https://www.juancole.com/2026/01/venezuela-american-international.html
The US attack on Venezuela and kidnapping (Trump said that this is an appropriate term to describe what happened) its leader, and putting him on trial in the United States were illegal actions by any standards. Many eminent US and international experts have condemned this blatant and brazen aggression as illegal. To her credit, a senior Labour MP, Dame Emily Thornberry, has also broken ranks with her colleagues and has openly criticised Trump’s strikes on Venezuela as “not a legal action” and she “cannot think of anything that could be a proper justification”.
Some US apologists have argued that the US’s domestic laws justified this war of aggression. Even this excuse is false because Congress had not approved the invasion. By common consent, Venezuela was not the main or even a major source of trafficking of narcotics to the United States. The whole operation was about illegally grabbing Venezuelan oil and running Venezuela, as Trump has openly admitted.
If domestic laws are allowed to supersede international law, China will be more justified to attack Taiwan, which is regarded as a part of China, or Russia to kidnap Zelensky on charges that he poses a threat to Russia, as he is trying to join NATO against Russia. Putting Maduro on trial on trumped-up charges will also undermine the legitimacy of the US judicial system.
None of this means that Maduro was a true democrat or was universally liked by all Venezuelans. Even if the last elections in Venezuela were stolen, it still does not justify a foreign aggression to change the regime. Trump still claims that 2,000 US elections were stolen, but this would not have justified any foreign country to invade the United States to nullify the results of the election.
There certainly exists a great deal of corruption and mismanagement in Venezuela, but a great part of it is due to the US’s illegal sanctions on that country. Venezuela used to produce over three million barrels of oil a day. That figure has been reduced to less than one million barrels due to US sanctions, which have devastated the economy. Under these conditions, corruption thrives, and democracy and the rule of law suffer.
The United States has done the same to Iran, which used to produce as much as five million barrels of oil a day before the revolution, and now produces only one million barrels a day, sold at discounted prices. Of course, this leads to economic hardship, damage to installations, public dissatisfaction and riots, on top of government corruption and mismanagement.
America prides itself on being a country of laws. Such overt violation of international law will ultimately affect the Americans themselves, as we have seen in the erosion of many democratic principles at home. The Trump administration should be pressured to reverse course, because the current state of lawlessness will damage America and the world.
https://lnkd.in/eCzvmzDb
F Jahanpour 