The U.S. president’s strategic shift is not temporary. It represents a medium- to long-term trajectory that stems from the confluence of simmering contradictions and various domestic and international factors.

Donald Trump’s second-term foreign policy has accelerated the collapse of the postwar liberal international order by abandoning its institutions, norms, and sources of legitimacy. Economic integration is now widely used as a tool of coercion, placing middle powers in an unstable interregnum defined by great-power rivalry, forced alignment choices, and a widening contrast between U.S. unilateralism and China’s defense of globalization and multilateralism.

Is the United States engaging in retrenchment or a new form of hegemony? Venezuela and Greenland are not separate stories but a single thread. A more transactional, more emotional and more coercion-oriented U.S. is taking shape.

The cases of Greenland, Venezuela and Ukraine signal what’s coming in the next phase of global governance. It is not disappearing but is being rebuilt—faster, more contested and more deal-driven than ever under the pressure of crisis and rivalry.

The most important question stemming from America’s intervention in Venezuela is not whether it violated international law and norms, but what it reveals about the future of the liberal international order. Contrary to what some commentators say, that order is not collapsing, since its core pillars remain in place and the alternatives to them are still weak. But sustaining it will now involve more frequent discretionary US actions, and it will become increasingly unclear where the thresholds for future interventions lie.

When lawless behavior by powerful nations can be carried out with virtual impunity—with no significant international opposition—a civilized world order founded on rules rather than brute force can no longer be guaranteed.

The U.S. kidnapping of President Maduro represents one of the worst violations of international law by a major power in decades. It also reflects the role of Venezuela as a battleground of U.S. and Chinese interests.

For China-U.S. relations today, the realistic question is not how to construct a G2 but how the two countries can find a workable mode of coexistence under conditions in which cooperation and competition can coexist.

On Saturday 3 January U.S. President Donald Trump announced a large-scale US strike on Venezuela and the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife. He also plans to allow "very large United states oil companies" into Venezuela. This military operation essentially constitutes armed intervention aimed at seizing another nation’s oil resources. The Trump 2.0 administration aims to pragmatically consolidate U.S. resource hegemony across the Western Hemisphere while alleviating the burden of sustaining global order.

The United States has been the biggest beneficiary of changes in the international order over the past century. Four key factors have contributed to its current hegemony.