The arrest of Nicolás Maduro in a sudden United States military raid on Caracas has not merely ended a presidency. It has cracked open one of the most consequential fault lines in contemporary international politics, where sovereignty, energy security, humanitarian catastrophe and great-power rivalry collide in full view of the world. For Venezuela, this moment feels less like liberation than suspension: history holding its breath.

For the Middle East—home to many of the Global South’s pivotal middle powers—what happened in Caracas resonates far beyond Latin America, because it reinforces a long-held fear that sovereignty is no longer a shield but a variable, enforced selectively by those with reach. States that balance energy wealth, fragile legitimacy, and strategic hedging now see in Venezuela a warning: that autonomy survives not through alignment alone, but through leverage, diversification, and constant vigilance in an order where power increasingly precedes principle.

Venezuela’s collapse did not begin with American helicopters over Caracas. It has been decades in the making. Once Latin America’s wealthiest petrostate, the country sat atop the world’s largest proven oil reserves, yet by 2025 its production had fallen below one million barrels per day, down from more than three million in the late twentieth century. Oil, which once generated over 95 per cent of export revenues, became both a lifeline and a curse. Mismanagement, corruption and sanctions hollowed out the state. Hyperinflation reached millions of per cent in the late 2010s. By last year, more than eight million Venezuelans—nearly one in three citizens—had fled abroad, creating the largest displacement crisis in the history of the Western Hemisphere.

Maduro’s rule, sustained by the military, intelligence services, armed colectivos and foreign allies, had long lost democratic legitimacy. His 2018 re-election was rejected by most Western and Latin American governments, and human rights bodies documented systematic torture, arbitrary detention and extrajudicial killings. Yet even regimes that govern badly are protected by a foundational norm of international order: sovereignty. That norm has now been bent, perhaps broken, by force.

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Washington’s justification rests on a familiar but dangerous blend of........

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