He has attacked Venezuela and taken away its president, for many reasons, none of which are especially edifying: because he wants its oil, because he conveys an easy and unrealistic message against drug trafficking and immigration – which were his campaign pillars -, because it pleases the Cubans of Florida, because it covers up the and because it fits with his imperialist vision of the planet, among other things. Democracy, political prisoners or the victory of the opposition in the 2024 elections, that’s it.
While the new Venezuelan president moves between marking distance and cooperating with the White House, one certainty remains: that the coup perpetrated last weekend will transform the world order, already deeply altered by the return to power of its leader.
We are facing a blatant demonstration of international anarchy by the Trump Administration, which invites other rebel states to follow its example because, at last, it has been successful. And if the world’s leading power can do it, bypassing its own Congress, trampling on the United Nations Charter, threatening other partners, even NATO, as in the case of Greenland, which is its new target, well, what can totalitarian leaders like those of Russia or China not do?
Nothing new, but more serious
It is nothing new for the US to replace governments it does not like, especially in Latin America. But the so-called Monroe Doctrine, in its various interpretations, is two centuries old. Now comes the and recovers those expansionist airs of another time. With an extra bit of danger: the Caracas adventure of Trump’s team is particularly brazen and comes at a precarious moment for international relations, already greatly affected since the magnate returned to the Oval Office in January 2024. Individualism prevails over multilateralism and a personal style is imposed that rejects mediations and intermediaries and, what is worse, prudence and international law.
In the Caribbean country, the US president was already accumulating possible crimes of murder, piracy and extortion, since this fall he launched his military campaign against ships that were supposedly carrying drugs, operations that have left more than one hundred dead and of which no evidence has been presented until now, leading the opposition to speak of “extrajudicial executions.” Now it is clear that adding a possible kidnapping, that of Maduro, already seemed like an extra anecdote.
Oona Hathaway, professor at Yale Law School and president-elect of the American Society of International Law, explains this clearly in an interview with: “What is dangerous here is the idea that a president could simply decide that a leader is not legitimate and then invade the country and, presumably, put someone favored by the Administration in power.”
Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores, arriving in Manhattan by helicopter, escorted by federal agents, for their appearance before the judge last Monday.
Legality: but what is that?
The first lesson of this brave new world of Trump is that international legality is, let’s say, indicative. “Operation Absolute Resolve” will have been exemplary in terms of the US Army and Intelligence, but nothing more. Its legal basis is non-existent. “It has given Russia, China and anyone who wants to try a road map to invade countries and capture leaders they dislike, with an illegality that, by comparison, makes the 2003 invasion of Iraq look as legalized as a bank merger,” analyst Tom Nichols graphically summarizes, in .
Let’s say that Nicolás Maduro was not, in the eyes of a large part of the international community, a legitimate president. Also, a process for possible crimes against humanity is advancing against him, which the reports do not support. A, say the opponents, those to whom Trump is not going to give any room for now. And yet, his detention has lacked legal and even moral support, because Trump has not even kept his manners. Namely:
- He has not had the support of the international community, not even his regional allies, because he did not inform anyone of his plans alone.
- Nor has it had the support of the North American Congress itself: by law, the president needs such approval if it is a US military operation in another country. Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, has argued that the government’s action was not an act of war, but a “police operation” and that the Defense Department simply protected the arresting agents. That’s why it was not reported. Problem: This could “transform virtually any war into a police operation by accusing opposition leaders and claiming that the large military forces needed to secure the leader’s arrest were simply protecting law enforcement,” says the .
- The specific drug trafficking accusations brought against Maduro are considered by most experts to be weak and would not constitute convincing arguments, under either international law or US law, for the final attack.
- Venezuela did not represent a direct threat to the US, which could have been used as an excuse, but no, drugs are not considered an imminent danger.
- Wars must have a legitimate, not adventurous, action, have a just cause as a basis and a just purpose as an end. In repeated statements, Trump has made it clear that his desire for Venezuelan oil is even greater than his desire to bring Maduro to court or to establish democracy in Venezuela.
- Armed conflicts, furthermore, require moderation on the part of the most powerful (and the US is the greatest power on Earth) and a clear renunciation of imposing one’s will just because, for pure benefit. World peace, extensive and lasting, is degraded if all this is exceeded.
- Trump attacked without the casualty of war (reason for war), without a just cause recognized by international law and the , which in its article 2 prohibits war of aggression; in article 51 it allows individual and collective self-defense to keep the great powers at bay, and in Chapter V it establishes a body (the Security Council) designed to maintain peace. There is a Marco, but that wasn’t the one that suited Trump and he skipped it.
The Argentine Luis Moreno Ocampo, who was the first chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), an assessment of this illegal aspect of the operation in Venezuela and its consequences, which has quickly gone viral. He recognizes that Maduro committed “very serious crimes” but that “they cannot justify a crime of aggression, which is the most serious in the world.” “It is again prohibited,” he says.
Against Maduro, remember, there is a process in The Hague “that is working” and he believes that “soon” we will see an arrest warrant for crimes against humanity “against the people involved in them” in Venezuela.
That’s what we should have trusted, and not “arresting and kidnapping people, imprisoning them and torturing them, often using judges to do that.” To that process and to the region and its support, he says, to the dissidents who won last year’s elections, who have not had enough support for an overturn in the Miraflores Palace.
Encouragement to totalitarianism
This behavior outside the law can fuel the desire to do the same in governments and regimes that have expansionist desires, desire to surround themselves with satellite states or, directly, to annex territory or subjugate populations. Of course, they are the first to take note of what happened, despite the fact that both take a scratch with the defenestration of Maduro for their good relations with Chavismo. Even on social media, a map that divides the globe into three, with three owners, has caused a stir: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.
Neither they nor the Iran of the ayatollahs have ever been very concerned with the theory of just war or international law, nor with respect for diplomacy. They go after their interests and with them deterrence and force work, but the feeling of open bar after what Trump has done is heavy, forceful.
The world order that we gave ourselves after the Second World War, so successful in these last 80 years, can barely be held together when barely two of the five permanent members of the Security Council – the United Kingdom and France – comply with the UN Charter and international law. China and Russia have already jumped over those red lines, and the US itself did the same in Iraq, for example, an offensive that was carried out without the explicit support of the Council, and is now delving into that line that was desired to be overcome. How is an institution of 193 states (plus two observers) going to work like this?
If Washington joins Moscow and Beijing in its approach to international relations, then the postwar Western consensus is definitively dead. “America first” was what Trump defended in his re-election campaign and stated that he did not want to get involved in foreign conflicts, that he wanted to shelve them precisely because they were a headache and a waste of money, but now, with that same excuse, he is attacking and doing so without limits. Tranquilizer it is not.
Xi Jinping and Vladimir Puti, in their last meeting in Moscow, last August
For more
Venezuela falls short of Trump. As he demonstrated in his press conference last Sunday, he has other countries in mind, which supports the idea that his mercantilist vision is the one that will prevail in the three years he still has in office in the United States. At his appearance, “She’s also very sick,” he said. “Another operation sounds good to me,” he told his president. Cuba is “ready to fall,” he added, although less threatening, more like someone issuing a diagnosis. And with Mexico we will have to “do something” if they do not work more against drug trafficking, even though its president, Claudia Sheinbaum, is “a wonderful person.”
He also threatened, incidentally, to attack Iran if it kills the protesters over price increases, protagonists of the worst popular uprising in three years, and he mentioned Greenland again: “We need Greenland from the point of view of national security,” he defended. Shoot everything.
If there is anything that could decisively destroy NATO it would be an attempted annexation of , an autonomous territory under the wing of Denmark, an allied country and part of the European Union (EU). Annexation could empower Denmark to invoke the collective self-defense provision of the North Atlantic Treaty against the United States. It sounds crazy, but why not, if aggression knocks at the door. Only Marco Rubio has tried to calm things down a bit, saying that they are not considering armed action, but rather the purchase of the island that opens up the Arctic.
This is not what was said on Tuesday, setting off all the alarms, in a statement sent by the Press Secretary, Karoline Leavitt. “The president and his team are discussing a number of options to achieve this important foreign policy objective and, of course, using the US military is always an option available to the commander in chief,” it read.
If the US goes for more territories, it can blow up international and regional institutions, create division within them (as it is already doing with Europe), break alliances that have been key in North American foreign policy for decades and shore up what the world is already experiencing. Also nuclear, too.
In the l, released last month and declared that “the Monroe Doctrine will be reaffirmed and applied to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere.” It collided head on with Brussels, encouraging far-right parties that want less Europe, fewer institutions, less unity. On Defense, it states that Europe must “stand on its own two feet and operate as a group of aligned sovereign nations, including assuming primary responsibility for its own defense.”
The broken board remains, the wet paper, the pieces of what were decades of consensus and a certain framework of global understanding, all dynamited. There are those who say that we have to endure, that Trump will only be there for one more term, but can the change be definitive, irreversible? What if his number two, the vice president, is even more of a defender of the MAGA philosophy than Trump himself? Well happy 2026 and stuff…
