While Christmas and New Year celebrations took place, fleets of American stealth drones flew over Caracas, Venezuela. Largely invisible to the naked eye and radar systems, these eyes in the sky were gathering intelligence on Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s routines, the defences of his compounds, and the layout of his possible escape routes. They were flying over Caracas late at night on 3 January, when American special operations forces captured Maduro.

The US Air Force deployed at least one of its highly secretive RQ-170 stealth drones over Caracas, and an unknown number of other intelligence gathering drones that provided them with real-time surveillance for special operations forces. Roughly 150 aircraft launched from 20 American military bases across the Western Hemisphere, over a dozen ships, and thousands of American military personnel were involved – directly or indirectly – in Operation Absolute Resolve.

They were linked together by military and intelligence gathering satellites hovering in geosynchronous orbit, which bounced data from assets on the ground to Washington DC and forward command bases, monitoring weather systems and conditions. American cyberwarfare capabilities appear to have caused targeted outages across Caracas, easing the way for aircraft and special forces operators. And, finally, amid this extraordinary technological armoury, there were also several humble blowtorches, used to cut through Maduro’s reinforced doorway in his secure location.

The global reactions to Nicolas Maduro’s capture have rightly emphasised the dubious legality of his abduction under international law and its implications for the global power dynamics. However, it also might be worth taking a step back to ponder the implications, which are equally remarkable, of the fact that the United States was able to do any of this at all.

Surgically attacking enemies and toppling the leader of a state has grown far easier than it used to be when the tools at hand were an inventive assassin and a knife. Technology’s ability to open new avenues of opportunity and advantage is, as some scholars and military officials have noted, highly seductive, leading to growing reliance on new tech across military branches. The idea that technological advances and the boons they bring are inevitable and overpowering is not unique to consumer products.

The recent toppling of Maduro is an excellent example of this dynamic in foreign affairs. As information about the United States’ highly complex operation to abduct him is revealed, we can see just how deeply embedded modern technology has become in enabling and encouraging the kind of realist power plays in foreign relations that Henry Kissinger could have only dreamed of conducting.

The seduction of technology has always compounded available options for international actors. Nuclear weapons, for example, introduced an enormous amount of complexity into the international system at the end of the Second World War. The internet opened a realm of cyberconflict that has only grown more fraught with the advent of initial AI systems in the contemporary era. The emergence of drone warfare in particular has upended modern battlefields and intelligence gathering, contributing to both Ukraine’s stalwart defence against Russia and Islamic insurgencies across the Middle East.

Maduro’s capture was an overwhelming display of American military prowess, but it was also inherently a display of technical prowess, and it would simply not have been possible for this to happen without the massive technological advances of the past few decades. When Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega was toppled from power by the United States 36 years ago, effectively to the day of Maduro’s capture, American military forces had to chase him down after he initially evaded them. Cornered in the embassy of the Vatican, Noriega was subjected to a kind of aural tech warfare as American troops revved engines and played hard rock music at high volumes to drive him out for arrest. During the numerous failed attempts by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to assassinate Fidel Castro, US operatives famously tried a variety of cutting-edge technological inventions, ranging from explosives hidden in seashells and cigars to poisoned swimsuits.

As technology has advanced, whether it be subtle intelligence gathering drones or more powerful missiles, like those that recently dismantled Caracas’ anti-air defences, it opens the door to ever-more ‘short’ scale options for international actors: immediate challenges can be overcome through immediate technological superiority.

Now that we more easily can, we have increasingly turned towards doing actions that were previously considered too costly or unviable. This dynamic is a basic foundation of human action, and perhaps human nature, in history. But we are living now through the indisputable apex of human technological ability, which, in turn, has opened the door to new heights of interstate action in the global arena.

This new technological reality has coincided with, and perhaps influenced, a new wave of imperialist advocates in government. Justifications abound from the Trump administration about Maduro’s capture, and indeed there are many valid reasons for him to no longer be the president of Venezuela, ranging from his regime’s political oppression, his ties to drug cartels, and his long mismanagement of the Venezuelan economy. But days after Maduro’s capture, prominent Trump administration homeland security advisor Stephen Miller baldly asserted: ‘We live in a world, in the real world…that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.’ These, Miller claimed, ‘are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.’

In other words, the US unilaterally removed Maduro and has subsequently seized control over Venezuela’s valuable oil systems, Miller implies, because we had the power do so.

Miller manages to echo Thucydides and simultaneously overlook thousands of years of formal and informal strictures on warfare and interactions between nations, fobbing off our modern diplomatic agreements and laws as ‘international niceties.’ But he is right that international relations in human history have often been governed by the ability of one group of humans to overmatch others. The rapid return of a ‘transactional world’ in global affairs has taken many by surprise, nonetheless. We may look back at the moment of Maduro’s capture as the final dissolution of a certain ideal of rules-based international order.

Greenland, Miller and Trump have claimed, could be next. Colombia, Cuba, Iran, and Mexico have been obliquely warned that their governments could face American intervention.

And they could. The United States, right now, has the ability to dominate these countries more easily than ever before. The expansion of technology, perhaps especially drones and the rapid digitisation of the 21^st century world, has contributed to a massive erosion of global sovereignty, reducing the borders and airspaces that were fundamental mainstays of the liberal international order, to highly permeable lines on maps.

We have seen this before across human history. Gunboats helped power American imperialism in the 19^th century by showcasing how American navies could negate less powerful countries’ military capability. In the present, it is modern technology like unmanned military power and cyber warfare, including rapidly expanding artificial intelligence capabilities and even ‘robotic’ actors, that are already empowering whatever the emerging ‘Donroe Doctrine’ will become. The logic is clear: American technology and thus America is dominant, as the president and military personnel took pains to emphasise during their announcement of Maduro’s capture.

The advent of a new, tech-fuelled imperial America appears to be looming, and resources will be claimed, threats dispersed, and land possibly seized. Military contractors and rising defence industry and Silicon Valley darlings have both latched onto this assertive mindset and contributed to it. Palantir’s Alex Karp, in his recently published The Technological Republic, argued forcefully for Silicon Valley’s return as a major player in tech-fuelled military prowess, where the technological edge will be the main one in defeating America’s enemies and projecting American power.

This is certainly not exclusive to the United States’ rendition of Maduro, of course. China’s ever looming plans to take Taiwan have been shown through its determination to leverage its powerful technological edge, building behemoth ‘Water Bridge’ ships that seem poised to besiege the island. Russia and Ukraine have conducted massive aerial battles of drone swarms and anti-drone batteries that have targeted the capitals of both countries, dancing around the usage of more ‘formal’ military capabilities like bunker-busting missiles and rewriting the tactics of modern war.

What advocates of the turn towards the new imperialism seem to overlook, whether it be Stephen Miller in the White House or Aleksandr Dugin in Russia, is that tech-empowered short-scale options have never been more numerous for smaller governments and militant groups as well. Weaker actors, too, have seized drone manufacture and cyber options as new, key forms of asymmetrical warfare.

This worrisome blossoming of technological access has opened the door to both new forms of imperialism and, it seems evident, the possibility of new forms of bloody resistance. Drones heralded Maduro’s end today, but they also almost killed Maduro in 2018, after all, when dissatisfied elements of the Venezuelan military revolted and tried to fly explosive drones at him during a speech. Whatever comes next for the world’s nascent imperial turn, the seductive lure of hypermodern technology is going to play a prominent factor for all involved.