When the Sheriff Writes the Will

“In God We Trust”

There are many ways to export democracy. Air-dropping leaflets is crude. Sanctions are blunt. Moral lectures are cheap. But deposing a foreign president, renditioning him to your own courts, and then announcing—without so much as a diplomatic blush—that you will overseethe country’s political transition and its oil business? That is not democracy promotion. That is regime change with an Excel spreadsheet.

Let us strip this of euphemism and look at it plainly. The United States says it has removed the Venezuelan president, hauled him across borders, and now intends to supervise Venezuela’s political future and hydrocarbon wealth. Read that sentence again, slowly. If this were happening in Africa, Asia, or Latin America under any other flag, the West would already have a phrase for it. We used to call it imperialism. These days, we dress it up as “stability management.”

Venezuela—Venezuela—is not a protectorate. It is a sovereign state, however broken its institutions may be, however compromised its elections have become. Sovereignty does not evaporate because a government is incompetent, authoritarian, or unpopular. If it did, half the world would qualify for external management. Including, on some days, Washington itself.

The ethical problem here is not whether the Venezuelan leadership deserved removal. Many will argue it did. The ethical problem is who decides, by what authority, and to whose benefit. When the same power that executes the removal also appoints itself midwife to the transition—and accountant to the oil sector—the conflict of interest is not subtle. It is brazen.

The United States—United States—has long claimed to be the custodian of a rules-based international order. Rules, however, are only credible when they apply to the rule-maker. Rendition without multilateral mandate, regime change without UN cover, and resource oversight without local consent do not sit comfortably with the sermons Washington delivers to the rest of the world about democracy, legality, and restraint.

This is where the language begins to sound uncomfortably “third worldish.” Not because developing countries have a monopoly on bad behaviour, but because this is precisely the conduct Western diplomats once lectured against: strongmen removed by force, courts used as instruments of politics, transitions managed by outsiders, and natural resources treated as prizes of victory. Swap the accents and the flags, and this is the playbook of the very regimes the democratic world claims to oppose.

There is also the small matter of oil. Venezuelan crude is not an abstract concept; it is the bloodstream of the nation’s economy. To announce external oversight of that sector during a “transition” is to tell Venezuelans—quietly but clearly—that their future will be mortgaged before they have even voted. History suggests that when foreign powers “oversee” oil, the local population sees very little of it, while international markets and corporations do rather well.

Washington will say this is temporary. That it is about stabilisation. That it is necessary to prevent chaos. All familiar arguments. They were made in Iraq. They were made in Libya. They were made every time a short-term intervention promised long-term democracy and delivered instead a generation of distrust. Temporary arrangements have a habit of becoming permanent interests.

There is a deeper cost too, one that cannot be priced per barrel. Every time a powerful democracy bends its own principles, it hands authoritarian regimes a gift. Moscow, Beijing, Tehran—none of them need to invent propaganda when the West supplies the evidence. “You talk about sovereignty,” they will say, “until it is inconvenient. You talk about law, until it gets in the way.” And they will not be entirely wrong.

This is not an argument for moral paralysis. It is an argument for consistency. If the international community believes Venezuela needs intervention, then let it be multilateral, lawful, and transparent. Let it involve regional bodies, the UN, and—most importantly—Venezuelans themselves. Democracy imposed by force and managed by foreign overseers is not democracy. It is administration.

“The irony is that the United States does not need to do this to lead. Its greatest strength has never been its ability to remove governments, but its capacity to persuade, convene, and constrain itself. When it abandons that restraint, it stops being the standard-bearer and becomes just another power pursuing interests with a moral press release attached.”

So yes, this episode should trouble anyone who still believes the democratic world stands for something more than might dressed as right. Because when a superpower deposes a president, drags him home, and then announces stewardship over ballots and barrels, it is not exporting democracy. It is exporting a message: that rules are for others, and power decides.

And that, for a country that prides itself on constitutional order and ethical leadership, is a remarkably poor export.