Brendan O'Neill: Marine Le Pen is right about Venezuela

Why did it take a former far-right leader to spell out the danger of Trump’s intervention?


Here’s a sentence I never thought I would write – people should listen to Marine Le Pen. She might not be your cup of tea. She isn’t mine. Yet she has hands-down made the clearest, most principled comment on Washington’s venture in Venezuela. Slicing through both the hypocritical hysteria of the Maduro-sympathising left and the infantile gloating of MAGA influencers who’ve learnt to love war again, Le Pen reminds us what is at stake in this strange geopolitical blaze: the future of sovereignty itself.

I’m not in the habit of quoting at length from leaders of the hard right. But bear with me. For the former leader of France’s National Rally has shown up everyone from simpering Keir Starmer to the right’s overnight converts to the discredited cause of regime change. Of course no one should shed a tear for Nicolás Maduro, she says. There are ‘a thousand reasons to condemn [his] regime’. His ‘oligarchic and authoritarian’ system of government imposed a ‘pall of oppression’ on the Venezuelan people, she wrote on X. History will not mourn his removal.

And yet there is a ‘fundamental reason’, she says, to oppose what the Trump administration has done. Externally imposed ‘regime change’ is a crime against sovereignty, she writes. ‘The sovereignty of states is never negotiable, regardless of their size, their power or their continent.’ Sovereignty, she says, is ‘inviolable and sacred’. And here’s the thing, the moral question that outweighs every other concern, including the undoubted wickedness of Maduro – if we accept the violation of sovereignty in Venezuela, we greenlight its violation everywhere.

‘To renounce this principle today for Venezuela, for any state, would be tantamount to accepting our own servitude tomorrow’, she writes. That would put the states of the world in ‘mortal peril’, she says, denuding them of the very sanctity that is their best protection against ‘major geopolitical upheavals’ and the ‘shadow of war and chaos’. You don’t have to agree with Le Pen on Islam, immigration, the death penalty or anything else to recognise that she’s right here: either states are sovereign or they are not.

How extraordinary that it took a troubled former figurehead of the French far right to lay out the issues so clearly. While Sir Keir, the self-styled bossman of human rights, splutters like an overgrown baby in response to America’s seizing of Maduro, and as Trumpist hotheads discover that they do like regime change after all, Le Pen swoops in to remind everyone of the civilising, liberating importance of the ‘sovereignty of states’.

Such moral clarity is welcome, whoever’s voicing it, because the fallout from America’s incursion into Venezuela has been nothing short of nuts. From all sides. Leftists are wailing as if it were Iraq 2.0, or possibly even the new Vietnam. Trump has single-handedly smashed the ‘rules-based order’, they yell, which is rich from the people who made excuses for Hamas’s violation of Israeli sovereignty and its abduction of Jewish grannies, mums and babies. Listen, if you spent the past two-and-a-half years publicly agitating for the destruction of the sovereign Jewish State, we don’t want to hear from you about the two-and-a-half hours American troops were inside sovereign Venezuela.

The response from the Trumpist right has been even worse. It’s the moral infantilism that is most galling. The alt-right social-media personality Mike Cernovich responded to Le Pen by tweeting ‘nobody wants to hear [this] pussy shit from you’. Such puerile posturing has been widespread in MAGA’s digital ranks. ‘FAFO’ (F***k Around and Find Out), they say – even the official X account of the White House has said that – as if this were a TikTok spat rather than a serious geopolitical matter. No doubt my plea for moral depth is just more ‘pussy sh*t’.

It’s not only that MAGA influencers have breached their own professed principles, gleefully sacrificing their much yapped-about opposition to regime change at the altar of owning the libtards. It’s also that they have become a mirror image of one of the most insufferable constituencies of modern times: the laptop bombardier. Unlike some of these twentysomething digital slaves who think saying ‘pussy’ to Trump’s critics is the new American Revolution, I’m old enough to remember the Kosovo, Afghan and Iraq interventions. And I can tell you that the meme-making cheerers of Trump’s decapitation of a bad government are indistinguishable from the sh*t liberals of the Noughties who waged war from the comfort of their chaises longues in Hampstead.

Own the libtards? You are the libtards. Every irritating thing about the laptop bombardiers finds its contemporary expression in the MAGA gloating over Maduro. The dogmatic smugness. The elevation of one’s own narcissistic need for a sense of moral purpose over such trifling matters as national sovereignty and global security. The demonisation of every critic of the intervention as an apologist for tyranny. You think you’re being original by calling Trump’s critics ‘Maduro c**k-suckers’? I was being called an apologist for Saddam before you were even born, mate. And I hated his regime as much as I did Maduro’s.

It’s like history repeated as farce. The Venezuela venture feels like the world’s first vibes war. A war fought as much to assist Trumpism in its digital flame war with its foes as to achieve local and global aims. As with those disastrous ‘humanitarian’ ventures of 20-odd years ago, Trumpists’ thirst for moral exhilaration seems to be a key driver of their support for the ousting of Maduro. They seem less interested in saving the people of Venezuela from Maduro – whose cruel state remains in power – than in saving their own reputations as post-‘pussy’ strongmen. The folding of their own domestic squabbles into an actual war is Libtardism 101.

This is why Le Pen’s intervention is striking. She has laid down a gauntlet to the so-called populist right. She is essentially saying: ‘Are we sovereigntists or not?’ She is low-key shaming the America First lobby, which is why some of its more foul-mouthed adherents are so mad at her. She’s right, though. People of all political persuasions need to see that national sovereignty is the issue of our time. And whether that sovereignty is being undermined by broken borders, ECHR meddling, globalist hectoring or brief military incursions to remove a head of government, we all lose out. For when sovereignty dies, so does democracy. The bracing lesson of this first week of 2026 is that sovereignty has even fewer friends than we thought.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and blogs regularly on Spiked where this article was sourced.