Venezuela 2026 and meaning of power: Sovereignty, coercion, and emerging world order

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OPINION

By Simon Mulongo

On January 3, 2026, the United States crossed a boundary that the post-1945 international order was meant to protect. US forces entered Venezuelan territory, seized President Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores, and transferred them to detention in New York to face drug trafficking and what Washington terms narco-terrorism charges. Within hours, President Donald Trump declared that the United States would oversee a political transition and effectively run Venezuela, openly linking governance to control of oil revenues.

Venezuela’s Supreme Court appointed Delcy Rodríguez as interim president and condemned the operation as an atrocity and a violation of sovereignty. Days later, Trump escalated further, warning Rodríguez that she would pay a very high price, possibly bigger than Maduro, if she failed to cooperate, while maintaining a heavy US military posture in the region.

What does this act represent? It is not classical colonialism with annexation and settlers, nor can it credibly be described as routine law enforcement. It is best understood as coercive imperial management, a contemporary form of imperial power that combines military force, financial pressure, legal exceptionalism, and direct political intimidation, without assuming the burdens of long-term colonial administration.

At its core, the act asserts that sovereignty is conditional. Conditional on compliance, alignment, and access to strategic resources. The United States did not merely punish an individual leader. It claimed the authority to decide who governs Venezuela and on what terms. When Trump threatened the interim president personally, the implication was unmistakable. Political legitimacy would be recognised only if it conformed to US demands. Can sovereignty survive such a claim, or has it been reduced to a negotiable privilege rather than a legal right.

International law is not silent on this question. Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter prohibits the use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state. Article 51 permits force only in self-defence against an armed attack. Criminal allegations, however serious, do not meet that threshold. The International Court of Justice clarified this in Nicaragua v United States in 1986, ruling that hostile conduct or illicit activity does not justify armed force unless it reaches the level of an armed attack. The Court reaffirmed strict evidentiary standards in Oil Platforms Iran v United States in 2003.

The seizure of a sitting head of state deepens the breach. Customary international law recognises immunity ratione personae for serving heads of state before foreign domestic courts. This principle was reaffirmed in Arrest Warrant Democratic Republic of Congo v Belgium in 2002. The doctrine exists not to excuse wrongdoing, but to preserve stable interstate relations by preventing reciprocal prosecutions. Forcible rendition collapses that stabilising barrier. Extending threats to an interim president transforms the issue from contested legality into an assertion of external veto over political authority.

US domestic law does not resolve the contradiction; it sharpens it. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution vests the power to declare war in Congress, while the War Powers Resolution of 1973 restricts unilateral executive use of force. In the Venezuela case, no declaration of war or specific authorisation was issued. A military operation involving territorial entry, leadership seizure, and interim governance exceeds any defensible interpretation of presidential authority and collapses constitutional restraint into executive discretion.

Yet legality alone does not explain the decision. The deeper drivers are strategic and material. Venezuela is a geostrategic node endowed with the world’s largest proven oil reserves, estimated at over 300 billion barrels. Its location places it firmly within a hemispheric space that the United States has historically treated as vital. Trump’s unvarnished language removed any remaining diplomatic ambiguity. This was not merely punitive. It was an attempt to reorder access, authority, and alignment in a resource-rich state.

The reactions of China and Russia illuminate the wider order. Both condemned the U.S. action, yet neither intervened militarily. This was not hesitation but a calculation. China’s interests in Venezuela are primarily financial and energy-based. Caracas owes Beijing an estimated 60 to 70 billion dollars, much of it repaid through discounted oil shipments. Chinese firms are embedded in Venezuelan energy and infrastructure, and relations were elevated in 2023 to an all-weather strategic partnership. Yet China’s primary theatre remains the Indo-Pacific, and its exposure to global trade makes confrontation in the US near abroad strategically irrational. Beijing’s response is therefore condemnation, asset protection, and quiet bargaining rather than escalation.

Russia’s calculus differs in motive but not in outcome. Moscow benefits symbolically from complicating U.S. dominance in the Americas, but its capacity to respond is constrained by war commitments and sanctions pressure elsewhere. Direct military intervention would impose costs it cannot absorb. Indirect measures remain possible, but the ceiling of response is clear. Strategic partnerships end where risk tolerance ends.

This is the uncomfortable lesson for developing economies. External patrons are not guarantors of sovereignty. They are investors in alignment. When costs rise, support thins.

Where does this leave Africa? The continent is rich in minerals critical to the global energy transition, including cobalt, lithium, rare earths, copper, and manganese. Yet Africa refines only a small fraction of what it extracts. The Democratic Republic of Congo produces more than 70 percent of global cobalt, while Africa’s share of refined cobalt remains below 5 percent, and China dominates downstream processing. This imbalance is a strategic vulnerability expressed in numbers. Leverage lies downstream, not at the mine.

Africa’s defence and political systems compound exposure. The continent accounts for less than 2 percent of global military expenditure, and many states rank high on fragility indices reflecting weak institutions, politicised security sectors, and elite fragmentation. In such conditions, coercion rarely requires invasion. Sanctions, financial exclusion, elite targeting, and securitised partnerships are often sufficient. If a sitting president can be seized and an interim leader threatened elsewhere, what prevents similar playbooks from being adapted under the language of counter-terrorism or anti-corruption?

The danger is not external interest. It is an internal weakness. Resource wealth attracts power. Weak institutions invite control. When elites trade strategic assets for political survival, sovereignty becomes transactional.

The way forward is neither defiance nor dependency. It is institutional realism. States must harden internal order through parliamentary oversight of security agreements, transparency in extractive contracts, enforcement of beneficial ownership disclosure, and credible judicial independence. They must de-risk mineral economies by moving into processing and manufacturing, using regional scale through continental integration to retain value. They must diversify financial and payment systems, because modern coercion is often financial before it is military. And they must strengthen collective diplomacy, because fragmentation invites intrusion while coordination creates leverage.

Venezuela 2026 is not an anomaly. It is a signal. It tells us that the world is drifting from rule-based restraint toward managed coercion, from sovereignty as a right toward sovereignty as a condition. The question confronting Africa and the wider developing world is stark. Will states build institutions that make coercion expensive, or will they rely on the symbols of sovereignty while its substance quietly erodes.

The writer runs EMANS Frontiers Ltd., Governance and Security Consultants