Does Donald Trump’s Venezuelan move violate international law and the rules-based order?
In using military force to capture Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, has the US President made it easier for Chinese leader Xi Jinping to intervene forcefully in the domestic affairs of Taiwan and even decapitate its leadership?
The answer to the first question is likely yes. But on the second issue, dictators such as Xi and Vladimir Putin will be feeling far more uncomfortable after last weekend.
In 2019, the National Assembly of Venezuela invoked the Venezuelan constitution and declared that Maduro had usurped power and was not the president of Venezuela. In 2024, he held on to power despite compelling evidence he had decisively lost the July elections.
More than 50 countries, including the US and those in the EU, subsequently refused to recognise Maduro as the country’s head of state.
Even so, the existence of an illegitimate and corrupt leader does not itself provide legal ground for another country to use military action to capture the head of a regime or effect a change in who leads that country.
That was the case when John F. Kennedy approved the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 and is probably the case now. There was no treaty that permitted the action and no appropriate international court authorised it.
For this reason, international lawyers are scathing.
This legal perspective leads to the further assessment that by ignoring or violating international laws, rules and conventions, Trump is relinquishing the high moral ground for the democracies. China building and militarising artificial islands in the South China Sea was found to be illegal in a binding decision by the Court of Arbitration. Beijing didn’t care but at least the law was on our side.
Has Trump just made aggression easier for revisionist dictators around the world? I don’t think so. Leaders in countries such as China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, sometimes referred to as the CRINKs, systematically use or violate international law whenever it suits them.
For regimes in these countries, the first and most important question they ask when deciding on a course of action is whether they will feel pain, and how much.
In the contemporary global environment, the question for them is even simpler: how will America respond? This is because the involvement, or at least approval, of the US as the sole superpower is required to impose prohibitive material costs on the revisionist actions of these countries.
It should be clear by now that Trump’s America First does not mean retreat or isolation. It means doing what it takes to maintain US primacy in the Western hemisphere and project power and influence in other parts of the world.
To achieve that end, the Trump administration believes almost any means are justifiable.
This is not the restrained and cautious America of the Barack Obama or Joe Biden eras. Some lament this. But it was also during these two eras that China intensified its coercion and harassment of Taiwan and accelerated its activities in the South China Sea; that Iran greatly increased its support for and funding of proxies such as Hezbollah and Hamas; and Russia invaded Crimea in 2014 and Ukraine in 2022, with Putin making the calculation that Obama and Biden respectively were unlikely to oppose him.
The first countries to condemn the capture of Maduro were Russia, China, and Iran. This is because under Maduro, Venezuela was becoming a military and economic beachhead for these authoritarian countries in the Americas. The reason allies are anxious about Trump is obvious.
But in observing what he has done rather than said, Trump has deployed military force against the Islamic State in Somalia, Iraq, Syria and Nigeria, the Houthis in Yemen and nuclear sites in Iran. These are not formal allies of any of the major authoritarian states but they share the common purpose of challenging the interests of the democratic countries.
It may be that Trump’s plans for Venezuela are ill-conceived and he finds himself unable to extricate the US from a military and political morass.
This is something he promised the US would not suffer under his administration. But assessments that Xi will be emboldened to use force to decapitate the leadership in Taiwan or speed up plans for an invasion after last weekend seem wide of the mark.
It is true that Trump’s military actions have been against smaller or weakened countries with minimal American casualties and risks. But Trump’s preparedness to use force and take political risks is something that has the leaders of the CRINKs worried. It is US geopolitical timidity and caution that embolden them.
There is an uncomfortable truth about any international order no matter how benign or hostile. It is primarily shaped and ultimately maintained by the accumulation and exercise of power. The degree to which one is comfortable with the US pushing and crossing the boundaries of international laws and conventions for geopolitical gain depends on how seriously we take the threat of the revisionist authoritarian powers.
The more profound we believe the threat to be, the more the exercise of raw power will take precedence over legal obligation and restraint.