On a quiet Saturday morning, American special forces seized Nicolas Maduro in Caracas and flew him to the United States. Within hours, US President Donald Trump announced that Washington would “run” Venezuela – at least temporarily.
What sounds like a 1990s action film plot marked the final burial of the notion that Trump is a president of peace, an illusion sustained largely by his own rhetoric. More importantly, it marked the day the world’s former arbiter of international law and norms showed it no longer respects either.
That Maduro was a tyrant is beyond dispute. He presided over the systematic destruction of one of Latin America’s richest nations – economically, institutionally and morally. Elections were farcical, opposition leaders were imprisoned or exiled, and millions fled a country rendered unliveable by corruption and misrule. His fall is not being mourned in Caracas, London or Berlin.
The US formally charged Maduro with serious criminal offences. A federal indictment in the Southern District of New York accuses him of narco-terrorism, cocaine trafficking and kidnappings, alleging Maduro used the Venezuelan state to facilitate the production and export of vast quantities of cocaine to the US.
Supporters of the operation retreat, predictably, to moralism: Maduro deserved it. True. But moral revulsion is not a legal doctrine. If it were, Western democracies would be rather busy around the globe. A system that authorises force based on virtue rather than law does not remain virtuous for long. It becomes discretionary. And discretion, in the hands of power, is the enemy of order.
One could argue America has broken international law before. Perhaps in Kosovo, where it stretched humanitarian intervention beyond its legal frame. Maybe in Iraq, under a doctrine of pre-emption that proved strategically disastrous. But even those transgressions were cloaked in coalition-building, congressional authorisation and a strenuous effort at legal justification.
Editorial Context & Insight
Original analysis & verification
Methodology
This article includes original analysis and synthesis from our editorial team, cross-referenced with primary sources to ensure depth and accuracy.
Primary Source
News - South China Morning Post