The United States’s attack on Venezuela has raised questions about domestic checks on power and signaled a challenge to international law and longstanding norms of sovereignty and the use of force. The priority given to securing U.S. access to Venezuelan oil and other resources further underscores the material interests underlying the operation. Combined with President Donald Trump’s open flirtation with territorial ambitions elsewhere—toward Greenland, if not Canada—the episode has reinforced growing international concern that the administration has taken a significant illiberal turn in foreign policy, shifting away from rule-based order to raw power projection.

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