[Emperor Selassie addressing the League]

Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia, addressing The League of Nations in Geneva on June 30, 1936, invoked the collective security clause and, with great gravitas and grace, asked this council to act against the aggressor, Italy, with no confidence whatsoever that his pleas would beget the desired action. The Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini, had used a small dispute over an Ethiopian oasis town in the Ogaden region to invade Ethiopia a year earlier to realise what he considered Italy’s right to it’s own set of colonies in Africa to match the British East African Territories, and German Tanganyika — the very grandly conceived Africa Orientale Italia, comprising other than Ethiopia, an annexed Somalia and other smaller principalities. It was an age when even middling European powers thought nothing of carving up parts of the non-white world as their own eminent domains. “What reply shall I have,” Selassie famously asked the League, as great power representatives tried to avoid meeting the Emperor’s fierce gaze, “to take back to my people?”

It marked the beginning of the end of the League of Nations set up by the victorious powers of the First World War at the 1919 Treaty of Versailles to preserve peace, their interests and their order.

Nicolas Maduro, the erstwhile President of oil-rich Venezuela, is no Selassie. But, Ethiopia’s fate consumed the League. Maduro’s forcible removal by US Special Forces may have started the unravelling of the UN in slow motion.  Unexpectedly for Trump, the independently elected Vice President of the country, Delcy Rodriguez, has asked for an expeditious return by the US of Maduro, and otherwise demanded America keep it’s hands off her country. Moscow, and Beijing — which has invested over USD 70 billion mostly in it’s oil industry, will definitely want a restoration of the status quo ante, failing which a Rodriguez dispensation with no obvious links to the US, when what Trump wants is a pliable government in Caracas which will hand over the country’s oil fields to US companies to run, a’la Aramco in Saudi Arabia.

But, as the UN Secretary General warned, such unilateral action bodes ill because, he declared, it will set a precedent. So, what’s new? Even for the level of brazenness, the manner in which the hemispheric hegemon — the United States of America, exercised it’s geostrategic Monroe Doctrine imperatives and ordered  the capture of the presidential compound in Caracas, after securing a nearby military airfield, and spirited away Maduro and spouse out of the country aboard USS Iwo Jima, must surely herald something unprecedented — a return to a time when powerful countries did what they pleased. The US President Donald J Trump made plain his reasons — no, not the violation of democratic norms by Maduro, but that America now had the largest oil field in the world under it’s control, and can force the price of oil down to cents on the barrel. It is the hoary issue of controlling natural resources. If China did the same thing by cornering rare earths reserves worldwide over the last 15 years but by stealth, Trump means to do it by rougher and readier means.

On Venezuela’s request the UN Security Council will be convening to discuss the matter today. For the record, Washington claims “narco-terrorism” as instigating its military intervention and has justified it under the self-defence provision of the Charter. Russia and China have accused America of straightforward aggression, violative of all UN norms of peaceful conflict resolution.

It will be interesting to see what India’s official position will be — as of 0530 hrs IST 4th January 2026, there was no reaction from Delhi. Will it stand by the principle of inviolate sovereignty and join in condemning the US at the UN and elsewhere. Or do what it did in 2019 when the Venezuelan-US relations last flared up, and Delhi urged peace, neutrality, and similar pablum.  Because Maduro’s hijacking sets another kind of precedent.  Thus, a country can charge and try in absentia leader of another country and then arrange for his shanghai-ing out of his country to face imprisonment in the country that indicted him.  It would be a free for all, and no leader will be able shake off the fear of a similar thing happening to him. Specifically, Narendra Modi has been held legally responsible by many Western human rights agencies for the killings of Muslims in Gujarat when he was CM. He could be waylaid in any foreign country he’s visiting and transferred to face trial. If it happened to Maduro today, it could happen to Modi, or Mohammad bin Sultan of Saudi Arabia or anyone else, tomorrow. It’d be chaos. I mean, who is to stop, say, the Local police apprehending (with Xi Jinpeng’s connivance, of course) Trump when he is visiting Beijing for breaking some Chinese law, in which case what can Washington and the US military do short of initiating WW3? Such are the complications, the Trump actions have set in motion, considering the UNSC will do no more than what the League did faced by Ethiopia’s case.

Actually, it is in India’s vital interest to ensure a complete breakdown of the UN system by sharpening the big power clashes of interest.

India has benefitted nothing from the UN once Nehru, in his surfeit of good feelings for China offered the permanent security council seat offered India by the US and the Soviet Union in 1955-56 to it’s mortal enemy — Maozedong’s China. India has ever since been like the beggar with its nose on the glass panes — wanting what those in the inside have. The Indian government, with the benighted MEA in the lead, believe that it is only a matter of time and turn of events before India is permanently seated. That is about as likely as snow in The Delhi summer, because there’s China barring India’s entry. No, there has to be a new system, a new order, and it is time the Modi regime does what is needed — ek dhakka or dau, to collapse the UN as is.

The only Indians who benefitted from the UN and the Bretton Woods financial institutions — truth be told — are the hordes of diplomats and civil servants — and only because they could speak and draft documents in passable English language better than their Third World counterparts, and who parlayed short stints at these orgs and their numerous agencies into comfortable dollar-indexed pensions and residence abroad, or at home. The country otherwise got a short shrift. Recall how the US and the UK played Nehru such that he submitted the Kashmir issue to the UNSC in 1948 and permanently stymied India?

India  has no stake in the existing structures and systems of international order. The pity is our political leadership lacks the strategic druthers to break and disrupt such that a new order emerges where India has more say.