Venezuela Is a Gift to Putin
and a harbinger of more Russian aggression in Europe
The official Russian reaction to the news from Venezuela has been predictable. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, long an irony-free zone, issued a statement of concern about “the grave violation of sovereignty and international law.” War bloggers on Telegram are furious. And in some sense, this is indeed humiliating for Moscow, who signed a strategic partnership with Maduro just last year.
But from a big-picture perspective, this move only promotes Putin’s vision of the world. What just happened is entirely consistent with the spheres-of-influence approach that Putin has long advocated, and that Trump embraced in the latest National Security Strategy. The emerging order is one in which Putin, Xi, and Trump each get to do whatever they want in their respective zones: a grand bargain among the powerful at the expense of everyone else.
Some commentators have suggested US actions have given Putin the green light to do what he wants in Ukraine. Gideon Rachman asked what we would say if Russia tried to do the same with Zelensky.
But Putin is already pretty unconstrained in Ukraine. The people warning that “Zelensky is next” seem unaware that Russia has already tried to kill Zelensky multiple times. The limiting factor has been Russian incompetence, not their regard for laws of war.
The bigger danger instead is that US actions in Venezuela embolden Putin to ramp up sabotage and hybrid warfare in Europe. If this is really a signal that a spheres-of-influence world is taking shape, and Europe has been abandoned by the United States, Putin will feel entitled to reciprocal impunity in what he considers contested or gray-zone spaces. After all, if Trump is allowed to do it in Venezuela, why can’t Putin do it in Lithuania. Or Poland. Or France.
Either way, Europe has to step up. The IISS, a European think-tank, noted that the number of Russian sabotage operations in Europe almost quadrupled over the past year.
The initial signs of a European awakening are not hopeful. Kaja Kallas, the person in charge of the EU’s foreign affairs, responded by writing “The EU is closely monitoring the situation in Venezuela. The EU has repeatedly stated that Mr Maduro lacks legitimacy and has defended a peaceful transition.” This is mealy-mouthed even by European standards.
So while the Kremlin’s embarrassment is tactical, the strategic gains are real. If Russian war bloggers are angry, it’s more out of a sense of jealousy than outrage at American lawlessness. Russia, after all, tried to do the exact same thing in the opening phase of its invasion of Ukraine, and failed miserably.
Most importantly, American actions once again suggest that “great power competition” is not the right framework for the global transition happening in front of us. What we’re witnessing looks less like competition and more like a tripartite division of the world, something I had discussed last year. (In The New Republic and here on Substack.)
After all, great power competition implies rivalry, zero-sum conflict, strategic maneuvering against other great powers. What’s emerging instead looks more like a hegemonic carve-up.
Russia is, of course, not a great power on par with China and the US, but an ambitious also-ran. (The G2+1 formulation.) But Putin, backed by the comfort of a pliant population and a nuclear umbrella, has mastered the art of compensating for a lack of economic weight with a surplus of risk tolerance, what I have elsewhere called agentic power.
In 1941, the conservative thinker James Burnham envisioned exactly this kind of post-liberal order: a world of three “super-states” that would control the sovereignty of weaker nations and ignore it as they wished. George Orwell famously borrowed Burnham’s idea for 1984. But with current American foreign policy, this is what that world looks like in practice. Not a challenge to Russian or Chinese interests, but a demonstration that what happens in your backyard stays in your backyard.
The implicit bargain is that Putin and Xi will be extended the same courtesy. For “smaller” places caught in the gray zones, like Ukraine, Taiwan, the Baltics, even Greenland, this is not an abstract theoretical debate but a question of survival.
Many are making the comparison to Noriega and Panama in 1989. Arguing, nothing special here - America does this kind of stuff all the time. There may be something to that in a narrow sense. But I guess the response would be that the context now is very different. Panama ended up being kind of a footnote, because the order-building dynamic was so strong in those years. Now the gears are in reverse. So there’s a superficial similarity between the events. But, in the end, Panama was just noise. Venezuela sends a signal.
Many people have said that Putin (or Xi) did not care about it and were/are restrained only by the opposition of force of arms so it doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things.
I think they miss the real significance of the current ongoing breakdown of the world order. It is one thing to say that in final analysis, all matters are settled by force but the consensus on how, when and what conditions it is allowed is very important.
I had mentioned in a twitter post a few years back but the real break from the historical past was not colonialism but the post-45 order with its rejection of wars of conquest, internationalism, and universalist orientation of dominant ideologies in both camps (liberalism/socialism-communism).
Yes, yes, there was tons of hypocrisy, the rules were honored in breach, and the Cold War was much more brutal outside the collective West, but an order where all that is thrown overboard and we return to the world of 19th century with 21st century technology would be way more brutal.
If the outcome of WW2 was different and we had ended up with a cold war between the US and Nazi Germany, for example, then the world and the "rules of the game" would be completely different from the ones in our timeline.