An armed supporter of ousted Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro stands next to another one holding a poster of him during a demonstration in Caracas on January 4, 2026, a day after he was captured in a US strike. The capture of Nicolás Maduro has most certainly unsettled the international system and offers a clear illustration of how Donald Trump’s Conservative Republicanism has evolved from a domestic ideological formation into a disruptive force in global geopolitics. Its central tenet, Make America Great Again, has subsequently been externalised, extending into the Caribbean Basin and now asserting itself within Venezuela.
Clearly, this outward projection of ideological power has contributed to a paralysis of multilateral governance, weakening both institutional authority and collective restraint. In 2025 alone, unilateral United States actions facilitated regime change in Syria following the removal of Bashar al-Assad, exacerbated instability in Iraq and Yemen, intensified strategic pressure on Iran and Cuba, and culminated in the bombing of Islamic State positions in Nigeria. Accordingly, these developments signal a recalibration of international norms in which force increasingly precedes consensus.
This recalibration most certainly reopens the unresolved question of sovereignty in the contemporary world order. Sovereignty, long treated as the juridical foundation of international relations, was never a mere abstraction. For much of the Global South, it was a hard-won political achievement forged through struggle against colonial domination and external control.
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Clearly, the outward projection of Conservative Republicanism into Venezuela does not represent a historical rupture, but a return to familiar patterns under new ideological language. Subsequently, sovereignty appears no longer as an inherent attribute of statehood, but as a conditional status, extended selectively and withdrawn strategically. Accordingly, the rules-based international order reveals itself not as collapsed, but as unevenly applied, rigid for the weak and elastic for the powerful.The paralysis of multilateralism that follows from this conditional application of sovereignty is neither accidental nor temporary.
It is structural. Institutions established to mediate power, most notably the United Nations, continue to command rhetorical respect while being routinely bypassed in practice. Accordingly, the rules-based international order reveals itself not as collapsed, but as unevenly applied, rigid for the weak and elastic for the powerful.
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