If Netanyahu can get away with genocide, then why can’t Trump get away with abducting another country’s President? Barbarism is as barbarism does.
Sami Al-Arian is the Director of the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA) at Istanbul Zaim University. Originally from Palestine, he lived in the US for four decades (1975-2015) where he was a tenured academic, prominent speaker and human rights activist before relocating to Turkey. He is the author of several studies and books. He can be contacted at: nolandsman1948@gmail.com.
Cross-posted from Middle East Eye
The US abduction this past weekend of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife was not simply an escalation in a long dispute.
It was a declaration, made through aggression, that sovereignty in the western hemisphere is a mirage subject to US intervention – and that international law is an instrument reserved for adversaries and weak states, not an obligation that applies to great powers or empire.
While the US framed the action as “law enforcement”, in practice it resembled a military raid – a reality underscored by President Donald Trump’s own words. He called the operation “extremely successful” and said the US would “run the country” until a “safe, proper and judicious transition”.
He warned Venezuelan political leaders that “what happened to Maduro can happen to them”, saying he was not afraid of putting “boots on the ground”.
Most revealing was Trump’s decision to tie the action openly to oil. He brazenly claimed that Venezuela had “stolen” oil from an industry the US had built “with American talent, drive and skill”, calling it “one of the largest thefts of American property in the history of our country”.
This language belongs to the arrogant vocabulary of conquest, rather than legality and justice.
To understand Trump’s actions in Venezuela, one must situate them within a larger pattern of imperialism. Declared in 1823 by the fifth US president, James Monroe, the Monroe Doctrine sought to establish the western hemisphere as a US sphere of control.
Over time, it evolved into a doctrine of hemispheric enforcement: the US would determine which governments were deemed “legitimate”, which were “dangerous” and subject to sanctioning or replacement, and which resources were “strategic” and could thus be acquired by hook or crook.
Logic of domination
When a government obstructs US hegemony or strategic and economic priorities, instability becomes policy, and various slogans – “democracy”, “anti-communism”, “counter-terrorism”, “the war on drugs” – are used to compel coercion.
What is new in January 2026 is not intent, but brazenness. Earlier interventions relied on deniability in the form of proxies, covert funding and “advisors”. Here, the US president openly embraced the logic of domination, presuming the world would be cowed and shaken by the visible display of American brute power.
Venezuela sits atop more than 300 billion barrels of oil, the largest proven crude reserves in the world. That fact has never been morally neutral in an imperial system that treats energy as power.
But it’s not just about oil. Venezuela’s Orinoco mining belt is rich in gold and other precious metals; with more than 8,000 tonnes of gold, the country holds one of the largest reserves in the world.
This matters because interventions sold as “anti-narcotics” or “anti-corruption” often carry a hidden purpose – in this case, handing Trump and the heads of multinational corporations the power to decide who controls concessions, who commands trading routes, and who gets to monetise what lies beneath the ground.
Venezuela also holds billions of tonnes of iron ore and significant deposits of rare earth elements, nickel, copper and phosphates. These resources are critical inputs for modern technology and industrial production, including steel, which is essential for manufacturing military hardware.
In geopolitical competition, control of heavy-industry resources often determines the balance of power.
In the weeks and months preceding the attack, the US tightened the screws on Venezuela in ways that revealed its strategic purpose. This past December, the US imposed a naval blockade that disrupted tanker flows, seized cargoes, and halved oil exports.
What Washington demonstrated was not simply that sanctions inflict harm, but that sanctions, blockades, seizures and “law enforcement” narratives are deployed as preparatory fire for regime change.
Collapse of legal pretence
What Washington has sought to reverse is not only where Venezuela’s oil flows, but what that oil is used to build at home.
Following Hugo Chavez’s election as president in 1998, Venezuela redirected oil revenues towards large-scale social programmes designed to address decades of extreme inequality. In the years that followed, poverty was cut by more than half, extreme poverty fell sharply, and access to healthcare, education, housing and food subsidies expanded dramatically.
It was precisely this model that US policy sought to dismantle, beginning with targeted financial measures in the mid-2000s, and escalating after 2015 into sweeping oil, banking and trade sanctions.
The humanitarian deterioration that followed was the direct consequence: a deliberate reversal of social gains through externally imposed economic strangulation, aimed not at reforming governance, but at forcing regime collapse by making the existing system economically unviable.
After Maduro’s abduction, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has been pushing for regime changein Venezuela for months, described the attack as a “law enforcement” operation. But it was condemned by many countries in the region, including Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia, as well as around the world.
China said it was “deeply shocked and strongly condemns the US for recklessly using force against a sovereign state and targeting its president”.
Washington’s insistence that this abduction was simply “law enforcement” is not just unconvincing; it’s politically revealing. A US indictment of Maduro, unsealedin the wake of the military raid, is not evidence of criminal wrongdoing, but rather a stamp placed after the fact to normalise what American empire had done.
And while Trump claimed the US would now run Venezuela, his own State Department has issued a warning that it cannot help American citizens who might be stranded in the country.
Gaza and Ukraine
Venezuela cannot be understood in isolation from Gaza, which has functioned as a global litmus test for lawfulness in international politics.
Washington has spent the past two years shielding Israel politically, arming it militarily, and undermining any efforts towards accountability for its many crimes.
In the South Africa case accusing Israel of genocide, the International Court of Justice issued provisional measures in January 2024, which were modified and reaffirmed in March and May of that year. But the humanitarian situation in Gaza, repeatedly documented by United Nations bodies, has remained catastrophic, with ongoing deaths and mass displacement – even during the so-called ceasefire.
At the level of criminal accountability, an arrest warrant against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been issued by the International Criminal Court, but it has not been enforced.
There is a clear contrast in how the law is applied to Venezuela versus Israel.
Maduro is abducted without trial, and his country is placed under foreign “transition” management, while Netanyahu is treated as a strategic partner. A system that claims universal legality is thus undermined by its own regime of exemptions.
On Ukraine, the West insists that borders are inviolable and aggression is criminal. But on Gaza and Venezuela, the opposite is justified. It is power, not principle, that determines when sovereignty matters.
Venezuela’s central lesson to the world is grim but unmistakable. The US cannot do to North Korea what it has done to Venezuela, because North Korea possesses a credible nuclear deterrent. Venezuela does not.
Trump’s own record underscores this logic. With Pyongyang, Washington has been forced into deterrence management and negotiation, precisely because the costs of decapitation or occupation would be existentially escalatory.
Venezuela thus becomes a case study that strengthens the argument, across the Global South, that nuclear capabilities function as regime insurance. This is not a moral endorsement of proliferation; it is an empirical reading of imperial behaviour, grounded in realist geopolitical logic.
Iran and the limits of force
The same deterrence logic applies even more strongly to Iran – and this reality explains why a Venezuela-style operation in Tehran would likely fail, even as some in Washington and Tel Aviv still fantasise about it. But such an attack would almost certainly fail because of structural constraints that the US cannot neutralise through force.
Iran demonstrated its retaliatory capacity in the 12-day war last June. With a large missile and drone arsenal, hardened facilities, and the ability to strike regional bases and critical infrastructure, Iran could inflict considerable damage on its adversaries. Any escalation would not be guaranteed to remain local.
The Strait of Hormuz is critical to the global economy. According to the US Energy Information Administration, oil flows through the strait in 2024-25 accounted for more than one-quarter of global seaborne oil trade and roughly one-fifth of global oil and petroleum product consumption.
With a population of 92 million and a territory spanning 1.6 million square kilometres, Iran is neither demographically nor geographically manageable as an occupation project.
The US occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrated that overwhelming force can topple a state, but there is no governing a society that rejects the occupier. Iran has spent two decades studying those failures and developing asymmetric counters, including regional depth.
Regime-change operations depend less on popular consent than on intelligence penetration, defections and internal betrayal. The Maduro operation will thus likely intensify, not diminish, efforts within Venezuela to dismantle foreign intelligence networks and prevent future infiltration – a conclusion shaped by earlier experiences, including the failed 2002 coup against Chavez.
At the societal level, pro-government mobilisation – including calls by civilian reserve forces and community-based defence structures to oppose foreign intervention – reflects a pattern Washington has repeatedly misread, from Iraq to Afghanistan. Removing a leader does not extinguish resistance when intervention is widely understood as foreign domination tied to the seizure of national resources.
Venezuela thus confronts the US with a familiar dilemma. A state may be weakened by sanctions, but society is politically hardened by siege. Coercion at the top entrenches opposition below.
Gaza exposed the hollowness of western universalism, liberalism and globalisation. Venezuela extends the lesson into the western hemisphere, with a clarity that even allies cannot easily obscure. When legality is enforced only against opponents, as Gaza and Venezuela show, it ceases to function as law, and becomes an instrument of power. And when aggression is openly linked to oil, empire stops pretending to be anything else.
More than two millennia ago, the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius offered future rulers a simple warning: “Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future, too.” Trump, however, has never been accused of heeding wise counsel.
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