[Prefatory Note: A revised, modified, and updated text of my opinion piece published by Al Jazeera on January 21, 2026 with a different title. A longer version will be published shortly on social media platforms.]
The United States attack on Venezuela on January 3 should be understood not simply as an unlawful use of force, but as part of a broader shift towards nihilistic geopolitics in which international law is openly subordinated to the imperial management of global security. What is at stake is not only Venezuela’s sovereignty, but the collapse of any remaining confidence in the capacity of the United Nations system, and particularly the permanent members of the Security Council, to restrain aggression, prevent genocide, or uphold the core legal norms the UN was established 81 years ago to defend and promote, and while not succeeding in the past has now abandoned all efforts to encourage geopolitical restraint and responded complacently to Trump-led assault on the very idea of humane forms of world order.
The multi-dimensional Venezuelan intervention, its political prelude and aftermath, as well as the accompanying rhetoric of US leadership together expose a system in which legality is invoked selectively if at all, veto power substitutes for accountability, and coercion replaces consent. Venezuela thus becomes a scary metaphor, a case study, and a warning: not of the failure of international law as such, but of its deliberate marginalization by those states with geopolitical pretensions, states deliberately entrusted with managing global security after achieving victory in World War II. To discourage the wholesale dismissal of international law it should be appreciated that international law continues to work for most non-security related interactions across international boundaries. Issues of violation, non-implementation, and impunity relative to global security are where the difficulties of achieving respect for international law are concentrated. This is not new in the history of international relations, but since 1945 and the Nuremberg and Tokyo War Crimes Tribunals has been disguised by pretensions that a new world order emerged when the UN was established. Closer scrutiny of the UN framework reveals that international law was designed to be subordinated to geopolitics whenever serious challenges to global security emerged. Why else confer an unrestricted right of veto on the five principal winners of the war against fascism, which emerged from the struggle as the most powerful and dangerous states, whose power most needed curbing rather than preserving in the Security Council, the only organ in the UN System that could render obligatory decisions. Of course, as it was assumed and piously hoped in 1945 that countries that cooperated so effectively in the just completed war, massively costly in lives, expense, devastation, and human suffering, would continue to work together in peacetime by acting responsibly within the frame of the Charter.
If the Venezuela intervention and subsequent ‘occupation’ is considered purely from the perspective of international law, this action constitutes a crude, brazen, unlawful and unprovoked recourse to aggressive force, in clear violation of the core norm of the UN Charter, Article 2(4), which reads: “All Members of the United Nations shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” The only qualification to this prohibition is set out in Article 51: “Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations.” This flagrant violation of Venezuelan territorial sovereignty and political independence was preceded by years of US sanctions, weeks of explicit threats, and days of lethal attacks on vessels allegedly transporting drugs, as well as seizures of oil tankers carrying to and from Venezuela.
This unilateral action was further aggravated by the capture of Venezuela’s head of state, Nicolas Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores, by US Special Forces, reportedly guided on their sordid mission by CIA operatives. Once seized they were transported to the US in a humiliating fashion to face assorted charges of “narco-terrorism” and unlawful encroachments on foreign property rights in a US federal court, in apparent violation of sovereign immunity. This imperialist mission, openly flaunting the immunity of foreign leaders and political independence of a sovereign state, was underscored and magnified by President Trump’s declared intentions. Trump openly plans to direct personally Venezuelan policymaking for an indefinite period, ostensibly until the country was “stabilized” sufficiently to restore oil production facilities. This was to done in a manner responsive to goals of maximizing the profitability of major US energy corporations, including Chevron, Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips. When asked who was in charge of Venezuela’s governance, Trump responded impatiently, “We are in charge.” This use of ‘We’ is more adequately comprehended by substituting ‘I.’
There is more politically at stake in this drastic reversal of the US Good Neighbor Policy, associated with US Latin American diplomacy since 1933 and the presidency of Franklin D Roosevelt, than initially meets even the most discerning eye. Of course, this commitment to cooperative relations was not upheld. It was periodically undermined in relation to Guatemala’s radical nationalism, Castro’s revolutionary victory in Cuba, Salvador Allende’s electoral triumph in Chile. These and other bumps in the road of a more neighborly atmosphere of mutuality were rationalized as Cold War efforts to preclude ideological footholds being acquired by socialist regimes receptive to developing positive relations with the Soviet Union. More discerning observers also took account of post-1945 US foreign policy agendas that accorded priority to the protection of the profitability of US corporate interests threatened by the rise of Latin American economic nationalism that had for decades been kept in check by ‘gunboat diplomacy.’ In a deeper sense the differences between now and then are the absence of a Cold War veneer that obscured the degree to which US interventions were motivated by economic national interests associated with maintaining high rates of profitability for foreign investors. It is also meant holding the line against advocates of economic nationalism that the UN General Assembly blessed by resolutions on Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources [UNGA Res 1803( 1962) and the Declaration on the Right to Development [UNGA Res 41/128].
Initially, informed observers assumed that the attack on Venezuela aimed at achieving some variant of traditional regime change. It was presumed that Maria Corina Machado would be installed and anointed as Venezuela’s new president. She was a veteran far right opposition leader, even a strident proponent of US intervention, and a surprise 2025 Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Her ceremonial acceptance speech in Oslo lavishly praised, and rather absurdly insisted that Trump was a more deserving candidate than she, which was also a graceless slap at the Nobel selection process.
The most unexpected development of the intervention in Venezuela has been the bypassing of Machado despite her demeaning flattery that so often paves the way to power and profits in the Trump era. Instead of Machado, the U.S. opted for the installation of Vice President Delcy Rodriguez as Venezuela’s new president. Washington claimed confidence in Rodriguez, apparently having reason to believe that she was ready to accept US demands, particularly in relation to the rehabilitation of the oil industry together with a willingness to accommodate U.S. foreign investors intent on the exploitation of other valuable natural resources that awaited development. She was also believed to possess the governing capacity and popular support to achieve stability on terms compatible with these US economic priorities.
More quixotically Trump declared that had Machado declined the Nobel Prize on the grounds that he was the most deserving candidate, she would now be Venezuela’s president. In other words, inflated flattery only attains its goals if it meets Trump’s transactional expectations! To be sure, we face an unsolvable puzzle when trying to distinguish Trump’s narcissistic indulgences from the occasional truthful disclosure of his real intentions.
Despite this caveat it seems a more plausible explanation is that Machado lacked sufficient domestic support to stabilize the country, whereas Rodriguez appeared willing and able to accommodate US economic demands, particularly those relating to control over Venezuela’s resource wealth, while enjoying sufficient popular support that included the loyalty of the armed forces to allay the stability concerns of the American oil companies. The pre-attack “pro-democracy” narrative promoted by US state propaganda perhaps gained a limited credibility by opting for this continuity of leadership, rather than would have followed a humiliating march into Caracas headed by Trump and Machado leading the way arm in arm to an inaugural event certifying her as Venezuela’s new puppet leader.
It is entirely plausible that Trump paid attention to cautionary advice about showing the American flag in Caracas. It was reported that after meeting Trump on January 9 in the White House, executives of major US oil corporations, widely assumed to be the principal beneficiaries of the intervention, expressed their reservations about resuming operations as well as making needed new investments in the country, citing concerns over instability in the economic and political climate, and perhaps implicitly, in the reliability of Trump support, given his on again/off again style of governance.
Clarifying relations between international law and global security
This military operation in Venezuela, together with its political aftermath, clearly violates international law governing the use of force, as authoritatively codified in the UN Charter. Yet even this apparently straightforward assessment contains ambiguity. The Charter’s institutional design, as noted, privileges the five victorious powers of the second world war, granting them permanent membership of the Security Council and an unrestricted veto, which offers an assurance that none of the Permanent Five or their partners and allies would be subject to sanctions or accountability procedures. In effect, responsibility for managing global security was deliberately left in the hands of these states, which also became the first nuclear weapons powers, enabling any one of them to block Security Council action even when supported by a 14–1 majority.
The Security Council is the only political organ of the UN authorized to issue binding decisions, aside from the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The ICJ, however, operates under voluntary jurisdiction, as states may withhold consent to what is known as “compulsory jurisdiction.” The ICJ is effective only to the extent that states comply with its judgements. It does possess a secondary impact to the extent that its judicial pronouncements influence public discourse or motivate civic activism. Over time the general profile has emerged that the management of global security has in practice been left to the discretion of the Permanent Five, usually dominated by the US or paralyzed by vetoes. Turkish President Erdoğan critically summarized this state of affairs by telling the General Assembly that “the world is greater than five.” At this time, a more descriptive geopolitical slogan would be ‘the world is not greater than three.’
In this sense, the Venezuelan operation should be understood less as signaling the collapse of international law than as an expression of nihilistic geopolitical management. If so, the appropriate remedy is not simply to strengthen international law, but to strip geopolitical actors of their self-assigned managerial role in global security. Russia’s aggression against Ukraine in 2022 can be viewed similarly: a geopolitical failure, incited by irresponsible NATO provocations, culminating in Russia’s own provoked yet egregious breach of Article 2(4). Many have advocated UN reforms that would make Security Council representation less tied to the outcome of World War II and its authority tied to a super-majority of 2/3s rather than unanimity.
The Venezuelan operation further erodes any residual confidence in the capacity of the Permanent Five, and especially Trump’s United States, to manage peace, security or genocide prevention in a prudent and responsible manner. It therefore reinforces the need to consider alternative frameworks, either by curtailing the veto or by shifting security governance beyond the UN to counter-hegemonic mechanisms, including BRICS, China’s Belt and Road Initiative, and emerging South–South development frameworks, and bizarrely in the grandiose pretensions of the Gaza Board of Peace. To date, however, there are no signs that the political will exists to obtain such a transformative adjustment in the relationship between geopolitical ambition and international law.
It must nevertheless be emphasized that despite this negativity, international law remains indispensable and effective in most areas of cross-border interaction. In domains such as diplomatic immunity, maritime and aviation safety, tourism and communications, negotiated legal standards are generally respected and disputes resolved peacefully. International law functions reliably where reciprocity prevails but has never throughout the history of international relations constrained great-power ambition in the domain of global security, where asymmetries of hard power dominate now dominate more than effort, given the course technological innovation.
The 2025 US National Security Strategy: Nihilistic Geopolitics
To understand Venezuela’s place within Trump’s worldview, it is essential to examine the National Security Strategy of the United States, released in November 2025. Trump’s cover letter introducing the document is suffused with narcissism and contempt for internationalism, including international law, multilateral institutions, and the UN. He proclaims: “America is strong and respected again — and because of that, we are making peace all over the world.” Such misleading rhetoric would be treated as pathological if put forward by an ordinary individual, but so far Trump gets away with it. This language becomes alarming when habitually used by a leader who has absolute control over the use of nuclear weapons. Trump concludes by promising to make America “safer, richer, freer, greater, and more powerful than ever before”.
The NSS repeatedly invokes “preeminence” as the central objective of US foreign policy, to be pursued by any means necessary. The Venezuelan intervention should be viewed as a sordid sequel to US complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and a seeming prelude to further projects, including exerting control over Greenland and posing renewed military threats against Iran. Yet the document’s primary focus is Latin America, framed through a revival of the Monroe Doctrine, now reinforced by the explicitly named “Trump Corollary,” colloquially dubbed the “Donroe Doctrine.” This is a robust reenactment of President Theodore Roosevelts broadening of the Monroe Doctrine in 2004 to include commitments to intervene with force in Latin American countries, not only to oppose European incursions, but to assure that the governments in the region respected their obligations to repay public debts and handle national governance in an orderly manner. The assertion of these policy goals became known as ‘the Roosevelt Corollary,’ and heralded a period of US hemispheric dominance more than a century before Trump assumed the presidency.
Trump’s hemispheric focus abandons the post–Cold War ambition of exercising global US leadership in the spirit of Obama and Biden, which wasted vast resources in failed state-building ventures in Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead, it prioritizes resource extraction, securing oil, rare earths, and minerals with immense benefits for US corporations and its militarized bureaucracy, while marginalizing NATO and abandoning multilateralism. These moves coupled with their focus on obtaining sovereign rights in Greenland and the Board of Peace presiding over the future of Gaza, as well as determining the future of the Palestinian people, and threatening intervention in Iran confirm the reality and grandiose character of Trump’s extra-hemispheric strategic ambitions, centering on achieving ‘A Greater America.’ This is vaguely comparable to Israel’s regional aspirations for ‘Greater Israel,’ but on a larger scale and less limited scope.
These assertive foreign policy moves should also be interpreted as Trump’s alternative to the ‘liberal internationalism’ criticized at the outset of NSS for its pretensions to assert ‘global leadership’ in the aftermath of the Cold War. This criticism is directed at the foreign policies of recent Democratic Party presidencies, which are held by Trump responsible for the lack of focus on fair burden-sharing and the pursuit of policies truly beneficial to the U.S.. This is translated by iTrump’s transactional mentality into policies of direct economic benefit and relevant to the maintaining military superiority in over China and Russia, its main rivals. If not by intention, it also expresses Trump’s skeptical views about alliance relations, especially with Europe, which are associated with bad deals in which the U.S. allegedly gives far more than it receives. It proposes a warped view of national interests, which discounts the benefits to the U.S. of international cooperation and indeed all forms of multilateralism including anachronistic dishing of every international institution, even the UN.
This hyper-nationalism was given tangible expression at the start of 2026 by Trump’s wholesale withdrawal from participation in and funding for 66 international institutional entities, including the climate change framework treaty and WHO. Venezuela, with its vast oil reserves, strategic location and authoritarian left populist government, provided an ideal launching pad for this fusion of statism and unrestrained imperial ambition— besides, its domestic side effect of conveniently diverting attention from Trump’s personal entanglements with Jeffrey Epstein and the dwindling domestic approval of the unwavering backing of Israel’s genocidal policies in Gaza camouflaged by a one-sided, cruelly imposed and interpreted ‘ceasefire.’
The Venezuela intervention from its inception displayed aggressive regional goals. From its inception it was accompanied by an explicit demand that the new leadership in Caracus take orders from Washington as the price of its political survival. Trump and his reactionary Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, openly linked Venezuela to future regime-change efforts in Colombia and Cuba, with Trump issuing a crude threat to topple the outspoken Colombian president, Gustavo Petro, and US Special Forces reportedly killing 32 Cuban members of Maduro’s Presidential Guard in carrying out their kidnapping mission. Venezuela has been under U.S. orders to terminate all shipments of oil to Cuba, which had been dependent on oil imports to meet its energy needs.
Implications
It remains uncertain whether Delcy Rodriguez’s government will negotiate an arrangement that preserves formal sovereignty for Venezuela while surrendering substantive control over internal governance to Washington for an indefinite period. Such an outcome would signal a full embrace of digital-age gunboat diplomacy, a dramatic rejection of the UN endorsement of the entitlement of all distinct nations to exercise the right of self-determination, with particular reference to territorial sovereignty, political independence, and an inalienable right to economic development. Trump’s outlandish expansionist visions even contemplates a coercive territorial incorporation of Canada into the United States, a move that has predictably produced an anti-American reassessment of Canadian national security in Ottawa, give an eloquent response by Prime Minister Mark Carney at the recent meeting of World Economic Forum.
International reactions to the assault on Venezuela have been so far mostly muted, reflecting fear, confusion, and perceived futility. Meanwhile, geopolitical rivalry intensifies, particularly with Russia and China, raising the specter of a new Cold War or nuclear conflict. The NSS makes clear that US preeminence requires excluding all extra-hemispheric powers from the region, by its repeated referencing of “our Hemisphere.” Such a commitment challenges China’s hemispheric presence that has been quietly engaged in extending its infrastructure diplomacy throughout Latin America. A dangerous flashpoint with China could occur in relation to its role in providing Peru with the largest port in the region or its role in Panama given the country’s proximity to and sovereignty over the Panama Canal. Some Trump critics think this may be a preliminary effort to legitimize hegemonic spheres of influence for the three geopolitical actors, with implicit concessions of Ukraine to Russia and Taiwan to China. Of course, if such a grand deal is ever consummated it will complete the process of sidelining or even eliminating the UN as a failed experiment in a peace-building world order and consign the peoples of the world to the paleo-realist wisdom of Thucydides in his Melian Dialogue, ‘the weak do what they must, the strong do what they will.’
It would be an oversight not to acknowledge Trump’s unacknowledged affinity with such America First thinking associated with his more diplomatically sophisticated forebears as Kissinger and Brzezinski. They were far more prudent and grounded in diplomatic protocol, but not much less blind to the benefits of global humanism and the urgencies of demilitarization and ecological adaptations to mounting global challenges. Only China seems currently attuned to the internationalist imperatives of a ‘live and let live world order’ that connects its visions of the future with reciprocity, restraint, economic and technologic mastery, and ecological resilience. Such a recognition of China’s pedagogical leadership should not be read as an endorsement of China’s internal ethnic and political pattern of state/society relations that leaves much to be done in the domain of human rights.
I fear what might be presently called ‘Trump’s World’ will be a curse taking its toll on future generations, not only elsewhere on the planet but in its almost certain boomerang effects on the quality of life in the United States. Hyper-nationalism fused with nihilistic geopolitics poses the most profound threat to species sustainability in human history both by what is does, as well as what it proposes to do and not doing.
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Global Justice in the 21st Century 