In custody: Nicolás Maduro posing with DEA Agents following his capture by the United States.
If there ever was a refrain that captured public reaction to the second Trump administration, it would be this: “Can they do this?” From slashing funding for USAID, to declaring tariff-based trade war with the world and direct military strikes on Iran, the question has followed nearly every major foreign policy decision. But nothing has provoked it quite like the recent capture and arrest of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, who was seized from his own capital and flown to New York to stand trial.
The shock here was not political apathy or ignorance. It was a collective pause, a widespread recognition that something fundamental had shifted. For many watching, this was not just another controversial foreign policy move, but perhaps the clearest sign yet that the liberal international order is no longer quietly eroding, it is openly collapsing.
An order is an organized group of international institutions that help govern the interactions among the member state. The purpose of any order is to outline the different norms and behaviours that are acceptable or that will not be tolerated. The liberal international order was never about a world without power. Instead, it was about a world where power was expected to justify itself. Built in the aftermath of World War II, it rested on the belief that sovereignty mattered, that borders were not to be violated at will, and that the use of force required legal authorisation rather than raw capability.
That even the strongest of states were bound, at least in appearance, by shared rules and institutions and that compliance was beneficial to all. When those rules were broken, they were denied or debated under diplomatic language, it was a dance that only those who followed international politics could understand.
However, what made the arrest of Nicolás Maduro, so destabilising was not just that a rule was violated, but that the violation was carried out so openly, without any serious effort to pretend as though the rule applied.
Trump was very clear about his desire to establish a regional buffer, free from influence from foreign adversarial powers. In the 2025 National Security Strategy document, the American president sets out what he names the “Trump Corollary” as the reassertion of the Monroe Doctrine. Very basically, the Monroe Doctrine is the idea that the Western Hemisphere is the U.S. sphere of influence that European powers (now expanded to states deemed adversarial) should not interfere in the region. In the document, Trump writes:
Our goals for the Western Hemisphere can be summarized as “Enlist and Expand.” We will enlist established friends in the Hemisphere to control migration, stop drug flows, and strengthen stability and security on land and sea. We will expand by cultivating and strengthening new partners while bolstering our own nation’s appeal as the Hemisphere’s economic and security partner of choice.
Venezuela was tightening its embrace with China and Russia, ramping up trade in oil, arms, and technology. The deepening ties rattled Washington, and Trump drove the point home in his National Security Strategy, ostensibly branding Beijing and Moscow as “Non-Hemispheric competitors.”
But there was another motive that made this historic moment feel different. Within hours of Maduro’s capture, Trump boasted that the United States would “run Venezuela”, signalling to the entire world, the desire to put American energy interests at the centre of this territorial breach. By claiming that Venezuela had been “stealing” oil rightfully belonging to the United States, despite it being on sovereign Venezuelan land, Trump made no attempt to hide the true motivations of the operation. This was not about toppling a repressive dictator. This was not about capturing a narco-terrorist or freeing the Venezuelan people. This is, admittedly from the president, about capturing the largest oil reserves and paving the way for American corporations to profit from it.
The open declaration to seize control of Venezuela and its oil production and exports is something U.S. leaders once only whispered about in back rooms and secret memos. In the past, Washington dressed its interventions in grand narratives “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq, “defending democracy” in Chile, “humanitarian intervention” in Libya. But this time, in Caracas, the mask has slipped. The U.S. is startlingly blunt: the driving force behind its operation is oil.
All of this makes the public’s instinctive reaction of shock and confusion very understandable. Ordinary observers do not need an international relations degree to see that when energy resources are openly tied to military action and economic leverage, the liberal international order has collapsed in favour of a much more obvious: might makes right nature.
Fundamentally however, the clear collapse of the liberal order is especially clear in how the oil leverage logic makes the broader strategic picture more alarming. If the United States can justify unilaterally capturing a sitting head of state and use resource control as a tool for geopolitical leverage, other states with lesser regard for international norms will take heed. Whether it is China with Taiwan and Russia with Ukraine, the lesson becomes clear: if power is all that matters, the ends justify the means.
The arrest of Nicolás Maduro will not be remembered as an isolated act of American overreach. It will be remembered as a moment of clarity. A moment when the language of rules and norms and the reality of power in the international system became impossible to ignore.
The collapse of the liberal international order did not come because of sudden violation of principles; these principles had been violated before. Instead, it collapsed because those violations were no longer disguised. When power ceases to be justified and when sovereignty is conditional, there are few things left in common to guide behaviour. The public’s question of “can they do this?” has already been answered. The more consequential question, however, is what kind of world emerges when the answer is yes, and when nobody feels the need to pretend anymore?