Issue: Diplomacy & International Law -- Strengthening diplomacy and adherence to international law

The new year opened to the sound of airstrikes. On January 3rd, the world woke to reports that United States forces had launched a large-scale military operation against Venezuelan territory, an act that instantly sparked public debate, diplomatic channels, and professional legal discourse. The military operation, together with the broader policy choices of the United States, carries consequences extending far beyond Caracas, with profound implications for the future of force, legality, and authority in the international order.

United States forces targeted sites identified by Washington as integral to “state-backed transnational criminal and narcotics networks,” allegedly operating under the protection of the Maduro government. Operation Absolute Resolve was presented by U.S. officials as limited in scope and effect, and described as a lawful exercise of national security powers consistent with international law. The Trump administration relied on a highly controversial 1989 Office of Legal Counsel memorandum asserting that the President is not constitutionally required to comply with the United Nations Charter as a matter of domestic law, a position long regarded as incompatible with the United States’ international obligations.

The strikes, reportedly, achieved their immediate operational objectives and concluded without further escalation. Venezuela denounced the operation as a grave violation of its sovereignty and of the prohibition on the use of force under the United Nations Charter, rejecting the characterization of the strikes as law enforcement and calling for international scrutiny. These sharply opposed official positions crystallized the legal stakes from the outset. Absolute Resolve followed years of sanctions, indictments, and public accusations that steadily reframed force as an available policy instrument, setting the stage for a confrontation in which legality was asserted rather than debated, and consequences were left conspicuously undefined (DOJ; OFAC).

Everything turns on a basic rule that the system cannot afford to lose: no State, however powerful, may act as nemo iudex in causa sua; “no one is judge in his own case”. As long as the international rules-based order continues to breathe, however laboured that breath may now be, the legality of State conduct cannot be determined unilaterally by the acting State itself. International law rests on the fundamental premise that legal assessment is external, contestable, and grounded in shared normative frameworks rather than sovereign assertion. It is objective legal analysis, not official narration, that determines whether conduct complies with the prohibition on the use of force and related Charter obligations, and it is that same analysis that exposes the broader systemic implications of violations. When States collapse legality into self-validation, the function of law shifts from authorizing conduct to measuring deviation, allocating responsibility, and structuring the political and institutional costs that follow.

That premise is strained further when a State invokes domestic constitutional authority to displace its international obligations. In the context of the American intervention, the reliance on internal executive legal reasoning to justify action underscores a familiar but consequential disjunction: under international law, a State may not invoke its internal law to justify failure to perform treaty obligations or to excuse a breach of peremptory norms (Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties Article 27; Draft Articles on Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts, Article 3). This asymmetry reflects a foundational choice in the international legal order to prevent States from insulating themselves from external scrutiny by recharacterising international constraints as optional or subordinate. 

Error in Genere

Early official explanations from the Trump administration framed the strikes as action taken against a designated terrorist organization, invoking  U.S. national interests and the collective self-defense of other States. Parallel reporting suggested that a classified Justice Department memorandum advanced a similar logic, asserting that certain drug cartels pose an “imminent threat to Americans” sufficient to justify the use of force. This reasoning depends on a crucial legal move: recharacterizing drug trafficking as an “armed attack” within the meaning of Article 51 of the UN Charter. In its seminal judgment in the International Court of Justice (ICJ), Military and Paramilitary Activities in and against Nicaragua, the Court held:

“An armed attack must be understood as including not merely action by regular armed forces across an international border, but also the sending by or on behalf of a State of armed bands, groups, irregulars or mercenaries, which carry out acts of armed force against another State of such gravity as to amount to an armed attack.” (para. 195)

Drug trafficking, however serious and destructive, has never been recognized as an armed attack triggering the right of self-defense. It does not involve the use of force by one State (or non-state armed group) against another State in the sense required by the Charter, nor does it amount to hostilities or combat under any accepted legal framework. International law has consistently rejected such attenuated chains of causation as a basis for self-defense, particularly where the alleged “attack” lacks immediacy, direction, and military character (Oil Platforms, para. 51).

The argument weakens further when extended from cartels to members of the Venezuelan government. Even assuming the truth of allegations concerning official involvement in drug trafficking, the connection between State conduct and the harms cited remains indirect and parasitic on criminal networks whose primary function is commercial, not military. If drug trafficking by non-state actors cannot plausibly be characterized as an armed attack, the claim that derivative State involvement in such activity triggers a right of self-defense is even less credible. 

Recasting the Venezuela operation as an effort to neutralize narcotics networks by weakening the State institutions allegedly enabling them pushes the legal justification into dangerous territory. Once force is directed at the machinery of government rather than at discrete, imminent threats, it ceases to function as self-defence and begins to resemble intervention aimed at shaping another State’s political authority. The ICJ has treated similar attempts with consistent scepticism. In Armed Activities on the Territory of the Congo, the Court rejected security rationales built on preventative logic and diffuse threat narratives, stressing that the Charter’s self-defence framework does not accommodate open-ended operations designed to stabilize regions, suppress criminal ecosystems, or preempt future risks  (paras 143–147).

Sine Imperio

The strain on legality becomes most visible when the operation is recast as cross-border law enforcement. International law has long treated the extraterritorial exercise of enforcement powers as exceptional and strictly bounded, precisely because such acts cut directly into another State’s sovereign equality. This is especially true where senior State officials are concerned. Sitting heads of state benefit from personal immunity (ratione personae), which functions as a jurisdictional bar to foreign criminal process and to coercive measures such as arrest or detention for the duration of their term of office. The ICJ confirmed this protection as a structural rather than discretionary, reflecting the system’s interest in preserving the independence and equality of States rather than the merits of any particular officeholder or allegation (Arrest Warrant of 11 April 2000, para. 51).

While States may, in limited circumstances, extend their prescriptive jurisdiction beyond their territory, the physical execution of enforcement measures remains territorially confined unless the territorial State consents. This distinction between prescription and enforcement is among the oldest principles of international law. From the S.S. Lotus in 1927 onward, it has served as a bulwark against unilateral coercion disguised as legal process. The unlawfulness of enforcement without consent does not evaporate because the underlying conduct is egregious, criminal, or universally condemned (S.S. Lotus, page 18).

Historical practice reinforces the point. Israel’s abduction of Adolf Eichmann from Argentine territory in 1960 was not assessed through the lens of Eichmann’s crimes. Argentina’s complaint before the Security Council was upheld in principle, and the Council warned that repetition of such acts would undermine the foundations of international order and generate insecurity incompatible with peace. This call for reparation (legal redress) underscored a core lesson: even the most compelling enforcement objectives do not license territorial violation (SC Res 138).

As operations expand in scope and ambition, the legal tension sharpens further. Measures that predictably impair governmental functioning, constrain leadership choices, or reconfigure a State’s internal authority strain the concept of proportionality beyond recognition. At that point, the vocabulary of self-defence or law enforcement no longer describes what is occurring. In Armed Activities on the Territory of the Congo, the ICJ treated such conduct as a grave breach of the prohibition on the use of force, particularly where it aligned with efforts to undermine or replace an existing government. The legal classification is a purely objective exercise.

Against this background, the central question shifts. If the operation is unlawful, what follows in a system where judicial avenues are blocked, and coercive enforcement is neither available nor credible? International law rarely secures compliance through immediate compulsion. Its influence is exerted through secondary mechanisms: the attribution of responsibility, the restructuring of institutional relationships, and the long-term recalibration of authority and credibility. When a powerful State acts in open defiance of Charter limits, the absence of courts or sanctions does not empty legality of meaning. It alters the register in which law operates. The inquiry moves from enforcement in the narrow sense to consequence in the systemic sense, asking how illegality constrains future claims, reshapes expectations among allies and adversaries alike, and redistributes who can speak persuasively in the language of law.

Hot and Cold With the Same Breath

A State does not get to sit on two chairs, blowing hot and cold in the same breath. It cannot stretch the law when it suits and then insist on its strict observance when it no longer does. International law is not naïve about this tension, but it is also not vindictive. It is along that line that the estoppel doctrine comes into play. 

Estoppel in international law is a narrow doctrine rooted in good faith. It is not a generalized penalty for inconsistency or illegality. At its core, it operates to prevent a State from departing from a clear and specific representation of fact or law on which another actor has reasonably relied to its detriment. The doctrine is situational and relational. Whether a representation becomes legally binding depends on context and circumstances, and estoppel must be distinguished from mere fluctuations in political or legal rhetoric (Temple of Preah Vihear, pp 23–26). In Nuclear Tests, the ICJ treated unilateral public statements as capable of generating legal effects, but only because they were addressed to a defined audience, conveyed with apparent intent to be bound, and relied upon in good faith (Nuclear Tests, paras 43, 46). Estoppel, properly understood, concerns holding a State to its own word in a concrete setting, not stripping it of the ability to invoke the law because it has breached it elsewhere.

That distinction matters for assessing the systemic consequences of expansive self-defence claims. A State’s unlawful conduct does not confer legal permission on others to act unlawfully in response. The prohibition on the use of force does not operate on a reciprocal or retaliatory logic. Accordingly, another State does not acquire a legal entitlement to disregard Article 2(4) merely because prior practice has stretched or violated it. Illegality remains illegality, assessed independently against the Charter framework and the absence of a valid Article 51 predicate.

Where the analysis does shift is outside estoppel in the technical sense and into the domain of practical credibility. The Charter system depends on a shared willingness to treat the prohibition on the use of force as a genuine constraint rather than a default rule riddled with exceptions. When a leading State advances elastic justifications that reframe armed attack as long-term risk management or diffuse threat suppression, it weakens its capacity to insist on stricter readings when confronting other uses of force. This does not legalize subsequent violations by others, but it alters the terrain on which interpretive disputes unfold. Over time, repeated reliance on expansive self-defence narratives lowers the persuasive force of objections to aggression, accelerates erosion of the armed attack threshold, and complicates collective resistance to unlawful force. The cost is not paid in a single case, but cumulatively, as the language of exception becomes easier to invoke and harder to contest.  

Legal Consequences of War

Irrespective of how Washington framed Absolute Resolve, once force was used by one State against the territory of another, the situation crossed into the domain of international armed conflict as a matter of law. This classification does not depend on political labels, rhetorical minimisation, or unilateral characterisation. Under Common Article 2 of the Geneva Conventions, the existence of an international armed conflict turns on objective facts. Where armed force is employed between States, the law of international armed conflict applies, even if one party denies that a conflict exists or portrays the operation as something else.

This is not a marginal or contested threshold. While international humanitarian law does wrestle with difficult classification questions at the edges, such as indirect involvement, proxy warfare, or support to non-state armed groups, those complexities are beside the point here. The scale, directness, and State-to-State character of the U.S. operations against Venezuelan territory placed them comfortably within the core of Common Article 2. From that moment, the relationship between the two States was governed by the full corpus of the law of armed conflict, not by analogies to law enforcement or counter narcotics cooperation.

Statements by U.S. officials following the operation only reinforced this legal transformation. President Trump described the outcome in terms of administrative control, asserting that the United States would “run the country” pending a future transition. He explicitly linked that role to Venezuela’s oil infrastructure, outlining plans for U.S. companies to enter, repair, and restart production, with costs recouped from extracted resources. Such language matters legally. Where a foreign military power exercises effective control over territory, even temporarily and even without sustained resistance, international humanitarian law classifies the situation as an occupation. Occupation, per se, is neither a bad nor a good thing. It, on the other hand, is not a political designation but a legal condition triggered by facts on the ground.

Most importantly, an occupation carries its own, distinct legal regime. That makes every occupation a hard amalgamation of legal and factual realities. The Hague Regulations of 1907 establish the foundational framework, defining occupation through effective control and characterising the occupier’s authority as provisional and non-sovereign. They strictly limit the exploitation of public property and natural resources and prohibit permanent alterations to the occupied territory’s legal and economic order. The Fourth Geneva Convention complements these rules by detailing obligations toward the civilian population, confirming that its protections apply in all cases of occupation, and imposing duties related to public order, welfare, and the continued functioning of local institutions. The occupier does not acquire ownership, trusteeship, or entitlement to restructure the territory’s economy for its own benefit.

The legal consequences extend well beyond questions of governance and resources. Once an international armed conflict exists, the entire targeting framework of the law of armed conflict becomes applicable. Members of the opposing State’s armed forces become lawful military objectives by virtue of their status, wherever they may be found, subject to the spatial limits of the conflict and the rules governing hostilities. At the same time, civilians and civilian objects remain protected against attack unless and for such time as they take a direct part in hostilities. These rules apply symmetrically. Venezuelan forces acquire corresponding rights and obligations vis-à-vis U.S. forces, and the conflict is regulated by the same legal constraints on both sides.

This has immediate implications for the idea that operations against drug-related targets could continue under a law enforcement logic. Once an international armed conflict exists, the permissibility of attacks is no longer assessed through domestic criminal categories or counter-narcotics frameworks. Targets must qualify as military objectives under humanitarian law, and attacks must comply with distinction, proportionality, and precautions. The recharacterization of criminal activity as “combat” does not expand the lawful scope of force; it narrows it. What began as an asserted effort to suppress transnational crime thus triggers a legal regime that imposes far stricter limits on the use of force than those invoked to justify the operation in the first place.

Credibility, Mediation, and Norm Leadership

The deeper impact of unlawful force is rarely found in immediate reactions. It unfolds over time, in the quiet redistribution of authority and influence within the international system. International law does not operate solely through adjudication or enforcement. Much of its constraining force is exercised upstream, through agenda setting, coalition building, and the ability of certain States to frame conduct as lawful or unlawful in ways that resonate with others. Credibility is the currency that enables this function. It is accumulated through consistency in legal argument and restraint in the invocation of exceptions, and it is expended when legal categories are stretched to accommodate immediate policy objectives.

This matters most in contexts where persuasion substitutes for compulsion. Mediation, facilitation, and norm leadership depend on a State’s capacity to invoke shared legal standards without appearing selective or instrumental. When a State advances expansive readings of self-defence or collapses the armed attack threshold into long-term threat management, it weakens its ability to insist on disciplined interpretations when confronting later crises. The effect is not symmetrical. The prohibition on the use of force remains binding on all States. Yet the authority to articulate what the prohibition requires in contested situations becomes more diffusely distributed and more easily challenged.

This dynamic is visible in responses to aggression more generally. When violations of Article 2(4) occur elsewhere, their wrongfulness does not hinge on the prior conduct of third States. Russia’s use of force, for example, stands or falls on its own legal merits, assessed against the Charter framework and the absence of a valid Article 51 justification. No amount of inconsistency by others converts that conduct into something lawful. What does shift, however, is the terrain on which condemnation and collective response unfold. Legal arguments grounded in restraint carry greater weight when advanced by actors perceived as having treated the prohibition as a genuine constraint rather than a flexible tool.

The consequence is cumulative. Each instance in which exceptional justifications are normalised makes subsequent invocations easier to contest and harder to police. Norm leadership erodes not because the rule disappears, but because fewer actors can defend it without qualification. In a system already strained by selective compliance, that erosion accelerates the drift from prohibition to permissibility, and from rule to rhetoric.

Signalling Costs Without Enforcement

When formal enforcement is blocked and coercive countermeasures are politically or strategically unrealistic, international law does not fall silent. It operates through indirect but consequential channels that signal costs, recalibrate expectations, and shape future behaviour. These mechanisms are often dismissed as soft or merely political, yet they perform a critical stabilising function in a system where compliance depends as much on credibility and coordination as on compulsion.

One such channel is reputational downgrading, understood not as abstract loss of standing but as a concrete shift in how a State’s legal claims are received. States that repeatedly advance expansive or elastic justifications for the use of force find that their subsequent objections to illegality elsewhere are met with greater scepticism. This does not alter the substantive law, but it affects its traction. Legal arguments that once anchored collective responses become easier to contest, fragmenting alignment among allies and partners. Over time, this erosion raises the transaction costs of coalition building and weakens the ability to mobilise shared legal positions.

A second mechanism lies in institutional distancing and conditional cooperation. Participation in international and regional frameworks often rests on assumptions of reciprocal restraint and respect for baseline norms. Where those assumptions are undermined, cooperation may continue formally while thinning substantively: reduced leadership roles, narrower mandates, greater scrutiny, or the quiet reallocation of agenda-setting authority. These shifts rarely announce themselves as sanctions, yet they register disapproval and constrain influence in ways that are difficult to reverse.

Economic and regulatory relationships provide another vector. Even in the absence of overt retaliation, States and private actors adjust risk assessments in response to perceived legal volatility. Trade, investment, and energy cooperation are sensitive to signals about the reliability of legal commitments and the predictability of State conduct. Where national security is invoked expansively to justify the use of force, counterparties may hedge, diversify, or renegotiate terms to insulate themselves from future disruption. 

Domestic political processes also function as a signalling mechanism. Parliamentary inquiries, litigation strategies, and shifts in political rhetoric do not enforce international law directly, yet they shape how breaches are narrated and remembered. These processes matter because international legality is sustained through repetition and reference. When violations are framed as exceptional, contested, or unresolved rather than absorbed into routine practice, the normative baseline remains visible, even if temporarily displaced.

The Allies’ Burden

Great powers rarely stand alone when they breach foundational rules. What gives such breaches their systemic force is not only the act itself, but the response of those who claim to stand for the law. The United States’ actions in Venezuela arrive against a backdrop of repeated strain on the prohibition on the use of force, visible across multiple theatres and justified through increasingly elastic narratives of necessity and security. 

If the international legal order is to retain any stabilising force, responsibility does not rest with one State alone. U.S. allies with deep investments in the rules-based system, such as the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Australia, and Japan, play a decisive role in signalling whether foundational norms remain operative constraints or have become discretionary. Their reactions shape not only the diplomatic atmosphere but also the legal expectation. Silence, acquiescence, or purely instrumental alignment communicates tolerance for exceptionalism. Principled distancing, even when costly, preserves the distinction between rule and power.

That burden is particularly heavy for States whose own security depends on the integrity of the prohibition on the use of force. Against this background, remarks by Volodymyr Zelenskyy, suggesting that if the United States knows how to deal with dictators in Venezuela, it may also know where else such methods could be applied, take on significance beyond their immediate political context. Read charitably, the statement reflects frustration and a search for solidarity in a system that has often failed to deliver timely protection. Read legally, however, it gestures toward a line of reasoning international law has deliberately and repeatedly rejected: that the permissibility of force turns on judgments about regime character rather than on objective legal criteria.

Ukraine’s subsequent clarification, delivered by Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha, reanchored its position in more orthodox terms, emphasising non-recognition of the Maduro administration and support only for developments consistent with international law. That recalibration matters. It underscores the difference between opposing a government politically and endorsing the use of force against it legally. International law draws that line for a reason. Once assessments of legitimacy or authoritarianism are allowed to substitute for Charter-based limits, the system slides toward outcome-driven justification. History offers no shortage of reminders of where that path leads.

States that rely on the prohibition on the use of force for their own survival have the most to lose from its erosion. Arguments that appear expedient in one context are rarely confined to it. The distortion of the self-defence doctrine by the United States in 2003 was later echoed by Russia to rationalize its aggression against Ukraine. 

This is why demonstrating distance from unlawful uses of force, even at the price of trade friction or economic retaliation, is not an act of disloyalty. It is an investment in systemic stability. Without such signalling, the costs of illegality are externalised, the armed attack threshold continues to erode, and the incentive structure tilts toward replication. What restrains further escalation, by Russia or by others watching closely, is not rhetorical commitment to order, but visible insistence that law continues to matter when it is inconvenient.

In earlier periods, European States could perhaps afford ambiguity. Isolated violations could be treated as aberrations, absorbed with minimal damage in the expectation that equilibrium would return. That assumption no longer holds when expansive interpretations of self-defence and enforcement are not episodic, but articulated as policy. Silence in such circumstances does not preserve flexibility. It signals acceptance.

The temptation to accommodate is understandable. Close alignment with Washington offers security guarantees, economic advantages, and political leverage. Yet accommodation premised on selective legality is a fragile bargain. In a world where power defines spheres of influence and law becomes optional, middle powers cannot rely on favours without paying a price. Recent U.S. strategic documents leave little doubt that loyalty does not insulate allies from coercion when interests diverge.

When Venezuela turned to the United Nations Security Council to denounce the U.S. operation as a blatant violation of the UN Charter and territorial sovereignty, it was a reminder of the foundational promise embedded in that Charter: that no State may lawfully use force against another’s territorial integrity except in the narrowest of circumstances. António Guterres, the UN Secretary-General, underscored this obligation in his remarks to the Council, reaffirming that all States must comply with the Charter and international law, and warning that unilateral military action against a neighbouring sovereign poses grave risks to the peace and security the organisation is mandated to uphold.

Among national responses, Spain’s stance offered perhaps the clearest articulation of disciplined non-recognition. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez made a pointed distinction between political non-recognition and legal non-recognition. Madrid has long viewed Nicolás Maduro’s government as lacking democratic legitimacy, yet Sánchez was emphatic that such illegitimacy does not translate into legal license for foreign intervention. Spain will not recognize an intervention that contravenes international law, even if it purports to challenge an undemocratic regime.

This emphasis resists a dangerous slippage common in political discourse, in which illegality is conflated with rightful intervention because the target is unpopular or repressive. Even deeply flawed governments remain objects of legal protection under the Charter; breaches of legitimacy do not erase the prohibition on force. As Spain’s diplomatic statements at the Security Council made clear, respect for sovereignty and peaceful dispute resolution must be sustained “always and everywhere,” rather than deployed selectively in response to convenient ends. Crucially, this position also demonstrated an attempt to anchor state responses in legal categories rather than in transient political alignments. 

Normalization is the Real Danger

The central danger exposed by Absolute Resolve is not confined to the operation itself. It lies in the gradual normalisation of legal exception. When the use of force is justified through elastic concepts, law enforcement reframed as self-defence, armed attack diluted into long-term threat management, and occupation redescribed as temporary administration, the prohibition on the use of force does not collapse outright. It thins. Its edges blur. Over time, what was once exceptional becomes available, and what was once prohibited becomes contestable.

International law has never relied solely on courts or coercive enforcement to survive. Its resilience has always depended on shared discipline in argument, on restraint in invoking exceptions, and on collective insistence that legality continues to matter even when it is inconvenient. That discipline is most tested when powerful States act. If their departures from Charter limits are absorbed without consequence, the system does not simply tolerate a single violation; it recalibrates its baseline.

The effects are cumulative and asymmetric. Each expansive justification lowers the cost of the next. Each failure to signal distance accelerates erosion of the armed attack threshold. The result is not immediate anarchy, but a steady redistribution of legal authority away from rules and toward power. History suggests that once this shift takes hold, it is rarely confined to its point of origin. Arguments migrate. Precedents are repurposed. Exceptionalism travels.

What remains, then, is a choice about friction. The international legal order cannot eliminate unlawful force, but it can make it costly. That cost is not always imposed through sanctions or judgments. More often, it is imposed through credibility loss, institutional distancing, economic repricing, and the narrowing of who can speak persuasively in the name of law. These are imperfect tools, yet they are the only ones available when enforcement is blocked.

Seen in that light, the stakes of Absolute Resolve extend well beyond Venezuela. They concern whether the prohibition on the use of force remains a meaningful organising principle, or whether it becomes a rhetorical reference point invoked selectively and abandoned when inconvenient. Preserving what remains of international stability requires more than condemning violations after the fact. It requires sustained resistance to the quiet transformation of exception into norm.

Davit Khachatryan is an international lawyer and lecturer focusing on the intersection of armed conflict, emerging technologies, and international law. 

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