Sovereignty in the Age of the Raid

There is a reason the argument has stalled on a single word. Not missiles. Not explosions. Not the extraordinary claim that a sitting head of state has been seized and flown out of his country by a foreign power. The word is ‘capture’ – and its rival is ‘kidnapping’. This is not semantics. It is jurisdictional warfare. If the reports are even partially true – U.S. strikes in and around Caracas, followed by the claimed removal of the President of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro – then what we are witnessing is not merely a foreign policy crisis. It is a stress test of sovereignty itself, staged as spectacle. And the outcome will not hinge on verification alone, but on which grammar of power prevails.

To say capture is to pre-legitimate violence. It installs a police narrative before any legal forum can intervene: suspect apprehended, justice pending, order restored. To say kidnapping is to rip away the costume and name the act for what it is: armed seizure across borders, sovereignty overridden by force, law trailing behind violence like an afterthought.

The struggle over language is the struggle over reality.

Sovereignty as conditional privilege. Sovereignty, in theory, is simple. States are equal. Borders matter. Violence across them is prohibited except under narrow, clearly defined circumstances. In practice, sovereignty has always been hierarchical – robust for the powerful, negotiable for the rest. What makes this moment different is not that the United States has intervened abroad. That history is long, bloody, and well-documented. What is different is the form: the convergence of military force, criminal indictment, and executive spectacle into a single gesture – the raid.

This is sovereignty hollowed out and repackaged as law enforcement. The logic runs as follows: if a leader is criminalised, sovereignty dissolves around him. Once indicted, he is no longer the president but a fugitive. Once a fugitive, he can be “captured.” Territory becomes incidental. Borders become inconvenient. International law becomes commentary, not constraint.

This is not how law is meant to function. It is how the Empire modernises.

International law as performance art.

The defenders of this logic, the Trumpian Regime, insist that international law remains intact – that justice is finally being served. However, the law that arrives after the missiles is not law; it is narration. International law is most loudly invoked when it is least able to restrain power. The UN Charter forbids the use of force except in self-defence or with explicit authorisation. Neither condition is clearly met here. And yet the language of legality floods the discourse: capture, indictments, charges, bounties, criminal enterprises.

This is the paradox of contemporary power: legality is not abandoned; it is weaponised.

The uncertainty – whether Maduro is truly in U.S. custody, whether proof will be produced, whether the story holds – is not incidental. Ambiguity is governance by other means. It delays accountability, fractures the response, and allows violence to solidify into fact before law can intervene. By the time legality catches up, the world has already changed.

The neo-fascist aesthetics of order

What we are seeing is not classical fascism. It is something slicker, more administrative, more palatable to liberal audiences: a neo-fascist aesthetics of order. Its defining feature is not ideology but method. Decisive executive action replaces deliberation. Military force masquerades as policing. Complexity is flattened into morality plays: villain apprehended, chaos resolved. The executive becomes the embodiment of sovereignty itself, unconstrained by domestic institutions or international norms.

This is why the raid is such a potent political form. It bypasses democracy while claiming to protect it. It suspends the law while invoking justice. It promises purification through force. And crucially, it travels well. Once normalised, it becomes precedent.

In the United States, this aesthetics has a name, even if it often pretends otherwise. MAGA is not merely a partisan formation; it is an affective regime that rehearses exception as common sense. Its devotion to “law and order” is not juridical but visceral. Procedure is mocked. Delay is weakness. Force is clarity. The pleasure it takes in decisive punishment – of migrants, protesters, foreign leaders – conditions the public to accept the raid as reason itself. What appears abroad as foreign policy is domestically cultivated as desire.

The incoherence of this order becomes clearer when placed alongside a different, but revealing, fact. Juan Manuel Santos, then President of Colombia, was awarded the sole Nobel Peace Prize in 2016 for negotiating an end to his country’s civil war. The prize did not sanctify innocence; it sanctified process—dialogue over annihilation, negotiation over capture. Peace, here, was valued because it stabilised a regional order, reassured investors, and restored governability to a territory long marked as risky.

Venezuela, by contrast, is granted no such ethical patience. Its crisis is framed not as political, historical, or structural, but as pathological—an exception that authorises suspension. Sovereignty becomes negotiable. Law becomes optional.

This is where the politics of María Corina Machado Parisca come fully into view. Beneath the rhetoric of democracy and freedom lies a rigid neoliberal programme aimed not at reform but at conversion: the conversion of Venezuela into a compliant investment frontier. Her vision is one of privatisation without mediation, deregulation without consent, and alignment without reciprocity. The country is not to be rebuilt; it is to be opened—its resources, labour, and institutions rendered legible and saleable to transnational capital.

Within this logic, dialogue is unnecessary because the outcome is presumed. Elections matter only insofar as they ratify a preordained economic settlement. When they do not, sanctions, capture, and extraterritorial coercion appear not as violations, but as corrections. The contradiction is not accidental. Peace is rewarded when it stabilises the system. Force is excused when it enforces it.

A familiar imperial rhythm

The costs of this logic are not borne only abroad. They return home quietly and unevenly. When war is reframed as policing overseas, policing at home absorbs the grammar of war. Surveillance expands. Militarised force becomes routine. Due process is recoded as indulgence. Public money flows toward spectacle – raids, weapons, security – while infrastructure rots and social provision thins. Ordinary Americans are promised safety and delivered precarity, governed not through stability but through managed fear. Empire abroad does not protect democracy at home; it hollows it out.

None of this is unprecedented. The U.S. has long toggled between reverence for sovereignty and contempt for it, depending on whose sovereignty is at stake. Anti-communism, counterterrorism, counternarcotics, democracy promotion – the rationale shifts, the structure remains. Criminalisation has become the preferred bridge between war and politics. Label the target illegitimate. Elevate U.S. jurisdiction. Treat violence as enforcement. This is how the Empire learns to speak in the idiom of courts while acting in the register of conquest.

The long-running obsession with “extracting” Maduro – circulating for years in policy circles, exile fantasies, and botched private ventures – did not emerge spontaneously. It reflects a deeper belief: that sovereignty in the Global South is provisional, revocable upon misconduct as defined by Washington. That belief has now been operationalized.

What breaks after this

If this act stands – if a foreign power can seize a head of state and frame it as an arrest—sovereignty does not disappear. It reorganizes. Some governments will applaud quietly. Others will panic. Many will adapt, hardening their own security apparatuses, shrinking civic space, and justifying repression as defence against external threat.

Ordinary people will absorb the costs: instability, retaliation, displacement, and the normalization of emergency politics. And the most dangerous lesson will travel outward: jurisdiction follows force. If you are powerful enough, law will find a way to justify what you have already done.

For Venezuelans, the consequences are immediate and asymmetric. Any external seizure framed as justice hardens the internal security state, forecloses political opposition by associating dissent with foreign aggression, and licenses further repression in the name of defence. Retaliation – economic, diplomatic, covert – rarely distinguishes between regime and population. Ordinary people inherit instability they did not author, while their political future is rewritten elsewhere. They appear in the narrative only as background—terrain rather than agents—spoken about but never spoken with.

The real scandal

The scandal is not only about whether this violates international law. It is that the distinction between war and policing is being deliberately erased. Once that line collapses, there is no stable framework left – only managed exceptions. Leaders become arrestable. Borders become porous. Justice becomes something delivered from the sky.

You can despise Maduro and still recognise the danger. You can oppose authoritarianism and still see that authoritarian methods do not liberate – they metastasize. Sovereignty was never pure. But after this, it is unmistakably conditional, explicitly ranked, and enforced by spectacle.

This pattern is familiar. Manuel Noriega was criminalized, then invaded. Osama bin Laden was indicted, then assassinated. Qasem Soleimani was labelled a terrorist, then executed by drone. In each case, criminal language prepared the ground for sovereign violence, converting military acts into moral necessities. The lesson is not equivalence, but continuity: once a leader is narratively transformed into a criminal, geography dissolves. Jurisdiction follows force.

The response to this logic cannot be enthusiasm or denial. It must be a refusal. Refusal to accept violence retroactively clothed as law. Refusal to collapse war into policing and justice into spectacle. Refusal to celebrate outcomes while abandoning process. The danger is not simply that international law is violated, but that we are trained to stop expecting it. Once that happens, sovereignty becomes conditional, justice becomes airborne, and politics is reduced to managed exception.

Kidnapping or capture?

The answer will determine not just how we understand this moment, but what kind of world we are being prepared to live in.

Ali Ridha Khan is on Substack!