India, Jan. 4 -- If you want to understand why the US attacked Venezuela late last week and captured its president, Nicholas Maduro, and took him to New York to try him under American domestic law, there is no point in consulting a book on international law or the UN charter. They have become passe. Here's what I suggest: Take a look at any standard software licence and the various subscription plans it mentions. In the eyes of Washington, and the current American president, Donald Trump, the so-called rules-based international order is no longer a set of universal laws; it's a tiered subscription model. Here's how the model works.

For countries like India, there is a mandatory basic plan. They must follow every line of the code regardin...