The National Security Strategy and the Maduro Operation: A Coherent Mess

The through line of the Trump administration’s foreign policy is not merely episodic noncompliance with international norms, but a deeper rejection of the rules-based international order itself. Rather than treating law as a strategic asset that shapes, legitimates, and multiplies U.S. power, the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy (NSS) and its Maduro operation elevate raw interest, race and ethnic identity, and sphere-of-influence logic. That shift matters profoundly. It signals a move from a world in which law constrains and channels power to one in which power defines law’s relevance.

The rules-based international order is the post-World War II framework of legal norms, institutions, and practices designed to prevent great-power war, advance human rights, and facilitate prosperity through predictable, reciprocal commitments. Its legal core rests on the UN Charter’s Article 2(4) prohibition on interstate force and numerous mechanisms for collective security, the peaceful settlement of disputes, and the protection of fundamental human rights. Its institutional elements include the United Nations and its specialized agencies; regional organizations; international courts and tribunals; and trade and financial institutions that regulate state behavior and reduce transaction costs. The rules-based order is also greatly influenced by the work of civil society organizations, academics, and journalists, among other nongovernmental influences. For the United States, this order has been both values affirming and power enhancing: It has amplified American influence by aligning U.S. leadership with widely shared interests in security, economic development, public health, and human rights.

Why Rejection Is Different From Violation

The U.S. invasion of Venezuela has triggered an international armed conflict that violates the UN Charter’s prohibition of the use of interstate force. There’s little that’s new about these types of violations. Many states have committed them, including democracies and other “major players.” A partial list of rogue actors features the United States, the Soviet Union/Russia, the People’s Republic of China, Israel, Egypt, Syria, Uganda, Iraq, North Korea, Argentina, Vietnam, Indonesia, and South Africa, with the U.S. vying for the most frequent (but not necessarily the most egregious) violator award. And these are only states that have been adjudicated guilty by the International Court of Justice, the UN Security Council, or the UN General Assembly. Still, such exercises in adventurism have tended to be the exception in the post-World War II era, thus proving the utility of the law.

That said, states, including the United States, habitually tout the virtues of international law even as they violate it. As Francois de La Rochefoucauld famously observed, hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue. Historically, even powerful states that breached clearly established international law norms did so while claiming legal justification—such as self defense, consent, humanitarian necessity—or by simply denying their accused conduct. Either way, they acknowledge the authority of the norms and thus reinforce their applicability.

The Trump administration’s NSS is a radical departure from previous such statements of U.S. policy. It doesn’t attempt to justify departures from the rule of law. Instead, it refuses to render homage by simply ignoring the international legal order. By ceasing to argue within the law’s categories and instead appealing to civilizational identity, regional prerogative, and unvarnished power interests, the administration challenges the premise that international law organizes legitimate state action at all. That rejection—of the law’s authority, not merely its constraints—is the big deal.

While the United States appears to no longer seek to justify its conduct in accordance with its obligations under the UN Charter, it can and does attempt to justify its actions in accordance with its new NSS, which replaces focus on international law obligations with regional sphere of influence powers, redolent of, and indeed citing to, the imperialist gestalt of the Monroe Doctrine. Out with the old (law) and in with the older (force). The U.S. does it because it can, or in the oft-quoted words of Thucydides, “the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.” It is not the violation of law, but rather, this shift from a focus on law to a focus on power to justify conduct, that is new, and that constitutes a grave threat to the rules-based international order.

The administration’s abandonment of the rules-based international order is most visible in its rhetoric, as expressed in the NSS, and then, in practice, through its Venezuela operation. The NSS recasts American security around an ethnonational identity, narrows sovereignty to a shield against universal rights and multilateral obligations, and privileges regional spheres of influence. Meanwhile, the subsequent Venezuela operation dispensed with sustained legal rationales under the UN Charter, instead advancing candid interest-based justifications and a Monroe Doctrine-style regional logic. Together, they reflect a coherent, if deeply troubling, posture: Law is optional; identity and interest are dispositive.

How the NSS Reveals the Abandonment

A superficial and literal reading of the Trump administration’s NSS reveals polemics untethered from global realities. Observers have cataloged the document’s inconsistencies, incoherence with actual Trump administration policy, and its strangely polemical yet empty prose. Its censure of Europe merits particular attention. The NSS faults governments not chiefly for strategic divergence, but for “civilizational erasure” through immigration and multiculturalism. The administration seeks to recenter transatlantic solidarity on heritage, not liberal-democratic values. The result is a politics of grievance that aligns with far-right narratives and treats “tradition” as a trump card against universal obligations. In practical terms, the document licenses selective engagement with institutions and law, embracing them when they shield preferred in-groups and ignoring the rules when they demand protection for those most in need of them: minorities and refugees. The NSS critiques Europe’s constraints on the “freedom of expression” of divisive, if not racist, right-wing movements while ignoring those movements’ rejection of universal human rights. Migration is framed as an existential threat to a civilizational identity, not a policy domain governed by refugee law and human rights instruments.

In this telling, the object of protection is less a constitutional, pluralist republic consistent with a rules-based international order and more a perceived white, Christian ethnocultural core. Equality and justice appear in abstract terms, detached from their concrete application to non-white, non-Christian, and non-European populations. Human rights are portrayed not as universally valid protections of human dignity, but as vehicles for unwanted external constraint. While inflating migration into the paramount threat, the NSS soft-pedals the dangers posed by authoritarian powers such as Russia and China. It invokes an “America first” rhetoric even as it overlooks others’ hegemonic ambitions that more directly threaten U.S. interests. These criticisms, rooted in the gulf between rhetoric and reality, are warranted. Yet beneath the surface lies a clear ideological core that sidelines the rules-based international order. The NSS advances a selective, ethnocentric understanding of sovereignty that treats international legal obligations as encroachments rather than as reciprocal commitments that protect U.S. interests.

The NSS’s posture is borne out in U.S. policy choices, most starkly in the realm of immigration. By casting migration as a primary, even existential, danger, the U.S. departs from America’s civic narrative anchored in constitutional government, equal protection, and individual and pluralistic democracy, and instead implicitly redefines national identity in ethnocultural terms. By characterizing the movement of people chiefly as a vector of crime, terrorism, and cultural dilution, the strategy signals that the object of protection is not institutions and principles, but a perceived ethnonational core threatened by demographic change. A look at its policies shows that the Trump administration’s priorities are as clear as day. In migration, the administration has dismantled asylum at the southern border, employed cruelty as deterrence, imposed bans and restrictions aimed at Muslim-majority and non-European populations in open defiance of international refugee norms and long-standing U.S. commitments, and restricted asylum for victims of gender-based and gang-related persecution that disproportionately affect non-white, non-European populations. It has meanwhile amplified narratives of “white victimhood” abroad, such as promoting a fictional narrative of a “genocide” against white South African farmers.

Beyond migration, the administration downplays Russian revisionism and aggression, and aligns with extralegal uses of force in the Western Hemisphere, including the murder of suspected drug traffickers and seizures of Venezuelan vessels under a tendentious “war on drugs” paradigm. It casts discrete uses, or threats of use, of force in civilizational terms that sit uneasily with facts or regional restraint. Think Greenland. It shows studied indifference to mass atrocities in Syria, Yemen, Sudan, and Myanmar; opposes UN efforts to strengthen human rights protections, including measures reaffirming the prohibition of torture; undermines accountability mechanisms by attacking the International Criminal Court; criticizes UN factfinding; disparages mechanisms of human rights accountability; and impedes multilateral human rights protective mechanisms.

Even episodic uses of force—such as the bombing of alleged Islamic State holdouts in Nigeria, framed as retaliation for anti-Christian atrocities—are cast in civilizational terms that bear little relation to the real circumstances underlying the conflict and that sit uneasily with the administration’s purported regional restraint. Each of these moves reflects not isolated departures, but a worldview that treats international legal constraint as irrelevant.

For decades after 1945, UN Charter norms, human rights treaties, and other international accountability mechanisms were embraced across administrations as force multipliers for U.S. interests, deterring aggression, stabilizing regions, and strengthening alliances. The NSSs of prior administrations have more or less been consistent with U.S. interests in the integrity of the rules-based international order. The Trump NSS inverts this legacy. Legal constraints are recast as threats to American sovereignty, and the rules-based system is treated as a structure to be circumvented rather than leveraged. This reorientation is not a rhetorical flourish; it marks a deliberate erosion of the very framework the United States has relied on to constrain adversaries, mobilize collective action, and create conditions for America—and Americans—to succeed in the global economy.

How the Maduro Operation Reveals the Abandonment

The Maduro raid offers a concrete, operational expression of the NSS’s worldview. Historically, states that used force across borders claimed legal cover: self-defense against armed attack, consent of the territorial state, or narrowly framed law-enforcement actions consonant with UN Charter limits. In the Venezuela case, after fleeting and implausible references to drug trafficking as a putative “armed attack,” the administration shifted to two candid rationales: cross-border law enforcement to deliver an indicted suspect, and pursuit of national interest in oil. Neither rationale addressed the UN Charter’s prohibition on the use of force or the absence of any law enforcement exception. Instead, the administration sought legitimacy in its own strategic narrative: a regional order policed by the United States, consistent with a revived Monroe Doctrine-type logic.

By elevating claimed regional prerogative and resource interests over UN Charter-based constraints, the Maduro operation did more than breach a rule; it displaced law as the organizing context. That displacement tells allies and adversaries alike that the United States no longer considers the need to legally justify cross-border use of force. It invites reciprocal behavior, normalizes unilateralism, and devalues the performative compliance that has historically sustained the rules-based international order even amid violations.

The Implications of Abandoning the Rules-Based International Order

The strategic, legal, and moral costs of this shift are immediate and compounding.

Allies rely on U.S. leadership not merely for capabilities, but for the capacity to mobilize coalitions through law-grounded legitimacy. When Washington devalues legal constraint and multilateral accountability, it becomes more difficult to galvanize partners for sanctions, deterrence, and defense. The result is diminished leverage precisely as multipolar competition intensifies and regional powers shape security and economic rules in ways adverse to U.S. interests.

By attacking international courts, disparaging human rights mechanisms, and sidelining factfinding, the United States signals to authoritarians that aggressive war, war crimes, and crimes against humanity will not meaningfully affect bilateral relations. The deterrent effect of accountability weakens, atrocities become more likely, and the normative floor that protects vulnerable populations drops.

Abandoning the rules-based international order sacrifices a force multiplier that has translated U.S. power historically into order-shaping influence. Retreating into regional hegemony, without a strategy for the roles of Russia, China, and other actors in Europe, Asia, Africa, and beyond, cedes agenda setting to competitors. It is self-defeating to discard legal and institutional tools that align others’ interests with ours while our rivals invest in alternative institutions and norms.

International posture and domestic identity are intertwined. An NSS grounded in civilizational politics and ethnonational identity undermines the civic, pluralist conception of the American experiment. At home, it legitimates exclusion and selective equality; abroad, it narrows the community of states with which the United States can credibly claim principled common cause. Over time, this corrodes the soft power and moral capital on which U.S. leadership depends.

Conclusion

The marginalization of international law and institutions carries material costs. Washington signals to authoritarians that violations of international law, whether waging aggressive war or committing war crimes and crimes against humanity, even murder of political enemies, will not meaningfully affect relations with the United States. The credibility of U.S. condemnations suffers, complicating efforts to rally allies for sanctions, deterrence, and defense. In the Americas, normalizing unilateral, extralegal behavior undercuts the very constraints the United States has long sought to impose on others.

Taken together—treating migration as the central threat, recasting European diversity as “civilizational erasure,” privileging white grievance over universal rights, and systematically undermining the international legal order—the NSS emerges as more than a jumble of contradictions. It is a coherent project to reorient U.S. national security around preserving a racialized idea of the West and enabling the unencumbered exercise of American power, untethered from legal constraint. To call this white Christian nationalist supremacy is not hyperbole; it describes the logic embedded in the text and the policy record. In that sense, the NSS is a rejection not only of postwar American internationalism, but of the civic, pluralist conception of the American experiment itself, and of the legal and institutional architecture that has long underpinned U.S. alliances, influence, and national security.

The dissolution of the post-World War II international legal order would be a mistake at any time. Several observers have noted that the NSS represents an abandonment by the United States of its position as the global power that shaped the post-World War II international legal order and a retreat into a merely regional power, but without consideration of how other regional powers’ similar outlooks—including Russia in Europe, China in Asia, and both in Africa—affect international peace and security and, thus, vital U.S. national security interests. At a time when the United States is losing its hegemonic leverage to other, rapidly developing nations in a global economy, this is nothing less than suicidal.