How to Think About American Power in a Post-Moral World

Instinctively, I resist writing reaction pieces. This is not affectation but professional caution: the academic vocation is ill-suited to instant judgement, and recent history is littered with confident forecasts that aged about as well as unrefrigerated seafood. Yet the United States’ removal of Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro is not merely another episode in the rolling news cycle. It is an event of such conceptual density – strategic, legal, ideological and civilisational – that refusing to think about it carefully would be the greater dereliction.

What follows, therefore, is not a hot take, nor a moral performance, nor an exercise in partisan positioning. It is an attempt to provide a framework for understanding what has occurred: what it tells us about American strategy, about the contortions of its critics and defenders alike, and, above all, about how the international system actually functions when power is exercised without apology, therapeutic language or ritual invocations of a ‘rules-based order’.

Until very recently, the idea that the United States might overtly remove the leader of a sovereign state – capture him, fly him to New York and announce intentions to oversee his country’s political transition – would have been dismissed as a fever dream of geopolitical maximalism. Yet this is precisely what has now happened in Venezuela. US forces struck targets in Caracas, seized Maduro and his wife and transported them to Manhattan to face federal charges. In Washington, the operation has been celebrated as decisive success. Across much of the world, it has been denounced as unvarnished imperialism, armed aggression and the crossing of an ‘unacceptable line’.

This essay is concerned with neither celebration nor denunciation. It asks a simpler and more unfashionable question: how should we think about such acts in a world where power has returned, moral language has become performative and the gap between rhetoric and reality has grown impossible to ignore?

An Unthinkable Act?

Regarding the events themselves, what we know is this: on January 3rd, following months of planning, a large-scale US military operation – dubbed Absolute Resolve – struck targets in Venezuela. Special forces captured Maduro and his wife, who now await federal court appearances in New York on charges of narcotrafficking and terrorism-related offences alleged by the US Government. President Donald Trump has stated that the United States will “run” Venezuela temporarily, oversee a political transition and assert control over security and economic levers, including the country’s vast oil reserves.

To defenders of the operation, the rationale is laid out in blunt and unapologetic terms. Maduro presided over an authoritarian, corrupt narco-state that trafficked drugs into the United States; his government was widely regarded as illegitimate following disputed elections; Russia and China had established growing footholds in the hemisphere; and Venezuela’s enormous hydrocarbon reserves offered an opportunity for economic reconstruction under American stewardship.

This, supporters insist, was not a moral crusade but a strategic correction. For many Venezuelan exiles and opposition figures, the operation has been greeted not with ambivalence but with open celebration: the long-awaited removal of a regime that had hollowed out the state and immiserated its population.

The Anti-Trump Reflex and the Collapse of Analysis

Predictably, much of the commentary collapsed into incoherence almost immediately, not because the underlying questions are simple, but because many participants began arguing past reality rather than confronting it.

Large segments of the anti-Trump Left responded not to the substance of the act but to its authorship: if Trump did it, it must be wrong. This reflex, repeated with ritual consistency over the past decade, has reached the point where facts themselves are treated as negotiable if they point in an unwelcome direction.

The irony, of course, is that many of these same voices once demanded aggressive action against authoritarian regimes elsewhere – Russia, Iran, Syria – often invoking the moral duty to intervene. Yet when a genuine exercise of power occurs in the Western hemisphere, sovereignty suddenly becomes sacrosanct. The only constant is affective alignment: not logic, not principle and certainly not evidence.

Sovereignty for Some, Revolution for Others

On the hard Left, the reaction has been equally predictable. For years, Venezuela under Maduro, and before that Hugo Chávez, was defended as a heroic act of resistance against American “imperialism”, even as the country descended into kleptocracy, repression and social collapse. Now, those same defenders have discovered a sudden and passionate reverence for sovereignty, international law and constitutional procedure.

Irony barely suffices here. These are the same movements that routinely dismiss borders as reactionary constructs and deride national sovereignty as an obstacle to progressive transformation. Yet when a favoured regime falls, the language of Westphalia is dusted off and deployed with theatrical earnestness.

The common thread linking anti-Trump liberals and socialist sovereigntists alike is simple: consistency with reality matters less than whether an outcome confirms prior cultural and ideological commitments. Arguments are judged not by their coherence but by their usefulness.

America First: Slogan, Strategy or Rorschach Test?

The only genuinely serious debate lies elsewhere – among those asking whether this action coheres with a defensible conception of American national interest.

If America First is interpreted as isolationism, then the operation looks like a violation of principle, and indeed of Trump’s own often repeated declarations against regime change wars and nation building interventions. Critics rightly point to Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya as cautionary tales. Fears of mission creep, quagmire and unintended consequences are not hysterical; they are grounded in hard experience.

Yet this moment also exposes a basic truth often ignored in such debates: isolationism has never been a stable posture for a great power with hemispheric reach. In an interconnected world, strategic vacuums are quickly filled, usually by actors less friendly to American interests. A state unable or unwilling to influence its near abroad invites others to shape outcomes to its disadvantage.

That is not ideology. It is political realism in its most elementary form.

Why Power Still Matters (and Why This Offends So Many People)

At the heart of this episode lies a truth long neglected in universities and policy circles alike: the international realm is governed not by moral consistency but by power and interest.

Within states, virtues such as the rule of law, proportionality and democratic accountability are indispensable. Beyond borders, they merely become aspirations, vulnerable to the primacy of sovereignty and the logic of geopolitical competition.

Recognising this is not an embrace of cynicism. It is an acceptance that states act where interests and capabilities permit and where restraint invites strategic loss. It is maxims, not axioms that prevail in the rough and tumble world of international politics. Thucydides understood this. So did every serious student of power who followed him from Machiavelli, to Justus Lipsius to Henry Kissinger.

What is relatively new is the visceral discomfort this reality now provokes among Western elites – many of whom previously endorsed interventions in the name of democracy or human rights, only to recoil when power is exercised without moral ornamentation. What they object to is not irrationality, but exposure: the stripping away of comforting illusions about how the world is supposed to work.

Defenders of the US action must nonetheless confront the real tests ahead. Removing Maduro is the easy part. Governing the aftermath – managing refugee flows, stabilising institutions, preventing bloodshed and insurgency – is where strategy will either vindicate itself or collapse.

The World Objects: Loudly, Predictably and Largely Irrelevantly

International reaction has been swift and instructive. Governments across Asia, Latin America and Europe have warned that the operation sets a dangerous precedent, undermining international law and sovereignty norms. China has condemned it as hegemonic behaviour. Countries friendly to the UShave expressed “grave concern”. Australia has urged restraint and diplomacy.

Within Venezuela, Vice-President Delcy Rodríguez was swiftly installed as Interim President by the Supreme Tribunal of Justice, denouncing US. assertions while Washington presses its claims to transitional authority.

None of this is incidental. Power never operates in a vacuum. It generates resistance, legal protest, economic disruption and geopolitical recalibration. These are not side-effects; they are the architecture of international politics itself.

What This Episode Actually Reveals

Several conclusions follow with uncomfortable clarity.

First, great powers act when they judge their core interests to be at stake. This is not moral endorsement; it is empirical description.

Second, contemporary political discourse is increasingly incapable of interpreting power. Outrage masquerades as critique; reflex replaces analysis; moral absolutism becomes a substitute for strategic thought.

Third, the return of great-power competition has rendered moral licence a luxury few states can afford. Whether one applauds or recoils, the central dynamic is influence and leverage, not abstract norms.

Finally, outcomes – not intentions – will be decisive. A failed transition will confirm every fear. A stable one will puncture much received wisdom. History, as ever, will judge by results, not rhetoric.

After the Flags Are Planted

This is not a defence of imperialism, nor a celebration of brute force. It is a recognition that when powerful actors act as powerful actors invariably do, the world does not resolve itself into moral absolutes. It resolves itself into consequences.

Those who appeal to legalism on the world stage will discover that law without enforcement bends easily beneath the weight of capability. Those who privilege emotion over analysis will learn that history is indifferent to sincerity and unmoved by protestation.

And for anyone convinced that foreign policy should be consistent and principled above all, there is one simple truth emerging from Caracas, New York and every capital watching this unfold: in a world where power still decides outcomes, those who cling to neat moral categories will find themselves outplayed by the brutal persistence of reality – and the last laugh will belong not to the righteous, but to the realist who survived the wreckage.

Michael Rainsborough is Professor of Strategic Theory and Director of the Centre for Future Defence and National Security, Canberra, Australia.