global geopolitics

From Venezuela’s Oil to Gaza’s Children: The Empire’s Hypocrisy Laid Bare


The United States and its allies have constructed an elaborate framework of international rules, norms, and institutions designed to govern the behaviour of nations. Yet the architects of this system have consistently exempted themselves from the very rules they impose on others. The theft of Venezuela’s oil revenue, the selective application of human rights principles, the manipulation of democratic processes, and the refusal of international legal jurisdiction all point to a single conclusion: the rules-based international order is not a system of law but a system of power, enforced by those who wrote it and applied only to those who cannot resist it.

The case of Venezuela offers a stark illustration of how this system operates in practice. The United States has collected more than $13 billion from Venezuelan oil sales in 2026, according to the Financial Times, but only approximately $300 million has been publicly recorded as having been transferred to Venezuela. A US official told The New Yorker that about $6 billion has been allocated for disbursement to Venezuela, leaving roughly $7 billion that the Trump administration has not publicly explained. President Trump stated that he believes “we’re entitled” to revenue from Venezuelan oil. This is not a matter of complex international finance or contractual obligation; it is state-sponsored theft on an industrial scale, justified by the assertion that American interests supersede Venezuelan sovereignty. The same government that lectures the world about property rights, rule of law, and sanctity of contract has simply taken what it wanted, offering only the thinnest justification for its actions.

This pattern of extraction has historical precedent. The invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 followed a similar logic: the United States asserted the right to remove a government it deemed hostile, seize control of that country’s oil resources, and restructure its economy to serve American and allied interests. The Iraqi oil industry, once nationalised and operated for the benefit of the Iraqi people, was opened to foreign investment under terms dictated by the occupying power. The legal framework for this extraction was the Coalition Provisional Authority’s Order Number 39, which guaranteed foreign investors the right to repatriate 100 per cent of profits and provided protection from nationalisation for decades. The Iraqi people, who had suffered under sanctions and war, were promised democracy and prosperity; what they received was continued occupation and the extraction of their primary resource. The Venezuela case follows the same template, differing only in the mechanism: sanctions and asset seizure have replaced military occupation, but the outcome is identical. The wealth of the nation flows to American and allied interests, and the people of the country are left with promises that are never fulfilled.

The selective application of human rights principles is one of the most revealing features of this system. The United States and its allies will sanction countries for alleged human rights abuses, condemn governments in international forums, and claim to be defending human dignity. At the same time, they continue selling weapons, providing military aid, intelligence, and diplomatic protection to another government accused of committing war crimes or causing large-scale civilian casualties next door. Human rights become a principle to enforce against adversaries, but an exception is made for strategic partners and allies. The standard is not applied equally; it depends on who is committing the abuse and whose interests are being served. Nowhere is this contradiction more stark than in Gaza, where more than 90,000 civilians have been slaughtered, including 10,000 children under the age of 10. The destruction of civilian infrastructure, the denial of food and water, and the deliberate targeting of hospitals, schools, and residential buildings constitute war crimes by any reasonable definition of the term. Yet the United States continues to provide military aid, intelligence, and diplomatic cover to the government committing these atrocities. The same officials who speak eloquently about human rights in one context provide the weapons that make mass slaughter possible in another. The inconsistency is not a failure of policy; it is the policy.

The recent attack on the International Criminal Court further illustrates the empire’s contempt for international law. When the ICC began investigating American and allied personnel for war crimes in Afghanistan and elsewhere, the United States responded not with cooperation but with hostility. The Trump administration imposed sanctions on ICC personnel, revoked visas, and threatened any country that cooperated with the Court. Senator Marco Rubio, then serving as Secretary of State, declared war on the ICC, asserting that the United States would not submit to the jurisdiction of a court that it did not recognise. This campaign culminated in the effective removal of the ICC’s Chief Prosecutor, who was subjected to such intense pressure that she could no longer function effectively in her role. The message was clear: international law applies to everyone except the United States and its allies. Any attempt to hold American or allied personnel accountable for war crimes would be met with retaliation, not compliance.

The war with Iran has emphatically demonstrated the structure of the rules-based order in real time. The United States has repeatedly asserted the right to strike Iranian targets, to impose sanctions on Iranian oil exports, and to seize Iranian assets. The legal justification for these actions has been, at best, tenuous. The United States withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, a multilateral agreement endorsed by the UN Security Council, and reimposed sanctions that were specifically lifted by that agreement. The claim that these actions were consistent with international law is difficult to sustain. Yet the United States has faced no consequences for these violations. The international institutions that might have held it accountable are either too weak to act or are dominated by American allies who will not act. The Security Council, where the United States holds a veto, is incapable of taking action against American violations. The International Court of Justice, whose jurisdiction the United States has repeatedly rejected, cannot compel compliance. The result is a system in which the United States can violate international law with impunity, while weaker nations face sanctions, military action, or regime change for far lesser offenses.

The intellectual foundations of this system are rooted in doctrines that predate the United Nations. The Monroe Doctrine, articulated in 1823, asserted that the Americas were off-limits to European intervention while simultaneously claiming the right of the United States to intervene in the affairs of its neighbours. The Roosevelt Corollary, added in 1904, asserted the right of the United States to exercise “international police power” in the Western Hemisphere. These doctrines established the principle that the United States had special rights that other nations did not possess, a principle that has been extended globally in the decades since. The Bush Doctrine, articulated in 2002, asserted the right of the United States to launch preemptive wars against any country it deemed a threat, regardless of whether that country had attacked or was about to attack. These doctrines are not a secret; they are openly articulated and defended. The United States does not claim to be following the rules; it claims the right to make the rules.

The refusal to accept international legal jurisdiction has been a consistent feature of American policy. The United States is not a party to the Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court, and actively campaigns against the Court’s jurisdiction. It threatens sanctions against any country that cooperates with the Court. It invokes the principle of sovereign immunity to protect itself and its allies from accountability. The argument is circular: the United States does not accept the jurisdiction of international courts because they do not have jurisdiction over the United States. The jurisdiction is denied, so it does not exist. The circularity is not a logical flaw; it is the point. The United States wants the power to judge others without being judged itself.

The democratic rhetoric that accompanies these actions is equally revealing. The United States will fund “democracy promotion” NGOs in foreign capitals, speak endlessly about freedom, human rights, and the will of the people, and demand respect for democratic institutions. But the moment a democratically elected government pursues policies that threaten Western geopolitical or economic interests, the same governments that spoke of democracy will support sanctions, political destabilisation, opposition movements, or even a coup to remove that same elected government. The case of Venezuela is exemplary: the government of Hugo Chávez was democratically elected, and his successor Nicolás Maduro was also democratically elected, yet the United States refused to recognise the election results and actively supported efforts to remove the government. The democratic process was respected only so long as it produced governments that served American interests. When it ceased to do so, the language of democracy was abandoned in favour of the language of regime change.

The United States will also express outrage over election irregularities in other countries while maintaining an electoral system that includes gerrymandering, voter suppression, and an Electoral College that allows a candidate to lose the popular vote and still become president. A relatively small number of wealthy donors and special interest groups spend billions of dollars to influence election campaigns and political outcomes. If those same practices existed in a country the United States was monitoring, they would likely be condemned as evidence of a flawed or anti-democratic electoral system. The hypocrisy is structural, not incidental. The American electoral system is designed to produce outcomes that serve the interests of the wealthy and powerful. The two-party system is a single-party oligarchy with two factions, both funded by the same corporate interests. The criticism of other countries’ electoral systems is not a defence of democracy but a projection designed to obscure the flaws of the American system.

The “rules-based international order” is not a system of rules at all. It is a system of power. The United States writes the rules, enforces the rules, and is exempt from the rules. It sees itself as the master of the universe, above all rules, while demanding that the rest of the world be held accountable to the rules and international laws it has designed. This is the face of empire, and it is why the rest of the world increasingly refuses to accept the legitimacy of American leadership. The Iran war has demonstrated that the rules-based order exists only to constrain the weak while empowering the strong. The United States has shown that it will violate international law when it suits its purposes and that there will be no consequences for those violations. The international institutions that might have provided accountability have proven themselves either unwilling or unable to act. The result is a system that has lost its claim to legitimacy.

The legacy of this system is visible in the internalised attitudes of those who have been colonised. You have individuals, particularly from some African and other developing countries, who are clapping like trained seals and cheering like trained sea lions for the very powers that colonised, enslaved, and exploited their ancestors. This is the legacy of colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, enslavement, control, and domination that our forefathers fought so hard against. They bled, sweat, and died fighting against domination, control, and oppression. Yet the level of colonial brainwashing and mental enslavement has made too many Africans look up to their colonial and slave masters, both Arab and Caucasian, as their gods. They applaud them when they commit crimes, when they plunder other nations, when they control others, when they dominate weaker countries, when they kill innocent people, when children are slaughtered, when innocent people are killed because they follow a different religion. This is the legacy of colonial brainwashing and mental enslavement, the product of centuries of cultural, political, and economic subordination, and the mechanism by which the empire maintains its hold over the minds of the colonised.

The Trump regime represents the most naked expression of this imperial logic. The open admission that the United States is “entitled” to Venezuelan oil revenue, the refusal to account for $7 billion in stolen assets, the support for mass slaughter in Gaza, the hostility to international law, the contempt for democratic processes that produce unwanted outcomes—all of these are features, not bugs, of the American imperial project. They are not anomalies in an otherwise benign system; they are the system itself, stripped of the polite language that usually obscures it. The regime does not pretend to be something it is not. It openly asserts American entitlement to the resources of other nations, openly rejects the jurisdiction of international courts, openly supports allies regardless of their human rights records, openly manipulates its own electoral system, and openly declares war on intent rather than action. This openness is not an accident; it is the reflection of an ideology that sees American power as the source of all legitimacy and American interests as the measure of all value.

The global elite has constructed a system of rules that applies to everyone except themselves. They write the rules, enforce them, and are exempt from them. They take what they want, kill whom they choose, and call the result order. They lecture the world about democracy while undermining democratic governments. They speak of human rights while enabling mass slaughter. They invoke international law while refusing its jurisdiction. They call this the rules-based international order and expect the rest of the world to accept it. The sooner the nations of the world recognise this reality, the sooner they can begin the work of building an alternative. The material interests behind the double standard are clear: the extraction of wealth from the global South, the preservation of Western economic dominance, the containment of China, and the suppression of any challenge to the existing hierarchy of power. These interests are served by the existing framework of international rules, and they will not be reformed from within.

The struggle for genuine international order requires the rejection of the double standard. It requires holding the powerful to the same standards they impose on the weak. It requires building institutions that are genuinely multilateral, not merely multinational in membership but dominated by the same powers that always dominate. It requires ending the impunity that allows the United States to ignore the ICC, the ICJ, and any other body with the power to hold it accountable. The alternative is continued plunder, continued slaughter, and the gradual erosion of the legitimacy of the entire system. The nations of the world are increasingly unwilling to accept a system in which the United States writes the rules, enforces the rules, and is exempt from the rules. They are increasingly unwilling to accept a system in which human rights are applied only to adversaries, democracy is celebrated only when it produces friendly governments, and international law is invoked only against the weak. The empire is sustained not only by force but also by consent, and the colonial brainwashing that makes people applaud their oppressors must be overcome if the struggle for genuine liberation is to succeed. The mental chains of colonial thinking must be broken if the material chains of imperial domination are ever to be thrown off. This is the work of our time, and it begins with seeing the system for what it is and refusing to accept it as legitimate.

Authored By: Global GeoPolitics

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References

Coalition Provisional Authority (2003) ‘Order Number 39: Foreign Investment’, Baghdad: Coalition Provisional Authority.

Financial Times (2026) ‘Venezuela Oil Revenue Discrepancy Report’, July 2026.

The New Yorker (2026) ‘The $7 Billion Mystery: Where Did Venezuela’s Oil Money Go?’, July 2026.

Trump, D. (2026) Remarks on Venezuelan Oil Revenue, as reported by Acyn, available at:



(accessed 26 July 2026).

United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (2026) ‘Gaza Casualty Figures’, July 2026.

United States Department of State (2002) ‘The National Security Strategy of the United States of America’, September 2002.

United States Department of State (2026) ‘Remarks on the International Criminal Court’, as reported in analysis.

Monroe, J. (1823) ‘The Monroe Doctrine’, Annual Message to Congress, December 1823.

Roosevelt, T. (1904) ‘The Roosevelt Corollary’, Annual Message to Congress, December 1904.