By Gargi Wickramasinghe
In the morning after the removal of Venezuela’s disgraced President Nicolás Maduro by U.S. special forces, an emotional Chavista woman protesting in the streets of Caracas was filmed saying: “Stay alert because they are not coming for us. They are coming for our oil – and they are coming for you too.” Her warning carried the weight of history: “Understand this -what they want here is oil to continue their wars. Understand that what they want here, is our land so they can keep feeding wars. They are not an army of peace.”
She spoke not only to her neighbors, but to the world.
In the chaos of Venezuela’s collapse and the shock of an American intervention, something much larger is unfolding. The supposed “rules-based international order” is once again revealing its actual architecture. It’s revealing its true form; that it is not built on law, nor on norms or multilateralism. It is built on power and on the resources that sustain power.
The invasion of Venezuela is not just about Caracas. It is a warning flare for the future of global politics.
The Invasion: Overthrowing an Illegitimate Ruler, or Something More?
The official U.S. narrative has been consistent: the operation was necessary to remove an illegitimate leader and dismantle a criminal narco-state. It is framed as a surgical intervention, a rescue mission for a suffering population.
But anyone who remembers 2003 knows this story by heart.
Back then, Iraqis celebrated as American troops entered Baghdad. They believed liberation had arrived. Instead, they received two decades of chaos and nearly a million deaths and continued suffering. The same celebratory scenes now appear in parts of Venezuela, especially among expatriates and opposition enclaves, but with a haunting familiarity. The same choreography: special forces seizing a dictator, airstrikes framed as precision and a capital city stunned into submission.
In fact, for those of us who feel 2003 is too far back, Greenland should have been the warning – an early sign of a Washington willing to treat entire territories as strategic assets to be claimed, purchased, or reshaped when the global chessboard demands it. We have seen this movie before. The guiding motive is not hard to decipher when you look at the numbers.
Venezuela possesses the world’s largest proven oil reserves – about 300 billion barrels, which amounts to roughly one-fifth of all global reserves. Venezuelan oil is not the light, sweet crude abundant in the United States. It is extra-heavy crude, essential for producing asphalt, diesel, and key industrial petrochemicals, including those used by militaries. The U.S. needs it. Venezuela has it.
And Washington has already signal-boosted its intentions. American officials have spoken openly about repairing Venezuela’s “badly broken infrastructure” and partnering with U.S. oil companies to restore production and that language barely bothers to hide the strategic takeover underway.
This is not about Maduro’s legitimacy. This is about the fact that Venezuela’s oil and mineral deposits that are strategically irreplaceable.
Is There Really an International Rules-Based Order?
The Venezuelan invasion offers the clearest demonstration yet that the so-called “rules-based international order” is less an order and more a rhetorical veneer. International law, in theory, defends territorial integrity and sovereign equality of every nation state. But in practice, sovereignty is treated like a switch: it turns on only when powerful nations want it on. It turns off when they don’t.
When intervention aligns with the preferences of major powers, it becomes lawful, even noble. When it does not, it becomes a violation of sovereignty, an outrage, a breach of global norms. This elasticity is not a failure of the system. It is the system.
Consider the invasion itself: executed with no congressional oversight, absent a broad international mandate, and justified by shifting legal rationales. It exemplifies a world in which legality is defined not by the UN Charter but by the geopolitical weight behind the action.
Also consider how resources shape enforcement. Oil, gas, minerals; these determine which countries get invaded, sanctioned, protected, or ignored. The ongoing operation in Venezuela is not an aberration. It is a reminder that power, not law, structures international relations.
Nothing illustrates this better than the debate over who Venezuelan oil actually serves. While China has been a significant buyer in recent years, accounting for about 4% of China’s crude imports (Reuters, 2025), Beijing’s stake in Venezuelan energy has always been more political than logistical. The true threat is not the loss of supply, but the precedent: Washington asserting the right to decide the fate of a sovereign country’s resources through force.
If that is the rules-based order, then the rules are simple: Power makes law. Resources justify power.
What Does This Mean for Europe and the Rest of the World?
Europe now faces a moment of uncomfortable clarity. It has anchored its identity, its foreign policy, and its security philosophy to the belief in a rules-based system. But the Venezuelan invasion demonstrates that the world is not governed by rules, it is governed by strategic interests, spheres of influence, and increasingly zero-sum rivalries.
Europe is uniquely vulnerable in this environment. It relies on the U.S. for defense through NATO, on the U.S.-dominated financial system for banking and sanctions enforcement, on American cloud computing systems for digital sovereignty and on global shipping and energy markets that Washington can reshape. American power is not Europe’s enemy. But American unpredictability may be Europe’s greatest risk.
The seizure of a nation with the world’s largest oil reserves sets a precedent that cannot be ignored. If Washington can unilaterally determine the leadership and future of Venezuela, what prevents similar actions in other strategically critical states? What prevents the U.S. from using its dominance in finance, tariffs, or digital infrastructure to discipline allies who drift away from its preferences?
Europe depends heavily on the U.S. for its military and economic coordinates, yet it has neither strategic autonomy nor a unified geopolitical vision. The invasion forces difficult questions: Is Europe prepared for a world in which U.S.- China rivalry escalates into full strategic containment? Is Europe comfortable being a subordinate actor in a U.S.- centric sphere of influence? What happens when U.S. and European interests diverge?
The Venezuela intervention is not the first alarm. It is just the loudest.
And beyond Europe, the global South sees an even starker message. The largest oil producer in the Western Hemisphere changed hands not through elections or diplomacy, but through force. Nations with cobalt, lithium, rare earths, gas, or major agricultural capacity will interpret this moment not as a one-off crisis, but as a roadmap for future power politics.
A Re-Ordered World and rearranged Spheres of Influence
We are entering a world shaped by three spheres of influence: The first sphere is the United States and the Western Hemisphere, a zone Washington has treated as its strategic backyard since the early 19th century. The Monroe Doctrine never truly disappeared; it simply went quiet and now potentially may even be going beyond it. The takeover in Caracas is its modern expression.
The counterweight is the China–Russia Eurasian alignment, a partnership born less from ideological harmony than from shared necessity. China brings manufacturing dominance, supply-chain control, and financial leverage. Russia brings energy, military projection, and territorial depth. Together they manage much of the world’s landmass, a growing share of global trade routes, and a powerful narrative for the global South: that sovereignty must be shielded from Western interventionism. Their cooperation is uneven and often transactional, but their grievances with U.S. power create strategic coherence.
Between these two blocs lies a fragmented middle, made up of nations trying to stay neutral in a world that no longer rewards neutrality. Europe exists here, economically entwined with China, militarily reliant on the U.S., internally divided, and increasingly anxious. So does much of Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Latin America outside of U.S. influence. These states want multipolarity. What they are getting instead is pressure to choose sides and shrinking strategic space, alongside rising exposure to global shocks ranging from energy, technology to currency warfare.
In this re-ordered world, concepts like democracy, sovereignty, and self-determination no longer function as guarantees. They function as bargaining chips. Instead of principles, power blocs will pronouncedly determine which nations get to be independent and which become battlegrounds for influence.
The sovereign state is will be a mere meaningful ideal. If it wasn’t made clear before, it should be clear now, that it is no longer a durable protection. It is more a permission granted at the discretion of more powerful states. The Venezuelan invasion does not destroy the old order. It reveals that the old order was never what we imagined. It shows us the rules of the real world and forces every nation to calculate accordingly.
The Warning From Caracas
The woman shouting in Caracas understood what many outside Venezuela have yet to confront. Her warning is not paranoia. It is geopolitical realism. Venezuela marks the beginning of a world where the alliances are fluid, where great powers reassert their spheres of influence, and where the comforting illusion of a rules-based order gives way to something far more brutal and far more honest.
The world has changed.
The invasion of Venezuela did not cause that change. It revealed it.
Factum is an Asia-Pacific-focused think tank on International Relations, Tech Cooperation, and Strategic Communications accessible via www.factum.lk
The views expressed here are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the organizations.
