Adam Zivo: Forget 'international law,' Maduro's arrest was the moral thing to do

Although Latin Americans are widely celebrating the United States’ abduction of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, some voices, predominantly western progressives, have condemned the operation as destabilizing, illegal and immoral. Don’t listen to them: their arguments are specious and rife with contradictions.  

These critics often claim that Washington’s past misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan prove that regime change in Venezuela will fail — but the cultural, political and historical contexts of these countries are incomparable. 

American nation building was unsuccessful in the Middle East because it imposed western political norms upon a population that neither understood nor wanted them. Without democratic traditions, Iraq and Afghanistan’s institutions devolved into swamps of corruption and patronage, while ethnic and religious sectarianism raged unencumbered. 

But Venezuela only descended into authoritarianism in the 2000s, following four decades of democratic rule.The country has all of the cultural and institutional assets needed for a stable post-authoritarian transition, including a resilient civil society, unifying sense of national identity and consolidated opposition movement.  

In this way, Venezuela is more analogous to Panama than any Middle Eastern case study. 

Panama became a dictatorship in the 1980s under General Manuel Noriega, following several decades of flawed democratic rule. Like Maduro today, Noriega was personally implicated in international drug trafficking and money laundering, which eventually prompted the United States to bomb the country in 1989 and abduct him to Florida for an American trial. Notably, the operation did not receive congressional approval and was criticized for being illegal under international law. 

Washington subsequently ensured that the results of the country’s 1989 elections, which Noriega had lost and annulled, were reinstated. Blessed with a straightforward, American-backed transition, Panamanian democracy resurrected and economic growth soared. Today, the country has the third-highest per capita GDP in Latin American. 

Evidently, regime change can create enduring stability, so long as the underlying conditions are right. 

Whether Venezuela will enjoy similar success remains uncertain for now, especially since U.S. President Donald Trump’s transition plans remain largely undefined. Yet, excluding this possibility by narrowly citing Iraq and Afghanistan is intellectually lazy. 

Even if Maduro’s ouster allows Venezuela to thrive, some argue that it was still wrong to detain him because doing so undermined international law. Frankly, anyone who takes this position is being naive, if not deliberately obtuse. 

States have only ever obeyed international law to the extent that it furthers their own national interests, because there is no global power that can meaningfully punish noncompliance. In practice, that means that such law is generally followed in low-stakes domains where mutual self-interest incentivizes cooperation (e.g. global trade), but ignored in high-stakes conflicts, especially when national security is in play. 

This was glaringly obvious during the Cold War, when both the United States and Soviet Union repeatedly violated international law to impose their will upon weaker nations. Soviet incursions into Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and American interventions in Guatemala and the Dominican Republic, were all illegal — but that didn’t change anything. 

After the Soviet Union collapsed, the world entered a 30-year period where international law became slightly more authoritative, because the United States, an unrivalled global hegemon, could enforce it. This helped constrain the behaviour of smaller countries that were vulnerable to coercion, but failed to stop major powers from launching illegal attacks (e.g. Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia; the 2003 American invasion of Iraq). 

This system was also resented by many of the United States’ adversaries, who believed, not unreasonably, that it was designed to favour Western interests and only selectively enforced.  

Now that the world is entering a more multipolar era, international law is losing the patina of relevance it once had. With the United States unable (or unwilling) to act as the world’s policeman, no one has to pay any heed to it — especially ambitious autocracies which never liked these rules to begin with.  

Nothing illustrates this better than Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which was (and still is) unequivocally illegal. The United Nations belatedly denounced the attack, but so what? Legal arguments did not stop the advance of Russian troops. Ukrainian soldiers and western weapons did. 

Trump’s abduction of Maduro will not make the world a more dangerous place, because it was, historically-speaking, an unremarkable affirmation of real-world norms. The West’s adversaries will call Washington hypocritical, as usual, until it is their turn to be called hypocrites again. It is a theatre of selective outrage, beneath which hums the actualities of realpolitik. This is simply the way things have always worked, yet some people seem intent on self-delusion. 

To illustrate, critics now claim that Maduro’s ouster will give Russia license to abduct Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and set a precedent for China to conquer Taiwan. Huh? What universe do these people live in? Russia has already tried to assassinate Zelenskyy dozens of times, and China intends to subjugate Taipei regardless of how lawyers in New York and Geneva pontificate.  

Somewhat relatedly, certain Canadians believe that accepting Maduro’s ouster will enable the United States to militarily pressure Canada or Greenland — but if this is indeed a threat, then Washington will not seek the United Nations’ permission to move forward. Idealists who ignore this fact, and who treat international law as anything other than a papier-mâché shield, are undermining Canadian sovereignty by drawing attention away from the pressing need for hard power. 

Not only is it vital to be realistic about how international law actually works, one must remember that legality and morality are not synonymous. There are many cases where the righteous path is not necessarily lawful — a seminal example being NATO’s 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia, which even the UN retroactively deemed “illegal but legitimate” in light of the atrocities it prevented. 

Toppling Maduro was unequivocally the moral choice. His political repression and economic ineptitude were so profoundly destructive that almost eight million Venezuelans (roughly a fifth of the population) fled the country as refugees of hunger, violence and destitution. Clearly, any change from the status quo constitutes an improvement. 

Trump is obviously focused on American interests and does not see Venezuela as a humanitarian project. He wants to purge the country of Russian, Chinese and Cuban influence, and to ensure that the Venezuelan oil industry, which is currently on the brink of collapse, is rekindled without fuelling American adversaries. 

This approach is undeniably imperialistic, but that isn’t inherently bad so long as Venezuelans consent to American intervention and materially benefit from it. So far, it seems that both of these conditions will be met.  

An AtlasIntel poll from last October found that Venezuelans living within the country were divided on whether the United States should militarily oust Maduro, with intervention being slightly preferred. In contrast, the Venezuelan diaspora (which was recently engorged with millions of refugees) overwhelmingly wanted American-led regime change, with 63.7 supportive and only 17.3 per cent opposed. 

This data is consistent with the enormous anti-Maduro celebrations that broke out in major Latin American capitals last weekend, as well as the explosion of social media commentary from Venezuelans who are ecstatic about Maduro’s downfall. Many of these commentators acknowledge that the United States has its own interests, but argue that life in Venezuela is currently so horrible that concessions to Trump are an acceptable price. 

Was Trump’s operation illegal? Sure, but taking a narrowly legalistic perspective is unhelpful, especially considering that Maduro’s abuses often violated international law themselves. What matters is that excising this dictator was a legitimate and moral decision, especially since the chance of a Venezuelan economic, if not democratic, revival currently seems high.

National Post