by Francesco Sylos Labini

A widespread narrative tends to lump together Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Xi Jinping as leaders driven by a common imperialist impulse. As a result, the conflicts involving them are considered analogous, and the three leaders are ultimately portrayed as equally “imperialist.” This is a misleading simplification that, rather than clarifying, obscures the real causes of these conflicts.

The war in Ukraine concerns Russia’s security architecture and, by extension, Europe’s. It is not an imperialist operation, but rather a response to the civil war in the Donbas that began in 2014 and to NATO’s eastward expansion. Moscow’s central demand was Ukraine’s neutrality. The Russian intervention was justified by invoking the principle of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), according to which the international community may intervene when a state fails to protect its population from serious crimes. However, this principle requires authorization from the United Nations Security Council, which was not granted; for this reason, the intervention is illegal under international law. Moscow has nevertheless referred to the Kosovo precedent: in that case as well, in 1999, NATO intervened militarily against Serbia without UN authorization, justifying its action by citing alleged human rights violations.

Invoking imperialism is also inappropriate in the case of China. The Taiwan issue falls within the framework of the “One China Policy,” according to which there is only one China and Taiwan is part of it. UN Resolution 2758 assigned China’s seat at the United Nations to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), expelling Taiwan from the UN. Most countries, including the United States and Italy, recognize the PRC as the sole legitimate government of China, renouncing official diplomatic relations with Taiwan while maintaining informal economic and military contacts.

The case of Venezuela is different. Unlike the Russian and Chinese cases, it falls within the long list of Western interventions in countries far from their own borders, carried out in the absence of a UN mandate. In Venezuela, it seems evident that the strategic objective is direct control over one of the world’s largest oil reserves—control that could allow Washington to dominate more than half of global reserves, thereby increasing energy pressure on Russia and China. The spectacle offered by many European leaders, intent on justifying yet another U.S. interference in Latin America, reveals a structural difficulty in understanding the transition toward a multipolar world. Five centuries of Western dominance and three decades of unipolar hegemony have eroded the cultural and diplomatic tools needed to address the current systemic crisis, and the West has felt no need to impose constraints on itself. In this way, international law has been undermined. Today, the hegemonic period has ended due to the shift of economic power toward the East, and international law has been weakened.

For this reason, current European governments find it difficult to condemn the American raid in Venezuela, just as they are unable to find a way out of the war in Ukraine. But this approach runs into two major obstacles. The first is economic: sanctions, forced self-sufficiency, and deindustrialization are eroding Europe’s productive base, resulting in an attempt to fight a war with soldiers who do not exist, weapons that have not yet been produced, and funds that do not exist.

The second obstacle is public opinion, which does not seem willing to wait any longer. What is needed is a new approach to international relations, based on respect for the law, on state sovereignty, and on recognition of a genuinely multipolar world.