Qamar Bashir

Imagine a moment so extreme that it defies the basic logic of national loyalty. Picture American opposition leaders traveling to Moscow, praising Vladimir Putin, and applauding the removal or arrest of a sitting U.S. president. Then imagine them standing before Russian media, thanking the Kremlin for “helping restore democracy” in the United States. Such an act would not be celebrated as dissent. It would be condemned as criminal, as treasonous, as an open assault on the constitutional order and sovereignty of the nation itself.

In this context, Maria Corina Machado’s public gesture toward Donald Trump—offered in appreciation for the economic and financial strangulation of her own country and the abduction of a sitting Venezuelan president by U.S. power during the dark hours of January 3—strikes many as more than political theater. To her critics, it appears as an act of high treason: the symbolic selling of national sovereignty to a foreign power in exchange for political backing to ascend to office.

What makes the moment even more charged is the shadow of the Nobel Prize itself. Donald Trump, once an aspirant for the award and denied by the Nobel Committee, now stands publicly “honored” by a political figure whose rise is seen by some as inseparable from U.S. intervention. To them, this exchange feels less like recognition and more like a taunt—an implicit rebuke of the institution’s decision and a politicization of one of the world’s most revered symbols of peace.

Others interpret it more starkly: as the trading of national dignity for foreign endorsement, a calculated wager that power can be gained without the organic consent of the Venezuelan people. Beneath this view lies an even darker implication—that refusal to comply with Washington’s strategic and economic demands, including Trump’s openly declared ambition to seize Venezuela’s oil wealth for American gain, could invite the same fate that befell Maduro.

She perhaps put the exalted concept as a backburner that  democracies breathe through dissent. From mass protests in Israel demanding accountability from Benjamin Netanyahu, to parliamentary resistance in Pakistan, to congressional scrutiny in Washington, internal struggle is the engine of reform. But there is a line—that line is crossed when a political movement steps outside its national ecosystem and invites a foreign state to intervene directly in the destiny of its own people.

This is why the language of treason enters the conversation. To challenge one’s own government is a political right. To applaud a foreign power for economically suffocating one’s own society is, in the eyes of many, a moral rupture. Sanctions do not fall on presidents alone. They fall on hospitals that cannot import medicine, on families whose wages collapse under inflation, on children whose futures are narrowed by scarcity. To praise these tools as instruments of “liberation” is, for critics, to sever political ambition from national responsibility.

The same pattern, many argue, is now being traced in Iran. For decades, Iranians have demonstrated that organic struggle is not only possible but powerful. In 1979, a mass popular movement overthrew one of the most entrenched, Western-backed monarchies in the region. That transformation, whatever its later consequences, was not engineered in foreign capitals. It was carried by millions in the streets of Tehran, Isfahan, and Shiraz. It was internal, national, and unmistakably indigenous.

Yet today, critics point to the re-emergence of Reza Pahlavi—who left Iran as a child more than four decades ago and has lived his adult life in the West—as a symbol of what they describe as “exiled leadership” being elevated by foreign powers. To them, the idea that someone disconnected from the daily realities of Iranian society can be positioned as a national alternative, while U.S. and Israeli leaders openly signal support for regime change, contaminates the authenticity of domestic protest.

When President Donald Trump issues statements hinting at military action “in support of protesters,” critics argue that the organic nature of Iranian dissent is immediately compromised. What may begin as a homegrown demand for reform becomes vulnerable to being branded—internally and internationally—as a foreign-engineered project. The protester in the street is no longer just a citizen with a grievance. He or she becomes, in the narrative of the state, a potential proxy of external power.

This is not merely a theoretical concern. History is crowded with examples where foreign intervention discredited legitimate internal movements by attaching them to geopolitical agendas. In 1953, Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh was overthrown in a covert U.S.-British operation after nationalizing the country’s oil industry. The Shah who replaced him ruled for more than two decades with Western backing, until a revolution erupted that reshaped the region and locked Iran and the United States into a cycle of hostility that continues to this day.

For those who view Venezuela and Iran through this historical lens, the pattern appears consistent. Sovereignty is tolerated when it aligns with great-power interests and challenged when it does not. Venezuela’s vast oil reserves—estimated at over 300 billion barrels, the largest proven reserves in the world—are not an abstract statistic. They represent strategic leverage in a global energy system where access to supply shapes diplomacy, alliances, and conflict.

This is why the charge of unpatriotism carries such emotional weight. To fight your own government is a political act. To fight your own society’s economic survival by endorsing foreign coercion is, for critics, something far more severe. It is seen as stepping outside the national tent and inviting an overwhelming external force inside—one that may crush institutions, fracture unity, and redraw the country’s future according to interests that are not its own.

Even the Arctic has entered this conversation. Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark that consistently ranks among the world’s strongest regions for governance, transparency, and human rights, has become a subject of geopolitical attention because of its rare earth minerals, strategic location, and emerging shipping routes. The implication is stark: in an era of intensifying global rivalry, even the most stable and democratic societies can become strategic assets rather than simply sovereign communities.

At its core, this controversy is not about medals, exiles, or speeches. It is about a red line between internal reform and external allegiance. It is about whether political ambition remains rooted in the will of the people or becomes dependent on the pressure of foreign capitals.

Organic struggle carries legitimacy because it is earned at home. It rises from neighborhoods, workplaces, universities, and streets. It persuades before it compels. It mobilizes before it conquers. Imported struggle arrives differently—through sanctions, asset seizures, diplomatic isolation, and military signaling.

History’s judgment on such alliances is rarely kind. Nations may survive bad governments. They rarely emerge whole when their sovereignty becomes a bargaining chip in someone else’s strategic game. The ultimate right to shape a country’s future, this argument insists, must remain in the hands of its own people—not in the applause of foreign leaders, and not in the shadow of global power.