The capture of Nicolás Maduro is hardly the first American intervention in Latin America, and though peripheral to Ireland’s immediate interests, further erodes an already ailing international order on which Dublin has staked both its economic model and geopolitical security.
Eliciting knee-jerk reactions from our domestic anti-imperialist left and anti-Maduro diaspora alike, the Caracas raid cements a new and likely permanent turn in the American-led Western bloc which Ireland has coasted off, arguably since the foundation of the state.
For decades, Ireland has couched its sovereignty in its ability to play by the rules in international forums, scripting a narrative and a set of procedures that have been the hallmark of our global footprint from the UN to Gaza. This mindset facilitates the Irish economy we know today (whatever its quirks and pitfalls) and, in part, motivated the hard-line pro-Ukraine and pro-Palestinian stance the state has taken in the post-COVID era.
Whatever about the 5,000-strong Venezuelan diaspora brought to our shores through the failure of Bolivarian socialism or the inference made by intelligence services that Hezbollah-linked narco gangs used Ireland as a hub for Venezuelan cocaine, the raid challenges Ireland’s default hedge in favour of a world of rules and norms.
Great powers like the United States have always broken rules, but they once took care to signal restraint and even plausible deniability. The Maduro raid abandoned symbolism altogether. It did not merely violate norms; it refused to acknowledge them as relevant.
Just like genocide on the Gaza Strip or Muscovite tanks rampaging through Donbass, any Irish unease is not about Maduro as such, but about precedent.
If a head of state (albeit illegitimate in the case of Maduro) can be seized abroad, then jurisdiction is no longer spatial; it’s political. Ireland’s role as a hub for American economic interests means external American power can plausibly claim “interests” on Irish soil.
Henceforth, instead of assuming goodwill via diasporic and investment ties, Dublin will need a doctrine when dealing with Washington. What Ireland offers the US (reliable investment base, transatlantic bridge, tech governance competence), and what it needs back (security guarantees, intelligence cooperation clarity, respect for Irish legal sovereignty).
Earlier in our lifetimes, US power claimed universality, “rules-based order,” “international community.” Today and tomorrow, regardless of the faction in power, it will operate more openly as a bloc leader, disciplining allies as much as adversaries
The deepest significance is psychological. The raid announces that the neoliberal world order is being rewritten elsewhere. Ireland must decide whether to adapt creatively or continue behaving as if the old script still governs the stage.
Ireland’s self-image as a post-colonial, rights-oriented state clashes with its material dependence on American capitalist structures. The Maduro episode sharpens this contradiction immediately evoking anti-colonial sentiments in even the most centrist of our Oireachtas members.
Ireland won’t stop speaking morally, but it will learn to do it strategically: fewer declarative lectures, more targeted interventions that preserve credibility without inviting punishment.
What comes next, then, is not a clean transition but a long unwinding of Irish multilateral norms. The old world does not end with a sudden declaration or treaty; it ends through habits becoming obsolete.
States like ours that once specialised in mediation are forced to confront their actual material position in the new Atlantic and global hierarchy. The international order for Dublin does not fall apart; it thins and hardens.
The liberal multilateral world is ending not because it was defeated by a rival vision, but because it could no longer reproduce the conditions that made it believable.
What the moment ultimately forces is a choice about the neoliberal state itself. For decades, Ireland perfected a model in which the state did not act strategically so much as facilitatively: lowering friction for capital, outsourcing risk to international regimes, and treating geopolitics as irrelevant background noise.
As that order erodes, the Irish state will be pushed toward one of two outcomes: either a strategic mutation, in which Ireland rebuilds capacity however modestly, or a deepening dependency, in which compliance and usefulness substitute for agency
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