I used to believe in the ‘rules-based order.’ The raid on Caracas shattered that illusion. This is a personal look at how we let power replace law, and why the Melian Dialogue is the only text that matters today.
A Confession of Naïveté
I have to admit something to you: I was asleep at the wheel. For years, I bought into the comfortable fiction that the world had evolved past the law of the jungle. I really believed that national borders were these sacred lines that you couldn’t just cross because you had a bigger helicopter. But when I saw the news—Maduro plucked from his bedroom and flown to Brooklyn like a bag of contraband—I felt a cold realization hit me. I had been wrong. We aren’t living in a global community of laws; we are living in a pause between conquests. The raid wasn’t just a military operation; it was a revelation that sovereignty is a fairy tale we tell the weak to keep them quiet.
The Ancient Logic of Power
It’s easy to get lost in the details of ‘narco-terrorism’ and legal indictments. But if you strip away the CNN chyrons, what you see is something ancient. It’s the logic of Thucydides playing out in high definition. The Athenians told the Melians thousands of years ago that justice only exists between equals in power; otherwise, the strong do what they can. We are seeing that exact principle applied to a sovereign nation.
Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.
– Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War
We need to stop pretending this is about drugs. This is about the terrifying reality that if you are weak and you have what the strong want, your independence is a clerical error that can be corrected with a raid.
The Oil Under the Floorboards
Let’s be honest with each other. Would we care about ‘justice’ in Venezuela if the ground beneath it was barren? The stock market certainly doesn’t think so. The spike in oil futures tells you everything you need to know about the ‘Why’ behind this operation. We are entering an era of desperate resource scrambling, and the niceties of international law are the first casualties. I feel a certain shame in how easily I—and maybe you too—accepted the official story because it was convenient. It’s cleaner to think we are the ‘good guys’ arresting the ‘bad guy’ than to admit we are an empire breaking open a piggy bank.
The Spectator’s Trap
The scariest part isn’t the raid; it’s our silence. We scroll past it. We shrug. We’ve become so accustomed to the spectacle of power that we don’t even recognize the danger it poses to our own souls. Simone Weil understood this mechanism of force better than anyone. She saw how force turns a human being into a thing.
Force is that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him.
– Simone Weil, The Iliad or the Poem of Force
By turning a head of state into a detainee, we’ve turned a nation into a territory. And by watching it happen without blinking, we turn ourselves into accomplices.
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Waking Up from the Dream
So, where does that leave us? It leaves us with the burden of seeing clearly. The illusion of a rules-based world is gone. We are back in history, fully and brutally. I don’t have a simple solution for you, but I do have a request: don’t look away. Don’t let the legal jargon sedate you. Recognize that the world just became a much more dangerous place, not because a dictator was caught, but because the rules that protected the rest of us were burned to fuel the helicopter that took him.