MADRID – Nicolas Maduro was not extradited. He was kidnapped. The distinction belongs not to legal semantics but to constitutive political violence. 

Extradition presupposes a minimum of reciprocity, an implicit acknowledgment that the other exists as a legal subject. Kidnapping, by contrast, is the unilateral imposition of will through force, an act that denies the target’s sovereignty even before it is executed. The U.S. operation on 3 January 2026 in Caracas was not the application of law. It was the physical realization of a prior judgment formulated in Washington: Venezuela, as an autonomous political project, had become unacceptable.

Six months earlier, in June 2025, another pillar of the international order was reduced to rubble in the U.S. strikes on Iran’s Natanz and Isfahan facilities. The air campaign was not a war in the classical sense, understood as a confrontation between states with reciprocal responsibilities. It was an architectural intervention. It did not simply inflict material damage but perforated the principle of territorial integrity, the core of modern sovereignty. Its deeper function was pedagogical: to demonstrate that, for certain powers and their regional allies, some sovereignties are not inviolable rights but geopolitical deviations to be corrected through selective, periodic actions.

Together, these episodes form a revealing diptych. They do not signal the gradual weakening of international law but its loss of operational relevance for the centres of power. What emerges is neither a neocolonial order sustained by economic dependence nor a postcolonial arrangement defined by legal ambiguities. It is older and more direct: a return to a paleo-colonial logic. Imperial will is imposed without mediation, no longer in the language of civilization but through a technocratic rhetoric of managing supposed global disorder. Sovereignty is not violated in the name of exception; it is evaluated, administered, and, if necessary, revoked.

Kidnapping and the administration of politics

Maduro’s removal was framed, tellingly, as a matter of “law enforcement.” As Professor Sarah Heathcote has observed, this characterization shifts the act from the realm of Chapter VII of the UN Charter, the use of force, into the technical sphere of police cooperation. It is not a mere exercise in public relations. It is a deeper political reconfiguration.

By designating the Venezuelan president as a “fugitive from U.S. justice” rather than a head of state, Washington executed an ontological maneuver. Venezuela was stripped of its status as a sovereign political community and reduced to the category of administered space, a problem territory where illicit networks justify external intervention. In this logic, sovereignty ceases to be an inherent attribute and becomes a functional status, granted conditionally by the imperial order to those who operate within its parameters. Venezuela had failed in its conduct; its status was revoked. The kidnapping was not an anomaly but the bureaucratic formalization of that revocation.

The international reaction, highlighting Europe’s near-absent response, functioned as a funeral ritual for the old system. It represented an order of rules that no longer constrains its most powerful actors. The lesson for any state outside the Western core is clear: sovereignty is contingent and revocable. It depends not on law but on avoiding structural obstruction to the interests defined in Washington. It is a digital Monroe Doctrine taken to its logical conclusion. The hemisphere is no longer a “backyard” but an administrative district of an empire that no longer needs to name its dominion to exercise it.

Violation and the maintenance of the hierarchical order

The offensive against Iran operates on a different yet complementary register. In this case, there was no formal denial of state status. Iran is, inescapably, a civilisational state with historical depth and strategic capacity. What was deliberately suspended were its fundamental prerogatives. The violation of its airspace and the attacks on critical infrastructure constituted acts of geopolitical pruning, designed to degrade without destroying.
The logic was neither conquest nor “regime change” but the preservation of a status quo grounded in strategic inequality. Iran had committed the cardinal transgression of developing capabilities, from uranium enrichment to precision missiles and strong alliances, that challenged the regional hierarchy established to contain it. The response was not sustained diplomacy but selective, disciplinary violence. It is paleo-colonialism applied to a resilient actor: it cannot be eliminated, but it can be periodically punished to restrict its manoeuvre and reaffirm the contours of the hierarchical order.

Faced with a joint U.S.-Israeli threat, Iran opted for calibrated resistance, aiming above all to preserve sovereignty and redefine the terms of deterrence. The outcome was a profound recalibration. External aggression transformed a long-abstract threat into an immediate, tangible experience, forcing an unusually cohesive internal consolidation. Far from producing political fragmentation or social erosion, the conflict strengthened institutional and social cohesion, undermining a core strategic assumption of its adversaries: that military pressure would accelerate internal erosion of the Iranian state.

Since then, Iranian deterrence has moved from a set of scattered tactical capabilities to a more integrated logic. Government continuity, the ability to absorb material damage without political collapse, credible retaliation, and the elevation of social resilience to a strategic asset became part of a unified defensive architecture. The message is unmistakable: aggression can impose physical costs but cannot deliver the political outcomes that would justify it.

The cumulative effect was not the restoration of a degraded legal order but something more modest and more consequential: the demonstration that even within a paleo-colonial environment, where hierarchy is imposed by force, that imposition is neither cost-free nor automatic. The twelve-day war did not resolve the rivalry nor remove the threat, but it altered the calculations. In a system where power seeks to administer the sovereignties of others, resistance has become the last operational form of autonomy.

Paleo-colonial cartography: districts, fortresses, and reserves

The emerging world map does not depict a new international order but a carefully managed fragmentation along paleo-colonial lines. It is not a system of shared norms or explicit hierarchy but a functional distribution of spaces, each subject to a distinct logic of control and tolerance.
First are the imperial administrative districts. Territories, largely within the traditional spheres of Western influence, where sovereignty functions as a revocable concession. International law is displaced by the administrative practice of power, applied through sanctions, covert operations, selective incursions, and, when necessary, political kidnappings. Local institutions are not custodians of sovereign will but managers of a conditional mandate. The Venezuelan precedent is not an anomaly but the founding act of this category.

Next are the fortress states under quarantine. Iran, North Korea, and, in a different register, Russia maintain effective sovereignty through relative self-sufficiency and robust forms of deterrence. They are not recognised as equals but contained as problematic exceptions. Their territorial integrity is periodically violated, not to conquer them but to degrade their capacities and remind them of the limits of permissible ascent. They live under permanent preventive punishment, where violence is a regular tool of hierarchical maintenance rather than a last resort.

Finally, there are the reserves of legal nostalgia. The European Union, Japan, Canada, and segments of Latin America serve as custodians of a liberal order that has lost its ability to structure real power. They speak its language, administer its rituals in Geneva and New York, and operate under the presumption that rules still govern international behaviour. Their influence remains relevant in narrative, legitimacy, and institutional management, but marginal in the application of effective force. They are the modern heirs of those who preserved Latin after Rome’s fall, guardians of a grammar respected but disconnected from the language of power.

This cartography does not depict a neocolonial or postcolonial world but something more elemental: a return to direct domination, where sovereignty is administered, suspended, or tolerated according to strategic utility. Stability here does not arise from consensus but from the uneven management of vulnerability.

The end of the imagined community and the triumph of the fait accompli

This paleo-colonial order signals the collapse of the imagined international community, the illusion of a society of states bound by reciprocal rights and obligations. That project, always fragile, has been abandoned by those who long claimed to guard it.

What dominates this space is the creation of faits accomplis. The kidnapping of Maduro, the attacks on Iran, the militarisation of the South China Sea: none are exceptions but components of a power architecture imposed before debate. International law does not precede action; it follows, attempting to rationalise a reality already transformed by force.

This logic produces its own instability. It encourages nuclear proliferation as a minimal survival guarantee, fosters tactical alliances built solely to constrain a hegemon, and turns diplomacy into a shadow theatre managing consequences rather than preventing conflicts. The paleo-colonial order does not avert crises; it manages them. It does not protect sovereignties; it selects them. In this framework, stability ceases to be the product of shared rules and becomes the outcome of strategic calculation, coercion, and adaptation to a power that decides when and where sovereignty may exist.

An empire without a project, a world without rules

The new paleo-colonialism lacks even the universalist pretensions of nineteenth-century colonialism. There is no white man’s burden, no civilising mission. There is, instead, a technocratic management of insecurity. The empire does not expand to convert or instruct; it intervenes to prevent disorder, contain rivals, and secure strategic flows. Its logic is reactive and paranoid, not visionary or normative.

The kidnapping of a sovereign president and the violation of a nuclear state are not anomalies. They are the extreme expression of this administrative logic applied to international politics. They reveal a world in which power no longer dresses itself in the robes of law: it acts naked, relying on material capacity and the absence of a cohesive counterweight to sustain the new—or rather, very old—order.

The future is not negotiated in treaties or built through universal consensus. It is carved through discrete yet decisive acts of force. The smoke over La Guaira and the craters in Isfahan are not signs of a system in collapse but visible foundations of what is to come: a world of administered districts, besieged fortresses, and nostalgic reserves, where the only true law is written, with each fait accompli, by the tip of the spear of those who can act without asking permission and without requiring legitimisation.