The US military actions in Venezuela point to the emergence of a de facto system of legal apartheid in the international order.
Now imagine a powerful state crossing borders, bombing a capital, and seizing a head of government, only to retroactively recast the act as “law enforcement.” Is this merely an aggressive interpretation of international law, or something more consequential? A system in which legality is defined by capability rather than principle? If so, the pattern should feel disturbingly familiar.
The law is unambiguous at the point of entry. The UN Charter categorically prohibits both the threat and the use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state. That prohibition is widely recognized in international jurisprudence and doctrine as a peremptory norm at the core of the modern international legal order. Its exceptions are deliberately narrow and exhaustively enumerated in two cases, either authorization by the Security Council acting under Chapter VII of the Charter, which alone confers collective legitimacy for the use of force or the inherent right of self-defense under Article 51. That right arises only in response to an actual armed attack, as consistently interpreted by the International Court of Justice, and is further constrained by the customary international law requirements of necessity, immediacy, and proportionality. But here, neither exception appears to be satisfied. There is no indication of collective authorization through the Security Council, nor is there a legally cognizable armed attack attributable to Venezuela that would trigger the defensive paradigm of Article 51. Instead, the justifications advanced rest on claims of criminal culpability, political illegitimacy, or strategic necessity- categories that international law has consistently rejected as lawful grounds for the unilateral use of force. Regime change, law enforcement across borders, and punitive intervention are not recognized exceptions to the prohibition on force. To characterize it as a “grey zone” is to misstate the architecture of the legal regime itself. This is exactly the zone the Charter defines as unlawful, because once force is decoupled from collective authorization or genuine self-defense, the foundational promise of the international order, the equal sovereignty of states and the replacement of unilateral violence with juridical restraint, ceases to operate.
Accordingly, this is where the limits of legal formalism become apparent. There is a well-established account of political order which holds that legitimacy arises from collective recognition that coercion is constrained by rules and that force, to qualify as authority, must be domesticated through procedure and predictability rather than discretion. In international society, there is no global power with uncontested jurisdiction- instead, there exists or should exist, a shared, if fragile and imperfect, agreement that force is exceptional rather than ordinary, and that its use must be collectively regulated. When a major power acts as though exception is a permanent entitlement rather than a narrowly confined deviation and the system enters a legitimation crisis and a deeper erosion of the foundational belief that rules bind even those who possess the greatest capacity to violate them. At that point, law becomes theatre, cited when useful, ignored when costly. And theatre is not harmless. Rituals organize reality. If the ritual of “international legality” is performed selectively, the audience learns the real script in which security is a function of alignment instead of rights.
Now, some will try to launder this through a domestic-criminal lens: the claim that Maduro faced US charges, that there were bounties, that this was, in effect, cross-border policing. But international law draws a bright line between extradition (a consensual legal process between states) and abduction by force (a sovereignty breach). Turning indictments into a license for invasion is the jurisprudential equivalent of declaring that a prosecutor’s filing can override the Charter. If that doctrine is born, it will not remain uniquely American. It will diffuse. Other powers will cite it, and they will cite it precisely when it is most destabilizing. And if the operation involved sustained hostilities between US forces and Venezuelan forces on Venezuelan territory, including strikes, raids, and military targets, then International Humanitarian Law (IHL), becomes relevant as a regulation of what the fighting may do. Even perfect IHL compliance does not cleanse an unlawful resort to force. That is a foundational separation. The world already has learned-painfully- that conflating “how war is fought” with “whether war may be launched” is how aggression is normalized under humanitarian vocabulary.
And now, just consider the political economy that hovers behind the legal rupture. Venezuela possesses extraordinary hydrocarbon reserves- roughly 303 billion barrels of proved oil reserves- a figure repeatedly used in major energy compilations, to mention also Trump’s explicit linkage between the operation and Venezuelan oil- speaking of “running” the country and tapping its reserves. All the same, when force is publicly coupled with resource governance, there is a legal alarm bell.
It is precisely here that the erosion of the law becomes visible, reflecting a common institutional condition in which enforcement gives way to discretion. Because once the core restraint on unilateral force is treated as optional, the downstream restraints on how force is used also become negotiable in practice, especially when the actor enjoys diplomatic insulation and enforcement paralysis. We have seen it before, in cases such as Gaza and Iraq; the absence of effective accountability mechanisms allows the initial resort to force to proceed without meaningful legal consequence, and once that foundational restraint is weakened, the practical force of downstream constraints on conduct becomes increasingly contingent. Legal limits on necessity, proportionality, and duration are formally maintained, yet in practice rendered elastic where the actor enjoys diplomatic insulation and enforcement paralysis. Across these settings, a recurring pattern emerges and we witness a gradual shift from rule-based restraint toward power-based exception, typically narrated in the language of security and operationalized military force, prolonged control over territory and populations, and legal frameworks that adapt to, rather than constrain, the exercise of coercive power.
It invites the inference- fair or not-that sovereignty is being treated as negotiable when it sits atop assets. And this is the culminating irony. International law was built- imperfectly, often hypocritically- but still built to prevent precisely the future that selective enforcement creates. If the “rules” bind only those without aircraft carriers, then what remains is international stratification, a hierarchy dressed as order.
No comments:
Post a Comment