America’s actions in Venezuela, coupled with Europe’s acquiescence, mark an open reversion to colonialist militarism. For much of the post-Cold War era, Western power operated through deniability. Coercion was cloaked in the language of humanitarian intervention, democracy promotion, or free trade. What distinguishes the Trump era – and Venezuela in particular – is not the invention of a new imperial logic, but the abandonment of euphemism. What had long been implicit became explicit, stripped of moral ornamentation and procedural restraint.
Europe’s role has been revelatory. Several European states have deferred to US strategic leadership, avoiding responsibility for the consequences of preceding economic strangulation and political destabilisation, a pattern that mirrors earlier responses to Iraq, Libya, and Syria.
Ukraine fits into this logic not as an aberration, but as its most consequential and structurally revealing case. If Venezuela represents the unmasking of imperial intent at the periphery, Ukraine represented the high-risk application of the same coercive logic at the core of the Eurasian balance, where the costs and contradictions of this strategy become impossible to conceal. What distinguishes Ukraine is not that the West suddenly abandoned norms there, but that norms were selectively instrumentalised in service of a geopolitical project whose premises predated 2014. Crucially, while Ukraine bears the human and infrastructural cost, the Western powers have borne the financial and reputational risk.
What is striking in the present case is not that the United States sought control over a resource-rich, strategically located state – that has been a constant of US policy – but that senior American officials openly acknowledged material interests as a legitimate driver of intervention. Venezuela thus marks a rhetorical regression to pre-1945 imperial discourse. The US is now unashamedly on a global rampage to fulfil its gluttonous appetite for the resources of all of the earth.
This moment is a clear rupture in the evolution of Western power. Since 2001, the “War on Terror” provided the legitimizing framework for intervention across West Asia, South Asia, and parts of Africa. Afghanistan and Iraq were presented as exceptional cases – responses to terrorism or imagined weapons of mass destruction – but they established precedents for preventive war, prolonged occupation, and the restructuring of political economies under external control.
As these projects faltered, Western interventionism adapted rather than retreated. Libya represented a shift toward regime collapse without reconstruction, while Syria demonstrated the use of proxy warfare, sanctions, and selective humanitarian concern. Across these cases, the language of universal values masked strategic objectives: control over energy corridors, containment of rivals, preservation of regional hierarchies, and demonstration of power.
By the late 2010s, however, this justificatory architecture had eroded. Repeated failures discredited claims of benevolent intervention, while domestic fatigue undermined the political capital required to sustain them. Trump did not so much create a new doctrine as discard the old one’s moral pretensions. His foreign policy reflected a transactional worldview in which power exists to be exercised, not explained.
The shift from implicit to explicit imperial behaviour signals a deeper structural change: the erosion of Western hegemony. During the unipolar moment, the United States could shape outcomes through institutions, norms, and consent as much as through force. As relative power declines – economically, demographically, and technologically – coercion increasingly replaces persuasion.
Sanctions regimes, financial warfare, extraterritorial legal claims – Trump has already articulated dubious claims on Panama, Greenland and Canada – and weaponised interdependence have become substitutes for legitimacy. Venezuela, Iran, Russia, China, even India, have all experienced different facets of this coercive turn.
But coercion without hegemony carries costs. It encourages counter-balancing, accelerates de- dollarisation, fragments global governance, and legitimises reciprocal disregard for international law. By aligning reflexively with US coercive policies while lacking the capacity or will to shape outcomes, Europe reinforces American dominance in form while hastening its decline in substance. The result is not a cohesive “West,” but an asymmetric bloc increasingly reliant on force and threat rather than leadership.
Classical colonialism rested on three pillars: military superiority, economic extraction, and ideological justification. While formal empire disappeared, the underlying logic persisted in modified form. What distinguishes the current phase is the weakening of ideology. Democracy promotion and humanitarianism no longer conceal material interests, nor are they consistently invoked. When officials openly discuss oil access, the mask slips entirely. This is colonialism without romance: extraction justified by power alone.
The long-term implications are paradoxical. Explicit imperial behaviour may yield short-term leverage, but it undermines the very foundations of durable power. The US will be feared, not followed; resisted, not emulated. Domestic polarisation, institutional decay, and declining social cohesion will constrain its ability to sustain external coercion. The normalisation of unilateralism will invite imitation. If international norms are treated as optional by their principal architects, emerging powers will feel little obligation to respect them. The result is a more anarchic, transactional international order – less stable, more militarised, and more prone to miscalculation.
In abandoning the pretence of moral leadership, the West may have gained clarity – but at the cost of legitimacy, stability, and ultimately, power itself.
Note: The article is written by Ajai Sahni, Executive Director, Institute for Conflict Management and Editor, Second Sight.
