If This Is “Democracy,” Then Words No Longer Mean Anything

By AM Tuesday, January 6, 2026

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Cam Ogie ✍ According to statements by the U.S. president, Washington claims to have “captured” Venezuela’s head of state and removed him from the country following military action.

Venezuelan authorities dispute the account and demand proof. Those facts matter. But even accepting the U.S. claim at face value, the precedent it asserts is extraordinary — and profoundly destabilizing.

Because if “capturing” a sitting head of state by foreign force is now acceptable, then the entire grammar of international order collapses.

Imagine, for a moment, if South Africa announced it had bombed Tel Aviv and “captured” Benjamin Netanyahu for the sake of democracy. Or if a rival power struck Moscow and seized Vladimir Putin in the name of human rights. Or if a regional bloc attacked Kyiv to “capture” Volodymyr Zelenskyy, claiming it was necessary to stabilize Ukraine.

No Western government would treat such acts as law enforcement. They would call them what they are: acts of war, violations of sovereignty, and kidnappings masquerading as moral necessity/crusades.

Yet when the United States does it — or claims to — the language shifts. “Capture.” “Stabilization.” “Restoring democracy.” The euphemisms are not accidental; they are the grease that allows violence to pass as virtue.

This is the core hypocrisy of the so-called “free world.” Democracy is invoked not as a principle, but as a permission slip.

Regime change doesn’t produce democracy — it produces factions.

History is unambiguous on this point. Externally imposed regime change does not deliver stable democracy. It shatters institutions and replaces politics with force. Once the state is decapitated or delegitimized from the outside, society fractures inward.

The United States has already tested this logic— repeatedly, and the result was catastrophic

In Chile, U.S. backing of the 1973 coup against Salvador Allende did not “save democracy.” It dismantled it, ushering in years of dictatorship, repression, and social trauma whose effects lasted generations.

Iraq shows exactly where this logic leads. In Iraq, the 2003 invasion was explicitly framed around regime removal and the pursuit of Saddam Hussein. His eventual capture was presented as a decisive moment that would bring order, legitimacy, and democratic renewal.

Instead, it marked the implosion of the Iraqi state. The 2003 invasion obliterated state institutions under the banner of freedom. What followed was not democracy, but sectarian fragmentation, militias, insurgencies, and a civil war that killed hundreds of thousands and permanently destabilized the region.

By dismantling core institutions and forcibly removing leadership, the invasion shattered Iraq’s political centre. Saddam Hussein’s capture did not end violence; it accelerated fragmentation. Militias formed along sectarian and factional lines, rival authorities emerged, and civil society collapsed under the weight of insurgency, reprisals, and foreign occupation. What followed was a prolonged civil war, mass displacement, and the rise of extremist groups that fed on the vacuum left behind.

The lesson was clear then, and it remains clear now: decapitating a state does not create democracy — it creates factions.

In Libya, the 2011 NATO intervention removed Muammar Gaddafi without constructing a viable state to replace him. The result was not liberation but a collapsed country carved into rival governments, militias, and proxy battlefields — a civil war that still has no resolution.

The pattern is consistent: once an external power decides who rules, internal factions organize around violence rather than consent. Armed groups replace civic institutions. Legitimacy becomes a weapon. Civil society disintegrates.

To pretend Venezuela would be immune to this logic is not optimism; it is denial.

Regime change replaces politics with force.

Externally imposed regime change follows a consistent pattern. Once foreign powers decide who governs, legitimacy ceases to flow from domestic consent and instead becomes a function of force and external backing. Political disputes are no longer resolved through institutions but through arms.

Venezuela is not immune to this logic. Removing or abducting a head of state does not heal political divisions — it radicalizes them. It invites splits within the military, emboldens rival claimants to power, and dramatically increases the risk of civil conflict.

Those who speak casually about “liberation” will not be the ones living with the consequences. Ordinary people will.

Sanctions, bombs, and abductions are not democratic tools.

Washington and its allies insist that such actions are necessary because the targeted government is “illegitimate.” But legitimacy is not established by foreign recognition or removed by foreign bombs. It emerges — or collapses — through domestic political processes.

When the U.S. imposes sanctions that devastate civilian life, then points to the resulting hardship as proof of failure, it is not diagnosing collapse — it is engineering it. When it signals support for regime change, it invites internal actors to pursue power through force rather than compromise. When it attacks state infrastructure or claims to have removed leadership, it accelerates the slide toward civil conflict.

This is not democracy promotion. It is political demolition.

And looming behind the moral rhetoric is the motive Washington rarely states plainly: control. Venezuela’s strategic crime is not that it violates democratic norms — the U.S. maintains close relationships with far more repressive governments when it suits its interests. Venezuela’s crime is that it insists on sovereignty over its resources and political alignment.

A U.S.-favoured replacement guarantees nothing – there is no guarantee that replacing Nicolás Maduro with María Corina Machado would bring stability, economic recovery, or expanded civil freedoms.

Leadership change alone does not repair shattered institutions or reconcile a polarized society. Political alignment matters. Machado has aligned herself closely with U.S. foreign policy priorities, including strong support for Israel during its war on Gaza — a campaign that leading human rights organizations, UN officials, and legal scholars have described as genocidal, and which the International Court of Justice has ruled presents a plausible risk of genocide under international law. She has also publicly supported relocating Venezuela’s embassy to Jerusalem in line with the U.S. position.

Whatever one’s view of these stances, they underscore a basic reality: installing a U.S.-aligned leader does not equal democracy. In deeply divided societies, externally favoured replacements often deepen fractures rather than resolve them.

Democracy as slogan, not principle - A rule that applies only to enemies is not a rule.

If international norms apply only to adversaries, then they are not norms at all — they are tools of domination. A world where powerful states can bomb capitals and abduct leaders while invoking democracy is not a rules-based order. It is a hierarchy enforced by force.

That world is unstable by definition.

Because once such behaviour is normalized, others will imitate it. Precedent is contagious. And when every power claims the right to decide who governs whom, diplomacy collapses into permanent crisis.

If democracy is to mean anything, it must include a simple principle: no state has the right to decide another nation’s leadership at gunpoint.

Anything less is not freedom. It is empire — stripped of its slogans, finally honest about its methods even as it continues to lie about why.

⏩ Cam Ogie is a Gaelic games enthusiast.