Donald Trump has commanded a precision military operation against a neighbour he didn’t like. Venezuela’s president was abducted and is now in detention from which he is unlikely to emerge.

But Trump’s short-term tactical success has come at the expense of the complete destruction of the rules of international behaviour. Things were already bad. They have now gone pear-shaped. Global lawlessness prevails. That’s a massive price for the international community to pay, since it licenses other powers – Russia and China in particular – to act in the same way. Russia has already. And China may well be tempted to. Trump’s determination to dominate the western hemisphere implicitly invites Xi Jinping to do the same in the eastern hemisphere. And it confirms the licence already extended by the US to Israel.

This is bad news for Taiwan. It is bad news for Japan and South Korea. It’s bad news for the members of Asean and it’s bad news for Australia. In Europe, the Trump administration’s repeated threats to annex Greenland have........

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