Ep. 173: The implications of Venezuela

Australia in the world is a podcast produced with the support of the Australian Institute of International Affairs. The AWA wants Australians to know, understand and engage more in international affairs. All views expressed are solely those of the speakers themselves. Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Australia in the World Podcast. As always you're with Darren Lim from the Australian National University. Happy new year everyone. It is Tuesday the 6th of January today. First apologies for no episode in December. I had two planned, but largely due to illness, neither was able to come out. No doubt many of you will just burn out as me by the end of an exhausting 2025. I'll be publishing one that was recorded towards the end of last month pretty soon and it's on AI, artificial intelligence and I'm pretty excited about it. But to kick off this new year we have had just the latest in the absolutely bonkers world of Donald Trump and US foreign policy. And of course I'm referring to Venezuela. So with the caveat that I am far from an expert on these issues, this is a fast moving news story and these are very early days. And I guess also the risk that I'm overreacting. If you are curious about what I think, I have drafted up some thoughts. I am going to organise my thinking into eight points and this will be long. It's going to take some time. And before I begin, let me also say given how critical I'll be, I hope that the Trump administration proves me wrong. So here we go. Point number one, what actually happened? As you all know in the early hours of the third of January Saturday, the US launched Operation Absolute Resolve in Venezuela, which it framed as being about law enforcement and security. A large US naval and air posture that had been building in the Caribbean for months was used to support a short high intensity strike in and around Caracas, including attacks on Venezuelan military infrastructure. Reporting suggests that there were more than 150 US aircraft involved in the opening phase and that the raid itself was over in just a few hours, although there were a number of casualties. The centerpiece was of course this special forces raid that captured and extracted the Venezuelan leader, Nicholas Maduro and his wife, who were then transferred to the US and he's being held in custody in New York now and is going to stand trial. But President Trump then did something that was I think even more consequential than the raid itself, which was characterizing the operation not as a limited action, but as the start of some new relationship of control. He said that the US would be running. That's the word running Venezuela for a period of time and he talked up access to Venezuelan oil and maybe reconstruction led by major US companies. Inside Venezuela, the regime's remaining leadership, which of course is everyone but Maduro, has moved quickly to project continuity. Delcy Rodriguez, who was the vice president, has been presented as the interim leader and conditionally recognized by Washington. I believe the military has signaled it will stand behind the institutions and the personnel that remain. Who was not in this picture? The Venezuelan opposition, who of course won the most recent election. I think it was in 2024 and the Nobel Peace Prize winning leader of the opposition, who was explicitly rejected by Trump as a potential replacement. He said that she didn't have the support, but there is of course reporting that he wasn't happy she accepted the Nobel Peace Prize this year that he apparently covered. Internationally, yes, it's still early days. The reaction has been swift but fragmented. You've got several Latin American governments who have been very critical and condemned the operation as a unilateral use of force. US allies have largely called for restraint, legality, but mostly avoided direct confrontation with Trump and Washington. I want to finish this first point trying to describe this by just holding on this single stunning fact that a sitting president of a sovereign state, Venezuela, has been captured by US forces and is now in a US jail awaiting trial. With that question, Maduro is a bad guy. He has done many terrible things that I won't get into on this podcast. Nevertheless, this is still a really big deal. It is jaw dropping. Point number two, what is the US or maybe more accurately Trump personally trying to achieve? Let's start with the obvious. This was not primarily a humanitarian intervention. It does not look like an ambitious neo-conservative project of democracy promotion. It is a demonstration of power. For the US as a state, you can, if you want to make up national interests that sound plausible, Washington has long accused elements of the Venezuelan state of facilitating drug trafficking and transnational criminal networks. It has also worried about Venezuela's alignment with Russia and China and about instability and migration in that hemisphere. But these really are academic arguments. The real story here seems to be Donald Trump's personal conception of interest, which is dominance in the Western hemisphere, transactionally expressed through resources and obedience. He has been very explicit, unusually explicit that oil is central here and that Venezuela should be made to comply with his demands. That makes this look much less like a law enforcement operation, right? More like a revival of an older imperial logic. The Monroe Doctrine reimagined as a presidential claim to run a weaker state that sits inside America's sphere of influence. And I think seen through this lens, this episode looks a bit like a live fire demonstration of the administration's 2025 national security strategy, especially its Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, which explicitly calls for enforcing US pre-eminence in the Western hemisphere and re-adjusting military posture to do that. And so if you combine the language of the NSS with this enforcement action, it makes other dramatic moves into the future much easier to imagine. Point three, this is clearly illegal under international law. Under the UN Charter, the baseline rules pretty straightforward, right? You just don't get to use threats or the actual use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of another state. This is why Russia's invasion of Ukraine was also illegal and bad. Yes, there are, of course, exceptions, self-defense against an armed attack or force authorized by the UN Security Council. But this operation doesn't fit either of those. Venezuela has not launched an armed attack on the US. And yes, the administration is attempting to stretch self-defense to cover drug trafficking. But doing that kind of collapses the core distinction that the Charter is trying to create. The idea that you just can't go to war because you don't like what's happening inside another country, even if it harms you. If drug flows were enough to justify an invasion, then really many or any cross-border harm could become a pretext for war. Nor is a domestic legal indictment enough. A criminal charge in New York does not override sovereignty in Caracas. Even adding that Maduro is a brutal and illegitimate ruler, these facts don't entitle a foreign army to enter Venezuela, bomb targets and abduct him. It's kind of, I think it will lead to a second legal problem, which is the head of state immunity. US courts will probably get asked to treat Maduro like Panama's Manuel Noriega, which was during Bush's seniors administration, and deny immunity on the basis that Washington did not recognise his leadership. But such a legal maneuver would not retroactively legalise the invasion itself. From the standpoint of international law, it is really very hard to argue against the case that what we have seen looks like aggression, an unlawful use of force at the highest level of state decision making. Point four. So what? Why international law matters? To understand why this matters you need to step back from Venezuela and talk about what international law is trying to do in the first place. Fair warning everyone, I need to give a bit of a mini-lecture here. A common way to think about international politics, and this is the way that I use, is that it is a whole range of cooperation problems under conditions of anarchy. Any second-year international relations student can hopefully tell you that anarchy here means the absence of a world government. There's no global sovereign with a monopoly on legitimate violence. There's no global police force, no global court with compulsory jurisdiction and a sheriff to enforce its judgments. So why do we have rules? The answer is that even in a world without a sovereign, states are still interdependent. The actions of one can affect the welfare of others. And so governments and states therefore face repeated interactions with each other, where the payoffs are higher if everyone exercises restraint. If every dispute can be resolved by force, then every state must constantly hedge against worst-case scenarios. This means bigger militaries, less trade, more suspicion, more arms races, more preventative war. The system, the international system, becomes more violent and more expensive for everyone, including the stronger states, which then bear more of the cost of stabilising what the system has become. The piece of West Valiya, if you might have heard of it, all the way back in 1648. As well as the centuries of European statecraft that followed it, gave us the concept of sovereignty, which meant that rulers should accept limits on intervention in each other's domestic affairs, and that they would treat borders as lines that can't be casually crossed. Because the alternative, at least then, was endless religious and dynastic warfare. And of course, the treaties of West Valiya ended the 30 years war, which was a pretty bad one. That West Valiya logic is the foundation of the modern concept of sovereignty. It's not perfect. It never was. Powerful states have always been tempted to treat sovereignty as a privilege they can suspend when it is inconvenient. But the key insight is that sovereignty functions as a kind of stabilising rule. It tells everyone, including smaller states, that there is a baseline expectation of non-interference. Fast forward to the 20th century, the mid-20th century, after World War II. The UN Charter was the most ambitious attempt to formalise that bargain, right? It didn't ban violence, states can still defend themselves, but it tried to make war the exception, not the default. It said, you don't get to decide, you know, literally, that your grievance entitles you to invade. You either need an armed attack against you or the collective authorisation of the Security Council. And so, notice how this turns the logic of might makes right into one of might constrained by rules. At least some of the time, it creates a focal point, a shared language that lets states coordinate and organise against aggression. It gives legitimacy to collective pushback. And hopefully, very importantly, it reduces uncertainty. If the rule is that you don't get to use force, other than in self-defense or Security Council permission, authorisation, then that allows states and governments to plan their security and their economies on that assumption. Now, many of you will respond powerful countries violate the rules all the time. Yeah, the US has at best an uneven record. It has sometimes treated international law as a menu, more like guidelines to quote Jack Sparrow, rather than a source of constraint. Russia and China do this too, but it does not follow that the rules are meaningless. The rules structure expectations, they raise the political price of aggression, and they help organise coalitions. This is why the post-war US-led system was at its best, strategically brilliant. At least, that's the argument made by my PhD supervisor John Eichenberry, so of course, I'm a bit biased here. But let's hold on that. American power after 1945 was overwhelming. It could have pursued a nakedly imperial approach. I mean, can you imagine what the kind of deals President Trump could have sought and gotten in 1945 had he been President then? But instead, Washington built institutions, the UN system, Britain Woods, the trading system, that embedded US influence inside rules and procedures. The US constrained itself, albeit imperfectly and selectively. But in return, we all got a world that was, on balance, relatively more stable, relatively more predictable, and as a result, more prosperous. That predictability reduced the need for constant crisis management, made alliances easier to sustain, and made US leadership at least tolerable to most. Even when the US broke the rules, Vietnam, Iraq, covert interventions, the fact that the rules existed still mattered. Those episodes were criticised as violations of a shared standard. They generated backlash, they imposed reputational costs, and over time, they forced course correction. For a long time now, US policymakers really have largely tried to follow the rules, and they have tried even harder, contorting themselves even to avoid being seen to violate them. The result is behaviour that isn't 100% rule following, but it's been much more restrained than it would have been or could have been. And we can see that now in light of these recent events. What is different about the Venezuelan operation is that the President seems to be acting as if the rules just aren't binding or even relevant at all. The message instead is that sovereignty is conditional, and the condition might simply be whether Donald Trump blikes you or whatever he feels like doing that day. I think we should emphasise again or examine again the arguments being floated, self-defense against drugs, law enforcement rather than war, the fact that Maduro is a bad guy and not a legitimate leader. These aren't bad arguments, but they don't survive contact with the UN Charters basic logic. If drug trafficking is an armed attack, then almost anything can be. If you can invade to arrest an elite that you have indicted, then any great power or anyone can manufacture indictments as a pretext for regime change. If legitimacy is defined by whether Washington recognises you, then sovereignty has become a favour granted by the strong. And this is why international law came into existence to prevent powerful states from unilaterally deciding that their preferences justify violence. And there's also, I think, a deeper, more structural point here about restraint. Great powers learn slowly and painfully but eventually that a world without rules is not in their interest. They may enjoy freedom of action in the short term, but over time they discover that they have created a world where their own security and prosperity are worse, because everyone else is arming, hedging, searching for counter-balancing coalitions. The genius of the post-war order was that it channeled American power into a system that others could prosper too, and where US leadership was therefore tolerated and often welcomed. Trump's worldview appears to be the opposite. It's transactional, it's immediate. He sees institutions as handcuffs, not as a source of subtle but meaningful influence. He sees restraint as weakness rather than a long-term strategy. But the problem for the US is the second and third order consequences that follow. Yes, there is satisfaction in this dramatic raid. It seems to have been very well conducted and impressive in its precision. But you own everything that follows, right? The incentives that you create for others, the stories your rivals tell, the doubts you inject into your allies, the precedence you set for the next crisis. In short, when the strongest state in the system signals that borders are optional, the rest of the system will become more violent because there is less to restrain that violence. And I think there's also a reputational transformation underway. When the US stops acting like an architect, a guarantor of the system and acts like it can simply take what it wants, it begins to look less exceptional and more like an ordinary neighborhood bully. And in the short run, bullies get compliance lots of the time, but in the long run, they trigger a backlash and efforts to find security and stability elsewhere. All right, that was 0.4, a longer lecture. Let's focus for 0.5 on the problems the US will likely face in running Venezuela. I mean, from what I have seen so far, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the Trump administration hasn't fully thought this through. The planning here looks tactical, months of intelligence positioning, frankly, operational excellence, a very impressive military operation. It's the politics that look a bit more improvisational. We're going to run Venezuela for as long as we need to and take the oil isn't really a strategy. I would have preferred that the administration have asked, what is the end state? Who governs? How is legitimacy going to be constructed? What are the costs and who pays them? How do you avoid civil war? What do you do if the military fragments, if criminal networks turn into insurgents? What happens if an American soldier is killed guarding an oil facility? These questions, of course, are the difference between a short raid and the kinds of quagmires we saw in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam. The first problem you've got is legitimacy. You can remove a ruler, but you cannot just manufacture the consent of the population with force. Venezuela is not a blank slate. It has politics. It has factions. It has people with guns. It has patronage networks. It has a military that is powerful, has been a political player and an economic player. And so this is the beginning of some kind of de facto empire strategy running up the states in Trump's words. It's worth stating that running empires is very hard and it's probably harder than at any point in history because the tools of disruption have dispersed and democratised. Drones, encrypted messaging, AI generator propaganda, global finance, even weaker actors have the ability to impose costs, organised resistance, embarrassed occupiers, if that's what we're going to call them in real time. Problem number two is violence. Occupations look easiest on day one when the occupier has leveraged their overwhelming firepower and surprise. The hard part is what comes next when the target begins to adapt. If Washington's plan is to protect oil infrastructure while leaning on existing state apparatus to keep order, then the US will inherit every grievance that Venezuelans hold against that apparatus. And if Washington tries to rebuild state institutions, it will discover that this is a slow, contested and deeply political process. And then there is the sheer operational reality. Venezuela is pretty large in terms of its landmass and its oil fields and pipelines and ports and refineries are dispersed. Protecting them will be labour intensive. And so even a light footprint, which is a phrase I recall from peacekeeping discourse in the 90s and 2000s, that will have to become a heavy footprint. If you become responsible for keeping the lights on, and this is where we inevitably turn to the Iraq comparison. I'm old enough to remember that mission accomplished banner and the lesson we took from it, that these triumphalist moments are emotionally satisfying. They're even politically intoxicating. But the second you topple the regime, every downstream problem becomes your problem. Power outages, food shortages, corruption, factional violence, criminal opportunism, sabotage, whoever gets the rents from oil. The incentive structure also becomes ugly. An intervention justified in the language of law enforcement. Maybe democracy is quickly revealed to be about resources and control, right? That fuels resistance. It attracts grift. It creates space for private security contractors, predatory political entrepreneurs. It narrows Washington's room for maneuver because any compromise will be read as weakness, both by opponents inside Venezuela and by audiences back home. For 0.6, let's think about how this action may benefit some of the US's competitors. It's tempting to jump straight to Russia will do more in Ukraine or China will invade Taiwan. I think that's too linear. It assumes that the rules are what is holding these actors back. And I think misses how strategic advantage actually will accrue here. Because the biggest gift the US has given its competitors is the narrative and structural shift. Narratively, the US has made it easier for authoritarian powers to argue that international law is a tool of convenience not constraint. When Washington wants to condemn aggression elsewhere, their response will be, you abducted ahead of state, you bombed targets, you said you would run another country. Of course, this wouldn't make that criticism right, but it will make it harder for the US to mobilize others on the basis of principle. Structurally, the erosion of the non-use of force will increase volatility. A world where borders can be crossed on a whim is a world where states will have to invest more in hard power and less in cooperation. More arms purchases, more hedging, more regional security dilemmas, less willingness to align with the US when such alignment carries higher risk. And this is what a rapidly degrading rules-based system will look like. And one thing in particular that it will create are, I guess what you could think of as windows of opportunity. In periods of volatility, competitors can exploit this uncertainty, probing alliances, testing resolve, offering alternatives, maybe not through invasion, but through influence operations, may be mercenary deployments, rezone coercion, economic leverage. If US allies become less confident that Washington is a rules-bound actor, they will demand more insurance, they'll seek more autonomy, or they might make accommodations with other great powers. Then you have all the states sitting in the middle. Mark the leaders of some of these fence-sitting states conclude that sovereignty is no longer a meaningful shield against unilateral action by the strongest power, and start looking for other sources of deterrence. In some cases, maybe that involves inviting a Chinese logistics facility, access arrangement, maybe even a basing presence, which become more attractive, not because the government wants to quite and quite choose China, but because they judge it could lower the risk of being pushed around or, hey, invaded by Washington. Next, you've got the contagion risk. If you've got the strongest state normalising the idea that sovereignty is conditional, other states can imitate. Maybe not identically, but in spirit. Strong men conclude now is the time to act. And in my field of study, the world of weaponised interdependence, the line between military and economic coercion will blur even further. The same logic that justifies raids can be used justify, asset seizures, blockades, other resource grabs. And then there is the darkest possibility. Leaders here watching a sitting head of state be pulled out of his home and his country in the middle of the night might reinforce the belief in some that the only truly reliable insurance policy is a strong independent deterrent up to including nuclear weapons. And that's really bad. It's catastrophic for the non-proliferation regime because it's saying that vulnerable regimes are no longer protected, you know, by promises, by norms, by treaties, and that they need hard deterrence for protection. So I think the strategic benefit for the US's competitors is a weaker, more isolated, more distrusted United States, operating in our harsher, more violent system, and having to spend more of its attention and resources cleaning up the consequences of its own choices. 0.7 US domestic politics is the most likely source of constraint. If there is going to be a meaningful check on this policy, it won't come from the UN or international courts or even our eyes. It'll come of course as it almost always does from US domestic politics. We all know occupations are expensive, risky, and slow. They generate casualties, scandals, and they burn through cash. And they will produce images of violence and disorder that will be hard to reconcile with the America First Agenda. Early signals suggest that the public is not on board. Polling ahead of the strike showed majorities opposed to military action. And even within the Republican coalition, you've got this fault line because there is a strong current of anti-interventionism in the MAGA base. Many people voted for Trump because they believed he would end these forever wars. So the operative constraint may be an intra-MAGA. Backlash. The sense that all this is not lowering living costs for Americans. It's not fixing the border. It's not delivering economic benefits. The problem with this argument is the tariffs precedent. I certainly assumed back in April that consumer backlash to higher prices would force moderation. And that just hasn't really happened despite the November election results. But as with tariffs, I think here the rubble will hit the road with the November midterms this year. And I think this issue, my best guess, is that this issue will be of net benefit to Democrats in those elections. All right, final point eight. What all this means for Australia. I think for us, the first step is intellectual honesty. International law is weaker today than at any point since, I don't know, the 1930s. And the Venezuela operation is a marker of just how far that erosion has gone. Simply pointing out illegality is not a strategy. It is at best a moral statement. And at worst, just admiring the problem. And I'm saying this is someone who wrote my law degree honest thesis on United Nations governance of failed states. I was a believer too back in the day. Second, this is yet further evidence that harder forms of power are the principle currency of international politics right now. Military power matters not just as deterrence, but as the instruments states will reach for when they believe rules don't constrain them. Economic coercion matters too for the same reasons. In a world of contested independence, influence will increasingly be exercised through control of markets, choke points, finance, critical inputs. But third, and this is crucial. None of this means giving up on the rules. Rules remain useful. They remain vital as focal points of coordination. Even when they are violated, they provide the language and the standard around which like-minded states can organize pushback. So we can't ask ourselves whether rules can magically stop aggression. Rather, we have to ask ourselves how can rules help build coalitions raise costs and reduce uncertainty. For Australia, the trade-offs here are very sharp. We can't publicly confront Trump on a case like this because doing so would be more costly than the benefits. Camera's instinct will be to urge restraint, emphasise diplomacy and avoid direct moral denunciation. But this should and I fully expect will be paired with sustained work, re-energised work, with other partners to keep the system from sliding further. The question is, well, what does that look like? And I'm not sure I have much original to say here. Let me try. First, of course, it's going to mean doubling down on deterrence and resilience at home. Defense capabilities and the economic security toolkit. Second, it will mean investing more in minilateral coordination among states that still do want a rules-constrained order. Japan, South Korea, key European partners, Canada, of course. But also, probably, I think, in large part, Southeast Asian states that don't want to live in a world where sovereignty is contingent on great power, preferences or whims. The organising principle for diplomacy here should be practical. Coordinate on sanctions, export controls, defence industrial cooperation, crisis diplomacy. Using legal principles as the common language and the organising frame for coordination. This also means then keeping legal infrastructure alive. Even if Washington is ignoring it, it still matters that other states document violations, support UN processes, and strengthen the capacity of international and domestic courts to investigate and to attribute responsibility. Those are slow tools, but they help preserve standards that hopefully future coalitions can mobilize. But, zooming out, Australia also has to confront a really difficult contingency. What happens if this US administration does something that is genuinely unacceptable to us, and no amount of cajoling, access or flattery can shift the outcome? Now, I don't want to speculate about what that trigger might be. We need, however, to think in advance about what we will do if that happens. And the uncomfortable answer is that we'll need leverage. Not leverage over the US per se, but leverage over this administration's priorities and constraints. Now, for Australia, by ourselves, that leverage is inherently limited. We don't have a big enough market. Our defense weight is not decisive. We can't walk away. So the practical question will become, what are the pressure points that matter to this White House and how can Australia, with others, influence them? And this leads to the second point. There is really zero chance we can do this alone. If leverage is going to exist, it will exist collectively, not in a traditional military balancing coalition, because we're not going to be pushing back with military force. But in a coalition that I think borrows the logic of balancing, coordinated state craft that aggregates capabilities in some way, in non-traditional ways, in creative ways, to raise the costs of unacceptable behaviour, to deny easy wins, and to offer conditional cooperation when Washington is prepared to stay within basic guardrails. In practice, that might look like standing up a group of like-minded partners, coordinating on economic and technology policy settings, investment screening, procurement, export controls, diplomatic statements, quietly, consistently, and in advance, so that if God forbid, a lion is crossed, the response is not a set of isolated complaints, but a combined credible package. Look, I don't pretend to have anything close to the answer here. But if the era we are entering into is one where power is consistently exercised more bluntly, then what is our leverage and how do we wield it becomes a core national security question, not just an academic one? Ah, few, I'm done. That was intense. But let me finish with the uncomfortable bottom line of all this, which is that liberalism is going to have to be defended with a combination of hard power and coordinated state craft. Organised around rules rather than relying on the rules through the work themselves. That is the world we are in now. This is what it means that the old order is gone. That's all for today's episode of Australia in the world. I thank Hannah Nelson for audio editing and of course we're always standing at the composer of our film music. I'll talk to you again very soon.