Captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro is escorted, as he heads towards the Daniel Patrick Moynihan United States Courthouse in Manhattan for an initial appearance to face US federal charges including narco-terrorism, conspiracy, drug trafficking, money laundering and others, at Downtown Manhattan Heliport, in New York City, US, 5 January 2026. REUTERS/Adam Gray

The capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro by the US shocked the world. Global Insight examines the implications of America’s use of military action for its neighbours and the international order.

On the night of 3 January, US forces conducted what was described by US President Donald Trump as a ‘large-scale strike’ on Caracas, Venezuela’s capital. President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, were seized from their residence by US troops during an operation in which members of Maduro’s security detail were shot and killed. The couple were transferred to a US warship and then flown to New York, where Maduro is to stand trial on charges including of narco-terrorism. He has pleaded not guilty and asserted his arrest was illegal.

International lawyers and world leaders swiftly condemned the action, though some applauded Maduro’s removal from power. Speaking at a morning press conference in Washington, DC, President Trump announced the US would assume control of Venezuela’s oil industry and would ‘run’ the country until ‘we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition’. Trump’s declaration sent shockwaves through diplomatic and international legal circles.

‘The invasion of Venezuela is a violation of every principle of international law,’ says Leila Sadat, a former Member of the IBA War Crimes Committee Advisory Board. With this military invasion and the seizure of a sitting head of state, President Trump has become, in Sadat’s view, ‘a rogue actor – someone who operates outside legal parameters by intent’.

The Trump administration’s approach, says Sadat – who’s the James Carr Professor of International Criminal Law at the Washington University Law School in St Louis – is ‘if the law says we can’t do it, we’re just not going to comply with the law’. This, she adds, ‘isn’t about stretching the law. It’s about rejecting it.’

The White House has repeatedly rejected claims that the military strikes on Venezuela and the broader operation are illegal and has framed them as lawful self defence and counter narco-terrorism actions.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has stated that the US is ‘at war against drug trafficking organisations’, rather than with Venezuela itself. He declared that the action taken by the US ‘was not an invasion’ nor ‘an extended military operation’, and therefore didn’t require Congressional approval. He added that the action in Venezuela ‘underscored [President Trump’s] ironclad commitment to preventing the Western Hemisphere from becoming a safe haven for drug traffickers, Iranian proxies or hostile regimes that endanger our national security’.

If continued, the conduct of the US will have profound implications for the global order. The US, long regarded as a principal architect and guarantor of the post-1945 legal order, no longer appears willing to accept legal restraint. The probable result, Sadat and others warn, will be a more fragmented, multipolar and potentially far more dangerous world. ‘International law only works if powerful states accept limits, and right now, the US doesn’t,’ Sadat says.

The raid on Caracas was only the most dramatic element of a wider campaign. US forces have bombed suspected drug boats in international waters, seized Venezuelan oil tankers on the high seas and moved to control the country’s energy sector. These measures illegally combine law enforcement, warfare and economic expropriation into a hegemonic assertion of power, international lawyers say. A central geopolitical question now is whether the US is not only violating international law in this instance, but whether it’s abandoning the very principle that law should constrain world powers at all.

For its part, the Trump administration has justified the strikes on alleged drug smuggling boats as part of a non-international armed conflict with narco-terrorists, explicitly accusing the Venezuelan cartel Tren de Aragua of conducting ‘irregular warfare’ against the US.

The ‘Donroe Doctrine’

In justifying the US attack on Venezuela, President Trump cited the Monroe Doctrine, first expressed in 1823 to warn European monarchies not to interfere in the political affairs of the newly independent Spanish colonies in Latin America. In the two centuries since, the doctrine has been reinterpreted to justify US interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean. President Trump commented that, after his decapitation strike on Venezuela, some were now calling it the ‘Donroe Doctrine’.

The Trump administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy, released in December, had foreshadowed the Venezuela operation. The official strategy paper elevated the Western Hemisphere as a priority for US dominance, framing drug trafficking as a national security threat, and labelled Venezuela a ‘narco-state’ aligned with hostile powers. The document justified strikes on alleged Venezuelan drug boats and previewed oil tanker seizures.

The Trump administration’s embrace of extraterritorial coercion and regime-change rhetoric represents a fundamental challenge to the post-1945 rules-based international order, says Mark Ellis, IBA Executive Director. ‘Such behaviour normalises power-based coercion over a rules-based international order, in direct contradiction of international law,’ Ellis says, citing Article 2(4) of the UN Charter, which prohibits the threat or use of force against other states and enshrines the principles of non-intervention and sovereign equality. It’s ‘a cornerstone of the modern legal order,’ says Ellis.

‘When powerful states repeatedly disregard these established norms, they risk reshaping customary international law itself, hollowing out the Charter’s prohibition on the use of force and reducing it to little more than legal fiction,’ adds Ellis.

President Trump has compounded these concerns by threatening action against Cuba and Colombia. He even threatened to take Denmark’s territory of Greenland by force – saying that the island is under threat from Russia and China and that the US can better protect it – triggering a trans-Atlantic crisis with America’s European allies. He later walked back on the Greenland threat in remarks at the World Economic Forum in Davos later in January. But damage was done.

‘For Latin America and the broader international community, an American president openly threatening to overthrow a neighbouring government is a chilling throwback to the darkest days of Cold War interventions,’ Ellis says. ‘Rhetorical threats matter. They test the credibility of the legal order meant to restrain abuses of power. Treating a NATO ally’s territory as prey for expansion is an existential threat to NATO’s cohesion.’

David Crane, a former US Army judge advocate and founding Chief Prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, is unequivocal in condemning the US action in Venezuela. ‘The seizure of Maduro was illegal on its face. It was an act of war, an act of aggression,’ Crane says. ‘The cornerstone principle of the UN Charter is that disputes are settled peacefully, and force is a last resort. None of that happened here.’

Further, President Trump risks legitimising authoritarian behaviour globally, Crane argues, suggesting that he is ushering in a new ‘age of aggression’ in international relations that abandons the rules-based order Washington once championed. ‘Aggression is now becoming part of the foreign-policy toolkit of the United States, China and Russia,’ Crane says.

Concerns deepened following remarks made by President Trump a week after the Venezuela operation. Asked about legal restraints in an interview, Trump replied that ‘there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me. I don’t need international law.’ He conceded his administration did need to adhere to international law, but added that ‘it depends on what your definition of international law is’.

During the interview Trump took a call from President Gustavo Petro of Colombia, who was concerned after repeated threats of a potential US attack on the Latin American country. President Trump has accused Colombia of failing to tackle drug trafficking, with Petro responding by offering to show the US his country’s efforts in destroying drug labs. ‘We are in danger,’ Petro said in a separate interview. ‘Because the threat is real.’

Regional condemnation and celebration

Reactions across Latin America were sharply divided, reflecting the deep ideological and political polarisation of the region, says Rafael Ioris, Professor of Latin American History and Politics at the University of Denver.

Some leaders, including Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Colombia’s Petro, Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum, Chile’s Gabriel Boric and Uruguay’s Yamandú Orsi, strongly criticised the US action. ‘These acts represent a grave affront to Venezuela's sovereignty and yet another extremely dangerous precedent for the entire international community,’ Lula said in a social media post.

But these objections didn’t appear rooted in support for Maduro, whose standing in the region has eroded in recent years, but in sensitivities to US interventionism and fears of allowing a dangerous precedent, according to Ioris. ‘Maduro’s kind of an easy target,’ he says. ‘No one was ready to support Maduro anymore.’ If the US tried to seize a leader with more regional political support, such as Colombia’s Petro, reactions ‘would be more problematic’, adds Ioris.

Other leaders, notably Argentina’s Javier Milei, Panama’s José Raúl Mulino, Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa, Peru’s José Jerí, Paraguay’s Santiago Peña and Chile’s President-Elect José Antonio Kast, welcomed Maduro’s removal as a necessary step to ending authoritarian rule in Venezuela.

Milei, a Trump ally, celebrated Maduro’s capture, proclaiming ‘Liberty advances, ¡Viva la libertad, carajo!’ on social media. He reportedly told Argentinian media that Maduro had ‘clung on to power’ by ‘rigging elections’ and said his capture was ‘excellent news for the free world’. Chile’s Kast said that ‘the arrest of Nicolás Maduro is great news for the region’, noting that more than eight million Venezuelans had been forced to leave the country during his regime.

Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, who won a 2023 primary election but was banned by the country’s Supreme Court from becoming a presidential candidate, brought her Nobel Peace Prize medal to the White House and presented it to Trump on 15 January in a gesture of gratitude to the American president for removing Maduro from power. Machado said it was a recognition of President Trump’s commitment to Venezuelan freedom. A smiling President Trump publicly thanked her and displayed the medal in the Oval Office. The Norwegian Nobel Committee clarified that Nobel Prizes are not transferable, and the award is only for the original laureate.

Ramdin called on all actors to ‘fully respect international law and the applicable inter-American legal framework, including the peaceful settlement of disputes, respect for human rights, and the protection of civilian life and critical infrastructure’. He added that ‘it is also essential that Venezuela’s path forward be grounded in governance based on the will of its people’.

The episode, Ioris argues, further strains Latin America’s regional commitment to international law at a moment when the US–China rivalry is intensifying. ‘US relations with Latin America are deeply intertwined [with America’s] global, hegemonic dispute with China,’ says Ioris.

Paradoxically, President Trump’s encroachment on Venezuela ‘puts pressure on, threatens and may slow down some partnerships of some countries with Chinese investment and trade,’ says Ioris. But ‘it also incentivises the countries to continue to look for alternatives, and the main one will be provided by China.’

Canada is facing a similar predicament in its relations with the US, which have been marred by trade tensions since President Trump imposed tariffs. Rather than bring Canada closer, the effect has been for the country to push its US neighbour away.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney visited Beijing in January to cement a new strategic partnership on energy, agriculture and trade. The goal ‘in a more divided and uncertain world,’ Carney’s office said in a press release, is to build ‘a stronger, more independent, and more resilient economy’ for Canada. ‘Of course, Trump can retaliate and put on new tariffs, but again that could actually deepen Canada’s incentive to continue to work with China,’ Ioris says.

Constitutional reckoning

Within the US, President Trump’s claims of unrestrained authority to deploy military force have triggered a constitutional reckoning. Months before the assault on Caracas, questions were raised about the legality of US strikes on suspected drug boats.

In October, Admiral Alvin Holsey, then head of the US Southern Command, resigned abruptly amid reported clashes with US Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth over the legal basis for the maritime strike campaign. Holsey reportedly circulated a resignation note inside the Pentagon citing illegal orders from Hegseth, raising alarms on Capitol Hill. ‘This unexpected resignation is troubling,’ said Senator Jack Reed at the time, adding that ‘any operation to intervene militarily in Venezuela – especially without congressional authorization – would be unwise and dangerous’. Hegseth meanwhile posted a brief social media statement thanking Holsey for ‘37 years of distinguished service’.

Controversy intensified after reports emerged that Hegseth issued a verbal order to 'kill everybody’ when the boat strikes began. That allegedly gave rise to the second strike on a disabled boat that killed survivors shipwrecked by the first strike. A disturbing video sparked bipartisan scrutiny in Congress, with lawmakers emerging with differing interpretations of the actions of the survivors after watching the footage. Hegseth has denied issuing a ‘kill everybody’ order for the boat strike on 2 September, labeling reports of such a directive as ‘fabricated’.

US military law is clear: killing unarmed civilians or non-combatants is murder and punishable with imprisonment. ‘Attacking civilian vessels at sea is a violation of international law, period,’ says Crane. ‘Shooting individuals who are floating in the ocean after escaping a vessel violates the Geneva Conventions.’

Thus, what began as a clandestine maritime operation has spiralled into a constitutional confrontation between Trump and some members of Congress over the problem of ‘illegal orders’ and the President’s authority to use military force. The Constitution explicitly vests the power to declare war with Congress.

A definitive historical parallel was the sinking of the Greek steamship SS Peleus in the South Atlantic by a German U-boat in 1944. The German commander ordered his crew to fire machine guns at shipwrecked survivors in the water. In a trial conducted by the British in Hamburg after the war, the captain and four crew members were found guilty of war crimes. Three were executed and two were imprisoned.

The Peleus case is widely cited in naval warfare law and used in US military handbooks to illustrate two core principles. One, that killing shipwrecked survivors is manifestly unlawful under the laws and customs of war at sea. And two, claiming superior orders is no defence when the order – such as firing on unarmed survivors in the water – is obviously illegal.

In another notorious case, US Army soldiers massacred some 350 people – mostly women, children and elderly men – at My Lai, a remote village in Vietnam. Initially, the US military tried to cover up the tragedy, but it was reported by journalists. Eventually 26 soldiers were charged with crimes, but only Lieutenant William Calley Jr was convicted. Calley had claimed he was just following orders. He served three and a half years under house arrest for the murders. ‘We do not follow unlawful orders,’ Crane says of the US military. ‘That principle is ingrained from privates to four-star generals. It exists because of My Lai – a “never again” mentality.’

In November, a group of Democratic lawmakers issued a video that went viral, warning members of the military not to follow illegal orders, lest they be held accountable. President Trump and Secretary Hegseth angrily accused the lawmakers, including former combat pilot Senator Mark Kelly, of sedition. Kelly’s view is that he and the other lawmakers said ‘something that was pretty simple and non-controversial – and that was that members of the military should follow the law’.

Recent polls show President Trump’s approval rating dropping. An AP-NORC poll in January showed that 56 per cent of US adults disapproved of how Trump has handled Venezuela. A YouGov/Economist poll showed that 56 per cent opposed the US taking Venezuelan oil and 62 per cent said the US shouldn’t run Venezuela.

As the Trump administration dismisses international legal limits, many Americans remain resistant to open-ended foreign entanglements. The widening gap between President Trump’s authoritarian impulses and American public opinion may now represent a meaningful restraint on this new ‘age of aggression’.

William Roberts is a US-based freelance journalist and can be contacted at wroberts3@me.com