*

Ricardo F. Morin

January 3, 2026

Oakland Park, Fl.

Power, Sovereignty, and the Cost of Duplicity

*

Venezuela’s transition and Ukraine’s survival now constitute a single test:  whether power can be constrained without illusion,  and whether the United States can act coherently even when its president cannot perceive coherence himself.

This text does not argue for a policy or predict an outcome.  It marks the threshold at which coherence ceases to be discretionary and becomes a condition of survival.

The United States cannot act in one theater in a way that invalidates the principles it claims to defend in another.  If sovereignty,  territorial integrity,  institutional continuity,  and legal accountability are treated as binding in Ukraine,  they cannot become flexible,  provisional,  or strategically inconvenient in Venezuela.  And the reverse must also hold:  if those principles are treated as binding in Venezuela,  they cannot be relaxed,  reinterpreted,  or selectively applied in Ukraine.  Once that line is crossed in either direction,  coherence collapses—not only rhetorically,  but structurally.  Power ceases to stabilize outcomes and instead begins to manage decay.

This is not a moral claim;  it is a functional one.  Modern power does not fail because it lacks force,  but because it loses internal consistency.  When the same instruments—sanctions,  indictments,  military pressure,  diplomatic recognition—are applied according to circumstance rather than principle,  they no longer constrain adversaries.  They instruct them.  Russia and China do not need to prevail militarily if they can demonstrate that legality itself is selective,  contingent,  and subject to reinterpretation by whoever holds advantage in the moment.

For this reason,  no transition can rest on personalization.  Trust between leaders is not a substitute for verification,  nor can rapport replace institutions.  This vulnerability is well known in personality-driven diplomacy and has been particularly visible under Donald Trump in his repeated misreading of Vladimir Putin.  Yet the deeper danger is not psychological;  it is procedural.  Policy that depends on who speaks to whom cannot survive stress.  Only policy that remains legible when personalities are removed can endure.

Nor can outcomes be declared before institutions exist to carry them.  Territorial control without civilian authority is not stability.  Elections conducted without enforceable security guarantees are not legitimacy.  Resource access without escrow,  audit,  and legal review is not recovery,  but extraction under a different name.  When the United States accepts results without structures,  it postpones collapse rather than preventing it.

Equally corrosive is legal improvisation.  Law applied after action—indictments justified retroactively,  sanctions reshaped to accommodate faits accomplis—does not constrain power;  it performs it.  Once legality becomes explanatory rather than directive,  it loses its disciplining force.  Adversaries learn that rules are narrative instruments,  not boundaries.

Finally,  there can be no tolerance for proxy preservation.  A transition that leaves intact militias,  shadow financiers,  or coercive intermediaries is not a transition at all.  It is a redistribution of risk that guarantees future rupture.  External backers may be delayed,  constrained,  or audited,  but they cannot be placated through ambiguity without undermining the entire process.

The test is stark and unforgiving.   If an action taken in either Venezuela or Ukraine could not be defended, word for word, if taken in the other—or if a compromise tolerated in one would be condemned if replicated in the other—then the axiom has already been broken.

What must therefore remain true,  in both places at once,  is this:  power must submit to the same standard it invokes—without exception,  without personalization,  and without retreat into expediency disguised as realism.

---

*

Authority Where Legitimacy Has Not Yet Converged

*

This section does not assess democratic legitimacy or political merit.  It observes how authority is presently constituted and enforced when coherence is under stress.

A question posed during a press conference—regarding the opposition coalition led by María Corina Machado and the electoral victory of Edmundo González Urrutia—elicited a dismissive response from President Donald Trump.  Asked why a transitional leadership would not center on that coalition,  he replied that there was “no respect for her,”  implying an absence of authority within the country.

Taken at face value,  the remark appears personal.  Read diagnostically,  it exposes a more consequential distinction:  legitimacy does not presently translate into authority inside Venezuela.  The same distinction—between legitimacy and enforceable authority—has shaped Ukraine’s resistance to Russian invasion, where legitimacy was established internally but had to be defended materially against external aggression.

Electoral victory, international recognition, and moral credibility confer legitimacy.   They do not, by themselves, confer enforceable power.  Authority, as it exists on the ground, flows from the capacity to compel compliance—whether through control of coercive institutions, resource chokepoints, or the operational machinery of the state.  In Ukraine, that authority is exercised defensively to preserve an already legitimate sovereign order against external aggression.  In Venezuela, it persists independently of electoral outcome, sustained by institutions and mechanisms detached from legitimacy.

In this sense,  the question raised by Trump’s remark is not whether Machado’s coalition is legitimate,  but what presently lends authority within the country—and who is capable of enforcing decisions,  preventing fragmentation,  or compelling compliance.   The answer is neither rhetorical nor normative.  It is about how authority is currently constituted and exercised under present conditions.

Recent commentary surrounding U.S. engagement with Venezuelan actors has made this distinction operational rather than abstract.  The marginalization of María Corina Machado has not turned on questions of democratic legitimacy, electoral mandate, or international recognition.   It has turned on her unwillingness to participate in transactional arrangements with the existing technocratic and financial strata that currently exercise control within the State.  In contrast, figures such as the Vice President Delcy Rodríguez are treated as viable interlocutors precisely because they command enforceable authority through continuity with those mechanisms—coercive, financial, and administrative—that persist independent of legitimacy.  Criminality, in this logic, is not disqualifying.  It is evidence of control.  What is being selected for is not moral credibility, but negotiability under pressure.

This distinction matters because transitions that confuse legitimacy with authority tend to collapse into disorder or entrenchment.   Authority negotiated without legitimacy produces repression.   Legitimacy asserted without authority produces paralysis.  Durable transition requires that the two converge—but they do not begin from the same place, nor do they converge through the same means.

In Ukraine, legitimacy and authority are aligned but strained by external aggression; in Venezuela, authority persists in the absence of legitimacy.  Treating these conditions as morally or procedurally equivalent obscures the obligations they impose.  When support is conditioned more heavily where legitimacy is intact than where it is absent, coherence gives way to ethical imbalance.

Trump’s comment does not clarify U.S. strategy.  It does, however, expose the fault line along which policy now risks fracturing:  whether authority is assessed and transformed in relation to legitimacy, or accommodated independently of it in the name of order.   The choice is not neutral.  It determines whether power reinforces or undermines the principles it invokes.

The distinction between legitimacy and authority does not negate the requirement of coherence.  It sharpens it.  When coherence is abandoned selectively, collapse is no longer an accident of transition but a consequence of duplicity.

---