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The question is not rhetorical. It is existential.
When the United States can walk into a sovereign country, attack it, remove its sitting head of state, and justify the act as “law enforcement” or “democracy promotion”, the global order has not merely bent — it has snapped.
Let us be clear.
This is not foreign policy.
It is a dangerous global precedent.
What is being sold to the world as democracy promotion is, in reality, might dressed up as morality — a language of virtue weaponised to justify coercive engineering of other nations.
The vocabulary is lofty; the conduct is primitive. Power speaks, law retreats, and the world is told to applaud.
The balance sheet no one audits
The results of this doctrine are no longer debatable. We have decades of data, mass graves, and refugee camps to prove it: millions dead, states fractured, regions destabilised, regimes changed to suit narratives!
And after the smoke clears?
No accountability. No reparations. No trials. No apologies.
Not at the United Nations.
Not in international courts.
Not before the mothers of the dead.
The architects retire to think tanks. The cheerleaders write memoirs. The victims are erased by the next crisis.
The United Nations: eloquent, irrelevant, invisible
The United Nations was created precisely to prevent this — to stop powerful nations from rewriting borders and governments at will. Today it specialises in a different craft: silence wrapped in bureaucratic procedure.
Emergency meetings are convened. Statements are “balanced”. Words like concern and dialogue are deployed like sedatives. And when the sovereignty of a nation is smashed in broad daylight, the custodian of international law clears its throat and looks away.
This is not neutrality.
It is abdication.
Europe’s poodles
Then there is Europe — once the loudest preacher of the “rules-based order”, now its most obedient undertaker. The European Union, led by France and Germany, has perfected the art of moral cowardice.
They issue calibrated murmurs, never objections. They express “unease”, never outrage. When Washington acts, Brussels rationalises. These are not independent powers; they are American poodles — impeccably groomed, reliably loyal, and trained to bark only at approved targets.
Sovereignty, it seems, matters only when violated by the wrong country.
The American habit
None of this is accidental. The method is old and depressingly familiar.
First, declare the leader illegitimate.
Then sanction the economy — medicine, food, fuel be damned.
Cripple the currency.
Fund the “right” opposition.
Destabilise.
Intervene.
Call it values.
And move on.
If regime change worked, the world would be peaceful by now.
Instead, it is littered with the wreckage of American certainty.
Certainty that power equals wisdom.
Certainty that force delivers order.
Certainty that there will be no consequences.
Why India must speak — now
This is the moment for India to stop hiding behind polite ambiguity. Strategic autonomy is not a decorative phrase to be displayed at summits. It is a responsibility.
India must make a clear, public, unequivocal statement opposing the use of force against a sovereign state without international mandate. Not because Maduro is virtuous — he is not — but because rules don’t survive selective enforcement.
Today it is Maduro.
Tomorrow it is any leader declared inconvenient.
Countries of the Global South understand this instinctively. When rules collapse, they are the first to be trampled.
Write this down:
When power learns it can act without consequence, it does not pause. It proceeds.
It proceeds to the next justification.
The next sermon about democracy.
The next country whose sovereignty is deemed optional.
And one morning, the world will wake up not to a new order —but to the absence of one.
No rules.
No red lines.
Only force — and the fragile hope that you are not next.
Hope, however, is not a policy.
And silence, at moments like this, is not neutrality.
It is complicity!
Mohan Murti, FICA
Advocate & International Industry Arbitrator
Former Managing Director- Europe
Reliance Industries Ltd. Germany
These pieces are being published as they have been received – they have not been edited/fact-checked by ThePrint.