Since U.S. Special Forces captured President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela in January, a steady stream of American officials and oil executives has visited Caracas. They flew there to do what generations of colonial administrators and businesspeople have done before them, effectively running another country. As The Times recently reported, Secretary of State Marco Rubio directs the acting president, Delcy Rodríguez, via text message and controls her government’s access to its own oil revenues. She tells him whom she wants to hire, and he tells her which Maduro apparatchiks to purge. Under Rubio’s tutelage, Rodríguez opened the nation to U.S. companies. According to the Trump administration, it’s too soon to talk about democratic elections; that has to wait until Venezuela’s energy sector is stable and its economy has recovered.

This asymmetrical relationship has led observers to reach for familiar yet somehow anachronistic terms: Venezuela has been described as President Trump’s “puppet regime,” as his “colony,” as an American protectorate and client state. The economist Carlos Mendoza Potellá, a former adviser to the Venezuelan central bank, argues that the country has ceded its national sovereignty. “We are not a nation anymore,” he said. “We are a territory with some delegate administrators implementing decisions made abroad. Who decides? Emperor Trump, who has his proconsul Marco Rubio.”

Yet none of these descriptors fully capture Venezuela’s odd status. On paper, it still has its own government, a defined territory, a stable population and some ability to enter into relations with other nations — the four criteria for statehood enshrined in the 1933 Montevideo Convention. There is no U.S. occupying military force (although some 900 American troops are assisting with earthquake recovery). At the same time, the Rodríguez government is not exactly autonomous, either. “This is not an occupied nation,” said Javier Corrales, a political scientist at Amherst College, “but it is a nation that has essentially surrendered a lot of its economic assets to the United States.”

So what exactly is Venezuela now? Is it a sovereign nation? Is it a new territory of the U.S. government? Is it something in between?

The U.S. takeover of Venezuela reflects the mechanics of the new age of empire, in which it has become increasingly unnecessary, inconvenient, expensive and illegal for great powers to declare formal occupations of small states. As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrated, “the costs of occupation have gone up dramatically,” said Tom Long, a professor of international relations at the University of Warwick. As a result, powerful nations have found ways to establish control over other countries without explicitly laying claim to them.

It was once thought that state sovereignty was an indivisible, immutable possession. A nation either had it or it didn’t. Today, sovereignty is more like “a bundle of rights,” as Long put it, that can be disaggregated, delegated, bought, seized and sold. Small states increasingly contract out elements of governance to foreign powers and international entities: A British company oversaw customs in Angola and Mozambique. Australia took over policing in the Solomon Islands for a time. Many nations have asked the U.N. or the I.M.F. to supervise state security, taxation and electoral functions when the home government is too weak to manage them. China’s Belt and Road Initiative gives Beijing leverage to boss around many nations. European countries gave up elements of their national sovereignty when they joined the European Union.

These trade-offs have been seen as both a potential boon to small states and a threat to their independence. In Venezuela, the United States has shown how great a risk they can be. The disaggregation of sovereignty has helped revive old-fashioned colonialism in a new guise.

Empires of the past were built upon the idea that conquest was the divine right of great powers. There was no legal distinction between the acquisition, occupation and takeover of foreign territory. The Portuguese did as they wished in Angola, and the British did as they wished in India. The Spanish viceroys sent to rule imperial possessions in the 16th century were thought to possess control over those lands and their people. They executed Indigenous rulers and imprisoned those who opposed the colonial regime. When Americans seized the Philippines from Spain, the role of the first governor-general there was modeled after his imperial predecessor, with few limits to his power.

In the late 19th century, as liberal and pacifist movements drove states to formalize international law, European powers sought to eliminate war by rendering conquest illegal. To do so, they defined national sovereignty as an inalienable possession. Occupation came to be understood as a temporary phenomenon distinct from permanent annexation.

At first, the United States bucked this trend, sticking with the colonial idea that the acquisition of foreign territory also represented the transfer of sovereign rights. It expanded its empire through armed invasions of Cuba, Mexico, the Philippines and Puerto Rico, even as it promised to deliver liberty and freedom in those places. Only once Washington had solidified its international holdings did it subscribe to the new laws of war. The 1899 and 1907 Hague Regulations restricted the rights of occupying powers, marking the purported end to millenniums of open conquest.

But that didn’t spell the end of hostile takeovers, as the awful history of the 20th century shows. Instead, as the legal scholar Sharon Korman argues, powerful nations came up with “functional equivalents of the right to conquest” — things like puppet regimes (think of the shah in Iran), covert military operations culminating in coups (Guatemala in 1954), false narratives to justify the “recovery” of lost territory (Russia’s invasion of Ukraine) and a whole vernacular of supposed impermanence, describing occupations as “interim” or “acting” powers.

In the early 20th century, the Roosevelt administration styled its interventions in Latin America as “fiscal receiverships.” Americans ran the customs houses in eight nations, giving them effective control over economic affairs. While the local government remained in place, Americans held the purse strings. But U.S. officials found that they could not fully control local bureaucracies or break through domestic corruption networks. A colonial maxim about surviving under imperial rule circulated across the region: Obedezco pero no cumplo (I obey but I do not comply). “Every U.S. customs receivership failed to raise revenues,” the economists Leticia Arroyo Abad and Noel Maurer find.

During the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union pursued varied forms of covert occupation and control, providing secret backing to loyal foreign allies. Around the same time, the idea that sovereignty is a singular possession — either you have it or you don’t — began to fall out of favor. The renowned international lawyer Hersch Lauterpacht wrote that sovereignty was in fact “divisible, modifiable and elastic.” The question of when and whether one state had seized another became far more difficult to determine: Had a country lost sovereignty only with foreign boots on the ground? Did other forms of coercion suffice?

This ambiguity had a strategic purpose, the legal scholar Aeyal Gross argues: “It is precisely the indeterminacy about a territory’s status (is it occupied?) that is often a defining feature of occupation and itself a major feature of control.”

Venezuela is a perfect example of that ambiguity. “Both the U.S. and the Venezuelan government benefit from opacity,” said Francisco Rodríguez, a senior research fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Since the capture of Maduro, he said, Venezuela has become a U.S. protectorate “in all but name.”

Shortly after Manuel Zelaya was elected president of Honduras in 2005, he says, the U.S. ambassador, Charles Ford, invited him to lunch. In a 2017 oral-history interview with the political scientist Oliver Stuenkel, Zelaya claimed that Ford handed him a list of nine individuals he could consider for government positions: three names per ministry, so that he could choose among them.

Ford describes this claim as “totally false.” He says the point of the meal was to see if Zelaya wanted “to expand our existing cooperation or to end some current programs.” Ford and Zelaya agree that the president named his own cabinet. But whatever occurred between the men, the United States was giving hundreds of millions of dollars in assistance each year, and that sum paid in part for influence. “Basically that’s how things worked, because you had this extreme asymmetry of power,” Stuenkel says, adding that his interviewees, other politicians, had described similar dynamics around the region.

At the time, Western scholars and officials were debating when and whether foreign intervention could be warranted. The United States in recent years had sent troops to East Timor, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq because, as one State Department official put it, sovereignty was not “a blank check” for atrocities. Political theorists also wrote of “shared sovereignty” as a method for strong states and multilaterals to help weak ones by shoring up their economy, politics or judiciary without necessitating the use of force. In 2004, the political scientist Anne-Marie Slaughter argued that “disaggregated sovereignty” would bolster the rights of all states by fostering their cooperation.

This logic inspired a whole host of states to contract out elements of domestic governance. There were often practical reasons to do this: Maybe a country was too weak to secure its own borders and elections, unable to fight corruption. (French troops helped Mali re-establish security in 2013, for instance.) Maybe it would benefit from international trade protections. “As memories of colonialism dim,” Ramesh Thakur, a scholar and former U.N. assistant secretary general, observed in 2002, “the salience of sovereignty is correspondingly diminishing.”

Yet if disaggregated sovereignty seemed for a time like a good idea, its perils, particularly for small states, are now clear. It has spread extractive legal and financial structures, allowing powerful nations to take advantage of weak neighbors. Late last year, for example, Morocco secured U.N. approval for its plan to control the Western Sahara by setting up an “autonomous region” in the contested territory. China is practicing “debt-trap diplomacy,” in which it lends billions of dollars to developing nations like Kenya and Indonesia to build ports and dams and railroads. Then it owns a share of those projects and conditions future investment on obedience. For instance: In 2017, Sri Lanka signed a 99-year lease to grant China control over the Hambantota port, a vast majority of which was paid for by Chinese loans. The scale of this Belt and Road Initiative will far exceed the Marshall Plan. And it works without occupations and the hassles they entail.

The unbundling of sovereignty has also enabled the creation of special economic zones, charter cities and freeports — territorial carve-outs from national laws that are the building blocks of what the journalist Atossa Araxia Abrahamian calls the “hidden globe” — through which much of the world’s wealth now flows. (A building in Harlem designated as a foreign trade zone, for instance, stores art for the wealthy.) The Trump administration seems particularly fond of these loopholes to state sovereignty: It has proposed establishing special economic zones in both eastern Ukraine and Gaza as part of its peace efforts.

Whatever we call it, the U.S. role in Venezuela is a result of this evolution. Regime change and formal occupation are no longer necessary when compliance and control can be imposed from afar. Caracas is at once sovereign and not, occupied and not. Delcy Rodríguez appears to have entered into a “pact of co-existence” with the Americans, Corrales said. She has conceded a significant degree of national autonomy in exchange for the preservation of power — or at least the appearance of it. This is, for now, an opaque and mutually beneficial arrangement for the two governments, if not for the Venezuelans deprived of self-determination.

Source images for illustration above: Juan Barreto/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images; Binnur Ege Gurun Kocak/Anadolu, via Getty Images; iStock, via Getty Images.