The United States (US) airstrikes on Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, and the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, commenced on 2 January 2026. An estimated 75 people were killed during this military operation. The Trump administration offered Maduro to surrender power since November 2025, and Washington has been in negotiation with Caracas for several months.
Maduro and his wife have been transported to New York to face trial where they pleaded not guilty to narcotics charges and will sit a full trial in March 2026. The war on drugs and communism have long been a Republican strategy from the days of Ronald Reagan during the Cold War that resulted in the administration supporting the contras in Nicaragua to overthrow the Marxist Sandinista regime without Senate approval.
However, the war on terror from 2001 conflated threats to national security and the justification on the right to self-defense with democratization and regime change heading swiftly toward the Middle East. Although the use of force is illegal under international law, the inherent right to self-defense is open to interpretation at the dismay of international lawyers. The highest legitimate authority for this is within the United Nations Security Council and as a Permanent Member of the Council, the United States is well aware of this.
This is why America consulted the Security Council immediately after 9/11 for a legitimate intervention in Afghanistan where the Taliban were harboring al-Qaeda. Moreover, America and European allies attained some legitimacy to install a no-fly zone and save civilian lives in Libya in 2011, but there was no consent fulfilled when America invaded Iraq in March 2003.
If the United States has been in negotiation with Venezuela concerning narco-terrorism, then this could constitute a threat to international peace and security and thus Washington should have better consulted the United Nations Security Council for Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter approval for retaliation. Even if permitted, appropriate sanctions against the Maduro regime should have been exhausted prior to military intervention.
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The Trump administration with its new National Security Strategy undoubtedly wishes to resurrect the Monroe Doctrine to make the United States great again. However, just like Slobodan Milošević in the early 1990s and Vladimir Putin since the last decade faced internal political problems in Serbia and Russia respectively and thus opted for war to divert the problems and reinvigorate the ideology of a Greater Serbia and Iron Curtain. Potentially, Trump is attempting to divert internal problems and divert attention for interventions whilst claiming relative gain as the global hegemon.
International law does matter, which is why the United States received many objections for its military strikes and kidnapping of a Head of State in the United Nations Security Council on 5 January 2026. The Russian Federation, China, Venezuela and many other states were particularly critical of the United States leaning toward the use of force rather than the use of international law. Venezuela holds a strong relationship with Russia and has attained financial aid.
Trump could argue that Russia and China would have likely vetoed a resolution for US sanctioned action against Venezuela due to alleged ulterior intentions to invest in deteriorated crude oil that would take many years. If Trump pursues rebuilding Venezuelan energy infrastructure, oil companies and US taxpayers would have to pay.
Now with Venezuela rests another forced episode of regime change that hopefully for the Americans will not be another saga of a protracted intervention. Regime change in Libya has been heavily scrutinized that resulted to Russian and Chinese opposition of regime change and to uphold respect for the rule of non-intervention more rigorously. The respect for international law is paramount but explanations of the United States and their conduct is being left to Washington, but a potential seizure of Greenland from Denmark without consultation from Denmark or Greenland would deteriorate relations with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
The international rules-based order that the United States cemented with the promotion of liberalism after the Cold War was won is now seriously under threat. One can question whether there is a difference between Trump’s military action in Venezuela and Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine and annex four oblasts in late September 2022.
In these contexts, relative gain is sought that is seriously undermining the United States-led liberal international order during the post-Cold War period. Trump is attempting to avoid the ‘hawkishness’ with earlier Republican administrations with his version of flexible realism and unilateralism with “America first” in the late 2025 National Security Strategy.
However, the United States might have to embrace multilateralism with European allies and authorization from the United Nations Security Council to work on mitigating global threats such as narco-terrorism to restore the national interest and avert further anti-Americanism.
*The views presented in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Diplomatic Insight.
Dr Danny Singh
Dr. Danny Singh is a Senior Lecturer at The University of Law, Leeds Campus. His research is based on international relations and just war ethics. He has published four books. These include the Russo-Ukraine War (The Tripartite Realist War: Analysing Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine) with Palgrave, police corruption in Afghanistan (Investigating Corruption in the Afghan Police Force: Instability and Insecurity in Post-conflict Societies) with Policy Press, just war theory (Comparative Just War Theory: An Introduction to International Perspectives) with Rowman & Littlefield and African political philosophy in relation to international interventions (Applied Afro-Communitarian Ethics and Foreign Armed Intervention) with Springer. He can be reached at Danny.Singh@law.ac.uk
