The Silencing of Law under Donald Trump’s Venezuelan Gambit

On 3 January 2026, the world crossed a line it was told would never be crossed again after 1945.

The President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, ordered the abduction of a sitting head of state—Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro—blindfolded on his own soil and hauled aboard a U.S. warship like contraband. This was not diplomacy. It was not law enforcement. It was not justice. It was imperial temerity laid bare: power kidnapping the law in full view of humanity.

Let us speak without euphemism. What occurred in Venezuela was not an arrest; it was a kidnapping from an independent and sovereign country. It was not an act of international order; it was international vandalism. And it was not an aberration; it was the logical endpoint of a long American habit of treating sovereignty as conditional and international law as optional.

Washington has tried to clothe this outrage in moral language—allegations of narco-terrorism, drug trafficking, and human rights abuses. But rhetoric cannot cleanse an act that stands in open defiance of the United Nations Charter. The forcible seizure of a sitting president by a foreign military power has no foothold in international law—none. It is not self-defence under Article 51. It was not authorised by the UN Security Council. It is unsupported by treaty law, customary law, or any serious jurisprudence known to civilisation.

What we witnessed was power replacing principle.

Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez was correct—and restrained—when she named the crime: a violation of Venezuela’s territorial integrity and a savage assault on sovereign equality. Her demand for the immediate release of President Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores is not a political plea; it is a legal imperative. Under international law, Nicolás Maduro remains the sole President of Venezuela, irrespective of Washington’s preferences or prejudices.

President Trump’s remarks from Florida—boasting of conversations, implying compliance, musing about “transitions”—were as chilling as they were revealing. Here was a U.S. president speaking as though nations are subsidiaries and their leaders removable by executive whim. “We’re going to do this right,” he said. History recoils at such sentences because they expose a mind-set in which might is mistaken for mandate.

Human rights law does not license unilateral military abductions. If it did, the world would dissolve into permanent chaos, with powerful states seizing disfavoured leaders under self-anointed moral warrants. Human rights law binds states to standards of conduct; it does not deputise empires as global kidnappers.

Consistency, moreover, is the acid test of sincerity. Applied honestly, the logic advanced by Washington would compel action far closer to home. By those standards, there would be a stronger legal and moral case to seize Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, given extensive documentation of mass civilian harm and credible allegations of genocide in Gaza. Yet no such logic is entertained. Why? Because this is not law. It is power selecting its targets.

Regime change is not a mistake in American foreign policy; it is a pattern etched in blood and footnotes—from Iran in 1953 to Guatemala in 1954, Chile in 1973, Iraq in 2003 and Bangladesh in 2024. But even by these grim precedents, the kidnapping of a sitting president marks a new low. This is precisely the conduct the post-war legal order was designed to prohibit. The ban on the use of force is not a technicality; it is the central nervous system of international law. To violate it without authorisation is to announce that rules bind only the weak.

The global response has exposed the moral fracture lines of our age. Brazil’s President Lula da Silva rightly called the strike a “serious affront” to sovereignty. Mexico condemned it unequivocally. Cuba denounced it as criminal. China expressed shock at the blatant use of force against a sovereign state. Across the United States itself, citizens took to the streets—Washington, New York, beyond—chanting “No war on Venezuela” and “No blood for oil,” lifting Venezuelan flags as a rebuke to imperial excess.

In Bangladesh, we too denounce this heinous crime in the harshest and most unflinching terms—echoing the cry “No war on Venezuela” and “No blood for oil,” while raising the Venezuelan flag high as a defiant rebuke to imperial arrogance and excess.

Others, however—most notably Britain’s prime minister and America’s ideological allies—welcomed or rationalised the crime, shedding “no tears” as law was trampled. Their applause will age badly. History remembers those who cheer when might masquerades as right.

The rot extends beyond Venezuela. Washington has repeatedly violated obligations under the UN Charter and the UN Headquarters Agreement—denying entry to officials it disfavors, obstructing participation, and treating the UN as a venue subject to American approval. When the host state of the world’s principal multilateral institution behaves as gatekeeper and censor, the message is unmistakable: legality is conditional on obedience.

The United Nations was designed to constrain power, not flatter it. Today, paralysed by vetoes, bullied by its host, and ignored by the most capable violators of its charter, it risks becoming a stage prop in the erosion of the order it was meant to defend. At some point, denial becomes self-deception. The system is failing not because international law is naïve, but because its most powerful beneficiary has decided it is expendable.

It is time to say the unsayable. The world must seriously consider relocating the United Nations away from a host that treats treaty obligations as inconveniences. It must also debate alternative global structures whose authority is not hostage to one capital, one veto, or one currency. Law cannot survive as a slogan. Either it restrains those who wield the greatest force, or it becomes rhetoric aimed at those who do not.

Donald Trump’s temerity in abducting President Nicolás Maduro is not a defence of order. It is a confession that order has been replaced by preference—and preferences, unlike law, recognise no limits. On 3 January 2026, power did not merely violate the law in Venezuela. It kidnapped it, bound and blindfolded, and hauled it aboard a warship. The world must now decide whether it will accept this barbarism—or insist that even the mighty are bound by rules. History will judge. Justice, though delayed, has a way of returning the verdict.

Written by Anwar A. Khan 

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