The military raid ordered by President Donald Trump to capture and extract Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro represents the starkest expression yet of his administration’s intent to reassert American dominance in the Western Hemisphere. Whether Trump thinks that Russia and China can apply the same spheres-of-influence principle to parts of Europe and the Asia Pacific remains unclear.

The big risk as things stand is that an adversary misreads his mixed signals, oversteps, and triggers an escalation nobody wants. But a world in which great powers dictate affairs in their respective backyards, if Trump does move that way, is more likely to descend into chaos or conflict than to achieve stable equilibrium.

The full article can be read on the Time website.