KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Trump’s foreign policy consists in dramatic entry, leaving early and the problem unsolved, theatrical cover-up, and premature victory declaration, akin to a cat’s litter box routine —seen in Gaza ceasefire failure, China trade war obsolescence, and Iran’s ‘obliterated’ nuclear program leading to potential Round Two against Iran. And now, Venezuela.
• In Venezuela, the U.S. kidnapped Maduro but achieved no regime change; government continues under VP Delcy Rodríguez. Trump threatens further action, claims US will ‘run Venezuela for the foreseeable future’, amid unfeasibility of full occupation. 
• The operation was a blatant breach of international law; no UN resolution or self-defence justification. Trump invokes the Monroe Doctrine for the U.S.’ ‘pre-eminence’ in the Western Hemisphere, but contradicts this by resuming and often escalating global interference. Oil as key motive; potential for Venezuela to become Trump’s ‘forever war’. Risks to Greenland, Global South decoupling, and escalating global disorder.
• EU monitors passively, risks undermining Ukraine stance; Greek PM Mitsotakis supports invasion, disregards legality despite Greece’s reliance on international law against Türkiye. 

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This Time, Merely Exiting the Litter Box Won’t Cut it 

The year 2026 commenced with a new war: the U.S.’ invasion of Venezuela and kidnapping of its head of state. Donald J. Trump’s foreign policy bears a striking resemblance to how cats defecate. Our feline overlords arrive with great ceremony, scratch the ground as if preparing something momentous, deposit a small but pungent offering, and then expend most of their energy theatrically covering it up — only to stroll away, tail high, declaring victory and proclaiming that the job is done. Just like President Trump’s declarations of victory, what remains is neither resolved nor improved, merely obscured, destined to resurface the moment anyone else enters the room; plus, it doesn’t smell well. The performance matters far more than the aftermath left for others to clean up. Before Venezuela, there was Gaza and the wider Middle East. Trump emerged victorious from his litter box and proclaimed a ceasefire that was never upheld and a peace plan that shall never materialise; Israel is continuing with what the International Court of Justice is currently adjudicating as genocide, Hamas is in no mood for disarming, and PM Netanyahu is overtly preparing for Round Two with Iran, while Lebanon is further destabilised. Second, the China trade war, the tariffs, and the so-called “Liberation Day”; this has become obsolete so quickly we have almost forgotten about it. Third, the “obliteration” of Iran’s nuclear program, allegedly removing the raison d’être of American military activity against Iran in its totality. Now, PM Netanyahu and President Trump publicly discuss Round Two, even though sterling and total victory had been declared in the summer. The same litter box methodology is now being used with regard to Venezuela, performatively declaring finality where none exists.

For starters, up to the time of this writing there was no regime change in Venezuela, but continuity of government. Venezuela (and inter alia Iran, by the way) is not a personal or dynastic regime whose collapse hinges on a single individual (Nicolás Maduro), as in North Korea or, historically, Qaddafi’s Libya. Power is embedded in institutions, security services, party structures, and international patronage networks. In the same way that kidnapping Chancellor Merz will not make Germany’s political system and governance melt away, removing the figurehead does not dissolve the system, hence the governance of Venezuela merely goes on under Vice-President Delcy Rodríguez, a long-time Chavista insider. President Trump noted that this was the first strike and that he hopes a second one won’t be necessary, and that Rodriguez should ‘do what’s right’, i.e. the U.S.’ bidding, otherwise ‘she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro’ — put differently, Trump threatens to revisit the litterbox. Of course, Trump also said his administration ‘will run Venezuela’, for a time, out of Washington —which is demonstrably unfeasible, while Venezuela is currently run by the Maduro government without Maduro rather than by the U.S. and Trump’s lieutenants— and that Rodriguez has already agreed to do his bidding, which she publicly denied. All this very much looks like a performative grand gesture; rhetorically convince the Venezuelans that it’s all over, in the hope that it will be magically over. Yet what will happen if this does not come to pass? Will the ‘Peace President’ militarily invade Venezuela, a country of 912,050 km2 and over 31 million population? Or will more sand be added to the litter box, in the hope that the world forgets, as it has indeed forgotten Trump’s tariff ‘Liberation Day’ and trade war with China? It might very well be that we are witnessing the very beginning, rather than the grand finale, of the Venezuelan saga — and the worst-case scenario for the U.S. is that this could end up to be Trump’s very own ‘Ukraine’, ‘Iraq’, ‘Afghanistan’, or even ‘Vietnam’.

Furthermore, we are invited to believe that the same American armed forces which utterly failed to defeat the Houthis twice, once under Biden and once under Trump, have now pulled Nicolás Maduro’s kidnapping off at minimal resistance within a couple of hours. More details will eventually surface on whether some kind of backroom deal was in the mix.

International Law, Europe, Monroe Doctrine, and Greenland

There is hardly any point anymore in pointing out that this was a blatant violation of international law, most obviously article 2 par. 4 of the UN charter stating that ‘all members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations’ — and that there is absolutely no way to frame the U.S.’ extraterritorial abduction of a head of state as legal. Needless to say, there was neither a UN Security Council resolution here, nor a plausible American self-defence against armed aggression threatening its sovereignty — much less a plausible and legal Responsibility to Protect. It is important to note that the international system’s subjects are the states, with their sovereignties sacrosanct and without differentiation between liberal democracies, other types of democracies, dictatorships, authoritarian regimes, and so on — hence every state has a seat at the United Nations irrespective of its government. In this context, what one thinks of Nicolás Maduro is utterly irrelevant in the face of the use of force against Venezuela’s sovereignty. The flagrant irony here is that Trump is invoking, or prompts others to invoke, precisely the earlier American ideological framings he had pledged to annihilate: the liberal international relations theory and the ‘rules-based international order’ (in lieu of international law) that primarily distinguishes between ‘democracies’ and ‘autocracies’. Given that Venezuela is framed as belonging in the latter (even if Trump himself insists on the illegality of the 46^th Presidency of the United States), removing a ‘dictator’ is projected as right and proper.

This was a talking point the European Commission only was too eager to adopt — despite the obvious fact that its whole argumentation vis-à-vis the Ukraine war was precisely the opposite for almost four years. (It is worth noting that Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine Andrii Sybiha also approved of the invasion of the sovereign country of Venezuela, in what constitutes a bitter irony.) The fact that so many European officials issued statements along the lines of ‘we are closely monitoring the situation in Venezuela’ has already prompted an internet joke: ‘Europeans are at previously unforeseen levels of monitoring the situation’. Professor of EU Law Alberto Alemanno has aptly put Europe’s dilemma on Venezuela as follows: ‘if Europe acquiesces in U.S. actions against the Maduro regime, it risks weakening the legal principles that underpin its opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. If it condemns those actions, however, Europe risks alienating its primary security guarantor and straining transatlantic unity at a moment when collective defence against Russia is especially critical. This dilemma exists only because international law has been applied inconsistently for decades. Europe must now choose between legal principle and strategic necessity, a choice that reveals whether the so called “rules-based order” ever had genuine normative content or was always just a legitimizing discourse for Western hegemony.’ In other words, the EU once again bites the dust. 

President Trump, however, has already signalled that Greenland is next, since the U.S. ‘needs Greenland for national security’; Greenland, of course, is autonomous territory belonging to the Kingdom of Denmark, an EU member state. It remains to be seen how the European Commission squares that circle.

Removing ‘a dictator who oppresses his people’, in Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s words, is only one rationale given among many; Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said that it’s about drugs that pose an imminent threat, as President Trump was claiming all along — but it is also President Trump that explicitly said ‘it’s all about the oil’. After all, Donald J. Trump had publicly written back in 2013 that ‘I still can’t believe we left Iraq without the oil’, and now says ‘the oil is ours’ with regard to Venezuela. Truth be told, the oil vector is quite explicitly foreshadowed in the new National Security Strategy: ‘the Western Hemisphere is home to many strategic resources that America should partner with regional allies to develop’. And, in theory, controlling Venezuela’s oil might be thought of as the U.S.’s ‘insurance policy’ for a planned attack on Iran, anticipating that the Strait of Hormuz could be closed, necessitating an alternative oil source (on which timescale?). Yet aside from the fact that Venezuela is currently not governed by the U.S. but by the Maduro government sans Maduro, even if Trump’s plan materialises Venezuelan oil and reserves are not to be instantly and magically translated into American revenues — while the U.S. midterms are due this coming November. 

Analysts are quick to point out that what we are witnessing is the Monroe doctrine, i.e. what the new National Security Strategy terms ‘the Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine’. According to it, the U.S. will ‘restore American pre-eminence in the Western Hemisphere’ and ‘deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in [the Western] Hemisphere’ — i.e., the Americas north and south, since the Western Hemisphere begins from Greenwich westwards, with most of Europe and Africa as well as all of Asia being in the Eastern Hemisphere. The idea here is that the U.S. will have the rest of the Western Hemisphere (North America, Central America, Latin America, Greenland) as its backyard without Great Power competition in situ, and that it shall allow other Great Powers to have their ‘backyards’ as well. 

Even if other Great Powers were to acquiesce to this plan —which they are not doing, if we are to judge by China’s response to the National Security Strategy, and to remember that Latin America’s Brazil is the ‘B’ in ‘BRICS+’—, the fundamental problem here is that you can’t have your cake and eat it too. The United States want to focus on ‘their’ hemisphere with a ‘Monroe Doctrine with a Trump Corollary’, but at the same time they are participating in the Ukraine war, meddling in the Middle East/Western Asia in countless ways starting with their very special relationship with Israel, massively arming Taiwan after the publication of the new National Security, intervening in Africa, and so on. There is no ‘deal’ to be made between Great Powers in which you get your half of the world and retain the right to intervene in the other half of the world.

How all this unfolds remains to be seen — from Venezuela’s fate onwards to the turbulences to the international system and order, Greenland, the EU’s oscillations, the Global South’s new incentives to decouple from the U.S., and so on, including the frequency with which President Trump will feel the need to visit his litter box, cover a quick, uninviting and ill-advised initiative with sand, and proclaim victory in exiting the litter box. At some point, however, all this is destined to hit the fan; there is simply no visible scenario in which order, i.e. peace, prevails.

The Greeks Invented Words like Democracy, Sycophancy, and Hypocrisy 

While most European leaders were busy declaring that they are merely monitoring the situation in Venezuela, (at least) one leader stood out, unflinchingly supporting and indeed celebrating the use of force against a state’s sovereignty and underscoring that international legality is not relevant to the discussion at the present moment: PM Kyriakos Mitsotakis of my native Greece, with the following statement: ‘Nicholas Maduro presided over a brutal and repressive dictatorship that brought about unimaginable suffering on the Venezuelan people. The end of his regime offers new hope for the country. This is not the time to comment on the legality of the recent actions’. The wider context of that last phrase is that Greece consistently invokes international law with overabundant frequency, due to the continuing partial occupation of Cyprus by Türkiye and to Greece’s disputes with Türkiye, not to mention Greece’s public rationale for its support for Ukraine and for ‘being at war’ with Russia due to the priority of international law, hence the statement is startling indeed. Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute commented on the Greek PM’s statement: ‘Calling Europe’s official reactions farcical would be unjustifiably kind.’ It goes without saying that the irony was not lost to Turkish commentators, such as Ragıp Soylu stating that ‘Mitsotakis is now fully on board of Netanyahu line of foreign policy. He doesn’t even pay the lip service to the international law, on the contrary, he completely disregards it. Why do you then constantly complain about Turkey’s “violation of international law”?’, or to a Turkish X account’s response to the Greek PM: ‘Great news! It sounds like Greek PM Mitsotakis won’t be complaining about the legality of Turkish actions in the Aegean, Thrace, Cyprus, etc. Greece doesn’t care about int’l law anymore.’ The PM’s statement engendered ire across the political spectrum, including from the former Greek PM with Nea Dimokratia Antonis Samaras.Yet it doesn’t end there. A top Nea Dimokratia politician, member of parliament since 2007, and six-time cabinet minister with Nea Dimokratia, lawyer Makis Voridis, doubled down on PM Mitsotakis’ disregard for international law and support for President Trump by making it further explicit; moreover, in his statement he quite obviously conflates ‘the Western world’ with the ‘Western hemisphere’. Greece, however, finds itself in the Eastern hemisphere — as does the whole of the European Union with the exception of Spain and Portugal, since the Western hemisphere ‘starts’ from Greenwich, London westwards. It seems that a sizable slice of the fate of Greeks is entrusted to top politicians who literally do not know which hemisphere their country finds itself in — in a globe of, naturally, two hemispheres, meaning that even by cluelessly guessing you would get that one right 50% of the time. What could possibly go wrong?

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