ANALYSIS
Interests first, order second. And no nuclear power is pushing back
September 2026
The facts
On September 23, 2026, on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio summed up his administration's doctrine for reporters in a single sentence: the United States will never put the international order above its own interests. He added that this is not an attack on the international system but an acknowledgment of reality: states act in their national interest, and the system, in his view, is failing because it has grown beyond its mandate.
The sentence is not new in substance. At his confirmation hearing in January 2025, Rubio had already called the postwar global order obsolete and now used against America. What is new is the context in which he repeats it: in the same weeks, Washington closed two agreements that, placed side by side, show what it means in practice.
The first concerns Venezuela. Since U.S. forces captured Nicolás Maduro in early January, the country has been led by acting president Delcy Rodríguez, in office by order of the Supreme Court and without any election. On September 2 her government signed energy agreements giving U.S. companies majority control over some 65 billion barrels, roughly one fifth of Venezuela's reserves, under concessions lasting one hundred years. Italy's Eni is among the participants. In parallel, talks are under way to move about 31 tonnes of Venezuelan gold, worth around $4 billion, from the Bank of England to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York; the Bank of England has said it will move nothing without a new ruling from a British court.
The second concerns Greenland. After a year and a half of pressure, which this site covered when Trump revived it at the NATO summit in Ankara, on September 22 the United States, Denmark and Greenland's government signed an agreement in New York that amends and supplements their 1951 defense agreement. Besides the Pituffik base, the United States will gain two new ones, at Narsarsuaq and Mestersvig, with freedom of movement on land, in the air, in territorial waters and in undersea approaches. Non-NATO countries are excluded from military facilities and strategic resources, and foreign investment in those sectors must be agreed with Washington: in practice, Russia and China are shut out of Greenland's rare earths. The Danish government stresses that the agreement respects the Kingdom's sovereignty and the Greenlandic people's right to self-determination. Yet the text also provides that it remains in force if Greenland becomes independent, with an obligation to join NATO. It still needs ratification by the Danish parliament.
Other interests at stake
The method had already been on display a year earlier, in Buenos Aires. In October 2025, on the eve of Argentina's midterm elections, the U.S. Treasury opened a $20 billion swap line with the country's central bank. On October 14, hosting Javier Milei at the White House, Trump said openly that the support depended on his ally winning: if he lost, the United States would not be generous with Argentina. Milei won on October 26. This is neither a coup nor a military operation: it is financial aid, legitimate in itself, made conditional on another people's vote, and declared as such in public.
The Gulf completes the picture. On September 2, 2026, as fighting with Iran concentrated around the Strait of Hormuz, Trump wrote on Truth Social that, now that the strait was under U.S. control, perhaps it should be renamed the "Trump Strait": an idea he had already floated in March and later described himself as just thrown out there. The name does not matter: straits are not renamed by decree, and no formal step followed. The premise does. Hormuz is made up of the territorial waters of Iran and Oman, and the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea guarantees everyone transit passage, not control to whoever has the largest fleet. Claiming control of it is the logic of Greenland applied to the sea. This site wrote about it when Trump threatened Iran's water and power facilities.
In the same days, according to three sources cited by Reuters and ABC News on September 16, the administration informally notified congressional committees of a $2.8 billion sale to Israel: 20,000 MK-84 and 20,000 BLU-117 bombs, each weighing one ton. The package had been neither finalized nor formally notified at the time of publication, and the State Department replied that its commitment to Israel remains ironclad. Online, the shipment has been compared to Hiroshima. The comparison only partly holds. One ton is the weight of the bomb, not of the explosive, which makes up just under half of it: 429 kilograms each. Calculated on explosive content, the total comes to around 20 kilotons of TNT equivalent, against the roughly 15 estimated for Hiroshima. The claim "more than Hiroshima" is therefore numerically plausible, while the "40 kilotons" figure in circulation also counts the steel casings. Above all, an atomic bomb releases its energy in an instant and in one place; forty thousand conventional bombs are dropped one at a time, on targets chosen one by one, and every choice is bound by humanitarian law.
The thread linking Buenos Aires, Caracas and Nuuk is the same one this site has already followed in eastern Congo, where minerals are traded for security and the price is not set by whoever owns the resource. In Venezuela the oil comes under an unelected government born of an outside military operation. In Greenland the rare earths are closed to competitors with the formal consent of Copenhagen and Nuuk, after months in which Trump had not ruled out force.
That leaves the question missing from most commentary: who is the counterweight? The other nuclear powers protested. But what did they do?
China condemned the Venezuela operation as a reckless use of force, and its foreign minister Wang Yi rejected the idea that any country can act as the world's policeman. The sources consulted, however, record no concrete Chinese countermeasures in Latin America. Beijing's real lever is economic: the rare earth export controls announced on October 9, 2025, suspended until November 10, 2026. At the Washington summit of September 23-25, Xi Jinping and Trump extended their tariff truce by two months, with no progress on either Taiwan or rare earths. China uses its leverage to negotiate its own position, not to defend the principle it invokes.
Russia called the Venezuela operation an armed aggression and raised it at the Security Council on January 5. On Greenland, the Kremlin dismissed the agreement as a matter only for the countries involved. This is not indifference: the sphere-of-influence logic Moscow claims in Ukraine is the same one Washington applies in the Western Hemisphere. Protesting too loudly against the latter would weaken the defense of the former.
India did not condemn the Venezuela operation: it called for calm and advised its citizens against travel to the country. Its form of resistance is a different, quieter one. In August, Russian crude accounted for more than 40% of its imports, despite February's trade deal with Washington and despite the law Trump signed on September 18 authorizing tariffs of up to 100% on buyers of Russian energy. The BRICS New Delhi declaration, too, adopted under India's chairmanship, defended international law without ever naming the United States.
Pakistan, a non-permanent member of the Security Council, warned in January, together with other countries, that the selective application of international law puts the whole collective security system at risk. In the same period it became one of Trump's favorite interlocutors: a mediator between Washington and Tehran, signatory of a $500 million mining agreement with American counterparts and, since August 7, party with Saudi Arabia and Turkey to a mutual defense pact signed in Mecca, under which an attack on one is considered an attack on all. It is the only nuclear power to have built a new alliance, but inside the American orbit, not against it.
Legal commentary
Three principles are at stake, and they must be kept apart.
The first is the prohibition on the use of force, set out in Article 2(4) of the UN Charter. The capture of a sitting head of state on his own territory, without Security Council authorization, was described as aggression by Russia and China and criticized also by Brazil, Colombia and several U.S. allies. The official U.S. justification, the fight against drug trafficking, falls under neither of the two exceptions the Charter allows: self-defense or Council authorization.
The second is permanent sovereignty over natural resources, affirmed by General Assembly Resolution 1803 of 1962: peoples' rights over their resources must be exercised in the interest of their national development. An unelected interim government, installed after a foreign military intervention, granting one fifth of the reserves for a hundred years to companies from that same country raises a serious question under this principle. It is a question, not a verdict: the resolution is not binding like a treaty, and no court has ruled.
The third is self-determination. On Greenland, formally, the principle is respected: the agreement was signed by Greenland's government and will go before the Danish parliament. The clause binding a future independent Greenland to NATO membership, however, settles today a choice that would belong to a state that does not yet exist.
Implications — the symmetry test
The first friction is Rubio's sentence itself. No state has ever truly placed the international order above its own interests: the difference is that the others deny it. Russia invokes international law for Caracas while violating it in Ukraine. China invokes it for Caracas while rejecting the 2016 arbitral award on the South China Sea. Pakistan invokes it at the Security Council while sending back to Afghanistan people the UN says cannot safely return. Rubio has simply dropped the pretense. The symmetry test does not absolve Washington: it says the problem is not a single "rogue state" but a system in which no great power accepts being bound.
The second friction concerns the missing counterweight. Anyone imagining an alternative bloc, the BRICS or a Moscow-Beijing axis, finds in practice a sum of bilateral negotiations: China trades rare earths, India trades oil, Pakistan trades minerals and mediation, Russia trades recognition of its own sphere. No one defends the principle when defending it costs something.
The third friction is close to home for Europe. An Italian company takes part in the Venezuelan oil agreements. Europe, which is indignant at Russian spheres of influence, has watched a member state, Denmark, negotiate under pressure the future of its own territory with its main ally. If the law only applies when convenient, that holds for us too.
Related pieces: Europe stopped depending on Moscow. Who does it depend on now? · Trump wants Greenland back. And NATO is threatening itself. · The Appeal That Fell Flat: Trump, the ICC, and the Weight of What Goes Unrecognized · BRICS in New Delhi: international law in the text, and who goes unnamed · Minerals for security: Congo's peace has a price, and Congo doesn't set it · Three States, One Treaty, Three Different Standards · The UN says it isn’t safe to return to Afghanistan. Pakistan keeps sending people back — even now that the two countries have declared war. · Taiwan: the price of a balance no one wants to break · Trump threatens Iran's water and power plants. It wouldn't be the first time — and it would be a war crime. · It's Not the Strait. It's the Example. · Nord Stream: Germany charges a former Ukrainian officer with sabotage as a war crime · For the Non-Recognition of the Conduct of the United States of America · Who pays for the war? Ukraine's debt, Russia's frozen assets and a rule Europe will have to bend
Sources: Rubio at the UN (9/23/2026) · Rubio, confirmation hearing (January 2025) · CNN — Trump and aid to Argentina (10/14/2025) · Al Jazeera — Argentine swap signed · UPI — Venezuelan oil agreements (9/2/2026) · Rio Times — Venezuelan gold to the Fed · UA.News/Reuters — Bank of England position · UN News — Security Council on Venezuela (1/5/2026) · International reactions to the Venezuela intervention · Il Post — Greenland agreement · Danish government — statement on the agreement · White House — text of the agreement · Reuters/US News — the Kremlin on Greenland · Chinese rare earth controls · CBS News — Trump-Xi summit · Business Standard — India and Russian oil · Foreign Policy — Pakistan and Washington · Al Jazeera — the Mecca pact · Newsweek — the "Trump Strait" · ABC News/Reuters — bombs to Israel · MK-84 fact sheet (explosive content) · Hiroshima yield estimate · UN Resolution 1803 (1962) · UN Charter, Art. 2(4) · UNCLOS — transit passage
Verification note: This piece was also prompted by a commentary circulating in Italy describing the United States as a "rogue super-state". Some of its claims find no support in the sources: the Venezuelan gold transfer concerns about 31 tonnes, not 312, and had not been completed at the time of publication; U.S. involvement in the Nord Stream sabotage remains a hypothesis, while the German Federal Prosecutor has indicted a Ukrainian citizen (we wrote about it here). The bomb sale to Israel is reported by anonymous sources and had not been finalized; the Hiroshima comparison is calculated on explosive content, not weight. We do not report, because they are unverified, the claims about funding linked to Vice President Vance in the Brazilian campaign or about a direct U.S. role in the Colombian elections.