World without law

As violations of international law go, the United States’ abduction of Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores at the weekend is hardly in the first rank. It will not stand comparison with, say, the Iraq invasion of 2003, or the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, or the Moroccan annexation of Western Sahara – or, of course, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which (as I remarked some time ago) blew all of its competitors out of the water.

And of course the usual suspects (not all of them Trumpists) are here again to tell us that international law doesn’t matter anyway, or perhaps doesn’t even exist, that might has always made right, and that all that counts is getting a good outcome. And since this operation has resulted in the removal of an illegitimate president at a relatively small cost, why worry?

But the cynics are wrong. International law does matter, not because it has been consistently observed, by the United States or by many others, but because it has nonetheless served as some constraint on the worst of international behavior, and every weakening of its structure makes further outrages more likely. Every precedent is noted by bad actors; just as the invasion of Iraq helped open the door to the invasion of Ukraine, so no doubt the weekend’s events will one day be cited to justify some worse instance of lawlessness.

Although the Venezuela operation is far from the worst thing Donald Trump has done, there is something particularly shocking about the brazenness of it. It’s not just a matter of contempt for the rule of law – that was on show in Iraq as well – but of the casual attitude towards it, as if law and world opinion were not even taken seriously as adversaries.

The most obvious comparison is not with Iraq but with the invasion of Panama in 1989, undertaken by George Bush senior to remove its then dictator Manuel Noriega. That too was widely regarded as a violation of international law, although our selective historical memory now tags Bush senior as one of the good guys, in contrast to his son who invaded Iraq. But there were potential justifications available then that are not available to Trump.

Noriega was not actually president, ruling instead through proxies, so he did not enjoy head-of-state immunity. The US had a much closer pre-existing relationship with Panama, with rights under the Panama Canal treaties that have no parallel in Venezuela. Drug trafficking really was central to Noriega’s operations, rather than the transparent pretext that it serves in the case of Maduro. And Noriega had unwisely induced the Panamanian legislature to declare that a state of war existed with the US, removing (at least arguably) the need for Bush to seek congressional authorisation.

But the biggest difference brings us to the heart of the Maduro abduction. In Panama, the US dismantled the whole of Noriega’s regime. Guillermo Endara, who had been fraudulently denied victory in a presidential election some months earlier, was promptly sworn into office and served a full term as president. In Venezuela, however, the existing regime has been decapitated but otherwise remains unchanged.

Endara’s counterpart, Edmundo González, who actually won the 2024 presidential election that was stolen by Maduro, has been given no role by the US. Nor has his party leader, Nobel laureate María Corina Machado, who Trump explicitly sidelined. Instead, Maduro’s deputy, Delcy Rodríguez, has assumed control as acting president, and there is no sign of a US attempt to unseat her.

It’s possible that Rodríguez or other elements of the regime (or perhaps even Maduro himself) have done a deal with US, but it’s also possible that this is just the natural product of Trump’s short attention span: a quick, flashy operation, favorable headlines, then a rapid loss of interest in the issue. Just as last year’s attack on Iran could be described as Iraq-lite, what we saw at the weekend was Panama-lite.

Toppling Noriega was a serious military operation, involving tens of thousands of troops, and no doubt something similar would be required to forcibly remove all of Maduro’s cronies. It’s to Trump’s credit that he shies away from that, whatever his motives. Peaceful transition is much to be preferred, and that may still be what happens. But if there is no transition at all, just a continuation of the Maduro regime without Maduro, Venezuela will have lost out all round.

Cutting Machado and González out of the process means giving up the only plausible legal justification for the abduction, namely that it was done with the consent of the country’s legitimate government. Many critics of the operation, who otherwise make some entirely valid points, have a blind spot here in their failure to acknowledge that González won the election and that Maduro’s tenure was fundamentally illegitimate. Javier Corrales and Dorothy Kronick, who studied that election, put it like this:

Other autocracies might hold elections that are questionable or controversial or probably stolen; Maduro held one that was unquestionably stolen. Other opposition candidates might protest that they would have won had the playing field been level; Venezuela’s opposition candidate did win. The government’s own vote-counting technology revealed a two-to-one antigovernment majority and, in doing so, laid bare the government’s disregard for the will of that majority.

But as we know, Trump cares for democracy and majority rule as little as Maduro does.

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PS: Isaac Chotimer in the New Yorker interviews Oona Hathaway, a distinguished scholar in international law, who gives a very good rundown of the legal issues involved in the operation.