Observe, if you can bear the stench of rotting idealism, the latest corpse being dragged through the mud of global geopolitics: International Law. The recent escalation of United States interventionism in Venezuela isn’t merely another chapter in the long, tiresome book of Monroe Doctrine delusions; it is the final, pathetic wheeze of a system that was always more of a suggestion than a mandate. For decades, the high priests of the United Nations have whispered sweet nothings about the 'rules-based order,' a phrase that sounds increasingly like a bedtime story told to a terminal patient. The reality, of course, is that the UN Charter has been reduced to a collection of suggestions that the powerful ignore and the weak cite while they are being trampled. It is a marvelous performance of collective insanity.

Washington, as usual, is playing its favorite role: the self-appointed sheriff of a town it burned down years ago. The moral grandstanding about 'restoring democracy' in Venezuela would be hilarious if it weren’t so relentlessly boring. One has to admire the sheer, unadulterated gall required to claim the mantle of international protector while systematically dismantling every legal mechanism designed to prevent this exact brand of interference. The American political machine—an expensive, bipartisan meat-grinder—doesn’t actually care about the Venezuelan people. If it did, it might have noticed that its sanctions are the equivalent of burning a house down to kill a spider. No, this is about the aesthetic of dominance. It’s about the neurotic need for an empire to remind itself that it still has a pulse by squeezing the neck of a neighbor.

On the other side of this tragedy, we find the Venezuelan leadership, a collection of kleptocrats who have spent years turning a resource-rich nation into a cautionary tale of revolutionary incompetence. They scream about 'sovereignty' as if it’s a magical shield that protects them from the consequences of their own spectacular failure. They use the ghost of Simón Bolívar to justify a regime that has more in common with a feudal estate than a modern state. It is a match made in hell: an imperial bully meeting a desperate autocrat, with the 'international community' standing in the corner like a feckless eunuch, clutching a clipboard of ignored resolutions. The collapse of international law isn't a sudden event; it’s a slow, deliberate hollowing out, where the words remain but the meaning has been extracted to make room for raw, naked power.

Let’s be clear about the UN Charter. It was designed in 1945 to ensure that the horrors of total war wouldn’t be repeated, primarily by creating a framework where sovereignty was sacrosanct. But sovereignty, it turns out, is a luxury item that only the wealthy can afford to defend. The US attack—whether through economic warfare, clandestine manipulation, or the threat of kinetic force—exposes the system as a hollowed-out pumpkin, glowing with the candle of nostalgia but lacking any actual structural integrity. The great-power geopolitics of the 21st century have no use for the quaint notions of the mid-20th. We are returning to the state of nature, but with better cameras and more efficient ways to starve civilians from across an ocean.

The tragedy of the situation is not that the rules are being broken; it’s that the rules were always a facade. We are currently witnessing the moment the mask slips. The US ignores the UN because it can; Venezuela cries foul because it has no other move; and the rest of the world watches with a mixture of apathy and performative outrage. There is no moral high ground here, only varying levels of cynicism. The Left will decry 'imperialism' while ignoring the internal rot of the Caracas regime; the Right will scream about 'socialism' while ignoring the blatant illegality of the intervention. Both sides are intellectually bankrupt, clinging to narratives that are as outdated as the paper the UN Charter was printed on.

In the end, international law has become a hobby for academics and a talking point for diplomats at cocktail parties in Geneva. For the people actually living under the shadow of these power plays, the law is an invisible ghost. It doesn't provide food, it doesn't stop missiles, and it certainly doesn't prevent a superpower from doing whatever it deems necessary to maintain its crumbling hegemony. We live in a world where the only 'rule' is the survival of the loudest, and right now, Washington is shouting over the silence of a dying global order. It is a grim, predictable spectacle, and frankly, I’m tired of watching it. The collapse is complete; all that’s left is to see who gets to write the obituary.