Stephen Sefton, January 11, 2026
There has always been an irremediable gap between the hypothetical high morality of Western culture and its habitual practice of pillage and massacre around the world. However, with the defeat of Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan in 1945, the Western powers established the United Nations Organization and manipulated it to lend a veneer of legitimacy to a new phase of their imperialism. Now, there is a broad consensus around the world that Western support for Israel's genocide against the Palestinian people and now the brutal illegal kidnapping of the president of a peaceful country, Venezuela, demonstrate the effective collapse of international law.
The criminal US aggression against Venezuela expresses in a particularly dramatic way the acute crisis of legitimacy in international relations and the chronic irrelevance of the United Nations. The prominent economist Michael Hudson recently explained a fundamental reality of contemporary history when he commented that when fascism was apparently defeated in 1945, Western governments actually rescued it. Together with the other peoples of the majority world, the peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean witnessed that profound truth in their own flesh for eighty years.
At that time and to date, the fascist union of corporate power and US state power has meant constant interference and repeated interventions in our countries, always deployed under the guise of the false hypocritical ideology of electoral democracy, human rights and the free market. By means of their economic, political-military and media power, the US ruling elites managed to impose the fiction of the legitimacy of their power even during the most sadistic episodes of dictatorship by their brutal local allies in the region from Trujillo and Duvalier in the Caribbean to Videla and Pinochet in the Southern Cone. However, the basis of authentic legitimacy is not overwhelming firepower or unquestionable financial dominance, but the equitable and fair distribution of rights and duties among the countries of the world in a consensual and voluntary way.
Apart from its notorious military aggressions of the last twenty-five years, which now include the attack on Venezuela, the practice of the US government and its allies has been of persistent and progressively greater provocations to achieve some or other change of government and to wear down its main opponents China and Russia. They deploy countless unilateral coercive measures, intense media and diplomatic offensives, systematic actions of internal destabilization and even sabotage and direct terrorism. With the advance of the decline of their economic and political-military power relative to China and Russia, the Western oligarch elites have acted with more and more desperation, of which, in their foreign policy, the outlaw aggression against Venezuela is the most recent expression.
This same desperation is also reflected in the loss of internal legitimacy at the national level of the US and European authorities, their system of misgovernment and their perverse injustice systems. In the case of the United States, the deployment of armed federal agents in several cities across the country has caused notorious episodes of brutality against the civilian population. The most recent incidents have been the extrajudicial public execution in the middle Minneapolis, without the slightest justification, of a US citizen by an agent of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The next day in Portland, Oregon, a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agent shot and wounded two people during a routine vehicle stop. The respective mayors of Minneapolis and Portland have strongly condemned the out-of-control lethal violence in their cities by these federal agents.
In Europe, although there have been no reported victims of official gun violence against the population, levels of extreme repression of freedom of expression are increasingly common. In England, people protesting against the Zionist genocide in Palestine are subject to the country's anti-terrorist law. In November of last year, a group of eight people imprisoned under that law began a hunger strike. Five decided to stop their strike due to health risks, but three are still going and have not eaten for more than 60 days. There has not been this kind of moral challenge to the criminality of the British government since the death of Irish Republican Bobby Sands in 1981 after 66 days of hunger strike along with nine other fellow Republicans imprisoned under Margaret Thatcher's regime. Of course, the British media suppresses the news.
Of similar significance in the moral collapse of the collective West is the case of the retired colonel of the Swiss army, Jacques Baud, a prominent author and commentator on military issues and geopolitics. The Council of the European Union accuses Colonel Baud of having spread Russian propaganda although what he has written and commented on the NATO war in Ukraine has been based exclusively on European, Ukrainian and US sources. Contrary to all norms that protect freedom of expression, the Council of the European Union has issued an executive decree depriving Colonel Baud of all his civil rights, banning him from traveling and freezing his bank account, leaving him dependent on friends to be able to buy food. Since there has been no judicial process, the only legal remedy seems to be a long drawn out process in the European Court of Justice.
Censorship, the abuse of anti-terrorism laws and the criminalization of legitimate freedom of expression further worsen the crisis of legitimacy of Western countries. It is a crisis already evident in the anti-democratic decision of almost all European governments to prioritize the militarization of their economies over the basic needs of their populations. Among the most urgent socio-economic components of the crisis in Europe and North America are: access to affordable housing, the loss of purchasing power of wages and the exaggerated cost of energy for family residences and business facilities. In general, the notorious inequality between the majorities and the elites is progressively increasing as well as what seems to be a chronic decline in the competitiveness of the most important European economies, such as those of Germany, France and Italy.
In Latin America and the Caribbean, the governments of Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Mexico are now condemning the criminal Yankee aggression against the sovereignty of Venezuela. But they themselves had undermined it for years by accusing the Bolivarian government of being authoritarian and even illegitimate. In this way, they harmed the independence and sovereignty of our countries by not respecting the fundamental principles of the self-determination of the Venezuelan people and non-interference in their internal affairs. By boasting of being great Western-style democrats and not showing the solidarity that they have come up with now, far too late, the governments of these countries were effectively facilitating the criminal US and European economic aggression against Venezuela. They share responsibility for the crisis facing our region right now.
The position of the countries of the Bolivarian Alliance of Our Americas has strongly highlighted the legitimacy of Bolivarian Venezuela, Revolutionary Cuba and our Sandinista Nicaragua together with the sister nations of the Caribbean. Our governments have always promoted respect for the interests of other nations and international law, the promotion of peace and solidarity inspired cooperation. In fact, last December, President Nicolás Maduro announced the reactivation of the Petrocaribe solidarity program and other initiatives to strengthen energy, food and health sovereignty in the ALBA countries and the region. It has been precisely the commitment of the ALBA countries to the principles of international law for the sovereign development of the world’s peoples that confirms and strengthens the unquestionable legitimacy of our governments.
December this year marks the fortieth anniversary of the Declaration on the Right to Development adopted by an overwhelming majority at the United Nations General Assembly in December 1986. It is not mere coincidence that the statement was made in the same year that the International Court of Justice condemned the US government of Ronald Reagan for its terrorist campaign against Nicaragua. The Declaration affirms a framework of international relations that prioritizes the right to socio-economic development of all peoples and identifies the human person as the focus of that development.
It has been the collective West and its allies that have hindered the progress and implementation of measures to promote that fundamental right. Now the People's Republic of China has reaffirmed the right to development of peoples in a very robust way with its four global international initiatives for Development, Security, Civilization and Governance. It has been the collective West and its allies that have hindered the progress and implementation of measures to promote that fundamental right. Now the People's Republic of China has reaffirmed the right to development of peoples in a very robust way with its four global international initiatives. These initiatives categorically reinforce the 1986 Declaration on the Right to Development, which states that all countries and their peoples have “the inalienable right to full sovereignty over all their natural wealth and resources.”
In line with this basic principle, the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said on January 7, “Creating a sphere of influence or creating geopolitical confrontation will not make a country safer, much less bring peace to the world. It is the cooperative common security that sustains it... Venezuela is a sovereign state and has full peline with this basic principle, the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said on January 7, “Creating a sphere of influence or creating geopolitical confrontation will not make a country safer, much less bring Peace to the world. It is cooperative common security that sustains it... Venezuela is a sovereign state and has full permanent sovereignty over all its natural resources and economic activities” In the same way, the President of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, has asserted, "...each country has the sovereignty to decide what it does with its natural resources... This is part of Mexico's foreign policy.”
Lula da Silva, president of Brazil, has declared, "We repudiate the attacks against Venezuelan sovereignty and reject any vision that may imply the antiquated division of the world into zones of influence.” Russian President Vladimir Putin has also categorically affirmed Russia's solidarity with Venezuela. So there is a broad consensus in the majority world that the aggression against Venezuela threatens the legitimate sovereign development of all nations, which requires Peace as an essential condition.
With their political-military and economic power relative to the countries of the majority world in decline, the outlaw Western elites and their allies in other countries are sinking deeper and deeper into sterile nihilism. Their governments once again shamelessly promote international relations based on extortion with threats of destruction and death, as seen in all its horror in Gaza, and here in our region in the socio-economic catastrophe in Haiti. The struggle of the Bolivarian government against the fascism of the collective West and its allies demands international solidarity because it is defending not only the legitimate self-determination of peoples but the Peace that makes that possible.
Countries with integrity and dignity respond to the intensification of the brazen assault by the US regime and its allies on international norms of dialogue, respect and equality between nations with an urgent renewed affirmation of Peace as the fundamental principle of legitimacy in international relations. As our own government has affirmed, “Peace has been deeply wounded and the whole Human Family, the Community of Nations, the Peoples of the World, all of us urge that it be reinstated as an absolute reflection of the Dignity of Peoples.”