Trump’s Venezuela invasion sets a perilous precedent | Kenneth Roth

No matter how you slice it, Donald Trump’s invasion of Venezuela is an act of naked aggression. It is blatantly illegal and sets a disturbing precedent of indifference to national sovereignty that tyrants worldwide will be eager to exploit.

The ostensible reason for the US president’s military incursion was to arrest Nicolás Maduro on criminal charges for drug trafficking. But that does not justify invading Venezuela to seize him.

Under the United Nations charter, military force can be used against a sovereign nation in only two circumstances – with the authorization of a UN security council resolution, or in self-defense from an actual or imminent armed attack. But there is no security council resolution, and Venezuela posed no such military threat to the United States.

Trump has suggested that he was acting to defend the United States from the threat of drugs emanating from Venezuela, but that rationale for military action is dangerous. To begin with, Venezuela is not a source for the real drug threat – the fentanyl that has been killing so many Americans. It is a route for some cocaine, generally produced in neighboring Colombia, but most of that goes to Europe, not the US.

Moreover, drug trafficking is a crime that should be met with law enforcement, as the UN general assembly made clear in denouncing the invasion of Panama in 1989 to arrest its leader, Manuel Noriega, on drug charges. Drug trafficking has never been recognized as an armed attack that would justify the use of military force.

The concept of self-defense requires an actual military attack. The distinction is important because lots of cross-border activity causes harm (infectious diseases, pollution, cheap imports), but if that could legitimize a military response, it would decimate the UN charter’s presumptive ban on invading a sovereign nation.

Trump’s inconsistency also suggests that drug trafficking is only a pretext for regime change. While Trump invaded Venezuela based on mere criminal charges against Maduro, in November he pardoned former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, who had been convicted of large-scale drug trafficking. Evidently the drug trade is not a problem when conducted by a friendly rightwing president.

Might Trump’s invasion be justified by the doctrine of humanitarian intervention, which a UN summit endorsed in 2005 as the “responsibility to protect”? Maduro was a brutal despot who maintained power through relentless repression, while his mismanagement impoverished the wealthiest countries in Latin America and sent nearly 8 million refugees fleeing. But because the use of military force is always risky, humanitarian intervention can be justified only as a last resort to stop an ongoing or imminent genocide or comparable mass slaughter. There was nothing like that under way in Venezuela.

Recent US experience provides a cautionary tale on the use of military force for ostensibly humanitarian purposes. The US overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya left each country in chaos for years. Bad as a dictatorship can be, chaos is generally worse.

Trump can point to other military interventions with less disastrous results – the invasions of Grenada and Panama. But these were tiny countries, without anything approaching Venezuela’s substantial armed forces.

Despite claiming that he will “run” the country, the autocratically inclined Trump does not appear interested in ending the dictatorship that has plagued Venezuela for more than a decade. The rest of Maduro’s regime remains in place.

In deciding who might replace Maduro, Trump eschewed María Corina Machado, who won the 2025 Nobel peace prize for her commitment to democracy, in favor of Maduro’s hand-picked vice-president, Delcy Rodríguez, whom Trump officials believe will protect US oil interests. Rodríguez never denounced the regime’s repression and corruption, and on Saturday she asserted that Maduro remains the country’s legitimate leader. But Trump seems confident that she will do his bidding when it comes to oil, threatening to repeat his invasion if necessary, possibly with boots on the ground – an occupation.

Needless to say, Trump’s revival of the Monroe doctrine, now embellished with the “Trump corollary”, provides no justification for his invasion. Trump, seconded by Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, may want to revive the practiced of major powers doing what they want within their spheres of influence, but the UN charter’s presumptive ban on military attacks on a sovereign nation was meant to end that recipe for endless war, even in a major power’s backyard.

Leaving legality aside, Trump’s invasion sets a perilous precedent. If he can invade Venezuela, why can’t Putin invade Ukraine? Or Xi Jinping seize Taiwan (which is not even considered a separate sovereign state)?

Trump is not the only one to be playing fast and loose with international law. The Russian and Chinese governments, somehow with straight faces, both condemned Trump’s invasion of Venezuela, as if it had no parallel to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which Russia is carrying out with substantial Chinese economic support.

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy went so far as to suggest that if Trump could topple Maduro, the dictator of Venezuela, then why not Putin, the dictator of Russia? Yet Zelenskyy knows full well that the more likely reading of Trump’s military adventurism is to undermine the international legal prohibition of invading a sovereign country – the core of Ukraine’s case for resisting Putin’s aggression.

European leaders have been no better. French president Emmanuel Macron virtually applauded Trump’s action, ostensibly because of Maduro’s oppressive rule. British prime minister Keir Starmer and European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas issued broad affirmations of international law without bothering to state that Trump’s invasion had flouted that law. German chancellor Friedrich Merz called Trump’s intervention “complex” and stressed the need for an orderly transition to an elected government.

The top European priority has been to keep Trump engaged in defending Ukraine. These leaders evidently figured that if keeping Trump on board requires biting their tongues or even stroking Trump’s ego at the expense of the legal principle that makes Putin’s invasion of Ukraine wrong, so be it.

Maduro’s real offense seems to have been that he had befriended the wrong leaders (Russia, China, Iran) while sitting atop the world’s largest reserves of oil – a resource that Trump covets. But by that rationale, Rwanda is justified in invading eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo because of its mineral riches, the United Arab Emirates is justified in supporting the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary in Sudan to maintain access to gold, and China could invade Taiwan to seize its semiconductor factories.

That world of “might makes right” may seem acceptable to an American president who believes in power above all else, but as global economic capacity shifts, and with it the ability to sustain a military in a protracted armed conflict, the US government should be loathe to abandon the rules-based alliances that it has led for decades. It is an act of naive hubris to believe that Washington will always be the alpha male for whom rules are made to broken, not followed.

• Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch (1993-2022), is a visiting professor at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs. His book, Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments, is published by Knopf and Allen Lane.