The United States and the New Rules of Global Power

The United States and the new era of global power.

For anyone who operates across borders, holds multiple passports, and builds businesses in different jurisdictions the post 1945 international order provided something essential: predictability. International law, treaties, and institutions created a framework within which cross-border life could be planned, assets protected, and movement relatively free.

That framework assumed that rules mattered more than raw power, that sovereignty meant something, and that a mid-sized country could rely on something other than its relationship with the strongest power to guarantee its security.

The United States’ latest conflict in Iran and “special military operation” in Venezuela, which resulted in the capture of President Nicolás Maduro, has demonstrated that this assumption is no longer valid.

The era of international law is gone. The world has returned to an ancient principle: might makes right. Beneath the familiar historical echo of empire lies something stranger a fundamental shift in how power operates, communicates, and sustains itself in the twenty-first century.

In February 2020, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko called the United States “the greatest empire, the leading country in the world.” Four years later, Dick Cheney was asked at the World Economic Forum whether he considers the US an empire. “We don’t see ourselves in that light,” Cheney responded. “If we were an empire, we would currently preside over a much larger portion of the Earth’s surface than we do.”

Cheney emphasized that the US has, on occasion, “had the opportunity to deploy massive military forces… to create democracies where previously there had been dictatorships.” During the George W. Bush era, the US invaded Afghanistan and Iraq under precisely such narratives. In 1999, NATO’s campaign in Yugoslavia was framed as “humanitarian intervention.” Camp Bondsteel was subsequently built in Kosovo a territory with the world’s fifth-largest lignite reserves. In 2016, a company linked to General Wesley Clark, commander of the 1999 bombing campaign, was granted coal rights over one-third of Kosovo’s territory.

The pattern continued under Barack Obama, who oversaw US military actions in seven countries despite receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. Then came Donald Trump.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad called Trump “the best American president not because his policies are good, but because he’s the most transparent president.” Unlike predecessors who cloaked themselves in moral rhetoric while serving corporate interests, Trump spoke plainly: “We want the oil.”

The Venezuela operation was different. No narrative of “fighting dictatorship” or “protecting civilians” was deployed. Trump initially cited Venezuelan drug cartels, but the motive was transparent: oil. The US intends to control Venezuela’s oil revenues indefinitely, with US firms investing $100 billion to restore production. The fact that the old guard excluding Maduro remained in power indicates Washington sought control, not regime change.

But here the story becomes more interesting than simple resource extraction.

By discarding the moral veneer of humanitarian intervention, the United States is asserting cognitive sovereignty. It no longer seeks to win the argument; it seeks to render argument irrelevant. This is power as pure performance a lesson in how narrative becomes obsolete when might is absolute.

For decades, American power operated through narrative intermediation: the need to justify actions through shared values and institutions. The UN Charter, the Geneva Conventions these were rituals the strong felt compelled to observe. Trump’s Venezuela operation breaks this ritual. It says openly: We no longer need your permission or understanding. We need only your attention.

When Trump says “We want the oil,” he is not being naive. He is signaling that the United States has moved beyond justification. The message to other nations is not “accept our reasons” but “accept our reality.”

Why now? Why does the US feel able to discard narrative tools it has used for decades?

The Domestic Lens

The answer may lie in domestic systems failure. When a government cannot govern effectively at home when institutions fray and consensus collapses foreign policy becomes a stage for projecting control that no longer exists domestically. Maduro, paraded through New York streets in an armored vehicle with doors open, is as much spectacle for American consumption as geopolitical message.

Consider the parallels: political paralysis; trust in institutions at historic lows; a public sphere consumed by algorithmic radicalization. In such an environment, projecting overwhelming external force reassures domestic audiences that the state remains potent, displacing attention from internal dysfunction.

This is not unique to the US. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine unifies domestic population around the Kremlin, distracting from economic stagnation. China’s assertiveness in the South China Sea consolidates domestic support for the Party. We are witnessing the emergence of post-liberal statecraft: internal legitimacy manufactured through external projection, and foreign policy as domestic image management.

This suggests reframing how we understand major powers. Rather than viewing China and Russia as rivals to a liberal US order, it may be more accurate to see all three converging toward a new model of statecraft.

The US drops the democracy narrative; China never adopted it; Russia abandoned it. All three now operate where internal cohesion and external projection fuse through technology, surveillance, and nationalism. The US’s move in Venezuela confirms this trend, not rejects it.

We are witnessing the emergence of post-liberal statecraft: internal legitimacy manufactured through external projection, and foreign policy as domestic image management.

Consider the parallels: on narrative flexibility, ideological justifications become tools to deploy or discard. On domestic spectacle, foreign policy victories are staged for domestic audiences. When it comes to technological integration, surveillance and cyber capabilities suppress dissent and project power. And on identity politics, nationalism creates internal cohesion while justifying external aggression.

The competition between these powers is real, but it occurs within a shared framework of post-liberal governance. They are not alternatives to each other but variations on an emerging theme.

In systems theory, a single disturbance can reset the behavior of an entire network. The US’s unilateral capture of Maduro is such a disturbance. It tells every mid-sized nation: your treaties, your alliances these are not buffers. They are liabilities if the dominant power decides otherwise.

The fact that Moscow despite strategic partnership with Caracas turned a blind eye shows Russia cannot seriously challenge US dominance. For the Kremlin, this means further loss of allies. More significantly, it signals to every nation that balancing between powers may no longer be available. The system is learning new rules.

Smaller countries face a stark choice: align with Washington or risk becoming the next object lesson. Their security is no longer guaranteed by international institutions, but depends on their relationship with the dominant power. Venezuela learned this the hard way.

Comparing the US to ancient Rome has become cliché. The parallels are real enough: the Senate, the architecture, rapid expansion, professional military, cultural attraction. But the Rome analogy is too linear, too tied to a narrative of rise and fall that may not capture present complexity.

A more useful framework comes from ecology. The United States functions like a keystone predator in a global ecosystem. Its presence shapes all other actors creating niches, suppressing alternatives, driving adaptation. But keystone species also create dependency. The system organizes around the dominant power, becoming less resilient, more brittle.

The question is not whether the US will eventually decline all systems do but whether the system it sustains is resilient enough to survive that decline, or whether it has become so dependent that removal would trigger collapse.

This is where the Rome analogy fails. Rome fell, and something else eventually replaced it. But the modern global system is so interconnected, so dependent on American-provided public goods security, finance, technology, information that its dissolution might not look like transition but cascade: feedback loops amplifying each other into systemic breakdown.

 

The Paradox of Might

Trump’s actions have opened a new chapter. Russia, China, and even the EU are likely to remain regional powers with limited influence outside their geopolitical orbit. The US, in contrast, will continue projecting power globally, leveraging military strength, economic might, and cultural reach.

Despite Trump’s claims about China seeking control over Greenland, it is questionable whether Beijing ever had global domination plans. The Great Wall was built to protect the “Middle Kingdom,” not conquer others. China’s cultural patterns do not suggest it could become a serious challenger to US global dominance, at least not in traditional imperial mold.

As Oswald Spengler argued in The Decline of the West, Slavic cultures particularly Russian may possess potential for sustained growth. But the Russian-Ukrainian war essentially conflict between two Slavic nations has left both weaker, limiting their capacity to play major global roles.

Thus, no alternative to the current US-led international order appears on the horizon.

And yet.

The US today projects overwhelming conventional force. Its navy patrols every ocean. Its economy remains the world’s largest and most innovative. Its culture penetrates every corner of the globe.

But as technology diffuses power to smaller actors through cyber warfare, autonomous systems, space assets, information manipulation the nature of “might” may shift. A drone swarm from a container ship. A cyberattack crippling financial infrastructure. AI-generated disinformation destabilizing an election. These are not the weapons of empires past, but they may be the weapons of the future.

US dominance today is real. But dominance in one paradigm does not guarantee dominance in the next. The keystone species that cannot adapt to a changing environment becomes the fossil.

So the question is not whether the US will remain sole superpower for the next decade or two. It almost certainly will. The question is whether the nature of power itself is shifting beneath our feet and whether the capabilities that make the US dominant today will be the same ones that matter tomorrow.

As a result of Trump’s actions in Venezuela, international politics will likely be defined less by shared norms and more by a single superpower’s capacity to impose its interests. For the foreseeable future, “might makes right” is very much a reality.

But the deeper reality is that might is becoming more distributed, more diverse, more difficult to measure. The United States may find itself dominant in a game that is no longer the only game in town or that is being transformed by players it cannot see, using weapons it does not recognize, in domains it does not fully control.

The capture of Maduro, the transparent talk of oil these are not the actions of a declining power. They are the actions of a power confident in its dominance. And yet, history suggests that such moments of apparent invincibility often precede the most unexpected transformations.

The new era of global power may not belong to the strongest in the old sense, but to the most adaptable in the new one.

The new era of global power may not belong to the strongest in the old sense, but to the most adaptable in the new one. And adaptability, unlike military might, cannot be paraded through the streets.