India, Jan. 5 -- 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 regarding sanctions, war and peace, trade, and sovereignty, or you face a system crash that can result in 50% tariffs and other economic and political consequences. But for the US, international law is sort of a "premium enterprise account" that is only available to the service provider, because it led the team that wrote it some 81 years ago. Its account comes with the exclusive right to temporarily or permanently cancel the terms of service whenever they become an inconvenience to the service provider. As for Venezuela, it has been put in the blacklisted category. In the service provider's eyes, Caracas isn't a user of the software called the international order; it is malware - a narco-State virus. And a system wipe is justified. Last Saturday, the US moved from imposing simple firewalls to an active "delete command", launching Operation Absolute Resolve to remove a sovereign head of State with force, giving the excuse of law enforcement. By launching the operation with no UN Security Council (UNSC) authorisation, the US has effectively signalled to Global South countries that the developer remains free to hack the system at will, as it did on Saturday. And there is no ombudsman to turn to, unfortunately. By ignoring the UNSC, Washington has directly violated Article 2(4) of the UN Charter, the sacrosanct source code that forbids the use of force against another State. However, in trying to avoid a system error in its narrative, the service provider referred to law enforcement and narco-terrorism to attack Venezuela. The carefully worded response from the European Union on Saturday read like an automated email from a tech support bot that has no actual power over the server or the service provider. EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas tweeted, "The EU has repeatedly stated that Mr Maduro lacks legitimacy and has defended a peaceful transition. Under all circumstances, the principles of international law and the UN Charter must be respected. We call for restraint." This was the standard system notification - acknowledging the bug, but unable to do anything to fix it. To be fair, Brussels has long advocated a "peaceful transition" feature coded into the system, but today it is helplessly watching the US run a delete command on Venezuela. By ignoring the American delete command in Caracas after condemning the Russian hack in Kyiv, the EU may have compromised its own moral source code. People on X.com reminded Kallas of the original source code: UN General Assembly Resolution 2625 that reads "Every State has an inalienable right to choose its political, economic, social and cultural systems, without interference in any form by another State." To be fair, the German foreign minister tweeted that "The UN Charter is not optional" and French foreign minister Jean-Noel Barrot noted that the actions "violate the principle of non-resort to force that underpins international law." However, none of them explicitly named the aggressor or condemned the attack. When the US ignores the Principle of Sovereign Equality (UN Charter Art. 2.1) to kidnap a head of State and attack a country's capital city and try the former under American domestic law, it ends up corrupting the software of international law. If China were to launch a military action against Taiwan tomorrow, the international community would likely struggle to respond effectively. The Russian attack on Ukraine is starting to resemble Trump's attack on Venezuela, albeit with the notable exception of territorial occupation. For a country like India, which has been slapped with 50% tariffs for the "crime" of sovereign energy trade with Russia, the message is clear: International law is a tool to discipline you. If you didn't write the code, you're just a bug waiting to be deleted. India has four basic options. Option one is to keep the legacy licence: Keep following American rules and hope for fringe benefits. The risk is that the OS developer is rewriting the rules in real-time to suit itself, which might harm our interests. The service provider is not trustworthy, we have learned, and may become hostile and could even send malware our way. The second option is to use a series of custom patches or plugins while maintaining strategic autonomy. This would mean using the US for some of its security needs, Europe for technology and economy, Japan and Korea for Indo-Pacific, Russia for continental geopolitics, and BRICS for geopolitical ends. The third, radical option is to abandon the software altogether and switch to the software being coded in Moscow and Beijing. It promises a world without dollar-dominance and sanctions, but undoubtedly carries the virus called Chinese hegemony. The danger is that trading a restrictive American licence for a Chinese one might be even more compromising for our systems in the longer run. A final option for India, as it chairs BRICS this year, is not to choose between American or Chinese software but to support the urgent development of an open source-based international order. We must rally the non-premium Global South world to build a system where the rules are hard-coded, transparent, and apply to the developers as well. Likeminded powers must come together to crowdsource ideas and fund to create such a software. If the US treats the UN Charter as a private user agreement that it can breach at will, it's time for the Global South to build a new system that actually works for all the users....