Back To Legal Basics On Venezuela

With various smokescreens billowing from the White House, let’s not lose sight of the fundamental illegality.

Image courtesy of Axios

It’s been an insane start to 2026. Since news broke of Saturday’s attack on Venezuela, critics of the Trump White House have rightly emphasized that it was both illegal and unconstitutional. That feels correct because nations don’t just go around doing this to one another. Under our Constitution, it is Congress and not the President that may declare war.

To exactly no one’s surprise, the White House responded by muddying the legal waters, claiming it was acting in “self-defense,” that the abduction of Maduro was a legal extradition backed by a “court order,” and that the need for secrecy overrode the requirement to notify Congress because that body can’t be trusted not to leak.

This is all nonsense, and we shouldn’t be lured in. The way to cut through it is to return to first principles of international law—starting with when “self-defense” may actually be invoked. We also need to review the law governing extrajudicial arrests and why they’re almost never acceptable (even when hunting Nazis!). And for completeness’s sake, we’ll discuss why, in a more perfect world, Trump’s flouting of the U.S. Constitution and the War Powers Act should have even this Republican Congress standing up for itself (ha).

For this discussion, I’ll refer often to the excellent work of the lawyers at Just Security.

Yes, it’s a war

The Trump White House is trying to have it both ways. To play to the cameras, and to generate whoops from his MAGA base (who are supposed to be anti-foreign intervention), Trump declared that the military action he ordered on Saturday was “an assault like people have not seen since World War II.”

Sure sounds like a war, right? Yet when asked why congressional authorization for this historically massive assault was not sought, Marco Rubio said it was not an invasion, just a military “operation” to arrest one person.

For purposes of international law, however, neither Rubio’s nor Trump’s subjective framing matters. Whether there is an international armed conflict is a “question of fact”—one that can be determined by a neutral fact-finding body—and here the facts already place the attack far beyond any gray area.

For starters, Trump ordered military strikes upon Venezuela’s anti-aircraft defenses, cut off electricity in a cyber attack on the Caracas grid, then had the security detail around Maduro killed before abducting him from his presidential residence. Trump’s bombing of targets resulted in the deaths of some 80 civilians and soldiers so far reported.

Trump is now threatening a blockade on oil shipments and boots on the ground unless Venezuela cooperates with U.S. demands, particularly around access to its oil reserves.

It’s an international armed conflict, even if Trump denies it. And that means the laws of war apply, including the Geneva Conventions and rules on the lawful treatment of Venezuelan nationals in the U.S.

Yes, it’s an illegal war

Before the world got together to do anything about it, powerful countries regularly invaded their neighbors, causing suffering, refugee crises, starvation and misery. That dynamic helped ignite world wars when alliances snapped into place.

We set up the U.N. in an effort to stop this from happening over and over again. Both the United States and Venezuela are signatories to the U.N. Charter.

So what does that Charter say about attacking another country? Article 2(4) expressly prohibits the use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.

It’s the most basic international rule, fundamental to the postwar world order. And the U.S. just blatantly violated it, just like Russia did when it invaded Ukraine.

There are only two exceptions to the rule against the use of force against another sovereign nation: 1) when the UN has authorized use of force, or 2) when a nation acts in self-defense from an armed attack. Neither is present here.

Trump nevertheless claims “self-defense” because Venezuela supplies drugs that kill Americans. Even a cursory review of this argument reveals that it doesn’t hold up. As the lawyers at Just Security succinctly noted,

Drug trafficking simply does not qualify as, and has never been considered, an “armed attack.” In brief, the relationship between drug trafficking and the deaths that eventually result from drugs being purchased and used in the United States is far too attenuated to qualify as an armed attack.

Moreover, the pushers selling the drugs on the streets of America are often completely unrelated to any cartels. Users buying the drugs take them and usually survive. Indeed, the drug sellers and cartels don’t want dead customers, they very much prefer living ones who will keep buying their goods.

Nor is the drug trade, much of which does not originate in Venezuela at all, a use of force that includes “hostilities” or “combat,” despite Trump officials throwing those terms around.

Stepping back even further, an interpretation of “self-defense” that includes attacking any country that allows drugs to enter the U.S. essentially renders that term meaningless. It would open the door to assaults on Mexico or Colombia—an idea that would once have seemed absurd except that Trump is now openly threatening both. We are already tumbling down that slippery slope.

Because the U.S. cannot plausibly argue that it was acting in self-defense against an armed attack by Venezuela, the military assault was an illegal act of war. And that winds up triggering a bunch of interesting protections we’ll get to later.

But all we did was snatch a bad hombre!

The White House narrative is that Maduro is an illegitimate dictator, that he was indicted in the U.S,, and that the military was just carrying out that arrest. What’s the big deal? Bad guy got what he deserved!

This is one of those times where we have to hold two ideas in our heads at once:

Yes, Maduro is a horrible, unelected despot, just like many like him all over the world; and

No, that doesn’t give the U.S. the right to go in by force to snatch him and spirit him to the U.S., as good as that outcome may seem on the surface.

Before we get into legal precedent against this move, consider first the practical question of extrajudicial abductions of world leaders. If Trump were ever indicted on crimes, say in France for corruption, would that give the French the right to kidnap him from Mar-a-Lago, put him on a plane to Paris, and force him to stand trial? As delightful as that sounds, it would still be one nation exerting its power and laws over another. It would lead to chaos and lawlessness, the very kind of “might makes right” aggression we are now seeing the U.S. press forward with.

Indeed, if the U.S. can do this, what’s to stop China from launching a full-out attack on Taiwan and abducting its president, Lai Ching-te? (That is the very question at the top of many Chinese social media discussions critical of the U.S. war on Venezuela.)

Arresting those charged with crimes is part of a state’s traditional police powers. That means such arrests are generally limited to a state acting within its own territory and jurisdiction, and not within the borders of another. Only when a state has consented to extraterritorial action by another state does it become legal. Here, Venezuela clearly did not give its consent, but that of course has never stopped Trump from assaulting before.

A case before the U.N. concerning the Nazi fugitive Adolph Eichmann abducted from Argentina by Israel is an illustrative precedent. The world despised Nazis like Eichmann and wanted them to face justice, but it still didn’t give Israel the right to act like the police within another country’s borders.

Just Security noted that in the Eichmann case, with support from the United States, the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution stating:

Considering that the violation of the sovereignty of a Member State is incompatible with the Charter of the United Nations…

Noting that the repetition of acts such as that giving rise to this situation would involve a breach of the principles upon which international order is founded, creating an atmosphere of insecurity and distrust incompatible with the preservation of peace …

Requests the Government of Israel to make appropriate reparation in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations and the rules of international law.

Even during the Reagan years, the State Department stated in written congressional testimony, “The United States has repeatedly associated itself with the view that unconsented arrests violate the principle of territorial integrity.” It added, “Arrests in foreign States without their consent have no legal justification under international law aside from self-defense.”

Congressional approval required

Under our Constitution, only Congress can declare war. And under the War Powers Act, Trump had to consult with and report to Congress within 48 hours of deploying forces (and remove them within 60-90 days absent congressional authorization of the action).

Trump ignored these legal requirements, surprise, surprise. But the stated reason Rubio and Trump provided for why Congress was not consulted was a doozy. Rubio claimed it was “just not the kind of mission you can pre-notify because it endangers the mission” while Trump added, “Congress has a tendency to leak.”

This could be said about any mission anywhere, and there is no indication that the Gang of Eight, which takes its national security role very seriously, has ever had a “leak” problem. The allegation of “leaks” is also quite rich coming from this White House and Pentagon.

But beyond the non-notification, the White House actively lied to congressional lawmakers, claiming that there was no plan for regime change and that this was not a lead up to a war with Venezuela or an occupation by U.S. forces.

Yesterday, Trump admitted to reporters that he consulted with oil executives in advance of and after the attack instead of Congress under the War Powers Act. If you’re wondering what oligarchy looks like, it’s this.

Now Trump is threatening further military aggression, meaning possibly boots on the ground, and another forever war for oil, all without authority from Congress.

The GOP in Congress could act, of course, to rein Trump in. But they deliberately and cravenly refuse to do so, with many like Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Tom Cotton (R-AR) siding instead with Trump’s warmongering and even cheering on his threats against Cuba, Colombia, Mexico and Greenland.

In sum, Trump’s actions were illegal under international law, unjustified by any cognizable claim of “self-defense,” comprised an extrajudicial abduction in violation of state sovereignty rules, and violate both the U.S. Constitution and the War Powers Act.

Beyond its lawlessness, the conflict is also fast becoming a political quagmire, raising far more questions than it answers. Tomorrow in my piece in The Big Picture, I’ll write more broadly about how the war threatens the rules-based international order and how the Trump White House’s initial euphoria over Venezuela could soon turn to gloom as he adds yet another highly politically unpopular item to his growing list.