At the Twilight of the “Liberal” International Legal Order

The operation launched by the United States in Venezuela on 3 January 2026, culminating in the abduction of President Nicolás Maduro, has already been analysed through familiar lenses: the legality of extraterritorial enforcement, the limits of intervention, immunities, and the perennial question of regime change under international law. Yet to approach this event merely as another controversial episode in the long history of US uses of force would be to miss its deeper significance. What makes this moment legally and structurally distinct is not that international law has once again been violated, but that the violation no longer appears to require legal persuasion or even the pretence of compliance.

This contribution argues that the Venezuela operation should be understood as a symptom of a broader transformation: the effective downfall of what has conventionally been described as the “liberal international legal order”. The term “liberal” is placed in quotation marks deliberately. Even at its height, this order was never fully democratic and equitable in practice, nor genuinely universal in application. Yet for roughly three decades after the Cold War, international law operated within a shared discursive framework in which power was at least required to speak the language of legality. That requirement now appears to be eroding. What we are witnessing is not simply a crisis of compliance, but the fading relevance of the justificatory architecture that sustained the post-Cold War order itself.

The Post-Cold War Promise: Law as a Vocabulary of Power

The post-Cold War period was characterised by a powerful normative claim: that international relations would increasingly be governed by rules rather than raw power. This promise was embedded in a dense legal architecture —expanding regimes on the use of force, international criminal justice, human rights, trade liberalisation, and investment protection. The US, supported by its allies, assumed the role of both architect and enforcer of this order. This role was never uncontested, but it was broadly tolerated, and even welcomed in ‘core countries’, as the price of systemic stability.

Crucially, however, the system rested not on perfect compliance but on ‘performative legality’. Even when international law was violated, the violating state typically sought to justify its conduct within existing legal categories. The Kosovo intervention was framed as an exceptional humanitarian necessity; the 2003 invasion of Iraq was justified —however unconvincingly— through ‘revived’ Security Council authorisation and anticipatory self-defence; targeted killings were rationalised through evolving interpretations of armed conflict and imminence. These arguments often failed doctrinal scrutiny, but their very articulation mattered. They affirmed that international law remained the relevant grammar through which power had to be exercised.

This performative aspect of legality played a stabilising role. It preserved the fiction —yet also the possibility— that international law constrained state behaviour, even when those constraints were bent or selectively ignored. It allowed weaker States, courts, scholars, and institutions to contest powerful States on legal terrain, however asymmetrically. The authority of international law did not derive from consistent obedience, but from the shared assumption that legality still mattered.

From Legal Justification to Strategic Indifference: Sovereignty Without Shelter

What distinguishes recent developments is not the return of power politics, but the ‘disappearance of justificatory anxiety’. In Ukraine, Gaza, and now Venezuela, major powers no longer appear to feel compelled to offer coherent legal explanations capable of sustaining general acceptance. Instead, legal argument is increasingly instrumental, episodic, or absent altogether.

Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine was initially accompanied by legal claims —self-defence, prevention of genocide, invitation by separatist entities— but these quickly gave way to openly civilisational and security-based narratives. In Gaza, legal argument has become increasingly polarised, with Israel abandoning genuine engagement with proportionality, distinction, or occupation law. Legal claims have not disappeared, however: in the genocide proceedings brought by South Africa before the ICJ and beyond, Israel has still formally relied on the language of self-defence, military necessity, and compliance with international humanitarian law; yet these submissions have been widely criticised as selective and insufficiently engaged with the evidentiary and structural requirements of the Genocide Convention, a concern implicitly reflected in the Court’s indication of provisional measures. Moreover, the ICJ already established that the exercise of self-defence is not applicable in the Gaza Strip due to the ongoing occupation.

The US operation in Venezuela, similarly, appears to rely less on legal persuasion than on strategic calculation: an assertion that power, opportunity, and necessity suffice. Washington framed the kidnapping of President Maduro not through a clear legal exception to the UN Charter but rather as extraterritorial law-enforcement and a faux counter-narcotics measure, despite lacking authorisation under Article 2(4) of the UN Charter or a Security Council mandate. Critics, including the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, argued that the intervention undermined basic principles of international law by using force to pursue geopolitical objectives rather than a judicially grounded claim. Such framing displays how maladroit expressions of ambition have come to outweigh legal justification.

The US-Israeli aggression against Iran in early 2026 also reinforces this pattern. The aggressors’ casus belli was framed primarily in terms of deterrence, credibility, and regional security, while sustained engagement with the UN Charter system remained notably limited. The US Government appeared to pay lip service to a doctrine of preventive self-defence; yet even this reference sat uneasily with the doctrine itself, especially since it lacked concrete evidence of an imminent or otherwise legally cognisable future threat from Iran.

This shift signals more than hypocrisy: it reflects a growing belief among powerful States that international law no longer functions as a system of generalised restraint, but as a fragmented toolbox—useful when advantageous, dispensable when inconvenient. The erosion of justificatory practice weakens not only specific legal norms, but the ‘epistemic authority’ of international law itself.

One of the most consequential casualties of this transformation is state sovereignty. For over a century, sovereignty functioned as the organising principle of international law, even as its content evolved. In the post-Cold War era, sovereignty was no longer absolute, but it retained a protective core: only exceptional circumstances —typically involving mass atrocities and, at least in principle, UNSC endorsement— could override it.

Recent developments suggest that this protective function is rapidly diminishing. Ukraine demonstrates that sovereignty offers little defence against blatant interventions in domestic affairs and a consequent military intervention by a foreign power. Gaza reveals how sovereignty and self-determination can be subordinated indefinitely to security rationales. Venezuela illustrates that even formal recognition of a government, territorial control, and diplomatic relations may be insufficient to shield a state from direct coercive intervention.

This is not merely the familiar problem of unequal application: it is a structural shift in which sovereignty no longer operates as a legal threshold, but as a ‘variable contingent on power alignment’. The erosion is not confined to the use of force. In international economic law, sanctions regimes bypass multilateral frameworks and due process guarantees, as they operate through unilateral coercion by States or supranational organisations. In human rights law, universality is giving way to selective enforcement. In energy law, access to markets and infrastructure is shaped less by treaty commitments than by geopolitical alignment.

Across these fields, a common pattern emerges: legal obligations remain formally intact, but their capacity to constrain powerful actors is shrinking. Sovereignty persists rhetorically, but its normative density is thinning.

Anti-Universalism Across Legal Regimes and the End of Liberal Exceptionalism

The decline of universalist ambition is not confined to security and sovereignty. It is increasingly visible across international legal regimes traditionally associated with liberal internationalism.

In international trade law, the WTO’s dispute settlement system has effectively collapsed, replaced by unilateral tariffs, retaliatory measures, and “friend-shoring” strategies that openly prioritise geopolitical alignment over non-discrimination. In investment law, States are withdrawing from dispute resolution treaties, reasserting regulatory autonomy and judicial sovereignty.

In international human rights law, universal monitoring mechanisms face open defiance, and regional mechanisms are increasingly viewed as fora for ‘lawfare’. Even climate law, once heralded as a domain of collective responsibility, is fragmenting into differentiated obligations driven by power, historical responsibility disputes, and strategic resource competition.

What unites these developments is not ideological convergence, but ‘structural anti-universalism’. The assumption that a single, comprehensive legal order based on shared values can govern global affairs is steadily being replaced by a pluralistic landscape.

Perhaps the most striking feature of this transformation is the role of the US. For decades, US exceptionalism operated within a broadly liberal frame: the US violated international law but often claimed to do so in defence of the system itself. Today, that framing appears increasingly untenable.

Consequently, rather than asserting its legal dominion (Herrschaft) in portraying its geopolitical power struggle against China and Russia as a dichotomy between a “democratic” worldview (Weltanschauung) and an “autocratic” one, the US now resorts to naked coercion, thereby forsaking its role as ‘leader’ (dirigente) to prolong its role as ‘preponderant power’ (dominante) within its declared Großraum. Strategic competition, economic security, and geopolitical dominance now openly override commitments to universality, multilateralism, and legal constraint. The Venezuela operation exemplifies this shift: it reflects a pragmatic alignment with a world in which legality follows power rather than disciplining it.

This does not mean, however, that the US has embraced an alternative normative order: rather, it suggests an acceptance that no genuinely universal order is feasible in the near future. The consequence is not a new global primacy, but the end of unipolar enforcement altogether.

Fragmentation as the New Normal: “Fossilisation” of “Traditional” Legal Positivism and Naturalism

If the post-Cold War moment was defined by unipolar enforcement under a liberal veneer, the emerging order reflects ‘managed fragmentation’. Rather than a single legal system with global reach, international law may evolve into clusters organised around major power centres such as the US, China, the European Union, and Russia.

Within these clusters, legal rules may remain relatively coherent and enforceable. This dynamic is already visible in human rights law, where universality increasingly operates through regional systems rather than a single integrated order. The European, Inter-American, and African regimes have developed coherent internal frameworks, while cross-regional convergence remains selective, dialogic, and politically contingent. Between clusters, coordination will likely be partial and transactional. International law will not disappear, but its function will shift from producing universal norms to serving as a coordination mechanism facilitating coexistence between overlapping and sometimes competing legal orders.

In this context, the role of the United Nations and multilateral treaties will be transformed. Their primary function will no longer be enforcement or norm-creation, but mediation, risk management, and procedural stabilisation. Law will survive, but as infrastructure rather than ideology.

In view of the foregoing, the shift from moribund cosmopolitanism — characteristic of a now-surpassed phase of globalisation — to a rhetoric of ‘Manifest Destiny’ may precipitate the gradual decline of traditional legal positivism and naturalism in international law. Indeed, without (inter alia) uniform rules of recognition or the purity of a ‘basic norm’, positivists may struggle to make sense of the interactions and contradictions between the new order’s clusters. Similarly, the lack of a universally recognised “moral” anchor will —notwithstanding its prior weaponisation— likely hinder starry-eyed attempts to realise any significant progress through international advocacy.

Thus, in this phase of interregnum, scholars and practitioners alike will need to reflect on what Pashukanis referred to as the ‘real historical content of international law’: the ‘struggle’ or disputes between States which, in our case, cling to the same socio-economic and political systems while adapting to the new material reality. This overarching dialectical construction of law can still be informed by a “fossilised” form of “traditional” legal positivism and naturalism, which may be revitalised once the contradictions of the interregnum reach a resolution. Such a prospect, however, is unlikely to materialise in the short run, while the withering away of the ‘form of (international) law’ remains a plausible alternative in the long run.

Conclusion

The downfall of the “liberal” international legal order does not mark the end of international law. It marks the end of a particular belief: that law could transcend power through universality, shared values, and institutional enforcement. That belief was always fragile and often hypocritical; yet it provided a common horizon against which legal argument, critique, and resistance were possible. Across multiple domains — from humanitarian intervention to the regulation of force, from human rights protection to the use of unilateral coercion — the promise of a rules-based, universally conceiving order has ceded ground to a more fragmented, contingent landscape.

In this light, the Venezuela operation is not merely an aberration. It is a signpost: a vivid example of how, in the absence of a shared horizon, power speaks more plainly, justification matters less, and sovereignty offers diminishing shelter. For international lawyers, the challenge is not to mourn the loss of liberalism, but to rethink the function of law in a world where universality has given way to managed pluralism.