Antonio Navalón
Since the Congress of Vienna in 1815, held after the collapse of the Napoleonic order, the modern world has understood a fundamental truth: no empire, no power, and no war can be sustained indefinitely without mechanisms of containment. The history of power has not only been a history of violence, but also of clumsy, incomplete, fragile attempts to build spaces where politics could replace the cannon as a last resort. Every major conflict left behind not only ruins and dead bodies, but also the awareness that, without shared rules, barbarism ends up devouring everything.
The 20th century, with more than 100 million deaths from two world wars, was not enough of a warning to prevent the sound of cannons—now converted into long-range missiles—from heralding new wars. At the time, from the ashes of memory, an institutional framework emerged, designed precisely to prevent the world from returning to the logic of the trenches. With all its limitations, that system offered alternatives: dialogue before war, alliances before extermination, diplomacy before imposition.
The United States was a central piece in that construction, although its relationship with wars was always marked by ambiguity. In both world conflicts, it avoided intervention until reality made it impossible. In World War I, German submarine warfare and the death of American citizens forced the United States’ entry. In World War II, the attack on Pearl Harbor eliminated any margin for neutrality. It was not a warmongering vocation, but rather the understanding that absolute isolation was a dangerous illusion.
From that experience came a strategic conviction: power must be institutionalized. The creation of the United Nations, conceived in San Francisco as a permanent forum for prevention and negotiation, responded to that principle. The United States, having learned that hegemony without rules leads to chaos, invested for decades not only in military capabilities but also in institutional, political, diplomatic, academic, and intellectual architecture. Peace was understood as a commodity that had to be managed, not improvised. Even on the economic front, the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913 reflected the desire to subject financial power to an institutional framework, rather than abandoning it to private whims.
That legacy, imperfect but civilizing, is now in crisis and under question. Forty-eight hours after announcing an indictment for narco-terrorism against the illegitimate but acting president of Venezuela, Washington made it clear that an era had come to an end. This was not just a specific legal or political decision, but a strategic message: rules can be suspended, sovereignty can be relativized, and dialogue can be replaced by direct coercion.
This gesture and intervention not only broke with a tradition of almost 80 years of US foreign policy, but also with more than a century of efforts to build mechanisms to cushion systemic violence. The idea that the international order must be preserved even when it is uncomfortable is being abandoned. In effect, the principle that the end does not justify any means is being renounced.
We are not facing a new era; we are facing the brutal reduction of politics to a basic equation: I capture you, I judge you, I condition you, and I allow you to govern only if you obey. The underlying motive is neither hidden nor disguised. Oil. Oil. And more oil.
In contemporary history, there is undoubtedly a before and after Trump.
Since the beginning of this stage, symbolically inaugurated in 2026, certain concepts have disappeared from the central discourse. There is no longer any talk of democracy. There is no longer any talk of human rights. There is no longer any talk of political prisoners. Today, the focus is on Venezuela, but it would be naive to think that this is an exception. Also, in the background—silent for now, but no less important or potentially dangerous—are Ukraine, Taiwan, and whatever may happen with the reactions of Putin’s Russia, Xi Jinping’s China, or the growing instability of countries such as Iran.
In this new era ushered in by Donald Trump, any country that once again violently interferes with the defense of U.S. strategic interests runs the risk of receiving the same treatment as Nicolás Maduro.
There are two types of isolationism. The first, of a historical nature, responded to the American people’s rejection of involvement in foreign wars. The second is more profound and corrosive: the isolation of language, narrative, and government structure from the rest of the world. When that happens, understanding ceases to be an option, and force becomes the only language available.
Let’s not fool ourselves. In this Trump era, the pact of international solidarity has been broken. The commitment, always imperfect but necessary, to try to make the world a place governed by something more than the law of the strongest has also been broken.
This is not a sudden rupture or a temporary accident, but the conscious abandonment of a logic that, with all its contradictions, had contained the excesses of power for decades. What is crumbling is not just a set of rules or institutions, but the conviction that force should be limited by principles, and that even the victors had obligations to the system they claimed to lead. In its place, a cruder order is emerging, in which legitimacy is no longer built through consensus but through faits accomplis, and where the message is unequivocal: those who can, rule and impose; those who cannot, adapt or disappear. This is not a return to a distant past, but a complete and total renunciation of the lessons learned after the great catastrophes of the 20th century.
May the era of cooperation and international diplomacy rest in peace.
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