January 19, 2026
MANILA – Over the eight decades since the end of the Second World War, an international order gradually took shape in which individual nations, large and small, could find their place and pursue development under a shared framework of rules. Through international bodies, treaties, and norms, countries were given at least a fighting chance to flourish. The principal guarantor of that order was the United States of America, which was also, unsurprisingly, its biggest beneficiary.
That order is now collapsing. Its unraveling did not begin with Donald Trump, nor can it be explained solely by the rise of China. Long before Trump entered the White House, the United States had already signaled that while it helped design the rules of the postwar system, it did not consider itself fully bound by them. Its refusal to ratify key international treaties—notably the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and the Rome Statute creating the International Criminal Court—sent a clear message: America saw itself as the system’s guarantor, but also as standing apart from it.
At the heart of today’s world crisis lies a deeper transformation. Global society has become highly differentiated. Power no longer moves as a single package. Military superiority does not automatically translate into economic control, technological leadership, legal authority, or moral credibility. Even America’s long-standing dominance of the international financial system no longer assures command over global trade. Its once unchallenged lead in science and technology has likewise narrowed.
Faced with these limits, the Trump administration has turned to what remains most firmly under the control of the American state: coercive power. Military supremacy is now being used to secure advantage across key economic domains—oil, finance, trade, raw materials, and advanced technology—under the broad banner of national security. This ambition is packaged for domestic consumption through the slogan MAGA: Make America Great Again.
Such a project inevitably encounters resistance within the US itself. The principles that once sustained the postwar international order—rule of law, free markets, enforceable contracts, autonomous science, a free press, and the right of peoples to choose their leaders—are also embedded in America’s own institutions. Actions that undermine these principles abroad place growing strain on them at home.
This is why what is happening in Venezuela carries wider significance. By preventing the country from freely extracting and selling its oil to buyers of its choosing, the US has effectively assumed the role of de facto administrator of Venezuela’s oil. American firms are being invited to extract, refine, and sell the oil, with the Trump administration determining how the proceeds will be used.
The scale of the problem the US has taken upon itself by intervening in Venezuela cannot be overstated. America wants Venezuelan oil, but not the burden of providing for Venezuelans’ needs. It wants leaders who can assume responsibility for the population while remaining obedient to foreign power. Yet political legitimacy rests on the principle that leaders must serve their own people first. No external backing can substitute for that.
The Economist has described this emerging pattern as “gunboat capitalism”—the projection of state power to advance national corporate champions and the use of private firms as instruments of statecraft. It is a form of state capitalism in which political authority overrides market rationality. No wonder US oil companies feel uneasy. No firm can easily assess where state authority ends, how durable such arrangements may be, or what liabilities follow when political winds shift.
There is an irony here. Trump appears to be borrowing from the Chinese model, where state power is routinely used to align corporate activity with state objectives. In societies like the US, however, such alignment can only be achieved through law, not executive fiat. Even then, the autonomy of modern economic systems cannot be overridden without institutional costs.
Nearly half a century ago, the political philosopher Michael Walzer observed in Just and Unjust Wars that in international relations “there is a presumption that the state speaks for the political community it governs, and there exists a certain fit between a people and its government.” Walzer’s reminder serves as a warning against moral crusading, against imperial intervention, and against the belief that exceptional power carries an exceptional moral license.
American exceptionalism once expressed confidence in the universal appeal of democratic institutions. When detached from restraint, however, it risks hardening into a conviction that power need not answer to the very rules it helped bring into being.