The end of functional hypocrisy

Posted on: 6 January 2026

On 3 January 2026, whilst the world was busy commenting on the American operation in Venezuela, something far more significant than a regime change took place. It was not Maduro's capture that marked the breaking point: it was Trump's declaration aboard Air Force One. 'We're in control of Venezuela now. We need total access to the oil and other resources of the country to rebuild it.' In that single sentence, delivered without any reference to democracy, liberation, or human rights, an eighty-year cycle came to a close.

To understand what actually happened, one must look beyond the event itself and observe the mechanism. Since 1945, the international order has functioned on a necessary fiction: great powers acted in self-interest but spoke in values. This discrepancy between rhetoric and action was not hypocrisy in the moral sense; it was a sophisticated signalling system that allowed international actors to coordinate without explicit negotiation. When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, they spoke of weapons of mass destruction and exporting democracy. When Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, they spoke of protecting Russian-speaking minorities. The fiction was evident to all, but it was functional.

This rhetorical architecture created what we might call an 'ambiguity buffer': a space for manoeuvre that prevented immediate escalation. Allies could follow the hegemonic power without losing face; they could tell their electorates 'we're defending democracy' rather than admitting 'we're protecting our oil interests'. Adversaries could negotiate without total humiliation; they could cede ground whilst saying 'we respect international law' rather than admitting 'we were overpowered'. It was hypocrisy, certainly, but hypocrisy with a precise systemic function.

Thomas Schelling, Nobel laureate in economics and game theorist, identified this mechanism precisely: 'focal points' are conventions that allow spontaneous coordination between rational actors. International law, with all its evident weakness in application, functioned exactly thus. It was not a real constraint; no one could force a great power to respect it if they chose not to. It was a common language that made interactions predictable. When an actor violated the rules, they at least had to pretend to respect them, and this pretence maintained the shared frame of reference intact.

What Trump did on 3 January was not to violate international law; everyone had already done that, Americans included. He removed the reputational cost of explicit violation. He said 'oil' instead of 'democracy', 'control' instead of 'liberation'. He eliminated the hypocrisy tax that the system required to function. And this is not a moral question; it is a question of power systems architecture. An engineer does not judge whether a bridge is 'good' or 'bad'; they assess whether it stands. The rhetorical bridge supporting the post-1945 order has lost a load-bearing pillar.

The International Crisis Group, in their 2 January report on conflicts to watch in 2026, wrote something that deserves clinical attention: 'Leaders who, if they see the chance, will resort to force and act on expansionist ambition, may see in Washington's lawlessness a green light for adventurism.' This observation goes beyond moral condemnation and grasps the systemic mechanism: when the hegemonic power stops translating its interests into universal language, the system is no longer 'liberal'; it returns to being purely mechanical. Not based on norms, however fictitious, but on force vectors.

The timing of this transition is not coincidental. Between 29 and 30 December 2025, China conducted the 'Justice Mission 2025' military exercises around Taiwan: the most extensive ever conducted, simulating a complete blockade of Taiwanese ports and, for the first time, systematically violating the 12-nautical-mile contiguous zone. The Diplomat, analysing these manoeuvres, noted how they aim to 'erase the vital buffer zone between China and Taiwan'. These were no longer diplomatic signals; they were operational technical rehearsals. On 31 December, Xi Jinping declared that 'reunification is unstoppable'.

The logic is symmetrical and ruthless: if the United States can extract a sovereign head of state invoking 'narco-terrorism', China can blockade Taiwan invoking 'separatism'. If Washington can explicitly declare it wants 'control of resources' in Venezuela, Beijing can declare it wants control of Taiwanese semiconductors. The legal justification is equivalent: none. And when all actors operate without legal justification, the international system is no longer a system of law; it is a system of balance of forces.

But Taiwan is not the only structurally analogous situation. Greenland, a Danish autonomous territory, has been the subject of explicit declarations from Trump: 'We need Greenland for national security reasons. Denmark won't be able to handle it.' The Danish ambassador to the United States had to publicly remind that 'we are close allies and should continue to work together as such'. When Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen responded by asking to 'stop threatening a historic ally', she received public derision in return. A NATO member openly threatening another NATO member for territorial acquisition: the logical precedent is that the alliance no longer protects its members from the alliance's hegemonic power itself.

For Britain, this presents a particularly uncomfortable position. Having left the European Union partly on promises of a 'special relationship' with Washington and greater sovereignty, the UK now watches an American administration that treats even NATO allies as potential targets for territorial ambition. The question of what protection alliance membership actually provides has become rather more pressing than it was a week ago.

Kashmir saw significant clashes between India and Pakistan in April 2025, the most severe in decades according to CIDOB. Two nuclear powers in chronic territorial dispute are watching carefully as the reputational cost of unilateral action approaches zero. If America can act without rhetorical cover, why couldn't India do the same in Kashmir? Why should Pakistan continue using proxies instead of direct action? The deterrence mechanism based on shared norms weakens with each precedent that explicitly ignores them.

The African Sahel presents an even more extreme case. Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger have already expelled French and Western forces. Russia with Wagner and Africa Corps is filling the vacuum, without any pretence of 'democratisation' or 'development'. It is pure expansion of influence, declared as such. If 'spheres of influence' become de facto legitimate again, sub-Saharan Africa becomes territory for explicit acquisition without even the need for rhetorical justification. Twenty-first century colonialism will not need missionaries; mercenaries will suffice.

The Council on Foreign Relations, in their Preventive Priorities Survey for 2026, classified American military action in Venezuela as one of the high-impact, high-probability conflicts. But they also included the Arctic, where increased Russian and Chinese military presence could trigger confrontations with NATO; the India-Pakistan conflict, with risk of nuclear escalation; and tensions in the South China Sea, particularly towards the Philippines. All these scenarios share the same structural element: the risk-benefit calculation for actors changes when the cost of explicit violation drops to zero.

The mechanism we are observing is what game theory calls a focal point shift. The old equilibrium was: 'sovereign countries are not invaded, and if you do it you must at least pretend you're not doing it'. The emerging new equilibrium is: 'whoever has the force does what they want, provided they don't touch the vital interests of another great power'. This is not the post-1945 liberal order; it is the pre-1914 Westphalian system, with the addition of nuclear weapons and global economic interdependence. A combination no one has ever tested empirically.

For medium-sized actors, those without the critical mass to define the rules, the new architecture presents an existential problem. Institutions like the UN, already weak, are no longer even symbolic tribunals; they become mere rooms for registering accomplished facts. The emergency UN Security Council meeting on Venezuela, requested by Colombia and convened for 5 January, is the perfect example: everyone already knows it will change nothing substantial. Switzerland, Belgium, the Nordic countries, emerging economies that had built their strategy on the protection of international law, find themselves without a common language for negotiation.

Venezuela had a recognised government, sat at the UN, had diplomatic relations with the majority of the world's countries. If this no longer protects, what does? The answer, probably, is only systemic antifragility: the capacity to build protection architectures that do not depend on external norms but on internal structures. Nuclear deterrence for those who can afford it. Multiple overlapping alliances for those who cannot. Diversification of economic dependencies. Capacity to absorb shocks without collapsing. In a world where rules are fragile, the only protection is to become antifragile.

There is an element of brutal honesty in what is happening. For decades, the system operated on a shared lie that everyone knew but no one named. Trump, with his characteristic indifference to conventions, has simply said aloud what everyone knew: that wars are for resources, that power is force, that values are rhetoric. But honesty, in this case, is not a virtue; it is an instability accelerator. The fiction was not a defect of the system; it was a design feature that allowed predictability and coordination. Removing it does not make the system fairer; it makes it more dangerous.

Those who continue invoking the old international law are using an obsolete operating system for hardware that has already changed. Geopolitical sincerity, paradoxically, may prove to be the most destabilising weapon of 2026. Not because truth is bad, but because some fictions are structurally necessary to prevent complex systems from collapsing into escalation spirals.

There is a falsifier I keep in my pocket, a condition that, should it occur, would disprove this analysis: if over the next twelve to eighteen months American communication systematically returned to 'democratic values', 'liberation of peoples', 'rules-based order', it would mean the 3 January declaration was tactical, not strategic. An anomaly rather than a paradigm shift. But if the cynical transparency continues, if other actors begin testing boundaries with the same explicitness, then we shall be facing not a rhetorical incident but a reconfiguration of global architecture.

Epiphany, 6 January, in the Christian tradition marks the manifestation of a hidden truth. Perhaps it is fitting that this analysis falls on this very day. A truth has been made manifest: the international system has stopped paying the hypocrisy tax. What remains to be observed, with the clinical detachment such situations require, is which among the other actors will decide to take advantage first. And at what cost to everyone else.