There is no legal difference between Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine and US President Donald Trump’s attack on Venezuela. Both are acts of aggression, the “supreme crime” according to the judgment at Nuremberg, because leaders who start wars are responsible for all the deaths and destruction that result. The UN Charter of 1945 proclaims its purpose of saving succeeding generations from the scourge of war and Article 2(4) lays down the fundamental rule that a UN member must never invade another except in self-defence.
Illustration by Joe Benke. Credit:
It is absurd to think that Venezuela was about to attack the US, last Friday or in the foreseeable future. So Trump has no legitimate defence. But like Putin, he has nuclear weapons and a veto on any discomforting action (such as a Security Council condemnation) that the UN might take.
In short, the indictment that awaited the Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife in New York conferred no retrospective extraterritorial authority to arrest or imprison them or to occupy or annex their nation. No treaty permitted this and no international court approved it. What occurred was not a “police action” or law enforcement procedure but a unilateral use of armed force to coerce the representatives of a sovereign state.
There can be no quibble about the purpose of the US invasion, namely to change the government regime. Trump has admitted as much: the US will now “run the country” irrespective of the interests or wishes of its people. Its economy will be organised by large US oil companies empowered to seize infrastructure and profits denied them by nationalisation under past president Hugo Chavez. This is a reversal of the requirement of international law by which the US should compensate Venezuelans for the consequences of its illegal invasion, for example the families of the 40 or so civilians said to have been killed, the destruction of their property and so forth. The planning for the oil transfer must have taken some time, which suggests the takeover of the nation’s oil reserves was one reason for the invasion.
But it was preceded by several months in which suspected drug smugglers were extrajudicially executed – two of them, notoriously, while clinging to the wreckage of their bombed boat. The invasion and the unlawful arrest of Maduro and his wife was the culmination of unlawful conduct by the US forces under the command of Trump and his war secretary, Pete Hegseth.
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Australia and Britain, among other law-respecting countries, are party to arrangements under which their armed services may have to fight under the command of or in partnership with US forces led by these men who are oblivious to the rules of, or to their duties under, international law. It will certainly not be comfortable for our own armed forces if they are called upon to protect Taiwan under US command.
That is more likely than ever as a result of Trump’s invasion of Venezuela: if he can get away with it, why not Chinese President Xi Jinping, who has a genuine historical claim, albeit flawed, to Taiwan? Trump’s unlawful but unpunished attack will serve him as a useful precedent and it is obvious that Trump, the great appeaser of Russia over its attack on Ukraine, will not fight to save democracy anywhere else.
