It has almost become laughable to invoke international law and condemn its violation after the world woke up, stunned on the third day of the new year, to something unimaginable even in the most thrilling Hollywood films. If the all-powerful president Donald Trump found no embarrassment in justifying bypassing Congress and failing to inform it of the astonishing raid on Caracas and the arrest of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, arguing that Congress is talkative, leaks information, and cannot be trusted with secrets, and therefore that violating the U.S. Constitution is not worth pausing over as an “insignificant detail” - how, then, could he be expected to give any weight to “aged” positions from Europe and the world reminding him of international law?

Indeed, in light of the overwhelming facts and implications that have flowed and will continue to flow from this event, such reminders will appear as a kind of backward luxury. The U.S. show of force in Venezuela will acquire a multiplied significance, even compared with the destruction of Iran’s nuclear arsenal. Who, then, would possess power comparable to that of a president who chose the sixth anniversary of the assassination of Iran’s second-most powerful figure, Qassem Soleimani (the former commander of Iran’s Quds Force, killed in a U.S. strike in 2020), to present Maduro as a detained prisoner being led to trial under U.S. justice in New York?

The brothers Assi and Mansour Rahbani were decades ahead of the world when they transformed political concepts into sublime works of art. Set to their music, in the play “Fakhr Al-Din”, a famous Lebanese musical theater work by the Rahbani Brothers, which still continues to astonish us, resonates that enchanting line: “The Sultanate’s sword is long”, that conveys the far-reaching power of authority and its ability to strike anyone, no matter how distant. 

The U.S. Secretary of War, boasting beside his president who announced the complete victory of the operation to uproot Maduro’s regime, arrest him, and begin the “administration” of Venezuela, as if this were the new, updated euphemism for an invented form of “colonialism”, almost seemed to borrow the Rahbani phrase as he informed the world that Delta Force had delivered a demonstration of the long arm of American justice. Yet whether the world spends days or months trading accusations and condemnations over this American show of force, it will not be able to grant the so-called “resistance” regimes, stretching from the Middle East to Latin America, the final word before verdicts are pronounced and sentences carried out.

What is “hoped for”, without illusions about hope, of course, from Middle Eastern countries, and from those that concern us first and last, Lebanon above all, followed by the states and countries implicated in the bloodshed of Lebanon, its land, and its ongoing violation, is that they understand, before it is too late, that the era of hiding behind obsolete rhetoric and pushing forward in provoking and luring major powers into deals whose time has expired, collapsed, and fallen apart, has ended irreversibly, under Trump and under others as well.

The so-called resistance forces, in the Middle East as well as in other “resistant” pockets in Latin America and elsewhere, have failed to grasp the meaning of last year’s developments, from Gaza to Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran itself. The arm of the American sultanate has now moved into the backyard of Latin America, which means the direct security of the United States. Accordingly, others, from Cuba to Colombia, and always to Iran and Iran’s arms in the Middle East, must brace themselves and no longer hide behind international law or humanitarian law, which no one crushed before them as they themselves did, neither Trump nor anyone else.

Maduro is no better than Bashar, even if the scale of their victims differs, between hundreds of thousands in Syria’s mass graves and the bankruptcy of a state floating on oil like Venezuela. Between these backward models of controlling people’s lives and the overwhelming dominance of American power, we find ourselves facing a new kind of world, of a new model, that no one will be able to deter.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by the writers are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Annahar