How Venezuela’s crisis tests global sovereignty

THERE is a reason the argument has stalled on a single word.

- ALI RIDHA KHAN

Not missiles. Not explosions. Not the extraordinary claim that a sitting head of state has been seized and flown out of his country by a foreign power.The word is 'capture' - and its rival is 'kidnapping. This is not semantics. It is jurisdictional warfare. What we are witnessing is not merely a foreign policy crisis. It is a stress test of sovereignty itself, staged as spectacle. And the outcome will not hinge on verification alone, but on which grammar of power prevails.

To say capture is to pre-legitimate violence. It installs a police narrative before any legal forum can intervene: suspect apprehended, justice pending, order restored. To say kidnapping is to rip away the costume and name the act for what it is: armed seizure across borders, sovereignty overridden by force, law trailing behind violence like an afterthought.

Sovereignty, in theory, is simple. States are equal. Borders matter. Violence across them is prohibited except under narrow, clearly defined circumstances.

In practice, sovereignty has always been hierarchical - robust for the powerful, negotiable for the rest. What makes this moment different is not that the US has intervened abroad. That history is long, bloody, and well documented. What is different is the form: the convergence of military force, criminal indictment, and executive spectacle into a single gesture - the raid.

This is sovereignty hollowed out and repackaged as law enforcement. The logic runs as follows: if a leader is criminalised, sovereignty dissolves around him. Once indicted, he is no longer the president but a fugitive. Once a fugitive, he can be "captured." Territory becomes incidental. Borders become inconvenient. International law becomes commentary, not constraint.

This is not how law is meant to function. It is how the Empire modernises.