When rules no longer rule the world

The events unfolding around Venezuela are being debated as a question of intervention and legitimacy, but they are better understood as a symptom of a deeper shift in how global power now operates.

The world that emerged from the Bretton Woods Conference, the post-war attempt to regulate global economic and political affairs, was built on a simple, if ambitious, premise: power would be constrained by rules, and economic stability would underpin political peace. The institutions created in its wake were imperfect and Western-led, but they represented a conscious effort to civilise power through norms, procedures, and multilateral consent. Eight decades on, the crisis unfolding around Venezuela suggests how far the international system has drifted from that founding impulse.

What is striking about the current escalation is not merely the use of force by the United States, but the manner in which it is framed. Military action is presented as law enforcement, intervention as counter-narcotics, and coercion as necessity. Venezuela and many international actors, meanwhile, see the same acts as violations of sovereignty and international law. This disagreement is not incidental. It reflects a deeper breakdown in the shared grammar of global politics.

For countries like India, and for much of the Global South, this moment demands attention not because of sympathy for any one regime, but because it raises a more fundamental question: what remains of a rules-based order when rules become optional for the powerful?

The Bretton Woods system was never neutral. It reflected the economic dominance and political priorities of its architects, chiefly the United States and its allies. Institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank embedded asymmetries that the developing world has long criticised. Conditional lending, policy prescriptions, and voting structures often worked to the disadvantage of newly independent states.

Yet for all its flaws, Bretton Woods rested on an idea that mattered deeply to post-colonial societies: that power would be exercised through institutions rather than unilateral force. Economic disputes would be negotiated, security would be collective, and sovereignty, at least in principle, would be respected.

That compact has been eroding for decades. The Cold War bent it, the unipolar moment after 1991 stretched it, and the crises of the past fifteen years, from financial shocks to pandemics and wars, have hollowed it out. What the Venezuela episode shows is not the sudden collapse of this order, but its quiet abandonment.

The most consequential shift since Bretton Woods has been the move from multilateral legitimacy to managerial authority. Decisions of global consequence are increasingly taken outside formal institutions, justified after the fact, and insulated from collective scrutiny.

The United Nations, once envisioned as the custodian of peace and security, is now routinely bypassed when its processes prove inconvenient. This is not new, but it is becoming normalised. When force is exercised without broad international mandate, and legal categories are stretched to fit political aims, the message to the rest of the world is clear: restraint applies selectively.

For the Global South, this has a familiar resonance. Many countries remember an era when intervention was justified in the language of order, civilisation, or security. Today the vocabulary has changed, but the structure of power has not. The claim that military action serves global goods, whether anti-narcotics, counter-terrorism, or humanitarian protection, is persuasive only when it is subject to shared oversight. Without that, it becomes indistinguishable from unilateralism.

It would be a mistake to view Venezuela as a regional anomaly. The implications of this crisis extend far beyond Latin America.

First, it sets precedents. If military intervention can be rebranded as law enforcement, other powers will adopt similar logic. Borders become conditional, sovereignty becomes contingent, and weaker states are left to wonder which justifications might one day be applied to them.

Second, it accelerates fragmentation. Responses from China and Russia are not merely rhetorical. They signal the consolidation of alternative power centres that reject Western claims to legitimacy while offering their own, often ill-defined, counter-narratives. The result is not a more just order, but a more divided one.

Third, it undermines economic stability. Venezuela’s energy resources mean that political instability quickly translates into market volatility. For developing economies already grappling with inflation, debt, and climate stress, geopolitical shocks add another layer of vulnerability. Bretton Woods sought to insulate the global economy from precisely this kind of disorder. Its erosion makes such insulation harder.

India’s foreign policy tradition offers a useful lens through which to view this moment. From non-alignment to strategic autonomy, New Delhi has consistently argued that global stability depends on restraint by major powers and respect for sovereignty. This has not been an abstract moral stance, but a practical one, shaped by history and geography.

India has no interest in defending authoritarianism, nor in romanticising regimes that have failed their own people. But it also understands that the collapse of norms rarely benefits those without power. For countries navigating a complex world of competing blocs, predictability matters as much as principle.

From this perspective, the concern is not whether the United States believes its actions are justified, but whether the system allows such actions to be judged collectively. When that capacity disappears, global politics becomes a contest of narratives backed by force, not rules backed by consent.

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the current moment is the shrinking space for middle positions. Many Global South countries do not wish to choose between Western unilateralism and alternative authoritarian models. They seek a system where development, security, and sovereignty can coexist.

Yet as institutions weaken, this middle ground narrows. Silence is read as consent, neutrality as complicity. The ability to dissent without aligning is eroded. This is a far cry from the pluralism that Bretton Woods, at least rhetorically, aspired to support.

The irony is that at a time when global challenges, climate change, pandemics, financial instability, demand more cooperation than ever, the mechanisms for such cooperation are being sidelined.

The Venezuela crisis is not a turning point because it introduces something radically new. It is a turning point because it confirms a trajectory. The world is drifting away from a system where power sought legitimacy, toward one where legitimacy is asserted through power.

For the Global South, the lesson is sobering. Waiting for a return to the old order is unrealistic, but accepting a world without rules is dangerous. The task ahead is not nostalgia for Bretton Woods, but renewal of its core insight: that even the strongest states are safer when bound by shared norms.

Whether that renewal is possible will depend not only on the actions of major powers, but on the willingness of countries like India to articulate, defend, and invest in a more inclusive multilateralism. The alternative is a world where order is temporary, rules are optional, and stability is a privilege rather than a public good.

That is a distance far greater than the eighty years that separate us from Bretton Woods.

The writer is a foreign policy commentator specialising in India’s engagement with the Global South, multilateral institutions, and the shifting geopolitics of a multipolar world.