Rules, Power, and Interests

The capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro by United States forces marks a watershed moment in the further erosion of rules based international order (RBIO) revealing once more the propensity of great powers to instrumentalize international law and human rights for strategic ends. For Asia, this episode is not a remote Western Hemisphere anomaly but a cautionary signal that the guardrails once thought to constrain great power behavior are increasingly contingent, contested, and conditional. I touched on the RBIO's increasing fragility and weakness last year (Arugay 2025). To the shock of many, 2026 started with this Venezuelan operation while even leaders like Putin were on holiday. The Venezuela operation illustrates the enduring logic of superpower exceptionalism, in which great powers claim latitude to reinterpret or suspend norms that otherwise bind the rest of the international system. Legal analyses overwhelmingly view the forcible seizure of a sitting head of state, on the territory of another sovereign without its consent or UN authorization, as a prima facie breach of Article 2(4) of the UN Charter and the customary rule of non‐intervention. US officials have framed the action as a law‐enforcement–driven “extraction” grounded in criminal indictments and the illegitimacy of Maduro's regime, blurring the line between domestic jurisdiction and the Charter's strict regulation of the use of force. This move resembles earlier efforts to justify targeted killings or transborder operations as sui generis responses to “rogue” actors, thereby chipping away at the collective security framework that formally vests coercive authority in the UN Security Council. The narrative surrounding Maduro's capture also reveals how human rights and democracy promotion can be mobilized as selective tools rather than consistent principles. Washington has long criticized Caracas for authoritarianism, corruption, and egregious human rights abuses, yet the means chosen to address these violations involve conduct that prominent jurists argue undermines due process guarantees, non‐refoulement protections, and the prohibition against arbitrary detention when viewed through an international human rights lens. Elsewhere in the world, particularly in Southeast Asia, widespread human rights violations have not resulted in military intervention like in Myanmar (Barber and Teitt 2021). Such selective universalism is familiar to observers in Asia who have seen rights‐based rhetoric invoked to justify certain interventions while comparable abuses by allies or strategic partners elicit muted responses. The Maduro precedent thus feeds broader perceptions, particularly in the Global South, that the liberal order's normative vocabulary is hierarchically applied, with great powers positioning themselves simultaneously as norm entrepreneurs, enforcers, and—increasingly—exceptions to the rules. This signalling reverberates in other contested theatres where major powers claim privileged security spaces, including the Western Pacific and Eurasia. By lowering the perceived threshold for decapitation‐style operations under the guise of law enforcement, the Maduro case risks normalizing the idea that powerful states can unilaterally collapse the distinction between domestic criminal jurisdiction and international security, especially when dealing with regimes they deem illegitimate. Asian governments have not been indifferent to these developments, and their reactions underscore deep anxieties about the future of sovereignty as a protective norm for small and middle powers. Leaders and foreign ministries from Southeast Asia have emphasized that even grave concerns over governance or human rights do not license unilateral force, with some explicitly warning that the operation weakens the legal shield on which less powerful states rely against coercion. In the case of the Myanmar issue for example, conflict management through multilateral channels like ASEAN remains the appropriate pathway (Haacke 2025). For Asia, the Maduro operation intensifies three interrelated dilemmas in the regional order. First, it complicates hedging strategies by middle powers that have sought to balance security partnerships with the United States against deep economic interdependence with China. Episodes of overt norm violation by Washington make it harder for these states to sustain narratives of a sharp normative contrast between U.S. “rule‐based” engagement and Chinese assertiveness, potentially nudging some governments toward more explicit neutrality or quiet realignment (Kuik 2016). Second, the case sharpens debates over leadership targeting and regime change in flashpoints such as the Taiwan Strait, the South China Sea, and the Korean Peninsula. Analysts have already begun asking whether the normalization of cross‐border seizures of indicted leaders could embolden calls in Beijing or Pyongyang for more aggressive countermeasures, or, conversely, prompt some Asian leaders to reconsider their own vulnerability to external legal and military pressure. Third, the incident accelerates the decentering of the UN as the primary locus of security governance in the eyes of many Asian elites. If the Security Council is seen as either paralyzed by veto politics or circumvented when major powers deem it inconvenient, regional institutions such as ASEAN‐led forums, minilateral security arrangements, and informal coalitions may further prioritize pragmatic risk management over the defense of universal legal principles. For a journal devoted to the systematic study of Asian political dynamics and policy innovation, the Maduro episode offers a crucial vantage point to reassess how law, power, and norms intersect in this region. Asian Politics & Policy has long sought to bridge comparative and international perspectives, demonstrating that domestic regime trajectories, civil–military relations, and foreign policy choices are tightly intertwined in Asia's evolving strategic landscape. In the wake of Venezuela, contributions that interrogate how Asian states interpret sovereignty, human rights, and great‐power intervention—whether in relation to maritime disputes, counter‐terrorism cooperation, or responses to democratic backsliding—become more urgent. The task is not merely to catalogue instances of norm violation, but to explain how regional actors internalize, resist, or repurpose global legal and normative frameworks in light of shifting power asymmetries. The current conjuncture demands analyses that move beyond binary evaluations of U.S. versus Chinese behaviour to scrutinize the structural incentives driving all major powers to test the boundaries of the UN Charter and associated regimes. Asia's policymakers, scholars, and publics must grapple with a world in which appeals to a “rules‐based order” coexist uneasily with mounting evidence of rule‐bending at the very top of the system. In this issue, and in those to come, Asian Politics & Policy invites theoretically grounded and empirically rich work that situates Asia within this unsettled global context, examining how regional actors navigate, contest, and potentially reshape the fading yet still consequential architecture of international law and human rights. Such scholarship is indispensable if the region is to avoid a descent into pure realpolitik and instead articulate a more resilient, inclusive, and principled basis for order amid intensifying great‐power rivalry. In the meantime, we hope our readers appreciate the cutting-edge research that our articles and reviews offer in this first issue of 2026

Belligerent · Charter · Collective security · Constitutionalism · International law · Jurisdiction · Rule of law · Sanctions · Sovereignty · Superpower · Global Peace and Security Dynamics · International Law and Human Rights · Peacebuilding and International Security

• Legitimacy and centrality under threat

  Open Access•Rebecca Barber, Sarah Teitt•Asian Politics & Policy•2021

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• Reassessing Asean's Five‐Point Consensus

  Open Access•Jürgen Haacke•Asian Politics & Policy•2025

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• The Rules‐Based International Order Under Siege

  Open Access•Aries A Arugay•Asian Politics & Policy•2025

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• Malaysia Between the United States and China

  Open Access•Cheng‐chwee Kuik•Asian Politics & Policy•2016

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