Venezuela, the Philippines, and the limits of sovereignty
The recent United States operation in Venezuela, which removed President Nicolás Maduro to face criminal charges in New York, is more than a dramatic episode in geopolitics. It exposes the fragility of sovereignty in a world where powerful states can act with near impunity, and it resonates profoundly with the Philippine experience. For smaller nations, the Venezuelan crisis is a cautionary tale of how sovereignty can be compromised when power is unequal.
Washington justified the action as a law enforcement measure, citing long-standing indictments against Maduro related to drug trafficking and narco-terrorism. Yet the scale and method of the operation, involving military aircraft and special forces, resembled an armed incursion rather than a police action. There was no United Nations authorization, nor any credible claim of self-defense. What occurred was the forcible removal of a sitting head of state by a foreign power.
Several governments condemned the assault as a violation of international law and warned that it weakens the already fragile norms that regulate relations between states. At the UN, concerns were raised about the precedent set when powerful countries unilaterally decide when sovereignty can be overridden.
In the Philippines, progressive lawmakers and civil society groups have urged the government to condemn what they describe as an unprovoked attack. Their concern is not simply ideological. It reflects a historical awareness shaped by experience: when international rules are bent or broken by the powerful, it is smaller states that become most vulnerable.
Our national history has been marked by external domination, from formal colonial rule to postcolonial arrangements that tied our security and diplomacy to the interests of larger powers. Sovereignty, for Filipinos, has been contested, compromised, and continually renegotiated under unequal conditions.
The Venezuelan crisis exposes a central contradiction in the so-called rules-based international order. Sovereignty is affirmed in principle but applied selectively. International law is invoked when it aligns with the interests of the powerful and is sidelined when it does not. That a global superpower can justify military action in Caracas while presenting itself as a defender of democracy elsewhere reveals how contingent these norms have become.
This raises uncomfortable questions about our own foreign policy posture. Our close strategic alignment with the US is often defended as a pragmatic response to regional instability. Yet alignment should not require silence, especially when the actions of an ally undermine principles we ourselves depend on. When force becomes normalized as a tool of political resolution, smaller states are left exposed.
This concern is sharpened by our own situation in the West Philippine Sea. Manila consistently invokes international law and multilateral mechanisms to defend its claims. That appeal loses moral and political force in a world where the same legal principles are openly disregarded by powerful states.
The future of any nation should be determined by its people, however imperfect that process may be, not by foreign militaries acting beyond international consent.
An independent foreign policy is not a rhetorical flourish but a necessity rooted in historical experience. Defending sovereignty, ours and that of others, remains essential if the world is to be governed by law rather than force.
Prince Kennex R. Aldama,
aldamaprince@gmail.com
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