Has international law become a tyrant's best friend? Democrats and foreign leaders are claiming that President Trump's arrest of Venezuelan dictator
Nicolás Maduro is illegal—at least as international law is interpreted by the reigning complex of professors, NGOs and multilateral bureaucrats.
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres is "deeply concerned that the rules of international law have not been respected." Joining him are the usual suspects, including safely-out-of-the-fray Europeans, China ("a clear violation") and shameless Russia ("an act of armed aggression"). Our favorite is Hamas's statement condemning the Maduro arrest as a "grave violation of international law" and "assault on the sovereignty of an independent state."
It would be nice to think we live in a Wilsonian garden where law governs relations among nations. We don't. The closest we've come was in the aftermath of the Cold War, when the U.S. was dominant globally and rallied coalitions to enforce international norms in the first Gulf War and the Balkans. Today rogue regimes are on the march, and international law and the institutions that supposedly uphold it end up protecting the lawbreakers.
It is unwise to junk the whole corpus of international law, which the U.S. did so much to build over the years, but its twisting can no longer be ignored. The rogues of the world break all the rules, only to deploy them against law-abiding democracies as a way to continue in their lawlessness.
The frequent citation concerning Venezuela is Article 2(4) of the U.N. Charter: "All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State." But go a little deeper and the analysis becomes muddy.
First, is the U.S. intervention a violation of Venezuelan sovereignty when the country's legitimate authority consents to it? Edmundo González, elected by the Venezuelan people in 2024, has spoken in support of the operation. The Maduro regime, which stole that election, objects. The bipartisan U.S. position is that Mr. Maduro wasn't the legitimate President.
Mr. Maduro welcomed Hezbollah and used Cuban troops to impose his rule on Venezuela. The regime in Havana says 32 Cubans died defending Mr. Maduro. As our contributor Eugene Kontorovich writes, "It would be odd to read
2(4) as allowing foreign powers to use troops to prop up an illegitimate, unelected dictator, but not to remove him."
Second, does this qualify as U.S. self-defense against the Venezuelan regime's drug smuggling and use of migration as a weapon? The U.S. also claimed self-defense as grounds to arrest Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega in 1989.
In that instance, a Justice Department
opinion by Bill Barr, later the Attorney General, found that "Article 2(4) relates to one of the most fundamentally political questions that faces a nation—when to use force in its international relations." That isn't for a court, unaccountable to the people, to decide.
The herd of instant analysts also claim the U.S. operation will give Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping license in Ukraine and Taiwan. "Think of what Russia and China just learned," Rep. Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said Sunday on
CBS's "Face the Nation." As if Moscow and Beijing don't already trample international law when it gets in their way.
President Xi isn't waiting on a new legal interpretation to seize Taiwan; that's what his military buildup is for. China has ignored the international ruling against its island grabs in the South China Sea. Vetoes by China and Russia have neutered the U.N. Security Council. The International Criminal Court has become a weapon against the U.S. and Israel when they fight terrorism.
The only defense against global rogues is the deterrent of Western military force. That force was on display with flawless precision in snatching Mr. Maduro. And the demonstration of U.S. nerve and military prowess will do more than a thousand U.N. resolutions to protect the free world and make Russia, China and Iran think twice.
Liberal internationalism is a moral and political failure if it can't distinguish between the aggression of Russia and China to swallow neighboring democracies and a U.S. military action to arrest a lawless dictator in league with the world's worst actors.
