When Applause Comes Before Principles
Prime Minister Mark Carney and Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre responded to the U.S. capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro in markedly different tones.
Mr. Carney welcomed the operation, then called for respect for international law, sovereignty and democratic self-determination. Mr. Poilievre offered unqualified praise for President Donald Trump.
The distinction matters. But so does what unites the two responses.
Both reflect a dangerous and increasingly familiar tendency: the normalization of behaviour that weakens the normative guardrails meant to constrain the conduct of states and governments.
In Mr. Carney’s case, applause for the capture and rendition of a foreign head of state came first, followed by pious invocations of the rules-based international order. In Mr. Poilievre’s, enthusiasm displaced restraint entirely.
The difference is real. The common ground is more troubling.
When breaches of international norms are greeted with approval and only later qualified with caveats, the caveats lose their force. Ordering matters. Principles invoked after the fact rarely survive first contact with power.
For Canada, it is against that backdrop that the U.S. operation in Venezuela must be assessed.
In the hours following Nicolás Maduro’s capture, President Trump and members of his administration framed the action as justice in motion — a law-enforcement operation designed to bring a fugitive to account, not the overthrow of a head of state.
The language was familiar and reassuring, drawing on two enduring elements of American political mythology: the belief that the United States is uniquely entrusted with the defence of law and liberty, and the conviction that American power carries moral purpose beyond its borders.
The mask slipped almost immediately.
Within hours of the capture, President Trump indicated that the United States was already working with Venezuela’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, describing conversations in which she offered to “do whatever you need,” and adding pointedly that she “doesn’t really have a choice.”
In the same exchange with reporters, Trump dismissed Venezuela’s leading democratic opposition figure, María Corina Machado, as lacking the support or respect required to govern.
Soon after, the president dispensed with even the pretence of moral justification, openly acknowledging that American involvement in Venezuela was about oil.
What had been framed as justice delivered in defence of law and liberty was revealed instead as the pursuit of strategic and economic advantage.
The transactional character of this moment — and the lesson it carries for Canada — is underscored by the conditions under which Venezuela’s democratic opposition must now operate.
María Corina Machado, an internationally recognized advocate for democratic change and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, publicly praised President Trump following her award.
Yet within hours of Maduro’s capture, Machado and her movement were summarily dismissed by the same president whose favour they had carefully sought. The speed and ease with which that dismissal occurred is instructive.
That is the deeper lesson for Canada. In a transactional order, fealty buys access, not assurance. Praise secures attention, not commitment. When power is exercised without restraint, yesterday’s ally can become today’s adversary, and yesterday’s cause can be readily abandoned.
For Canada and for our partners across the Western alliance, this latest act of imperial power, predicated on the thinnest of rationales, must be viewed with alarm.
What is at stake is the continued erosion of the institutional, political and moral guardrails that have underpinned the international order
As former foreign affairs minister Lloyd Axworthy warned, silence in the face of norm-breaking does not preserve stability. It invites vulnerability. Canada’s former ambassador to Venezuela made the same point: abandoning rules-based action has consequences.
Deference may secure short-term, transactional returns. It offers no protection over the longer term. A world in which justice, freedom and democracy become infinitely adaptable justifications rather than bedrock principles is one in which sovereignty is more exposed, not more secure.
For Canada, vigilance does not mean panic or posturing. It means resisting the temptation to applaud first and qualify later — and recognizing that the defence of institutional, legal and moral norms may be the only real bulwark against the erosion of our own sovereignty.