" is used as a new cover for the plundering of resources, we realize that the problem has never been a pretext, but in who has the right to define it. Has Trump opened the door or broken the last lock in a system that no longer protects anyone?
Dr. Hisham Okal - Professor of Crisis Management and International Relationsز
