On the morning of January 3, 2026, US President Donald Trump stood at a podium in Palm Beach, Florida. Less than twelve hours earlier, US forces had invaded Caracas in violation of international law and the UN Charter. A series of airstrikes on military targets provided cover for Special Forces to carry out their mission: capturing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores.

As Trump addressed the people of the world, he couldn’t help himself from going off-script. After previously failing to overthrow Maduro in 2019, he’d finally got his man — and access to the world’s largest proven oil reserves. Introducing the general who led the operation, Trump declared the invasion of Venezuela was an “attack on sovereignty” itself. Countries of the world should shutter at the implications.

The illegal kidnapping of a world leader and his wife was the culmination of a year of escalating evidence that the United States under a second Trump presidency was taking a very different approach to world affairs — one that requires a forceful response before it’s too late.

Escalating US pressure

In his inauguration speech in January 2024, Trump announced that Manifest Destiny was back — the assertion that the United States has a god-given right to capture territory and subject its will onto others. Mere weeks before the attack on Caracas, the new US National Security Strategy made that even more explicit: it declared that the Trump administration was resurrecting the Monroe Doctrine, meaning the US government saw the Western Hemisphere as its turf where it could act with impunity.

Even before returning to the presidency, Trump was threatening to take control of the Panama Canal and Greenland, a territory controlled by NATO ally Denmark, and mused about absorbing Canada as the 51st state. It was clear that the administration showed little concern for the sovereignty of other countries, nor for international law — a problem for its allies, which had spent the past couple years slamming Russia over its invasion of Ukraine being an illegal act of aggression.

Even as the United States threatened Greenland, Europe had little to say in response. Over many decades, it had allowed itself to become deeply dependent on the United States — economically and militarily — and now there was a US administration eager to weaponize that dependence. In February, Vice President JD Vance turned up in Munich and Paris to scold European leaders. Their values were backward, he declared, and Germany should stop excluding the far-right Alternative for Germany party into government. In Paris, he slammed European tech regulations and said the continent would always remain secondary to the United States on technology.

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It didn’t take long for the consequences of this new world order to become clear. That same month, the chief prosector of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Karim Khan, was sanctioned by the United States — a means of retaliation after the court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister for committing war crimes and crimes against humanity. The United States had targeted the ICC during Trump’s first term, sanctioning chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda when it looked like US war crimes in Afghanistan might be investigated by the court.

The sanctions severely hampered the ICC’s work, and Khan was cut off from key services like banking and even his Microsoft email address — a detail that set off further alarm bells in Europe when it was revealed in May. By June, more ICC judges along with UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese were added to the list, with another batch of judges joining them in August.

In November, French judge Nicolas Guillou spoke to Le Monde about the effects of being targeted by the United States. “The sanctions affect all aspects of my daily life,” he said. “All my accounts with American companies, such as Amazon, Airbnb, PayPal and others, have been closed.” He couldn’t book hotels, shop online, or do so many things that now get routed through US companies and platforms. Even non-US banks often avoided him for fear of falling afoul of US authorities. “Being under sanctions is like being sent back to the 1990s,” he said.

Canadian judge Kimberly Prost similarly described losing her credit cards immediately, while Albanese said it was hard even to get paid by her employer or reimbursed by her health insurance provider because she’s effectively been cut off from the global financial system. It also affected their families: Albanese has described how being sanctioned has affected her daughter’s plans to study in the United States, while Prost said the daughter of a sanctioned colleague had her US visa canceled.

But the sanctions are indicative of a much larger problem. “Behind the sanctions against the ICC lies the entire question of the rule of law,” said Guillou. The United States is not just actively trying to hamper the ability of the ICC to enforce international law, it’s flagrantly violating it in the process — with few repercussions.

When the United States conducted strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities in violation of international law in June, the reaction of Western countries was muted. They focused on their opposition to the Iranian nuclear program and called vaguely for de-escalation, rather than condemning the illegal action that had taken place. The message was clear: the United States could do as it wished, and it would not face pushback from the countries that presented themselves as the arbiters of global morality and human rights — even as the Trump administration placed increasing pressure on them too.

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As the months passed, Europe continually showed itself to be inept in the face of a belligerent United States. The United Kingdom eagerly presented itself as a US vassal in the hope of attaining US investment, while the meeting between Trump and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in July to mark the agreement of a new trade pact was widely seen as an embarrassing capitulation. It wasn’t much better when European leaders scrambled to assemble in Washington in August to try to convince Trump to maintain US support for Ukraine.

Time and again, Western leaders were showing that even in the face of bullying, abuse, and economic attacks from the Trump administration, they were powerless to do anything substantive to challenge US power — despite the European Union alone being a bloc of more than 450 million people which collectively has the second-largest economy in the world. The United States pressured the European Union to rein in its digital regulations at the behest of US tech companies (with the help of business groups in Europe), and when it sanctioned several European officials and advocates who’d worked on tech policy, political leaders could do little more than release some strongly worded statements. Vance’s earlier threats about European values and its approach to tech was further making its way into US policy.

The threat of US dependence

The actions of the past year showed very clearly that the United States is guided not by international law or any notion of doing good in the world, but by an agenda of “might makes right” that exists to serve the United States in the short term, regardless of the medium- to long-term fallout. Trump and those around him assume that they can do as they wish and that they will never feel the consequences because of the power they hold. It’s a risky gamble — but if other actions were not, the attack on Venezuela should be a wake-up call to US allies of the threat they face from continued dependence on the United States.

In short, sovereignty means little to the Trump administration, as evidenced not just by its actions, but also by Trump’s statement after capturing Maduro. Calling it an “attack on sovereignty” couldn’t be clearer, and shows that any country justifying the action is placing their own sovereignty at risk. It’s widely known that the United States is already conducting campaigns in Greenland, and it wouldn’t take much for Trump to decide he does want Canada after all and stage a surgical strike on Ottawa.

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In response to the attack on Venezuela, the French Foreign Ministry said the latest violation of the principle of non-use of force by the United States presented “grave consequences for global security, sparing no one.” Brazilian President Lula da Silva called it “the first step toward a world of violence, chaos, and instability.” The United States did not just invade Venezuela and kidnap its leader; Trump also announced the US military was acting as an occupying force, effectively holding remaining Venezuelan leaders at gunpoint to act as the United States commands, lest they face the same fate as Maduro.

The Trump administration has committed the crime of aggression, “which the court at Nuremberg described as the supreme crime, it’s the worst crime of all,” says former president of the UN war crimes court in Sierra Leone Geoffrey Robertson. Instead of facing international condemnation and a package of sanctions, as Russia did upon committing the same breach of international law, most Western leaders are calling for peace, democracy, and respect for international law, without directly addressing the United States’ grave violation of it.

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The attack on Venezuela shows precisely why countries need to accelerate efforts to carve themselves out of dependence on the United States. Recent increases in military spending are supposed to help achieve that, though a lot of military hardware still comes from the United States or depends on systems that the US government can cut off. Efforts to diversify economic relationships are also a work in progress, but take time to achieve. It’s clear the work cannot stop there.

Many Western countries are reticent to challenge the United States and the actions of the Trump administration too forcefully for a number of reasons. They’re militarily dependent on the United States, through NATO and other alliances, and Trump has already shown he can hurt them economically and continually threatens to tighten the screws. There’s also the technological dimension: they’re not only locked into digital systems controlled by US tech companies and dependent on US technology, but they also fear scaring away investment from some of the largest companies in the world and the deep-pocketed investors who’ve prospered from their rise.

As the sanctioning of ICC, UN, and European officials shows: digital sovereignty is paramount. The United States can cut off anyone from the technological systems its companies control, and it’s willing to use that power against anyone who tries to stand in the way of its interests, those of its client states, and largest companies. The bulk of that work must happen at the government level, to create the conditions, deploy the funding, and create the structures to rapidly build and deploy a new technological infrastructure. But individuals can still make a difference by pulling back from US tech services as much as feasibly possible.

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Ultimately, Western countries that claim to uphold international law and human rights have a choice to make: will they help the United States shepherd the world into an arrangement where the ability to wield power is all the matters — power that can just as easily be used against them — or will they take the short-term hit to stand with many nations in the Global South to try to protect the multilateral order they claim to support at every opportunity, except when the United States violates it?

Part of the reason the United States has been able to get away with everything it’s done this past year is because countries have not come together to wield their collective pressure to stop it. As 2026 begins, that needs to change: not just by developing new political forums to challenge the aggressive action of major powers, but also to build new economic and technological alliances to address problems many countries in the world face — not just Western nations used to focusing on their exclusive club.

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