Alexander Dugin, the fascist philosopher known as “Putin’s Rasputin”, said: “The capture of Maduro demonstrates that international law no longer exists — only the law of force applies.”

Alexey Pushkov, a Russian senator, accused the US of returning the world to “the savage imperialism of the 19th century”, adding: “Won’t the ‘triumph’ turn into a disaster?”

“The United States carried out a coup in Venezuela, struck the country, and demonstrated that international law means nothing to a nation that considers itself a hegemon,” said Igor Girkin, a former soldier and FSB officer turned commentator.

According to Michael Kofman, a Russian military analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Trump administration’s decision to strike Venezuela without even the “veneer of justification” “substantially frays” any sense of international order.

He adds that it “will make it much harder in the future for the US to convince other states that this type of behaviour should be punished”.

“By using force to assert its hegemony in the Western Hemisphere, the US is trading these short-term gains for a long-term structural cost to its overall position in the international system and to the advantages it enjoys over its rivals Russia and China,” he said.

“We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” he said. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

The statements by the two men amount to an explicit declaration of gunboat diplomacy and an embrace of the kind of 19th-century U.S. imperialist policy in the Western Hemisphere that has been widely criticized across Latin America.

Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in an interview that decades-long efforts by the United States to prove it is not a colonial power in the Americas has been “all thrown out” now, and that Mr. Trump’s actions could “potentially turn the whole region against us.”

He added that the administration’s aim of dominating the Western Hemisphere — including forcibly seizing leaders in the region — could spur China and Russia to try to do the same in their perceived “spheres of influence.”

That’s why, long after the shock has worn off, the enduring lesson for China will be a sense of vindication. Operation Absolute Resolve is a confirmation of what the CCP has always believed — that there is no such thing as a rules-based international order; that it’s a jungle out there.

Now Beijing will feel vindicated that America has shed the pretence. Whether Trump’s actions are the death knell of the rules-based world order, or merely reveal that it never existed, doesn’t truly matter. What matters is that the US and China, as the two most powerful nations on Earth, the two countries with the most capability to uphold the rules for everyone else, share a disdain for them. Like the fairies of Neverland, these laws only ever existed if they were believed in.

America’s greatest successes after the second world war came not from extracting resources from Europe or Japan, but from providing public goods: security, institutional rebuilding and a rules-based order that allowed societies to prosper.

The world order as we knew it has been overturned.

By seizing a sitting head of state and announcing direct American administration over a sovereign country – without international authorisation, coalition partners or even the language of temporariness – he crossed a boundary the post-1945 international system was meant to keep intact.

No fewer than 717 companies filed for Chapter 7 or Chapter 11 bankruptcy between January and November, according to S&P data reviewed by The Washington Post. This marks a 14 percent increase from the same period in 2024 and the highest rate since 2010, when the country was recovering from the Great Recession

Last year, before capturing President Nicolás Maduro, the Trump administration designated a Venezuelan slang term for drug corruption in the military as a terrorist organization and said he led it

One such study, conducted by Lee Epstein of Washington University in St. Louis and Mitu Gulati of the University of Virginia, concluded that over the century ending in 2021 the court ruled for businesses an average of 41 percent of the time. But the court led by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. since 2005 decided for businesses 63 percent of the time.

The study showed a growing partisan divide between the justices. In 1953, the study’s authors wrote, “Democratic and Republican appointees are statistically indistinguishable, deciding on average about 45 percent of the cases in favor of the rich.” By 2022, they wrote, “that share is about 70 percent for the average Republican justice and 35 percent for the average Democratic justice.”

Minnesota child care centers at the center of widespread fraud allegations fueled by a viral video were operating as expected when visited by investigators, the state Department of Children, Youth, and Families said in a news release Friday.

President Donald Trump’s administration is working quickly to establish a pliant interim government in Venezuela following the dramatic capture of Nicolás Maduro, according to US officials, prioritizing administrative stability and repairing the country’s oil infrastructure over an immediate turn to democracy.

President Donald Trump's love affair with the Supreme Court could turn sour in the new year.

Sheldon Whitehouse, an ex officio member of the Kennedy Center board, remains undeterred and determined to press on with his investigation

Ms. Hassan is of Somali ancestry, as are all but eight of the 86 people charged in the meals, housing and autism therapy fraud cases, according to prosecutors. A vast majority are American citizens, by birth or naturalization.

Another year has passed, and with it, another collection of Elon Musk’s ambitious timelines that didn’t quite align with reality....

Elon Musk made many 2025 promises that he couldn't keep.

The Harvard professor provides a ceaseless flow of startling details in this exhaustively researched, 1000-year account

Intimacy is entirely transactional and the entire human — from body, mind, and ordinary life — become consumer products.

Solar farms are already proving to be an effective addition to traditional power, but now it looks like they may have additional environmental benefits.