The mask has finally fallen. Yesterday’s brazen kidnapping of the Venezuelan President by the USA is not merely a violation of law; it is the resurrection of the colonial mandate. In seizing a sitting Head of State and declaring, as President Trump did yesterday, that the US will now “run the country” to ensure “American dominance in the Western Hemisphere,” Washington has stripped away the polite fiction of “democracy promotion.” This is 19th-century imperialism with 21st-century technology. It is, as Venezuelan Foreign Minister Yvan Gil correctly identified, a “colonial war” designed not to liberate a people, but to seize “strategic resources, particularly vast oil reserves.”
The Global South has been disciplined for generations to believe in a neutral order – one where law restrains power. That belief now collapses under the weight of evidence.
When Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva warns that this act represents the “darkest moments of interference” and a “grave affront to sovereignty,” he is voicing the collective realisation of the non-Western world: our borders exist only so long as they do not inconvenience the metropole.
Consider the invasion of Iraq in 2003. No UN authorisation. No weapons of mass destruction. Hundreds of thousands dead, yet no sanctions against the architects of that war. Contrast this with how weaker states are treated. When the US speaks of “fixing the badly broken infrastructure… and start making money,” as Trump promised yesterday, they are reciting the classic script of the coloniser: we must occupy you to improve you. Colombian President Gustavo Petro pierced this narrative immediately, stating, “Internal conflicts between peoples are resolved by those same peoples in peace.” To impose a solution from the outside – at gunpoint – is not aid; it is subjugation.
Take Guantanamo Bay-a permanent monument to suspended law. Indefinite detention without trial, torture rebranded as “enhanced interrogation.” If an African or Asian state operated such a facility, it would be dragged before every international forum. When the US does it, the world is instructed to look away. Since when did power become a legal defence?
Then there is the selective morality of international justice. African leaders are summoned to The Hague with speed; Western leaders are quietly excluded. When Washington dislikes a ruling, it threatens judges. This latest move – indicting a foreign President in a New York court – is the ultimate expansion of this double standard. It asserts that US domestic law is planetary law. As critics have long argued, this is “extraction, dressed up as order.”
The economic hypocrisy is even more brazen. The US weaponises the dollar, freezing reserves and suffocating economies like Iran into scarcity. Yet when the US runs deficits without restraint, it is called “stimulus.” Why is economic indiscipline tolerated when it wears the US flag, but criminalised when it appears elsewhere?
The question that now confronts the Global South is not moral, but logical: why do we continue to fund this arrangement? Why do we hold reserves in a currency that can be abused at will? Why do we submit to institutions that punish us for deviations they excuse in their patrons?
If rules collapse in the presence of power, then power – not law – is the system. The kidnapping of President Maduro proves that for the West, sovereignty is a privilege they hold, not a right they respect.
The real scandal is no longer Western hypocrisy; it is Global South compliance. Every reserve held, every sanction obeyed, every lecture politely absorbed is a vote for a system that treats sovereignty as conditional. Power has made its terms unmistakably clear. The only remaining question is whether those who are exploited will continue to finance the machinery of their own erasure or finally recognise that a world built on obedience to impunity deserves neither loyalty nor patience.
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