Donald Trump’s attack on Venezuela will embolden Russia and China, experts believe. US President Donald Trump is rapidly shredding the remnants of a world governed by international law, replacing it with an order where a few superpowers exercise unrestrained dominion over their spheres of influence. This is particularly alarming for Ukraine, Taiwan, and now, it seems, Greenland, although some other countries unfortunate enough to be located in the backyards of the US, Russia and China are getting nervous too.
“The biggest downside of the Venezuela operation could be the precedent it sets, affirming the right of great powers to intervene in their backyards against leaders they deem to be illegitimate or a threat,” Richard Haass, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote forProject Syndicate. “One can only imagine Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is calling for the ‘de-Nazification’ of Ukraine and the removal of President Volodymyr Zelensky, nodding in agreement. Trump’s military operation in Venezuela makes a negotiated end to the Russia-Ukraine war even more remote than it already was.
“A similar reaction is likely in China, which views Taiwan as a breakaway province and its government as illegitimate. This is not to say that President Xi Jinping will suddenly act on his ambitions for Taiwan, but events in Venezuela could increase his confidence that he would succeed if he were to invade, besiege, or otherwise coerce the island,” Haass concluded. The attack by US forces on Venezuela and their capture of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores — as well as Trump escalating threats to seize Greenland and to attack Colombia, Cuba and Mexico — have further exposed the flimsiness of a post-World War 2 global order supposedly based on international law.
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“The main instrument of international law that is violated here is the UN Charter, more specifically Article 2(4) of the charter, which sets out the prohibition on the use of force or threat of force,” said Atilla Kisla, international justice cluster lead at the Southern Africa Litigation Centre. This norm, he said, is considered to bejus cogens(“compelling law”), like the crime of genocide, from which no exception or waiver can be allowed, and so is a binding law for any state regardless of whether the state has taken up the principle in its own domestic law. “The prohibition of the use of force constitutes the bedrock of the modern international order,” said Kisla.
“There are only two narrow exceptions where force may be used under the UN Charter ” — either the UN Security Council (UNSC) authorises it, or a state uses force in self-defence under Article 51 of the charter. “However, none of those two exceptions to the prohibition of force apply here. And there is no armed attack that could trigger the right of self-defence under the UN Charter.
What we are left with is unilateral use of military force under the guise of necessity. The US as a state has violated a cardinal norm of the UN Charter and is responsible for this internationally wrongful act.” Kisla said that international law not only regulates state conduct, it can also hold leaders and individuals personally accountable. Ordering the unlawful use of force can amount to the crime of aggression, criminalised under Article 8bis of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC).
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