World leaders claim to uphold sovereignty and international law while bending the rules to serve their own power. This is not a flaw or an exception—it is the very logic of global politics, where norms are tools, not guarantees.

The Kremlin’s declaration that Venezuela “must be guaranteed the right to determine its own future without destructive external interference, particularly of a military nature,” issued after American forces captured President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores, was already freighted with contradiction. The sentence itself is almost textbook international law—sovereignty, self-determination, nonintervention. It could have been lifted from the UN Charter or the language of decolonization movements across the 20th century. And yet, spoken by a government that invaded Ukraine, leveled cities, displaced millions, and annexed territory by force, the words did not persuade. The words hovered, accusing even as they exposed the distance between what is said and what is done.

The easy response is to call the statement hypocritical and move on. Hypocrisy is a satisfying diagnosis because it preserves the underlying moral architecture. The rule is still sound; the speaker has merely violated it. The norm remains intact even if the norm-breaker does not. But this reassurance is false. What the statement reveals is not hypocrisy as a deviation, but as a structure. It shows how international norms actually function—not as shared commitments, but as instruments deployed when useful and discarded when costly.

This is not a Russian aberration. It is the condition of modern geopolitics.

Sovereignty is one of the most potent ideas ever produced by political thought. It promised an end to endless war by locating authority within borders. It gave language to the anti-imperial struggle. It offered newly independent nations a claim to dignity, autonomy, and recognition. For much of the world, sovereignty was not an abstraction but a hard-won reprieve from domination.

And yet sovereignty has always carried a second face. The same principle that shields the weak also protects the strong. The same norm that prohibits invasion can be invoked to excuse repression. From its earliest articulations, sovereignty was less a moral achievement than a political compromise—a way of stabilizing power rather than transcending it.

After the devastation of World War II, international law attempted to discipline this compromise. The United Nations Charter outlawed aggressive war. It elevated self-determination. It gestured toward a world in which force would be constrained by rules rather than sanctified by victory. After 1945, this compromise was formalized in law. Article........

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