No return to normal

Put aside the triumphalism of MAGA influencers; dial down the Trump Derangement Syndrome. The American abduction of Nicolás Maduro represents neither madness nor aberration. It is policy – rational in execution and rooted in precedent. And it is destined to outlast its architect since it emanates from long-term vulnerability.

Saying a policy is rational doesn’t mean approval. It’s recognition of purposive pursuit of the national interest. If US interests conflict with Europe’s, we should sober up.

Instead, we had Europe’s actual response. It oscillated between silence and belated censure. It betrays a continent trapped between nostalgia for a transatlantic order that no longer exists and terror of the multipolar conflicts replacing it.

The temptation to frame this operation as Trumpian excess – a strongman’s theatre that evaporates with the next election cycle – is the first illusion demanding burial. From Grenada to drone strikes over sovereign territory, American presidents of both parties have demonstrated scant respect for international law when interests demanded otherwise.

The beneficiary of Venezuelan oil flows, should they materialise, will be Trump’s successor. Infrastructure takes years to rebuild. Trump’s tenure is up in 36 months.

A Democratic administration inheriting stabilised production will discover convenient reasons to maintain what Trump initiated. To note this continuity is not whataboutism but epidemiology: understanding the disease requires studying its history, not merely its current symptoms.

The second illusion concerns Trump’s supposed affection for Putin. Strategic competition admits no friendship. Trump covets Greenland – a desire with Truman-era precedents – precisely to counter the Russo-Chinese Arctic axis.

That Putin’s Venezuelan foothold evaporated without resistance suggests either humiliating defeat or a quid pro quo (Venezuela on my terms; Ukraine on yours). Either interpretation demolishes the narrative of collusion. Great powers negotiate spheres; they do not maintain alliances.

We do not yet know whether Maduro’s capture resulted from bribed generals or geopolitical horse-trading. We cannot predict whether China, Iran  and Russia will flood Venezuela with proxy forces or whether this presages a new American doctrine of swift, hybrid operations.

What we can assess is Europe’s reaction: first, abject timidity; then, criticism too late and too mild.

With Marine Le Pen’s notable exception, Europe’s resurgent far-right parties applauded Washington – unsurprising, given American strategy explicitly nurtures nationalist forces to fracture EU cohesion.

Meanwhile, the political centre, already shrunken by successive electoral drubbings – with more to come – revealed itself incapable of either moral clarity or strategic vision.

This paralysis must end. Not through hysteria but through cold recognition that the post-war order has collapsed. Europe possesses neither the luxury of neutrality nor the option of American protection on European terms.

The Venezuela operation exposes a dependency more dangerous than energy imports: Europe’s strategic subordination to NATO frameworks designed for a vanished world. The prescription is not theatrical autonomy declarations but institutional transformation.

A genuine European army, funded through EU-wide bonds for military technology, cyber capabilities and joint procurement, would signal seriousness. Small member states fear sovereignty dilution; the alternative is sovereignty’s irrelevance when Washington dictates terms or Beijing offers Faustian bargains.

This requires abandoning the federalist impulse to centralise for centralisation’s sake. Strategic autonomy demands pragmatic partnerships beyond the EU’s borders – say, with Brazil and Mexico to counterbalance American regional dominance, with African nations to secure supply chains, with Asian democracies wary of Chinese hegemony. Europe cannot match American or Chinese power projection; it can become indispensable as an honest broker, provided it possesses credible deterrence.

The economic dimension proves equally urgent. America’s Venezuelan operation exposes not just resource competition but the death throes of fossil fuel geopolitics.

Rather than accepting this new normal of great power grabs, Europe should pioneer the governance structures that transcend it. The energy transition requires more than solar panels and wind farms.

It demands shared sovereignty frameworks with non-EU states, multilateral institutions that bypass the Sino-American-Russian great power triumvirate currently dividing the world into spheres of extraction.

This is not Green New Deal romanticism. Nuclear energy remains indispensable. But energy independence without political multilateralism is fantasy. Europe’s advantage lies not in matching American military reach or Chinese industrial scale but in demonstrating that sovereignty can be pooled without subjugation, that climate imperatives and security concerns need not conflict.

The obstacles are formidable. Eastern European economies dependent on cheap energy face short-term pain from such transitions. Carbon tariffs targeting imported oil risk transatlantic rupture without careful calibration. Hungary and Poland will resist any defence integration that constrains their room for manoeuvre. These difficulties do not constitute arguments for inaction; they define the price of survival.

The truth is cold and clarifying. Europeans are not facing a transient crisis. We are suffering from a condition of simmering conflicts and dirty peace. There is no foreseeable resolution.

American policy will not revert to imagined norms under future administrations. Russian ambitions will not moderate. Chinese influence will not recede. The question is whether Europe exploits this moment to build capacity for independent action or continues mistaking prayers for policy.

Illusions console; they do not protect. Cynicism paralyses. Between these failures lies the narrow path of strategic realism: accepting the world as it is while working to create the institutions that might make it less savage.

The Venezuela operation offers clarity about American intentions. Whether Europe possesses the will to act on that clarity remains the only question that matters.

The alternative to European strategic autonomy was never the status quo. It is accelerating irrelevance in a world where power alone commands respect and weakness invites predation. Europe has perhaps a decade to become consequential on its own terms. The clock, as always, is indifferent to our preferences.