In early October 2025, Reem Alsalem, a United Nations special rapporteur, submitted a report calling for a ban on surrogacy, and describing it as a “system of exploitation and violence”. Alsalem went further to liken the system of surrogacy to the system of prostitution, saying she found a lot of similarities between the two in terms of how they exploited women.
She isn’t the only international figure to take such a strong stance against surrogacy. Pope Francis, who passed in 2025, had also called for a worldwide ban on the practice which he believed was exploiting the women who became surrogates.
This call – which has seen equally heated criticism and support – comes at a time where more and more celebrities have been posting about their surrogacy journeys. The latest was actress Lily Collins earlier that year, who faced a slew of backlash to her announcement about welcoming her baby via surrogacy, including from many people who blamed the rich for exploiting women for their own desires to have children. While some celebrities like Kim Kardashian have been open about their reasons for using surrogates, others like Collins and Priyanka Chopra haven’t shared why they chose this particular path.
But as stories where parents welcome babies via surrogacy become more and more commonly shared publicly, the harms and complications of surrogacy have also been coming to light. More than the stories themselves it’s the fact that so many of these cases are now becoming public knowledge that is allowing people to look deeper into the impact of surrogacy and explore it from different perspectives. Treating surrogacy as inherently exploitative isn’t a recent phenomenon – in fact countries such as France, UAE, Saudi Arabia and even India have long banned the practice, regardless of whether or not the surrogacy is commercial or not. Other countries like the UK and Canada allow altruistic surrogacy but have banned it commercially – which means that surrogates cannot be paid, except beyond reasonable expenses in certain cases. On the other hand, most states in the US do allow gestational surrogacy commercially, although compensation and protections around this vary by state. Across the world, experiences around surrogacy can vary significantly, as governments, families, and agencies work within (or sometimes around) the law to match the desires of would-be parents in wealthy countries while respecting what exists of local law for the birth family and the child. This is much like how experiences have played out with international adoption, where the lure of a payday can complicate and confound the process.
“It would be incorrect to say surrogacy is always exploitation and incorrect to say surrogacy is never exploitation. That’s why it is so important to have proper legal protections, for the parents but also for the surrogate,” says Janene Oleaga, a family formation attorney and reproductive rights advocate, who works closely both with surrogates and intended parents. But for many others, like advocates working with Stop Surrogacy Now, who see it as categorically harmful, or intended parents who see it as the best decision they’ve ever made, the situation isn’t as nuanced. Which brings about the question of who is surrogacy really for? Who benefits from the system and what can be done to protect those most vulnerable?
International Approaches, Varied Responses
With so many emotional, financial and physical considerations coming into play with any decision around surrogacy, reactions to both bans or a lack of them can get quite heated, especially as different groups are affected in very different ways. India’s legislative ban on commercial surrogacy was advanced in 2019 and adopted in 2020, after many critics called international surrogacy an India a system that exploited poor women, but the ban is also seen as discriminatory against LGBTQ couples as altruistic surrogacy is now only allowed for heterosexual couples who’ve been married for 5 years. Italy’s ban on surrogacy has also been criticised for similar reasons. But for anti-surrogacy campaigners, their stance against surrogacy is not discriminatory, simply protective of the women they are hoping to release from this system.
Lexi Ellingsworth the founder of Stop Surrogacy Now UK says that the “euphemistic language disguises the brutal reality. Surrogacy exploits women for their reproduction ability, their fertility and denies newborns their mothers from birth,” she says adding, “Exploitation, human trafficking, obstetric violence, and coercion is rife. And the numbers are increasing. As we are against surrogacy as a whole, we do not discriminate. We reject the practice regardless of sex, sexual orientation, age, religion, income, marital status and circumstance.”
A recent case where a stillbirth in a surrogacy case turned into a legal battle is just one of many examples that campaigners like Ellingsworth point towards to showcase just how easy it is to harm surrogate mothers within this process.
Ellingsworth also points out that support for surrogate mothers who may feel exploited or harmed in the process is rare, and it’s not just the mothers campaigners like Ellingsworth are concerned about. Olivia Maurel, a spokesperson for the Casablanca Declaration also shares Ellingsworth’s views regarding the importance of protecting both surrogate mother and child. For Maurel, the issue is also deeply personal.
“My activism began with a double awareness, that of a child and that of a mother. As a child born through surrogacy, I quickly realised that this practice tramples on the most fundamental rights of the child: the right to know and be raised by the woman who carried and gave birth to them, and the right to an identity that isn’t fractured by contract,” shares Maurel, further adding, “Behind the glossy marketing lies a global market going to be worth 200 billion dollars by 2032, one that operates with virtually no oversight. Reem Alsalem’s report calls this what it is: a form of gender-based violence and reproductive exploitation. She urges states to recognize that consent obtained under structural inequality is not true consent.”
But Oleaga, who’s worked in cases where parents from various countries have come to the US for surrogacy still sees the positive in it, even as she agrees that safety and protections are crucial. “So I’ve had intended parents come from China and Europe to the US for surrogacy because it may be less expensive to go to other places but it’s oftentimes less legally secure. In the US it is a legally secure process,” she says adding that while the bad stories deserve to be reported on and exposed, “For every negative story you see in the news, there are hundreds if not thousands of opposite stories not just for the intended parents but surrogates as well. That’s why you see surrogates coming back”
And while financial exploitation remains a major concern, Rachel Goldberg, a licensed marriage and family therapist finds more nuance in working around that and safeguarding clients than calling for an outright ban. “If someone is pursuing surrogacy out of financial desperation, it can feel like I’m preventing them from moving forward, but my role is to protect them as much as the intended parents. When someone is in a desperate situation, there is more room for exploitation,” she says, adding that she will also consider many other factors including stability in the home and emotional readiness before assessing whether a client is ready to take this step.
In a 2023 paper, Dr Yingyi Luo argues for the application of labor law to bolster surrogate rights and protections while operating in a global market of cross-border surrogacy. Building on the example of Bulgarian labor law and safeguards for non-standard workers, Luo writes, “Surrogate mothers, even those who have not signed a surrogacy contract, do not need to validate their employment status. Once a surrogate mother becomes pregnant with the child of the intended parents, her status transitions to that of “employed.”” This labor-law forward approach could ensure accountability, financial and health protections, standards of care and due diligence, and compliance that can all be lost in the often informal or discreet nature of facilitating surrogacy.
An Inside Look At What Works, And What Doesn’t
For those who’ve worked in the surrogacy industry or been connected to it, the gaps are clear. Belal Breaga Bakht used to run a concierge service that provided on ground services between surrogacy companies based in the US and surrogates in India between 2007 and 2011. Bakht’s job became a way make sure the surrogates were cared for and looked after, both medically and financially and he shares that his position as an Indian who had been raised in the UK allowed him to connect well not just with the surrogacy company and intended parents, but also with the surrogates themselves.
“There are many working parts of this complex process, you’ve got marketing company and surrogacy company in US (or anywhere else), you’ve got the IVF side which is usually not linked surrogacy side – and they are the crucial part of this equation, if they are complicit in exploiting the women you can’t really stop it. So we took over that role slightly, even though we were not supposed to, and that’s because we had a very very strong Indian team,” Bakht shares. While Bakht was mindful of the gaps in the industry and where exploitation was possible he shared that would ideally like to see a regulated but legal surrogacy industry, where with the right care and protections both sides could benefit.
Yessenia Lattore, a mother of three in the US, who is currently undergoing her second surrogacy journey shares her own experience of what it meant to be working in an industry that is largely self regulated. Despite the fact that she’s aware of bad actors, and has seen bad experiences, she chose to come back as a surrogate because of her own positive experience.
“I don’t think surrogacy should be illegal, but in the US its not regulated and I personally think it should be regulated,” she says adding, “The first time I did it I was very naive, I kind of went with the first agency that responded to me – was communicative with me.” Still Lattore got lucky, both with the family she chose and her agency, although she chose to work with a new agency this time around.
For Lattore, the decision to become a surrogate was motivated from her own experience with pregnancy loss, and when she was able to have healthy children after that she realised that she wanted to help other women have children too. She likes to joke that she can’t be doing it for the money because she receives “minimum wage” – if she looks at it compared to the hours being put in. But even for someone who’s had a positive experience, she knows the industry can do better in making sure it’s the same for everyone. “Surrogacy should be done ethically, so a surrogate isn’t left with 3 babies that aren’t her own. We have a psych evaluation, contracts, and our own lawyer. I personally think it should be regulated because right now it is done in different ways,” she says.
Both Oleaga and Goldberg, who’ve worked with different actors within the industry, agree that self regulation is difficult, but question the extent to which regulations may be the answer, particularly under the current US administration.
“I do think safeguards are important, but when they become overly restrictive, they can prevent families from growing. More regulation means more red tape, which is the challenge when involving politics. At the end of the day, even though it shouldn’t be this way and doesn’t feel fair, consumers still have to do their own homework to protect themselves from bad players,” Goldberg says.
Oleaga also agrees that regulation is important and there needs to be more consistency, particularly in laws that offer protection to surrogates, intended parents and children.
While Oleago and may seem like they’re miles apart from what Ellingsworth or Maurel are saying – and in some ways of course they are – what all of them are asking for and working towards are protections for the women and children often left most vulnerable in the world. And that should be the main goal for the industry, regardless of what side of the argument you lie on.
Anmol Irfan is a Muslim-Pakistani freelance journalist and editor. Her work aims at exploring marginalized narratives in the Global South with a key focus on gender, climate and tech. She tweets @anmolirfan22
On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched joint military strikes against Iran in what the Pentagon designated Operation Epic Fury. The operation came two days after the most substantive round of U.S.-Iran nuclear negotiations in years had concluded in Geneva, with both parties agreeing to continue talks. Within hours of those assurances, the bombs fell. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed. Strikes targeted the Iranian president, military chief of staff, and extensive military infrastructure. A strike on a girls’ primary school in Minab reportedly killed nearly one hundred children between the ages of seven and twelve.
This article is not primarily about those facts, though they deserve full moral weight. It is about what those facts represent in the architecture of international law: not an aberration, but the latest and most severe instance in a deliberate, escalating pattern of U.S. policy that treats the prohibition on the use of force as optional, the Security Council as a procedural nuisance, and unilateralism as astrategic doctrine. From Venezuela to Iran, from Operation Midnight Hammer in June 2025 to the military raid on Caracas on January 3, 2026, to Operation Epic Fury in February 2026. The question for the international community is whether it will respond with proportionate seriousness or retreat, once again, into diplomatic ambiguity.
This article draws on the author’s prior analysis, examining U.S. strikes in Venezuela and the legal framework governing the use of force, as well as a companion analysis on civilian protection and the prohibition on the use of force in the Iranian context. It argues that the time for legal cataloguing alone has passed. What is needed now is a dual-track approach: constraint from within the United States, and constraint from without.
The Illegality is Not in Dispute
The legal analysis of Operation Epic Fury is straightforward. Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter prohibits the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state. Two exceptions exist: Security Council authorization under Chapter VII, and individual or collective self-defense in response to an armed attack under Article 51. Neither applies here.
The Security Council did not authorize the use of force against Iran. The United States did not request such authorization. Iran was not attacking the United States or Israel at the time of the strikes. Whatever residual concern might be derived from earlier Iranian actions had long ceased to generate an ongoing armed attack capable of activating the self-defense exception. Iran was, by all accounts, engaged in active negotiations. The U.S. Director of National Intelligence had testified as recently as March 2025 that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon and its supreme leader had not reauthorized the program suspended in 2003. The IAEA affirmed it had found no proof of a systematic weapons effort.
The strikes were also launched in violation of Article 2(2) of the Charter, which requires good faith in the fulfillment of Charter obligations. Launching military operations during active diplomatic negotiations, operations that the U.S. president had, days earlier, indicated would wait, is a breach of the most elemental duty of good faith that the Charter’s architecture depends upon. Iran’s Foreign Ministry characterized this correctly.
Separately, the stated U.S. objective of regime change, explicitly framed by President Trump as a goal of the operation, and echoed by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, who declared the aim was to “remove the existential threat posed by the terrorist regime in Iran,” constitutes an independent violation of international law. The prohibition on forcible regime change is not a contested doctrine. It flows directly from Article 2(4)’s protection of “political independence” and from the customary norm of non-intervention. It is, in the language of the International Law Commission, a peremptory norm from which no derogation is permitted.
A Pattern, Not an Episode
What distinguishes the current crisis from earlier controversies is not merely its scale. It is the administration’s explicit abandonment of any pretense of legal compliance. In the living memory of every diplomat, lawyer, and policymaker currently active in international institutions, the United States has consistently sought to present its uses of force as legally defensible, however strained those defenses sometimes appeared. The post-September 11 doctrines of preventive self-defense and the “unwilling or unable” standard were legally contested, but they were doctrines, attempts to operate within an interpretive framework rather than to discard it entirely.
In Venezuela, beginning in September 2025, the United States conducted lethal strikes against boats in the Caribbean, framing them as law enforcement operations to avoid triggering the War Powers Resolution. In January 2026, U.S. forces conducted a military raid into Caracas, killing dozens, capturing President Maduro, and announcing that the United States would “run” Venezuela until a new government was installed. The attempt to reframe a manifest use of armed force as a domestic law enforcement action is not merely legally incorrect; it is a deliberate attack on the conceptual architecture that makes international law legible.
The cumulative effect is the construction of a new operational norm, one in which the most militarily powerful state on earth reserves to itself the right to use lethal force anywhere, against anyone, for purposes it defines unilaterally, accountable to no external legal authority. This emerging pattern of blatant disregard of international law, if allowed to consolidate, will not remain the exclusive property of the United States. China, Russia, India, and regional powers are watching. Every precedent accepted becomes a precedent available. The erosion of the jus ad bellum (use of force) framework is a problem for every state that has historically relied on that framework for its own security.
The Regime Change Trap
Beyond the immediate illegality of the strikes, Operation Epic Fury has another grave problem: it has no plausible endpoint. With Khamenei dead and the Iranian command structure targeted, the power vacuum is not a side effect; it is the current situation. History provides no encouraging precedent.
The 2003 invasion of Iraq, similarly framed as targeting a dangerous regime with weapons of mass destruction, produced a multi-decade military presence, hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties, a regional security vacuum exploited by non-state actors, and a country that has never returned to the stability that even its imperfect prior condition represented. Libya in 2011 demonstrated that air operations designed to facilitate regime change produce state collapse, not democratic transition. These are empirically established outcomes.
Shajareh Tayyebeh school in Minab photos from Mehr (Abbas Zakeri, (CC BY 4.0))
Iran is a country of almost 90 million people, with a sophisticated military establishment, an extensive regional network of proxy forces, missile capabilities capable of striking U.S. bases throughout the Middle East, and a political culture that has historically rallied around national sovereignty under foreign pressure. The killing of Khamenei does not eliminate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. It does not dissolve the Quds Force. It does not prevent successor leadership from emerging. It may, as multiple analysts have noted, accelerate Iran’s determination to acquire a nuclear deterrent, the very outcome the operation was ostensibly designed to prevent.
President Trump has urged Iranians to “take over your government,” a statement that confuses aspirational rhetoric with operational planning. There are no credible exile groups capable of assuming state functions in Iran. There is no post-conflict stabilization plan of record. Instead, there are many indicators of a prolonged military engagement, regional escalation, and the kind of unsustainable occupation that has defined the two-decade aftermath of every comparable U.S.-led regime-change operation.
A protracted military presence in Iran, even through proxy arrangements, would constitute one of the largest strategic and humanitarian failures in the history of modern warfare, in a country whose geography, population, and political culture make external occupation far more complex than any preceding U.S. intervention. International law prohibits this operation not because lawyers are squeamish, but because the legal prohibition reflects hard-earned collective wisdom about what such operations produce.
International Law Ignorance as Policy
It would be a mistake to treat the current administration’s approach to international law as simply incompetent or uninformed. The pattern suggests something more deliberate: a calculated decision that the costs of legal compliance exceed its benefits, and that U.S. structural advantages, Security Council veto, dollar-denominated global finance, and unmatched military projection capacity all insulate Washington from meaningful accountability. This calculation may not be wrong in the short term. What it ignores is the systemic consequence.
There is a further assumption embedded in this posture that deserves direct challenge: that the chaos generated by unilateral force can be managed, contained, and ultimately directed toward preferred outcomes. This has not proved true. The history of U.S. military interventions is a history of second and third-order effects that escaped prediction, planning, and control; sectarian fragmentation in Iraq that persists two decades on, state collapse in Libya that turned the country into a transit hub for migration and arms across the Sahel, and a counter-terrorism campaign in Somalia now in its third decade with no measurable endpoint.
The USS Delbert D. Black destroyer fires a Tomahawk missile. (U.S. Navy Photo)
The assumption of controllability flatters the intervening power. It imagines that military and economic superiority translates into the capacity to shape political outcomes in deeply complex societies. It does not. Even the United States, with its unmatched alliance networks, its forward-deployed forces, its intelligence apparatus, and financial leverage, has repeatedly discovered that it can destroy a government far more efficiently than it can build a successor one. The chaos that follows the removal of even a repressive order does not wait for instructions. It does not respect the preferences of the power that unleashed it. And it does not remain contained within the borders of the state where it begins.
The international legal order, imperfect and unevenly enforced as it has always been, functions not because powerful states are compelled to obey it but because most states most of the time conclude that compliance serves their interests better than defection. The Charter system’s prohibition on the use of force exists because states recognized, after two world wars, that a world of unilateral military discretion produces catastrophic outcomes even for the powerful, and it persists because most states still recognize this truth. When the most powerful state in the system openly repudiates that framework, the signaling effect is global and immediate.
We are already observing the downstream consequences. Western partners have responded to Operation Epic Fury with studied ambiguity rather than unambiguous condemnation. France, Germany, and the United Kingdom issued a joint statement calling on Iran to negotiate, as if Iran were the aggressor, while carefully avoiding any characterization of U.S. and Israeli strikes as unlawful. Australia’s prime minister expressed support for the strikes as “acting to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.” These responses legitimate the legal theory underlying the strikes: that anticipated capability development, assessed by the striking state alone, constitutes sufficient grounds for military action against a country engaged in active negotiations. The logic, once accepted, has no limiting principle. It applies to any state that any powerful neighbor believes might at some future point develop threatening capabilities. Its adoption by Western governments is not a minor diplomatic concession.
Inside the United States
The question that follows from legal analysis is not merely descriptive. It is operational: what can be done? The answer requires distinguishing between actions available within the United States and those available in the international system. Both tracks matter.
Within the United States, the War Powers Resolution of 1973 requires that presidentially initiated hostilities be reported to Congress within 48 hours and terminated within 60 days, absent explicit Congressional authorization. Operation Epic Fury has not been authorized by Congress. The administration’s prior pattern, invoking Article II Commander-in-Chief authority, is constitutionally contested and legally fragile.
Congressional oversight mechanisms also provide near-term leverage. Appropriations authority gives Congress the power to prohibit the use of funds for specific military operations or for operations directed at the stated objective of regime change. The annual National Defense Authorization Act process, combined with supplemental appropriations, provides multiple leverage points. The New York City Bar Association has called explicitly on Congress to halt the administration’s violations of U.S. and international law in Venezuela; the same call applies with greater force to Iran.
Outside the United States
Following the Caracas raid of January 3, the Security Council convened in emergency session but produced nothing; no resolution was even tabled, because the structural reality of the U.S. veto foreclosed any attempt. This paralysis is itself the clearest evidence that the Security Council cannot currently function as a constraint on the United States.
The United Nations General Assembly retains authority under the Uniting for Peace procedure, established in 1950 for precisely the contingency in which Security Council paralysis prevents collective response to a threat to international peace and security, to convene emergency special sessions, pass resolutions characterizing the use of force, and authorize collective action short of binding enforcement. A General Assembly resolution characterizing the U.S.-Israeli strikes as a violation of Article 2(4) would carry significant normative weight, particularly if adopted by a large majority.
States with sufficient institutional capacity should also consider referrals to the International Court of Justice (ICJ). While the Court cannot compel the United States to pay damages or halt operations; Nicaragua v. United Statesdemonstrated in 1986 that a favorable ICJ judgment is unenforceable when the respondent holds a Security Council veto, an ICJ finding of illegality produces legal record of the highest authority, shapes subsequent customary law development, and imposes reputational costs that affect U.S. alliance relationships and diplomatic leverage across multiple issue areas.
The Responsibility to Respond Lawfully
This article has argued throughout for the legal constraint of U.S. military power. It is important to be precise about what that argument does not mean. It does not mean indifference to Iran’s internal repression. The Iranian government’s violent response to protests, its systemic violence against dissidents, and its documented human rights violations are real and serious. They generate legitimate humanitarian concern and justify a robust multilateral response.
What they do not generate is a unilateral legal entitlement for military intervention, including the intervention that has now occurred. Responsibility to Protect (R2P) was constructed within the institutional architecture of the Charter. It recognizes that sovereignty entails obligations, not only rights. But it equally and deliberately rejects the theory that individual states may determine unilaterally when intervention is justified. The moment humanitarian concern becomes accepted as a self-licensing basis for military action, it ceases to be a protection mechanism and becomes a standing authorization for the most powerful states to intervene wherever they characterize conditions as sufficiently dire.
International observers, United Nations mechanisms, and human rights organizations have documented patterns of lethal repression, arbitrary detention, and systemic violence against protestors and dissidents. Yet the existence of atrocity risk, however grave, does not create a unilateral legal entitlement for external military intervention.
The System Holds Only If States Make It Hold
Operation Epic Fury is not the end of international law. Breaches of law do not invalidate the law; if they did, no legal system could function. In 1986, the ICJ found the United States in violation of international law for its operations in Nicaragua. The United States vetoed Security Council enforcement. The law remained. What changed was the willingness of the international community to hold the line.
The current moment requires a similar choice. States that have spent decades insisting on their commitment to a rules-based international order must now decide whether that commitment is conditional on the identity of the violator. The ambiguous responses from London, Paris, Berlin, and Canberra suggest, so far, that it is. That decision, too, has consequences, not only for Iran, but for the precedents that will govern the next use of force, and the one after that.
Damage on Tehran’s Ghandi Hospital after attack by the U.S. and Israel (Hossein Zohrevand for Tasnim News Agency)
The United States built much of the legal architecture now being dismantled. American lawyers, diplomats, and policymakers shaped the UN Charter, the Geneva Conventions, the Rome Statute, and the norms of customary international law that govern the use of force. The prohibition on the use of force was built on the ruins of the last catastrophe. The task now is to ensure it does not have to be rebuilt on the ruins of the next one.
Finally, there is a deeper conceptual error embedded in any sustained posture that disregards international order. National interest, properly understood, is not a free-standing concept that exists before and independent of international order. It acquires meaning and practical traction only within a system in which the interests of states are mutually recognized and can be pursued through stable frameworks of interaction. A state can have a foreign policy objective; it can identify resources it wishes to secure, alliances it wishes to maintain, and threats it wishes to neutralize. But the pursuit of those objectives, their translation into durable outcomes rather than momentary impositions, depends on a surrounding order that holds. When that order is replaced by an ad hoc revolving door of unilateral force and managed instability, national interest dissolves. The powerful state finds itself not in a world it controls but in a world it has made ungovernable, one in which its own preferences can no longer be reliably projected, its own commitments no longer credibly made, and its own security no longer structurally guaranteed.
Davit Khachatryan is an international lawyer and lecturer focusing on the intersection of armed conflict, emerging technologies, and international law.
The capture in June 2024 of drug lord Ismael Zambada “El Mayo”, now on trial in the United States, decapitated the Cartel de Sinaloa, provoking a struggle for leadership between two factions and a war that has left thousands dead and disappeared. If there is no consensual leadership within the Jalisco Nueva Generación Cartel, the situation could escalate exponentially.
Mexico has spent 20 years militarizing its drug policy—not just by bringing the army in to fight a drug war, but because cartels in response have transformed into armed criminal enterprises that not only sell drugs but also control territories through extortion, domination of local politicians, and many other criminal businesses, as already described by the U.S. Department of the Treasury. From the standpoint of peace and the rule of law, this policy has failed; from the standpoint of business, it appears to be a success, not only for the cartels.
The armed forces, like organized crime groups, have gained greater political and economic power as a result of a failed drug policy, and both are responsible for thousands of victims. According to official figures, from 2006 to 2025, there have been 497,446 intentional homicides—oscillating between 25 and 30 per 100,000 inhabitants—and as of today, 391,722 disappeared persons, of whom 131,819 remain missing.
The conditions that enable the growth of lethal power on both the military and criminal sides include corruption among political elites who co-govern with organized crime, the impunity that leaves crimes on both sides unpunished, and the lack of transparency and accountability among the military, political parties, and public representatives. The fight against organized crime must use the tools of democracy and justice. Weapons have only brought more violence.
The Secretary of Defense, General Trevilla, stated forcefully that the operation to capture “El Mencho” demonstrated the strength of the Mexican state. The truth is that the state’s strength lies in its civilian institutions. Instead of strengthening institutions of justice and transparency, the Mexican government and Congress have been dismantling them, creating conditions that undermine basic rights. This is why a group of Mexican human rights organizations has asked United Nations bodies to intervene to protect victims and guarantee their rights.
The current crisis of the multilateral system stems from the fact that the West, as Mark Carney noted at the most recent World Economic Forum, has been living in a “useful fiction” in which it pretends that the rules apply equally to all, including Mexico. The United Nations, and especially its member states, must embrace universal values for a “new world order” and demonstrate this through action by upholding human rights in any country, regardless of its degree of power. The authorization, support, and acquiescence of the Mexican government toward crimes committed by Mexican cartels must be a subject of discussion and decision-making in the UN General Assembly, as requested by the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances.
Additionally, criminal organizations are enabled by weapons manufacturers, particularly in the United States, due to the ease of access to firearms. Arms companies benefit from this militarized policy because they sell to all sides of the conflict. Approximately 80% of the weapons used by cartels are acquired in the US. Still, they are also the main suppliers to the armed forces in Mexico—a win-win business that the United States Congress allows by failing to regulate the domestic and international sales and traceability of weapons. Congress must adopt comprehensive legislation—such as the ARMAS Act—beginning with restoring authority over controlled weapons sales to the U.S. Department of State rather than the U.S. Department of Commerce, followed by stronger controls on public sales in the United States to ensure traceability and prohibit transactions for individuals linked to criminals, including cartel members.
Criminal structures require “legal” business networks to transfer and launder money, such as banks, money transfer companies, currency exchange houses, and bitcoin networks that the U.S. Department of Justice has already detected. These transnational criminal enterprises rely on transnational complicity networks to move drugs to end consumers and bring money back. The U.S. government does not appear interested in dismantling these networks or regulating money-transfer and bitcoin businesses that become complicit service providers to criminals in the United States. A criminal policy focused on dismantling criminal networks—not just capturing drug lords, which is often popular for winning votes but ineffective at stopping criminal enterprises and violence—is needed. Along with conducting serious investigations into collusion between U.S. businesses and cartels, there must be greater oversight and monitoring to prevent transactions to criminal groups through banks, exchange houses, money transfers, and bitcoin.
The effects of the capture and killing of “El Mencho” remain to be seen. Still, organized crime will continue operating as long as drug policy remains militarized rather than civilian-led and focused on strengthening institutions of justice, transparency, and anti-corruption in both Mexico and the United States.
Michael W Chamberlin is a CIP Senior Non-Resident Fellow.
Warfare is increasingly conducted through sensors, networks, and remote platforms that keep their human operators far from danger. This distance has strategic, political, and ethical consequences that are only beginning to be understood. Erik Lin-Greenberg’s The Remote Revolution offers the clearest account to date of how uninhabited systems reshape leader behavior, crisis dynamics, and modern statecraft. His findings invite a second question. How should democracies design institutions that prevent unnecessary harm before it occurs and preserve accountability when conflict becomes remote?
Lin-Greenberg’s central insight is that remote systems introduce a predictable shift in how states initiate and manage the use of force. When leaders can act without risking their own personnel, their behavior changes. He writes that reduced risks “can lower the threshold for dispatching forces, creating a moral hazard that enables decision makers to launch military operations during interstate disputes when their state arsenals include drones.”1 His evidence spans wargames, surveys, and archival case studies. Participants accepted higher escalatory risk when uninhabited assets were involved. During the Cold War, both superpowers relied on remote reconnaissance for missions that would have been politically untenable with crews aboard. When Iran shot down a US Global Hawk drone in 2019, the absence of American casualties made it politically easier to absorb the loss and step back from escalation. These examples illustrate how distance alters strategic judgment, reducing both the barriers to initiation and, at times, the pressure to retaliate.
Lower risk expands what Lin-Greenberg calls the “menu of options.”2 Remote systems enable actions that fall between inaction and major escalation, including reconnaissance, limited strikes, and coercive signals that impose costs without creating public alarm. Azerbaijan’s reliance on drones in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war illustrates how remote tools expand operational choice while managing political exposure. Israel’s routine use of drones in cross-border operations against regional adversaries demonstrates how leaders create intermediate space between symbolic warning and high-intensity response. In episodes involving Syria and Hezbollah, remote systems have enabled calibrated signaling without the immediate risks associated with crewed aircraft.
Clankers and Casualties
One of Lin-Greenberg’s most distinctive findings concerns how states respond to attacks on uninhabited systems. Rivals often treat drone shootdowns differently from incidents involving inhabited aircraft. These losses rarely generate public pressure for retaliation. Decision-makers frequently see shooting down a drone as a low-risk signal of dissatisfaction.3 Cold War episodes show that remote-platform losses were treated as manageable setbacks rather than triggers for escalation.4 Israeli cases confirm similar restraint. These dynamics produce what Lin-Greenberg describes as “more but milder conflicts.”5 Remote systems do not eliminate escalation. They change its form, making crises more frequent but less likely to cross into major interstate war.
Public opinion plays a central role in this transformation. Lin-Greenberg notes that reduced risk “mitigates the political obstacles often associated with sending troops into harm’s way.”6 When political costs fall, strategic discretion expands. Drone campaigns in US counterterrorism operations illustrate this pattern. Casualty aversion remains a constant in democratic politics. Remote technology changes how leaders weigh those incentives.
For policymakers grappling with the expanding role of autonomous and remote systems, The Remote Revolution provides a rigorous and indispensable foundation.
Lin-Greenberg’s contribution is descriptive and theoretical. He explains how remote systems alter incentives and behavior. The next task is institutional. Democracies must translate this knowledge into preventive design. Recent analysis in the International Policy Journal has argued that compliance with the laws of war should be engineered directly into autonomous and remote systems. Embedding discrimination and proportionality requirements is a start. But engineering norms into code is insufficient without reforming the institutions that authorize and oversee lethal force.
Oversight and Operations
Oversight becomes more complex when remote operations move across statutory authorities. Military operations conducted under Title 10 are subject to armed services oversight and reporting requirements. Covert actions conducted under Title 50 are reported to intelligence committees and often operate under tighter secrecy. The migration of drone strikes between these frameworks during the post-9/11 era demonstrated how lethal authority can shift between oversight regimes with different transparency standards. Designing for prevention requires harmonizing expectations across authorities so that distance cannot exploit jurisdictional gaps.
Recent allegations of unlawful airstrikes against civilian vessels underscore the institutional stakes. When force is projected at distance against targets that are difficult for the public to visualize or verify, the risk is not only civilian harm but erosion of democratic accountability. The problem is structural rather than partisan. Any administration operating with remote tools faces incentives to lower political friction. The question is whether institutions are strong enough to resist that pressure.
A durable institutional response requires at least four changes:
Congress should require sunset provisions for semiautonomous lethal authorities, mandating explicit reauthorization every two years. This would prevent normalization of delegated force.
Agencies conducting lethal operations should submit public civilian harm prevention certifications before deploying new remote or AI-enabled systems, reviewed by an independent inspector general.
Lawmakers should codify a named human decision authority requirement for every lethal action conducted through remote or autonomous systems, with documented reasoning preserved for review.
Congress should establish automatic reporting triggers for the use of force against civilian vessels or non-state maritime actors, requiring public disclosure within a fixed timeframe.
These reforms do not prohibit remote warfare. They restore friction where political cost has diminished.
Designing for prevention also requires cultural change. Officers and analysts should be rewarded for surfacing uncertainty and slowing operations when civilian risk is ambiguous. Near-miss reporting should be protected from reprisal. Restraint must be treated as competence rather than hesitation.
Remote technologies are diffusing rapidly across state and non-state actors, normalizing distance in both surveillance and strike capabilities.7 The incentives Lin-Greenberg identifies are unlikely to remain confined to major powers. That makes institutional design more urgent, not less.
Distance changes what leaders see and what the public feels. Without institutional reform, it will erode the accountability that gives democratic uses of force their legitimacy. Democracies must build systems that prevent unnecessary harm, maintain human judgment at the center of lethal authority, and preserve moral clarity even when conflict unfolds beyond the horizon of public view. Remote systems may change the character of war. Deliberate design must determine how democracies respond.
Lucas F. Schleusener is a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations. You can follow him on Bluesky at @lfschleusener.bsky.social.
1 Erik Lin-Greenberg, The Remote Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2025), 5. 2 Lin-Greenberg, The Remote Revolution, 25. 3 Ibid., 33. 4 Ibid., 108. 5 Lin-Greenberg, The Remote Revolution, 5. 6 Ibid. 7 See, for example, Faine Greenwood’s reporting and analysis on the global diffusion of drone technologies and the regulatory lag surrounding remote systems.
In January, Americans became immediately and tragically familiar with the spectacle of masked and armed agents of Federal security forces shooting civilians in broad daylight. The horrific violence from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) against people in Minnesota, particularly the killings of protestors Renee Good and Alex Pretti, match the threat to everyday society seen in places abroad where security forces operate with reckless impunity. Immediate deescalation is necessary in Minneapolis, along with a commitment to avoid similar violence in other cities, but we must acknowledge that it is unlikely this administration will end their campaign to remove undocumented immigrants through seemingly any means. The systemic security force abuse that is accompanying ICE’s presence across American cities and hidden in detention centers will have lasting damage, particularly on already vulnerable immigrant communities and requires comprehensive prevention efforts by civil society and local government.
This kind of violence is not new, even in the United States where police abuse has resulted in numerous deaths, though its deliberate provocation by a Presidency against the people of a US state is unique. In the past protecting civilians from such violence was seen as a crucial part of US foreign policy, as part of a holistic effort to combat the conditions that foster violent extremism.
I have spent my career designing and managing conflict prevention, counterterrorism and security assistance policy and programs in Africa. I am not the first to remark on the striking similarities occurring on American streets with what I witnessed in multiple authoritarian African countries. I’ve sat in traffic, protected by diplomatic plates, eyes down and afraid to truly look, as police officers beat a man who was refusing, or couldn’t pay a bribe. I’ve designed security assistance programs across the Sahel that have been canceled due to massive military attacks against unarmed civilians in the name of counterterrorism. I’ve interviewed young people who defected from Boko Haram to learn why they joined, and personal or family abuse by security officials was often a primary reason.
I live in Washington DC, one of the first cities to be targeted by the Trump administration’s campaign to round up immigrants without regard for accepted standards of engagement. Like many in the community who pulled together through a patchwork system of signal chats, I drove kids to school who no longer felt comfortable walking or taking the metro. On our drives, we frequently witnessed masked agents pulling people, mostly men, from their cars and violently pressing them against the doors or shoving them to the ground, instantly handcuffed behind their back. Sometimes we drove past in silence, avoiding eye contact because it was too difficult. Other times they chatted in Spanish, identifying friends who lived in nearby buildings and texting them to make sure they knew to stay home. One day, the dreaded news came through: one of their fathers had been abducted on the street on his way to work. After being transferred from one detention facility to another, he told his family that the conditions were so terrible that he felt he had no choice but to self deport.
Although media attention is focused intently on Minneapolis now, ICE is still present in Washington and many other cities around the country, and their violent tactics have become emboldened and sanctioned by political officials. In fact, rather than simply being a tactic, ICE violence has become a policy, and a means to promote and enforce power.
Decades of research in Africa has shown that lack of trust in government, security force impunity, and general perception of marginalization are factors that can lead to recruitment by violent extremist organizations, especially when triggered by a “tipping point” event such as violent abuse by security forces. While there is no indication of increased violence among communities targeted by ICE, American civil society, and eventually the American government, should be attentive to these risks and take steps to prevent increased marginalization and risk of violent non-state groups forming in response to the abuses they have faced.
As the large-scale public response in Minneapolis and micro-level networks to protect and support neighbors across the country have shown, communities are resilient in the face of state sponsored violence. I’ve seen this personally through hundreds of community-based organizations I’ve worked with across Africa that have developed with limited resources to protect their people who face violence from both the government and non-state armed groups.
Federally sanctioned security force violence has harmed a sacred social contract between Americans and the government, but there are ways to prevent longer term damage. Although the context between the African countries where I have worked and the United States is very different, international experience and evidence suggest that states, cities and civil society could focus on the following actions to mitigate the risks of continued state violence and repression:
Strengthen hyper-local resilience networks: Protection and support that occurs closest to home such as Parent Teacher Associations (PTAs), neighborhood committees, or churches/houses of worship can provide a sense of belonging that reduces real or perceived marginalization. These frontline groups may be able to help develop strategies and capacities to resist violence. Many of these networks exist organically but can be strengthened with external financial or organizational support, however it’s important not to overwhelm their authenticity.
Rebuild trust in security forces through community-engaged policing at the state and local level: This approach is not new to the American context where some law enforcement entities have spent decades building relationships and trust within immigrant communities. Rebuilding or developing positive relationships that effectively address non-immigration related crime will require redoubling these efforts and focusing on transparency and independence from immigration enforcement. Lessons can be drawn from Kenya, for example, where there has been significant challenges of police misconduct and political interference.
Ensure a gender-sensitive approach: Although many of the people impacted directly by ICE’s violence are adult men, women’s lives are also changed particularly if they must take on additional roles to support their family financially to compensate for the loss of one income if a spouse is detained or deported. A gender sensitive approach should also consider the impact on boys and young men, whose role in the family and society may also be shifting.
Provide psychosocial support and counseling to those that have suffered or witnessed security force abuses: Given the risk that security force abuses can be a tipping point towards violence, it is critical to address this trauma early and provide ongoing counseling particularly for youth. Psychosocial support has been identified as a critical aspect of peacebuilding, reintegration of former fighters, and post conflict reconstruction following many types of violent conflict in Africa.
In the near term, these actions will fall to civil society, state and local government, and private citizens. The Trump administration has decimated many federal government services that address community violence prevention and detection domestically and abroad in the Departments of Homeland Security (DHS) Justice, and State, as well as the FBI, including funding for NGOs. But beyond that, as was the case in many other countries I have worked in, the use of sanctioned state sponsored violence is intentional. As opposed to many countries, where political leadership acknowledges the need to address systemic security force abuses but fails to control it in practice, in the United States, such abuse continues to be promoted as acceptable. The tragic deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, as well as the deaths of at least 53 people held in detention by DHS, are a direct result of the consistent sanctioned violence by security forces. This violence continues around the country, in neighborhoods where national media has gathered to witness it and in others where the harm is documented only by bystanders, and it is causing both short- and long-term damage to this country, and requires a holistic response.
Margot Shorey is an expert on counterterrorism and conflict prevention and previously served in the Department of State Bureaus of African Affairs and Conflict and Stabilization Operations.
As the United States prepares to co-host the 2026 FIFA World Cup alongside Canada and Mexico, and to host the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic Games, sports diplomacy faces a critical test. Mega-events no longer function solely as platforms for projecting democratic values; they increasingly expose the gap between international rhetoric and domestic governance. The tensions between the internationalism of global sport and hardline migration and border-control policies—particularly in the U.S. context—show that debates around boycotts are not causes but symptoms of deeper governance failures. There are reputational and democratic risks at stake, but action can restore credibility to democratic sports diplomacy.
In a former contribution published in 2024, The US and EU Can Build a More Democratic World with Sports Diplomacy, I argued that sport could serve as a strategic vector for democratic cooperation and international leadership. At the time, sports diplomacy was largely framed as an opportunity: a shared platform to project values of openness, inclusion, and dialogue in an increasingly polarized world.
Today, that proposition faces a far more demanding test. As the United States prepares to co-host the 2026 FIFA World Cup with Canada and Mexico, and to host the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic Games, sports diplomacy has shifted from aspiration to accountability. Mega-events no longer merely project democratic values; they expose whether those values are sustained through policy, governance, and institutional coherence. In this new context, sport has become a stress test of democratic credibility.
The 2026 World Cup illustrates this transformation with particular clarity. As a tri-national tournament, its success depends structurally on cross-border mobility. Fans, athletes, journalists, officials, and civil society actors must be able to travel freely and safely for the event to function as a genuinely global gathering. Mobility, in this sense, is not a logistical detail. It is a democratic condition.
That condition now sits uneasily alongside increasingly hardline migration and border-control policies in the United States. Expanded enforcement mechanisms, uncertainty around visas, and the growing prominence of a deportation-first logic risk transforming a global celebration into an experience marked by fear, exclusion, and arbitrariness. The tension between the internationalism of sport and fortress-style politics is no longer abstract; it is fast becoming operational.
Mega-sporting events are built on hospitality, openness, and shared experience. Restrictive border regimes, by contrast, are built on deterrence, suspicion, and control. When these logics collide, sport becomes politically incoherent. The reputational consequences are significant. Hosting a World Cup under conditions perceived as hostile or unpredictable does not enhance soft power; it erodes it. The very visibility that once made mega-events attractive as diplomatic tools now magnifies policy contradictions.
It is in this context that discussions of boycotts have resurfaced. These debates are often treated as emotional reactions or ideological gestures. That interpretation misses the point. Boycotts are not the cause of the problem, but a symptom of governance failure. They emerge when the gap between democratic rhetoric and administrative practice becomes too visible to ignore.
The question, therefore, is not whether boycotts are effective as a tactic. It is why they become thinkable in the first place. Concerns voiced by fan groups, journalists, advocacy organizations, and sporting stakeholders point to a deeper anxiety about access, safety, and rights during the World Cup. The potential chilling effect on attendance, participation, and media coverage represents not only a logistical challenge, but a profound reputational risk. When mobility becomes conditional and enforcement overshadows hospitality, the soft-power dividend of hosting rapidly evaporates.
This dynamic highlights a broader shift in sports diplomacy. Symbolism alone is no longer sufficient. Ceremonies, slogans, and narratives cannot compensate for governance gaps. Sport has entered a post-symbolic phase, in which policy choices and institutional arrangements matter more than messaging. Mega-events now test whether democratic systems can align domestic governance with international projection.
A brief comparative glance reinforces this point. The Milano–Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics offer an imperfect but instructive European benchmark. Framed around sustainability, territorial cohesion, and long-term legacy, the Games reflect an effort to embed sport within broader governance frameworks rather than treating it as a standalone spectacle. Europe’s own contradictions—particularly on migration—are well documented. Yet the lesson is clear: credibility does not stem from flawless performance, but from coherent governance and transparent commitments.
Looking ahead, the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic Games represent a narrow but critical window for correction. Unlike the World Cup, they allow time for institutional learning and policy adjustment. Clear and transparent visa regimes, safeguards for freedom of expression, protections for athletes and journalists, and effective coordination across federal, state, and local authorities could transform LA 2028 into a credible demonstration of rights-based sports diplomacy. Failure to do so would have the opposite effect, amplifying perceptions of democratic inconsistency rather than leadership.
If sports diplomacy is to remain credible, values must be operationalized through policy. To that end, several concrete steps are essential.
Policy Recommendations
The U.S. federal government should establish a dedicated World Cup mobility framework guaranteeing transparent, expedited, and rights-based visa and entry procedures for fans, athletes, journalists, and civil society actors.
FIFA should condition hosting agreements on binding human-rights and mobility guarantees, including independent monitoring of border and enforcement practices during the tournament.
Host cities and states should adopt clear protocols limiting the role of immigration enforcement agencies in and around sporting venues to prevent intimidation and arbitrary detention.
The European Union and partner governments should articulate minimum democratic standards for mega-event hosting, using Milano–Cortina 2026 as a benchmark for rights-based governance.
The International Olympic Committee should treat LA 2028 as a pilot case for democratic hosting, integrating freedom of movement, freedom of expression, and independent oversight as core Olympic requirements.
Sport cannot repair democratic deficits. But it can reveal them with unmatched visibility. As the world turns its attention to the 2026 World Cup and beyond, mega-events will not simply ask whether democracies can host the world. They will ask whether democracies are prepared to govern themselves coherently under global scrutiny.
Raül Romeva i Ruedaholds two PhDs, one in International Relations and another in Sport Science and Education. He is currently Professor of Global Politics and Sport Diplomacy at Universitat Ramon Llull and EADA Business School. He is also a former Member of the European Parliament and former Minister for Foreign Affairs, Institutional Relations, and Transparency in the Catalan Government.
The first year of the second Trump administration can best be surmised as a series of crimes for which accountability remains nonexistent. His administration forcibly disappeared approximately 250 Venezuelan migrant men, rendered them to El Salvador, and detained them in a prison notorious for its brutality. Unauthorized lethal airstrikes targeted allegeddrug trafficking vessels off the coast of Venezuela as a prelude to removing the country’s leader, all under the threat of further military intrusion. Masked federal agents abducted people off the streets and bundled them into unmarked cars.
These made-for-TV displays of state violence define the second Trump administration. While certainly shocking in their brazen, even gleeful disregard for the rule of law and democratic norms, the abuses unfolding across the United States and beyond do not lack precedent. Instead, emboldened by the lack of comprehensive, meaningful accountability for similar conduct over the past decades, the Trump administration has chosen to escalate and expand preexisting abusive practices in pursuit of its authoritarian aims—with grave consequences for ordinary people and U.S. democracy.
Unaccountability as permission
Two years ago, I led a research study with the Center for Civilians in Conflict (CIVIC) and the Stimson Center that investigated how the U.S. approaches accountability for civilian harm and law enforcement misconduct. The study found significant shortcomings in accountability across the U.S. security sector. In addition, the study warned that continued unaccountability risked creating a permissive environment for abuse while undermining democratic governance.
The Trump administration has repeatedly taken advantage of this permissive environment, from extraordinary renditions to illegal airstrikes to secret policing.
Extraordinary Renditions
In the spring of 2025, the Trump administration removed some 250 Venezuelan men from the United States to El Salvador. When relatives and lawyers sought to locate their loved ones and clients, U.S. officials refused to provide information. The U.S. and Salvadoran governments claimed the men were members of Tren de Agua, a Venezuelan organized crime group designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the Trump administration. However, the U.S. government appears to have alleged Tren de Agua membership based on inaccurate and unreliable methods.
Salvadoran authorities detained the Venezuelans incommunicado in the Center for Terrorism Confinement (CECOT), a facility notorious for inhumane conditions and violence. Men interviewed by Human Rights Watch and Cristosal following their release from CECOT and return to Venezuela described frequent beatings, sexual assault, and the denial of basic hygiene, sanitation, and medical care.
Possibly fearing international consequences for this detention, officials in El Salvador wrote to the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, trying to “assign the US government sole responsibility under international law for migrants detained in CECOT.”
The extrajudicial transfer of these men to torture in a third country closely mirrors the Bush administration’s post-9/11 extraordinary rendition program. Following the attacks, the CIA transferred terrorism suspects for interrogation to countries known to practice torture. Bashar al-Assad’s Syria was one such destination. Others included Morocco, Jordan, and Egypt. As in the case of CECOT, the rendition program ensnared individuals who had nothing to do with al-Qaeda or terrorism. The CIA refused to allow the Senate Intelligence Committee to investigate renditions, precluding any meaningful accountability.
Illegal Airstrikes, signature precedents
Prior to January’s invasion, the U.S. conducted a series of airstrikes off the coast of Venezuela, targeting vessels allegedly involved in drug smuggling. Thirty-five strikes have killed over 100 people. The U.S. has claimed these strikes constitute part of a non-international armed conflict against drug cartels. External legal experts, however, have concluded that the strikes not only lack a legal basis, but amount toextrajudicial executions. The Pentagon has also asserted that it does not consider it important for the military to know the identities of the people killed—or even whether they had been trafficking drugs. Fishermen from Trinidad, Colombia, and likely beyond have paid the price.
Self-styled Secretary of War Pete Hegseth promised to treat maritime drug traffickers, in his own words, “EXACTLY how we treated Al-Qaeda.” In fact, the administration does appear to be treating its targets exactly how the United States approached War on Terror “signature strikes.” Like their fishermen counterparts in 2025, ordinary Somalis, Yemenis, Pakistanis, and others were targeted and killed based on observed “patterns of life” thought to resemble those of terrorist operatives. With accountability for these incidents of civilian harm largely absent, the recycling and escalation of signature strikes unfortunately cannot come as a surprise.
Secret Police
Perhaps the most emblematic visual of the second Trump administration is that of masked federal agents, often not wearing insignia or refusing to identify themselves, emerging from unmarked cars to snatch immigrants—or anyone determined to “look like an immigrant”—off the streets. Excessive force is standard. In addition, agents have tear gassed, manhandled, and pointedweapons at ordinary Americans and elected representatives seeking to protect immigrant community members and constituents. On January 7, an ICE agent in Minneapolis shot and killed Renee Good, a mother of three, as she sought to protest for the rights of her immigrant neighbors.
Congress attempted to curtail the use of unmarked agents in the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act, which required federal law enforcement officers to wear visible identification when policing protests. However, the migration of tactics used against protesters to immigration raids and the continued deployment of masked and militarized agents at protests highlights the lack of political will to enforce non-repetition.
Envisioning Accountability
Accountable government institutions are critical to a functioning democracy. Because security agencies are uniquely empowered by the state to deprive people of their lives and liberty, ensuring they remain accountable carries heightened significance. Americans, at least as of two years ago, agreed. A joint CIVIC/YouGov poll conducted in conjunction with CIVIC and the Stimson Center’s 2023 study found that 73% of Americans agreed that the strength of our democracy depended on holding law enforcement agents accountable for their actions.
Further, participants in CIVIC and Stimson’s research emphasized the need for a comprehensive approach to accountability extending beyond a narrow focus on legal liability. Alongside legal liability, this comprehensive approach encompasses acknowledgment, explanation, and apologies; taking responsibility and making amends; disciplinary action; and non-repetition. Participants additionally made clear that any approach to accountability should be grounded in the needs and perspectives of the communities harmed by security activities.
Securing comprehensive accountability, whether for present abuses under the current Trump administration or for the past abuses that enabled them will not be an easy task. The destruction and devaluing of existingsafeguards and accountability mechanisms since last January only compounds the challenge. At the same time, the past year has also demonstrated the power of creative and relentless organizing to defend democracy and protect targeted communities. With a commitment to sustaining this energy across what was already a protracted and grueling fight, genuine accountability—and the benefits it provides—might just be achievable.
Rosie Berman is a researcher and writer based in Washington, D.C.
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 ColdWith theSame 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 clearand 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.
President Donald Trump’s military attack in Venezuela not only risks entangling the United States in a new costly war but also opens the door to a world in which interstate wars of economic conquest and expansion are common practice. In the wake of the attack, Trump previewed such as he threatened military action against Greenland, Colombia, Cuba, and even Mexico. Continuing down this path will lead to a more violent global environment and surely put Americans at greater risk – especially in an increasingly multi-polar world with unconstrained nuclear weapons. If we want to avoid that future, we must come together now, raise our collective voices, and say no to these new wars of imperial conquest.
Trump has launched an illegal military action to kidnap Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro and has asserted that the U.S. will now “run” the country. The intervention is supposedly a response to narco-terrorism, yet there is little indication that Maduro’s arrest will slow narcotics trafficking. Indeed, as many have pointed out, only a small amount of the most dangerous illicit drugs entering in the United States originate in or transit Venezuela. The primary purpose of this move, stated boldly in imperialist terms, is to gain access to Venezuela’s oil. Trump has ordered Venezuelan authorities to cut oil trade with Russia, China and Cuba and is seeking indefinite U.S. control over Venezuelan energy resources.
Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are exerting control of Venezuelan affairs with diplomatic pressures and a total embargo on oil exports, but they are prepared to use military force again if necessary. Trump made it explicit. “We are not afraid of boots on the ground if we have to.”
Trump’s military attack in Venezuela violates the U.S. Constitution and is contrary to U.S. laws that require congressional consultation and impose limits on the use of force abroad. It is also a clear violation of the UN Charter and is contrary to core principles of international law and international humanitarian law. As Michael Hirsh explains in Foreign Policy, the attack sets a dangerous precedent that could provide a green light for other powerful countries to engage in wars of conquest and aggression. The attack – and Trump’s subsequent threats to attack more countries – threatens to accelerate the unraveling of international norms established to keep the peace after two world wars.
The U.S. public reaction to the overthrow of Maduro so far is mixed. Few lament the removal of a repressive dictator, but many question Trump’s blatant disregard for the law and the lack of congressional oversight An initial Washington Postpoll found respondents evenly split on approving or disapproving the military capture of Maduro, 63% agreeing that the operation should have congressional approval, and 94% agreeing that the Venezuelan people should choose their own future leaders. A Reuters/Ipsos poll found 33% in favor of the operation and 72% concerned about the U.S. becoming too heavily involved in Venezuela.
Many Venezuelan exiles have applauded Trump’s military action, understandably. They have suffered from tyranny, corruption, and economic collapse, and are hoping that Maduro’s removal will bring national renewal. It is right to acknowledge and support the democratic aspirations of the Venezuelan people. It would be naïve, however, to believe that the Trump administration is actively interested in supporting democratic rights in Venezuela. While the U.S. supported Venezuelan democracy activist Maria Corina Machado for the Nobel Peace Prize and backed the campaign of her party’s presidential nominee, Edmundo González, in last year’s stolen election, Trump has dismissed opposition leaders as “lacking respect” within Venezuela.
Trump’s interest is oil, not democratic freedom. He seeks to give American energy companies control over Venezuela’s oil production. It’s about the money.
For the moment the administration has indicated its willingness to work with Venezuelan Vice President, now acting President, Delcy Rodriguez. The structures of the country’s government and armed forces remain in place. Whether and how Venezuelan officials will do Trump’s bidding remains uncertain. A lot of things could go wrong in this scenario. There are many cautionary lessons from past U.S. attempts to stabilize countries following military invasions, from Afghanistan to Iraq to Libya, but it is doubtful the Trump team cares about such.
In this moment, as envisioned by the country’s founders, Congress’ role is critical. Lawmakers must exercise their constitutional war power to ensure the United States does not use force rashly without weighing the significant potential consequences for the American public in the short- and long-term. Congress has the power of the purse to halt funding for any further use of force in, over or off the shores of Venezuela, and also to prevent threatened military action against other countries. Legislative debate and votes on these issues are underway in Washington. Grassroots activists and concerned citizens can make a difference by raising their voices and demanding that legislators (and candidates for the 2026 elections) support prohibitions on further military action in Venezuela and beyond.
We need a new American peace movement that can counter the march toward militarism at home and abroad, as we recently wrote in Waging Nonviolence. This includes developing a renewed, winning message about how the United States benefits from a rules-based international system, engaging in multilateralism, and investing in mechanisms to mitigate crises and resolve conflicts peacefully. Surely, some rules and mechanisms need updating and restructuring to meet the needs of a changing world. The U.N. system is imperfect, but could be modernized and strengthened with the support of member states.
Indeed, active engagement by the U.N. and other multilateral bodies, including the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, will be important to support any planned transitions and foster a peaceful future in Venezuela. If new elections are planned for Venezuela in the future, they should be structured and monitored by independent observers. Strong international engagement can help Venezuela enact critical reforms, including steps to address elements of the security sector truly involved in criminal activity. Mitigating the interference of competing external forces can also reduce the risk of a civil war scenario.
The American people do not want more wars of choice or conquest. Trump was elected on a promise to end wars, not to engage in aggressive action against other countries. The U.S. attempt to take control of Venezuela threatens to repeat some of the worst moral and strategic failures of past U.S. military adventurism, for which the American people and communities around the world have paid enormous costs. By coming together and emphatically rejecting this path, we can stop this dangerous trajectory. And importantly, we can begin to chart an alternative path for global peace and security.
David Cortright is a visiting scholar at Cornell University’s Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies and professor emeritus at Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. Peter J. Quaranto is a visiting professor of the practice and global policy fellow at the University of Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs, and served previously in senior roles at the State Department’s Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations.
For over nine years, the United States waged a bloody ‘Secret War’ in the country of Laos, alongside the more overt Vietnam War in Southeast Asia. The U.S. dropped at least 2.5 million tons of explosives on the people of Laos from 1964 to 1973, a quantity comparable to the entire amount used in both European and the Pacific theaters of World War II combined. Laos, a country the size of Utah, was attacked by the equivalent of a planeload of bombs once every eight minutes, 24 hours a day, for nearly a decade. An estimated one million people were displaced, wounded, or killed – almost one out of every two people living in Laos. While the people responsible for the bombing are dead, those in Laos during the Secret War and their descendants continue to pass down and share stories of their survival from the horrors visited upon them.
“What we do in Laos has thus as its aim to bring about conditions for progress toward peace in the entire Indo-Chinese Peninsula,” President Richard Nixon said in a 1970 statement. “We are also supporting the independence and neutrality of Laos.”
American leaders from the President on down justified the Secret War in Laos by claiming to only target North Vietnamese troops and an allied group in Laos called the Pathet Lao. In that 1970 statement, President Nixon described American military action in Laos as “limited” and “defensive,” and dismissed rumors of American war crimes in Laos as “grossly inaccurate.” By the time the Secret War in Laos started, it was known to the administration that groups such as the Pathet Lao used guerilla war tactics, dispersed and under the protection of the forest. Civilian villages were the only visible targets for American pilots in the sky.
In contrast to the reality for people in Laos, Nixon’s public statements are duplicitous at best. His calculated tone and hollow support for Laos independence obscured any objective truth about the United States’ bombing campaign.
This dehumanizing language is common in American foreign policy. Degrading and equating a group of people with an inflated boogeyman to justify violence has been used to rationalize the War on Terror, the recent strikes in the Caribbean, and U.S. support of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Harmful foreign policy decisions are made at both a physical and a narrative distance from those most impacted. To reverse this trend we must intentionally reintegrate memory like that of the survivors of the Secret War in Laos into our policymaking process. Survivor memory not only deserves to be shared but is also a rigorous source of data that can both correct history and prevent those in power from repeating it. It must be treated as such when crafting foreign policy.
Seeing Laos Beyond the Bombsight Reticle
Fred Branfman was the first American to document the atrocities that people in Laos lived through during the Secret War. Branfman and his Laotian partner Bouangeun Luangpraseuth talked to thousands of refugees in Vientiane, the capital of Laos, who had been forced from their homes in a heavily-bombed region of Laos known as the Plain of Jars. They collected a series of drawings and testimonials from the survivors of the Secret War, depicting life under constant shelling from American warplanes, and compiled them in the book Voices from the Plain of Jars.
The United States had intentionally kept its assault on civilians in Laos secret, fearful that knowledge of the war would further hinder public support for its military actions in Southeast Asia. Critically, television coverage of atrocities like the My Lai massacre in Laos’ neighbor, Viet Nam, allowing the American public to witness the war’s human costs, is credited with decreasing voters’ support for U.S. involvement. Because of this, the drawings were some of the only media from Laos collected and shown to the American public. When Branfman returned to the United States, he publicly shared the refugees’ stories in a congressional hearing in 1971.
The more we spend time with the refugees’ drawings and testimonies, the more we can see ourselves and our loved ones in them.
“Then they heard loud sound of guns so the three, father and children in one family, hurried forward searching to find a hole in which to flee from the falling bombs in the sky. But just then the bombs fell down on their heads before they could get into the holes … Is there anyone who knows and sees pity for and with them?” – artist unknown. (Voices from the Plain of Jars)“… But wherever you went all you heard about was people who had died. … there was an eight year old who was hit and wounded by the airplanes, but hadn’t yet died. He just screamed in the road. Then the hand of an old woman led the wounded child into the forest for temporary shelter.”(Voices from the Plain of Jars)“A life whose only value was death. I saw this in the village of my birth, as every day and every night the planes came to drop bombs on us. We lived in holes to protect our lives. There were bombs of many kinds, as in this picture I have drawn.… My heart was most disturbed and my voice called out loudly as I ran to the houses. Thus, I saw life and death for the people on account of the war of many airplanes in the region of Xieng Khouang. Until there were no houses at all. And the cows and buffalo were dead. Until everything was leveled and you could see only the red, red ground. I think of this time and still I am afraid.” (Voices from the Plain of Jars)
Without directly facing the human horrors inflicted on the people of Laos, policymakers at home and Americans deployed in Southeast Asia were able to detach from the atrocities they were committing. The United States’ military interventions in Southeast Asia were the first time a majority of damage was inflicted by artillery in the sky instead of troops on the ground, further accelerating this disconnection.
“[T]ens of thousands of innocents who were killed or wounded were not even regarded as human beings, their lives worth no more than those of chickens, pigs, or water buffalo,” wrote Branfman in Voices.
Branfman found the contrast between the harrowing memories of people in Laos and the disassociation of the American bombers he encountered particularly appalling .
“I remembered how gentle Thao Vong, the thirty-eight-year-old rice farmer who had been blinded in an air raid, had described the horror his life had become. It was chilling to hear how cold and bloodlessly [American] pilots described their role in ruining his life,” recounted Branfman. One pilot told him “‘I’m as liberal, as much for peace as anyone else. But war is not a pretty thing. In a guerrilla war, the civilians are going to pay a price.’”
Despite Branfman having shared the refugees stories with Congress in 1971, the United States did not openly recognize its involvement in the Secret War in Laos until over two decades later. In 2016, President Barack Obama traveled to Laos and acknowledged the civilian cost of the American Secret War in Laos for the first time 52 years after it was first waged.
The conclusion of the American Secret War in Laos was not the end of the horrors for the people of Laos. Of the at least 2.5 million tons of explosives dropped, around 30% failed to detonate, leaving millions of pieces of explosive ordnance (UXO) polluting the agricultural land that people in Laos rely on to provide for their families. Since the end of the Secret War, at least 25,000 people have been injured or killed from explosive ordnance in Laos. Today, Laos is still the most UXO-contaminated country in the world, and only an estimated 10% of previously contaminated land has been cleared for safe use.
In 2003, Channapha Khamvongsa, a Lao-American activist, rediscovered the original drawings collected by Fred Branfmann decades before after fortuitously meeting one of his colleagues in Washington, D.C. Recognizing that the drawings still had an important story to tell, she used them as inspiration to found Legacies of War, an organization that advocates for demining efforts in Southeast Asia. In 2010, Kahmvongsa spoke at the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Asia, the Pacific, and the Global Environment– the first hearing focusing on UXO in Laos with a Lao-American giving testimony. Fueled by the stories from the refugees and guided by the leadership of Khamvongsa, Legacies of War ushered millions of dollars of congressional funding for demining in Laos in just two decades. From 2004 to 2023, U.S. funding for demining in Laos increased from $1.4 million to $36 million. A total of almost $80 million was allocated for demining efforts across Southeast Asia in 2023. Legacies of War leadership was passed on to Sera Koulabdara in 2019, and she now chairs the U.S. Campaign to Ban Landmines and Cluster Munitions coalition and oversees a Demining/UXO caucus that educates the staff of 74 congressional offices. Channapha, Sera, and Legacies of War are a testament to the material impact of survivor memory on policy.
Human Rights: A Legal Framework Built on Survivor Memory
Legacies of War’s story is not the only of its kind. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the first legal framework that defines the enshrined right of all people to life and freedom, was signed 77 years ago today, on December 10th, 1948. The UDHR has roots in stories not unlike those told by survivors of the American Secret War in Laos. It came on the heels of the the Holocaust, where the world bore witness to genocide as Jewish communities were designated as sub-human. Testimonies such as The Diary of a Young Girl by 13-year-old Anne Frank, published a year before the signing of the UDHR, painted a personal and vivid picture of the humanity that was robbed from Jewish people in Nazi-occupied Europe. Many Americans grow up rightfully learning about the Holocaust. Its stories are often paired with the phrase “Never Again,” using the power of survivor memory to motivate young people to stand up and speak out against antisemitism.
The opening statement of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights simply states the foundation of the legal system that defines what we now call human rights. From its roots in Holocaust memory, a more radical, universal idea blossomed:
“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.”
In November, former Obama speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz remarked that Holocaust education for Jewish Americans has “backfired” as many young Jewish Americans universalize its teachings to speak out against Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
In Israeli-occupied Palestine, social media has allowed Palestinians to share their stories of living through a genocide directly with the world. Like the stories and drawings shared by the refugees in Laos, they bring to life what many Americans only know about through a filter of disinformation. Hurwitz referred to this Palestinian content as a “wall of carnage” that prevents Jewish Americans from being persuaded by “facts and arguments” in support of Israel. In the same vein that Hurwitz advocates for survivor memory through Holocaust education, she blatantly asserts that the memory of Palestinians be stifled. Much like the memories of Holocaust survivors, the voices of Palestinians are the most accurate, rigorous source of information available. Anyone who has listened will know that members of the U.S. political class like Hurwitz have it twisted: human rights are not a privilege saved for a select few.
Today marks 77 years since the UDHR was created. Even so, American leaders are increasingly removed from the terror they inflict on people abroad. In November, the United States was one of just five states at the United Nations to vote down legislation emphasizing the dangers of autonomous weapons systems, machines designed to target and kill people with no human intervention.
The framework of human rights offers us a chance to break out of the accelerating dehumanization of war and expand our definition of survivor memory to include victims of American imperialism and intervention. The notion of human rights would not exist without the testimonies of survivors.
In commemoration of the UDHR and in recognition of our own part in dispossessing the rights of people abroad, the United States must take steps to expand the role of survivor memory into its policymaking process.
Institutionalizing Survivor Memory
Policy players who are serious about reversing the harmful escalation of violence in American foreign policy must take steps to integrate the expertise of survivors into the center of their work. There are a variety of policy recommendations that can be implemented by members of congress and their staff on Capitol Hill, leaders of think tanks and coalitions, and journalists that are serious about using survivor memory to slow the destructive tailspin of American foreign policy.
• Members of the House and Senate should join caucuses led by survivors of American imperialism.
Joining caucuses such as the Legacies of War-led UXO/Demining Caucus are the most immediate way representatives and their staff can demonstrate their commitment to learning from the expertise of survivors. While any congressperson can join foreign policy caucuses, it is particularly important that members of foreign policy committees on the hill are in all of the relevant caucuses led by survivors of American war abroad.
• Intentional staffing and witness testimony can promote survivor memory on the Hill.
When foreign policy committees such as the Armed Services Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee are gathering expert testimony for a hearing on a region, conflict, or issue area, at least one of the expert witnesses must have personal experience at the receiving end of American foreign policy in that area. In addition to this, a pre-existing research group like the Congressional Research Service should have a branch dedicated entirely to collecting and providing first-hand accounts of survivors to Congress.
Members of congress should be intentional about hiring foreign policy staffers that have personal experience in a foreign policy issue that their constituents are interested in. Meetings with diaspora leaders in home districts can help guide policy and staffing decisions. In addition to this, members of foreign policy committees in the Senate and the House should create professional pipelines and scholarship programs to support staffers with survivor expertise.
• Survivorship should be regarded as a form of expertise in academic and foreign policy spaces.
Title is meaningful in policy spaces: it determines who gets a voice in conversations and debates. The title given to survivors of American imperialism should be no less than the leading experts. Personal experience with the effects of American war contains the full gravity and nuance that is necessary to pass legislation that matches the moment. No guest on a panel, co-author on a research paper, interviewee on a show or for a news article should be given any higher priority than that of the survivor. The expertise of survivors does not require any “scientific support” from American historians or scientists to be rigorous.
• The collection and preservation of survivor memory of American wars and interventions abroad should be federally funded and publicly available.
The upkeep of survivor memory and story databases should be supported by public funding, insulated from congressional attacks, and made freely available. In addition to this, public high schools and universities should be encouraged to use these collections as primary sources for education and research. Legacies Library created and maintained by Legacies of War is a good example of a collection of survivor memory by a nonprofit – these initiatives should not require donations or grants to continue upkeep.
Human rights are a shared language that allows us to see the humanity in each other. They are a needle that threads through each of our lives, reminding us that threats to the rights of any human are threats to our own humanity. The families separated at the U.S.-Mexico border are our families. The children buried under the rubble in Palestine are our children. The elderly in Laos hiding in holes from the bombs dropped overhead are our grandparents. The connections that stories make are not only valuable in rhetoric: they create real policy change.
If the public narrative always serves the people that gain power and profit from war, we can never take the first step toward a world that is reflective of the ideals of the UDHR. Looking honestly at survivor memory forces us to do the essential first step of ethical policymaking: facing the human consequences of our policy decisions, both at home and abroad. This is inherently messy and often uncomfortable, but it must be. Our humanity requires it to be.
Allie Hansen is the Security Assistance Monitor, Arms Trade, and Technology Research Fellow at CIP and an Advocacy Ambassador with Legacies of War.
