When authority wanes, the temptation is to prove that power still works

Set aside, for a moment, the many justified criticisms of Nicolás Maduro’s rule. Set aside the sorrow of Venezuela’s long social and economic unraveling, the corrosions of corruption and repression, the misery of hyperinflation and emigration, the failed bargains and broken oppositions. These are real, and they matter. But they do not change what this episode is in the longer sweep of history: a regime-change operation by force, narrated as administration.

This is how great powers behave when they sense decline.

Not collapse. Decline. The subtler, more dangerous phase when a state remains formidable and capable of extraordinary projection, disruption, and violence yet finds it harder to secure compliance by legitimacy, persuasion, and institutional leadership. In that phase, coercion does not replace strategy; it becomes strategy’s default setting. When authority wanes, the temptation is to prove that power still works.

Venezuela is a near-perfect stage for that proof. It sits in the United States’ traditional sphere of influence. It contains a strategic commodity that still animates global politics even in an era of energy transition. It offers, at home, the theatre of decisive action. And it sends, abroad, a message: Washington may be constrained elsewhere, but it can still act unilaterally where it feels it has historic entitlement.

This is the late-imperial reflex: the return of “demonstration power.”

The return of the hemisphere

The Western Hemisphere has long been the place where the United States can most readily convert military superiority into political outcomes. Distance is short. Intelligence networks are deep. Regional dependence is layered. The legal and moral controversies are real, but the logistical barriers are low. If a declining hegemon wishes to remind the world that it still has teeth, it often bites close to home.

That is why this act will be read in Latin America not simply as an intervention in Venezuela, but as a reassertion of the old doctrine with the hemisphere as strategic backyard, sovereignty as conditional, governments as removable when they fall out of alignment with Washington’s preferences.

And because the United States is the United States, it does not need to say “Monroe Doctrine” for the doctrine to reappear. It reappears through practice.

Oil: the motive you can say out loud

The striking feature of this episode is not only what happened, but how openly it was framed. When a leader talks about running another country “for now” and selling its oil while rebuilding its energy infrastructure, the mask slips. This is no longer the careful language of reluctant intervention or humanitarian necessity; it is the blunt language of administration and extraction.

Empires always wrap their actions in the moral vocabulary of freedom, stability, democracy, security. But in their harder phases they begin to talk more directly in material terms: supply, assets, leverage, control. The moral story remains; the material loot story grows louder.

That matters because it clarifies how the world will remember the act. It will not be remembered as a technical dispute over constitutional legitimacy. It will be remembered as a moment when Washington did not merely “support” a political transition but claimed an operational role in running a sovereign state and spoke of its resources as a fundamental outcome.

The strategic cost of breaking the rule you claim to defend

The United States has long cast itself as guardian of a “rules-based order.” That phrase has been used cynically at times, but it has also served a real function: it reassured allies, disciplined rivals, and offered smaller states a framework, however imperfect, within which power could be constrained by law.

Regime-change by force corrodes that framework. Not because the world was previously innocent, but because the precedent is vivid.

The deeper damage is not confined to one episode. It accumulates. Once the logic of exception becomes routine, the order becomes less an architecture of legitimacy and more a contest of capabilities. The world’s middle powers those states that cannot dominate, but can align, hedge, and build alternatives then behave accordingly. They diversify dependencies. They seek parallel financial rails. They harden regional institutions. They treat U.S. rhetoric as contingent and U.S. commitments as transactional.

A hegemon can win battles and still, in time, lose the habit of consent that makes hegemony possible.

Cuba as shadow, message, and temptation

In the days following the Venezuela operation, talk will inevitably turn to Cuba and whether this action signals a wider intention, whether it is meant as warning, whether a second Trump administration has more planned coercion in mind. The public signals have been ambiguous, and ambiguity is itself a form of power: it forces others to plan for worst cases.

Even if nothing immediate follows, the psychological and political effects are real. Regime-change in Caracas changes every calculation across the Caribbean and Latin America. It shifts expectations. It emboldens some interests and terrifies others. It invites pre-emptive repression, pre-emptive alignment, and pre-emptive hedging.

This is how insecurity spreads not only through action but through the credible possibility of action.

How 2049 will read this

If you want to understand how this will look to historians in 2049, you have to understand what historians do in eras of transition. They look for moments when the underlying logic of a system reveals itself. They look for acts that make sense only once you admit the older order is fraying.

By 2049 the centenary year of the People’s Republic of China, the world is likely to be still recognisably American in many respects of military reach, alliance networks, cultural gravity but also more densely multipolar: China more central, India more powerful, other states more consequential in their regions, and the global South more able to refuse a single “centre” of authority. In that world, “dominance” will not mean what it meant in 1949, 1991 or 2026.

In such a world, Venezuela 2026 will likely be filed under a particular heading: still powerful, increasingly brittle.

Future accounts will note that Washington retained immense capacity to act. They will also note what the act disclosed: the shift from legitimacy to policing; from institution-building to improvisation; from persuasion to power.

They will ask not simply whether the intervention succeeded in the narrow sense, but what it accelerated: the erosion of legal norms, the reawakening of hemispheric fear, the deepening of global hedging against U.S. coercion, and the temptation for other powers to imitate the “exception” when it suits them.

Most of all, they will ask the uncomfortable question that hangs over late-hegemonic behaviour: why did the strongest country in the world choose a method that makes the world less governable?

What this means for Australia

Australians should not watch this like it is distant theatre. We are an ally of the United States. We repeatedly invoke a rules-based order in our own strategic language, especially in relation to the Indo-Pacific. We claim to stand for sovereignty, law, and restraint. Those claims become harder to sustain when the leading power in our alliance system performs open regime change by force and speaks of running another country “for now.”

In a multipolar world, credibility is a strategic asset. If Australia wants to be heard in the region—on sovereignty, on coercion, on the inadmissibility of force—we cannot treat law as a slogan. We must be willing to say, publicly and plainly, that regime change by force is not “order.” It is rule.

What it will take for U.S. allies and “the West” to move on

The harder question, though, is not what one ally should say about one operation. It is what it will take for U.S. allies more broadly to stop acting as if the fundamentals of 1945 can be preserved indefinitely by habit, loyalty, and denial by going along in the hope that the world will revert to the old geometry.

Because it won’t. The tectonic plates are moving: production, trade, finance, technology ecosystems, military capabilities, demographic weight, and political confidence are redistributing across regions. In that context, “holding the line” on a U.S.-centred order becomes less a strategy than a form of dangerous nostalgia sometimes sincere, sometimes cynical, often costly.

Moving on will require at least five shifts none easy, all overdue.

First: intellectual honesty. Allies have to say out loud what they already know privately: that the U.S. remains powerful, but not reliably hegemonic; that American domestic politics now routinely produces abrupt foreign-policy swings; and that the gap between U.S. rhetoric and U.S. conduct is widening in ways that damage everyone tied to it. Without this honesty, policy becomes a theatre of declarations of principle followed by automatic alignment.

Second: strategic capability, not just strategic talk. Autonomy is not a mood; it is an asset base. Europeans, Canadians, Australians, Japanese and others will not “rebalance” without investing in the capacities that make independent judgment credible: resilient supply chains, industrial depth in strategic sectors, cyber and intelligence capabilities, diplomatic presence, and defence readiness calibrated to national interests and not simply alliance expectations. Otherwise, alignment remains the default because there is no practical alternative.

Third: alliance reform and toward consultation that binds, not merely reassures. A mature alliance system in a multipolar era must be able to say “no,” and to do so without rupture. That means institutionalising real constraints on adventurism: mechanisms for prior consultation, transparent legal standards, and consequences when partners act in ways that drag others into breach of norms or reputational damage. If alliances cannot absorb disagreement, they become instruments of compulsion rather than cooperation.

Fourth: rebuilding legitimacy through genuinely shared rules. The old order claimed universality but often operated as hierarchy. A revised order has to reflect the reality that many states will not accept rules they had no meaningful role in shaping. That means serious reform of global institutions, fairer development finance, credible climate commitments, and an approach to sovereignty that applies to friends and foes alike. If the rules are seen as selective, they become invitations to build rival rules.

Fifth: learning to live with pluralism. The emerging world will not be one empire replaced by another. It will be crowded. The test of statecraft will be how well countries manage overlapping spheres, interdependence, and disagreement without sliding into permanent coercion. That requires a cultural change in Western policy: less missionary certainty, more diplomatic craft; less obsession with dominance, more focus on stability, bargaining, and the prevention of catastrophe.

None of this requires abandoning the United States. It requires ending the reflex of treating U.S. choices as the organising centre of reality. A friend can be a friend without being a vassal. An ally can be an ally without being a rubber stamp.

And the most persuasive reason for allies to do this is not moral purity. It is self-interest. In the coming decades, middle powers will be judged not by their slogans but by their reliability, their restraint, and their ability to help build workable arrangements across divides. If “the West” wants any claim to leadership in the next order, it will have to show that it can respect law when it is inconvenient and especially when its most powerful member does not.

The late-imperial reflex and the cost of habit

The problem with the late-imperial reflex is that it feels, in the short run, like strength. It looks decisive. It satisfies a domestic hunger for control. It reassures those who confuse fear with respect.

But in the long run it does something else. It tells the world that the hegemon no longer trusts legitimacy to carry the load. It tells rivals that the centre is anxious. It tells smaller states that they must build insulation, because the rules will not save them. It tells historians, decades later, that this was a moment when the old order could not imagine a future except through force.

Caracas may become a turning point, or it may become another entry in a long ledger of interventions. Either way, it should be read for what it reveals: not only what America can do, but what America is becoming when it feels the world slipping out of its hands.