The US intervention in Venezuela to kidnap President Nicolas Maduro does not extend to law enforcement beyond the border. It’s a no-frills, international vandalism.
Power replaced law, preference replaced principle, and force was presented as virtue. This does not protect international order. It’s that quiet execution. When a state enacts a law to justify the kidnapping of its leaders, it does not protect order. Advertise contempt for it.
There is no basis in international law for the US to forcibly seize a sitting head of state. none. This is not legitimate defense under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. It was not approved by the United Nations Security Council. International law is many things, but it is not an immovable moral warrant for a great power to effect regime change through abduction.
Particularly pernicious are claims that allegations of human rights violations or drug trafficking justify the removal of a foreign head of state. There is no such rule. Not in treaty law. Not in the Customs Law. It’s not full-fledged jurisprudence.
Human rights law binds states to standards of conduct. It does not authorize unilateral military seizures by self-appointed world marshals. If that were the rule, the world would be plunged into a state of permanent sanctioned chaos.
Indeed, if the United States is serious about this purported principle, consistency will force it to take action closer to home. According to the logic currently being advanced, there is a much stronger legal and moral case to detain Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, given the extensive documentation of mass civilian casualties and credible allegations of genocide arising from Israel’s actions in Gaza.
But such logic is unacceptable. The reason is obvious. This is not a law. It is the power of choosing a target.
Regime change is not a deviation from American foreign policy. This practice has a long documented history, from Iran in 1953 to Guatemala in 1954, Chile in 1973, and Iraq in 2003.
However, kidnappings of sitting presidents hit a new low. This is exactly what the post-1945 legal order was designed to prohibit. The prohibition on the use of force is not a technicality. It is the central nervous system of international law. Violating this without permission is tantamount to declaring that the rules bind only the weak.
The United States completely understands this. It is acting anyway, and in doing so it is dissecting the United Nations Charter system itself.
The corruption doesn’t stop there. Washington has repeatedly violated its obligations under the United Nations Charter and the United Nations Headquarters Agreement. They refuse entry to officials they don’t like. It was not a diplomatic failure that prevented the Palestinian president from addressing the United Nations General Assembly in person last year. It was a violation of a treaty by the host country of the world’s major multilateral institutions.
The message was unmistakable. Access to the international system and compliance with the UN Charter are conditional on US recognition.
The United Nations is designed to restrain power, not to appease power. Today, serious violations of international law are no longer suppressed. Paralyzed by a veto, bullied by its organizers, and ignored by those most likely to violate the Charter, the United Nations has fallen from its supposed guardian of legitimacy to an instrument for its erosion.
At some point, denial becomes self-deception. The system is failing to deliver on its core promises. Not because international law is soft, but because its most powerful beneficiaries have decided that it is arbitrary.
Therefore, now is the time to say what cannot be said. The United Nations should be permanently relocated from host countries that treat treaty obligations as an inconvenience. And the international community must begin a serious and calm dialogue about an alternative world structure in which authority is not hostage to one capital, one veto, or one currency, or a system in which that authority can replace the United Nations precisely because the United Nations is being hollowed out from within.
Law cannot survive as a slogan. It either constrains those who wield the most power, or it is simply rhetoric deployed against those who do not. What the United States did in Venezuela was not a defense of order. This is confirmation that international ordering has been replaced by priority ordering. And, unlike laws, preferences have no limits.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.
