The American-led post-World War II order has been built upon the sustained rhetoric of normativity, which includes democracy, governance, and human rights, but it practises geopolitics in a far older language: utility. Nowhere is this dissonance more visible than in the contrast between how the West treats Venezuela and how it engages Pakistan.

Both countries are repeatedly invoked in the US and Western security calculus, are associated with illicit networks, and sit uneasily with liberal democratic norms. Yet one is publicly disciplined as a democratic deviant, while the other is quietly accommodated as a strategic necessity. This asymmetry is not accidental. It reflects how democracy has become a selective instrument rather than a consistent universal principle of Western foreign policy.

Venezuela’s position in the Western imagination is shaped more by its symbolism than by its material power. Over the past decade, it has been framed as a cautionary tale of democratic backsliding, economic mismanagement, and narco-state behaviour. Western governments have been vocal in condemning electoral irregularities, restrictions on opposition parties, and the concentration of power in the executive’s hands. Sanctions regimes have followed, justified as necessary pressure to restore democratic order.

There is, of course, substance to these concerns. Venezuela has become a significant transit corridor for cocaine flowing from Colombia to Europe and West Africa. According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, routes passing through Venezuela expanded sharply after 2015, aided by weak state institutions and collusion at lower administrative levels. The US Drug Enforcement Administration has repeatedly flagged the role of Venezuelan territory in cocaine trafficking networks linked to Latin American cartels. These activities have destabilised neighbouring states and fuelled organised crime beyond the region.

Yet it is also essential to keep the scale of this threat in perspective. Venezuela is a transit state, not the global centre of the narcotics economy. It neither produces cocaine nor controls the principal distribution networks that feed North American and European markets, unlike other Latin American countries. Its capacity to project narcotics as an instrument of state power is unfounded, and its political instability, while devastating domestically, does not fundamentally alter the balance of power in any major theatre. This distance allows Western capitals........

© News18