So that’s that, then. The performance is over.
We can stop pretending that Western foreign policy is guided by lofty principles, or that we recoil in horror whenever a powerful state muscles its way into a weaker one.
The comforting story that “free people stand up to bullies” has been quietly folded away and shoved in a drawer.
What has vanished with it is the supposed outrage over Russia’s assault on Ukraine.
For years, politicians and pundits across the spectrum—Nato evangelists on one side, red-hatted “America First” types on the other—assured us they were appalled by Moscow’s behaviour.
Yet it turns out their objection was never to invasion itself.
They just didn’t like who was doing the invading.
The Selective Memory of 2014
This double standard didn’t begin yesterday.
It was already on display back in February 2014, when Ukraine’s elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, was unlawfully driven from power with Western encouragement.
The reaction from the same people now clutching their pearls about sovereignty? A studied silence.
They got away with it largely because most people still don’t know, or aren’t told, how Yanukovych actually fell.
Ignorance, in this case, proved extremely convenient.
Caracas and the New Rules
Now we have Donald Trump imposing American will on Venezuela through blunt, unmistakable force.
Reports suggest dozens of Cuban and Venezuelan guards died defending President Nicolás Maduro’s palace, though the public has been shown no footage of the fighting.
Among the injured was Maduro’s wife, Cilia, later displayed before a New York court with a bruised face and a plaster on her forehead, alleging a broken rib.
One wonders whether the American special forces soldier who arrested her will be decorated for subduing this supposed menace.
Perhaps he’s still recovering from his heroic struggle.
Silence from the “Civilised World”
What is striking is not just what happened, but what didn’t.
No leading figure of consequence has dared openly to denounce Trump for what is plainly a violation of the basic rules that supposedly underpin civilised relations between states.
Nor does anyone seem to know—or be brave enough to ask—where he might decide to strike next.
Europe’s democratic grandees mutter and hedge.
They “express concern”. They do not condemn.
Had Vladimir Putin carried out an identical operation, the outrage would have been instant and thunderous.
Moscow’s Ironic Smile
The Kremlin, enjoying the moment, has allowed its Foreign Ministry to label the Caracas operation an “act of armed aggression” and an “unacceptable violation of sovereignty”. International law, we are told, has been trampled.
You can almost hear the suppressed laughter.
The next time an American official lectures Russia about Ukraine, remember this episode—and wait to see how the reply is delivered.
Trump Says the Quiet Part Out Loud
Even Trump himself hasn’t bothered with euphemism.
At a celebratory press conference last Saturday, he described his own action as “one of the most precise attacks on sovereignty”.
That rather spoils the efforts of his more devoted defenders, who might otherwise have tried to pretend it was something else.
The whole affair was grotesque, even by its own logic.
For all the bloodshed and upheaval, the prize is meagre: one awkward Marxist strongman replaced by another, this time more pliant.
The people of Venezuela, as ever, are irrelevant.
Democracy Still Left Waiting
The genuine leaders of Venezuelan democracy remain sidelined.
And nobody knows what will happen if the newly installed acting president, Delcy Rodríguez, fails to satisfy Trump’s latest demands.
Obedience, it seems, is now the sole qualification for survival.
Drugs, Hypocrisy, and Convenient Friends
Trump’s noisy accusations about Maduro’s alleged drug links ring hollow.
Only weeks ago, he pardoned former Honduran president Juan Hernández, who had been serving a 45-year sentence in the US.
Prosecutors described Hernández as a key figure in a massive cocaine operation that flooded America with drugs, and a Manhattan jury agreed.
Trump waved it away as a political “set-up” by Joe Biden.
So how serious is he about drugs, really? Or democracy? Or aggression? The answer appears to be: not very.
This is the same president who recently weakened federal marijuana laws, despite growing evidence linking heavy cannabis use to severe mental illness and violent crime.
Rigged Elections—But Only the Wrong Kind
If Trump truly detests fraudulent elections, he might consider paying a visit to his friend Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan—an oil-rich autocrat and reliable US ally.
Aliyev’s regime recently drove thousands of Armenians from disputed territory in a brutal ethnic cleansing.
His elections are legendary farces. In 2013, the government somehow announced its victory before voting had even begun.
Curiously, this does not seem to trouble Washington.
The Rubbish Heap Behind the White House
Behind the White House, metaphorically speaking, sits a row of overflowing bins.
Inside are discarded ideas once polished and proudly displayed: sovereignty, law, restraint, moral example.
Now they’re buried under fast-food cartons, coffee grounds and yesterday’s scraps, waiting to be hauled off or incinerated.
A Lesson We Refuse to Learn
Sometimes I wonder whether Trump has arrived not as an accident, but as a warning.
If we worship power and money, bend rules to suit ourselves, and sneer at restraint, then chaos will not tiptoe in politely. It will burst through the door shouting.
W.B. Yeats sensed something like this in The Second Coming.
He imagined a new pagan age giving birth to a brutal god of wealth and force, better suited to our appetites than Christianity ever was.
“What rough beast,” he asked, “slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
A Blank and Pitiless Gaze
Yeats’s image still chills me: a creature with “a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun”.
It comes to mind rather often now. One has to ask whom it reminds us of.
And we must also ask whether a “Trumpised” United States—reshaped more each day in the image of this extraordinary president—is beginning to mirror his temperament at home as well as abroad.
Violence Comes Home
No open-minded person can watch footage of the shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis without feeling a jolt of horror.
Did the man who pulled the trigger believe he was acting in the spirit of his president? Should such scenes belong in a country that still calls itself law-governed?
Something new and unsettling is taking shape.
It may have grown out of genuine frustrations, but that does not make it any less dangerous.
Ukraine. Russia. Venezuela.
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