I must say I am not an expert on the role of China so I will not touch on that. The role of the United States has been historically to promote democracy around the world. Having said that, they've had a very interventionist approach to things throughout the Cold War and beyond. With the new administration in the U.S. we feel like this is changing. The support for democracy has not been necessarily at the top of the agenda of the U.S. administration in the last two years. This has been seen here in Ukraine whereby there is less pressure from the U.S. government to push reforms and to look at how democracy can be pushed forward and supported.
The case of Venezuela, I think, is.... We used to have these doctrines around the UN and things like that, for example, the responsibility to protect, which Canada was instrumental in developing. These things have been falling a bit by the wayside in the last few years. For me, it's unfortunate because I think we had a number of mechanisms that were in place to support the populations directly when there was a case that warranted such intervention by a multilateral mechanism, without infringing necessarily on sovereignty, but in a way to “responsibilize” the world on a humanitarian crisis, for example.
The case of Venezuela would have been, in my mind, something that would have called for a “responsibility to protect” in terms of how the Americans could respond but also the world through the UN.