The U.S. Strikes Against Venezuela and the Credibility of the Anti-Aggression Norm

In the early hours of 3 January 2026, the United States conducted an operation involving strikes against Venezuelan targets. In an apparent escalation, President Nicolás Maduro was captured and removed from the country.

The law on the use of force is built around a strict rule and narrow exceptions. Article 2(4) of the UN Charter prohibits force. The legality, therefore, depends on whether the acting state can bring itself within the limited allowance for self-defence under Article 51 of the Charter. U.S. officials have framed the operation as a “law enforcement” mission rather than an armed conflict paradigm. Marco Rubio described Maduro’s seizure as an FBI-led arrest on Venezuelan territory. That characterization, however, does not control the international legal analysis. The applicability of the law on the use of force is a factual matter. It turns on whether force was employed on the territory of another State, not on how the acting State labels it. The same factual trigger engages the law of armed conflict, since it applies from the initiation of any armed conflict arising between two states, even where no state of war is recognized (Geneva Conventions, Common Article 2(1); Tadić, para. 70).

This post critically examines the U.S. official framing of its operation against Venezuela and assesses the operation itself under the UN Charter’s law on the use of force, situating the analysis within the broader implications such practices carry for the stability of the anti-aggression norm.

Prohibition of Force

Article 2(4) of the UN Charter establishes a general prohibition on the use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of States. Force is unlawful unless the acting State can rely on one of the Charter’s narrow exceptions. The analysis therefore converges on Article 51 and the question of whether Washington can plausibly characterise the operation as self-defence rather than prohibited force (the Trump administration previously framed operations against vessels allegedly carrying drugs as self-defence, describing them as actions taken against designated “narco-terrorist” operations in defence of U.S. national interests and in the collective self-defence of other states).

Article 51 permits the unilateral use of force only “if an armed attack occurs”. This performs a gatekeeping function that has been repeatedly emphasised by the International Court of Justice. In Nicaragua v United States, the Court drew a sharp distinction between the “most grave forms of the use of force”, which qualify as armed attacks, and other forms of unlawful force, which do not give rise to a right of self-defence (paras 191-195). An “armed attack” is a gravely violent act attributable to a State, or to non-State actors whose conduct meets a high threshold of gravity, involving the use of armed force directed against another State; mere provision of funds, weapons, or logistical help does not always rise to that level (para. 228).

The consequences of this design choice are often misunderstood. The armed-attack threshold is about the nature of the conduct. Harmful consequences alone do not transform an activity into an armed attack. The Court has consistently resisted attempts to stretch Article 51 to cover indirect, diffuse, or structural harms, precisely because doing so would collapse the conceptual boundary between war and other forms of international wrongdoing (Nicaragua, paras 191; 194-195, Oil Platforms, para. 64). The U.S. appears to frame narcotics trafficking and associated criminal violence as a threat grave enough to justify defensive force. But international law has never accepted that long-term criminal phenomena, however lethal in their downstream effects, constitute armed attacks in the Charter sense.

The U.S. messaging around “Absolute Resolve” points toward the likely frame: self-defence against “narco terrorist” threats and allied networks operating from Venezuelan territory, coupled with the claim that force is necessary because Venezuelan authorities are complicit or unable to suppress the threat. Since 2001, the U.S. has advanced broader interpretations of self-defence against non-State actors. However, the Venezuelan case is legally distinct.

At this stage, it is sometimes argued that attribution changes the analysis: that if the conduct of narcotics networks were attributable to Venezuela, force might become lawful. This misunderstands the structure of the law. Attribution answers the question of responsibility, not permissibility. Even conduct that is attributable to a State may fall short of an armed attack. This was made explicit in Nicaragua, where the Court held that certain acts attributable to the U.S. nevertheless did not amount to armed attacks triggering the right to self-defence (Nicaragua, paras 210-211).

In any event, attribution itself faces a high threshold. Under Article 8 of the Articles on State Responsibility, the conduct of non-State actors is attributable to a State only where those actors act under the State’s effective control. Attribution may also arise, to a more limited extent, where the State acknowledges and adopts the conduct as its own (Article 11). The ICJ applied this standard strictly in Nicaragua, requiring control over the specific operations in which the wrongful acts occurred, not mere tolerance, support, or indirect benefit (Nicaragua, paras 109-115). Nothing in the public record establishes that Venezuelan authorities exercised effective control over narcotics networks in this sense.

The invocation of the “unwilling or unable” doctrine does not rescue the analysis. That doctrine, developed in recent State practice, is invoked where a State claims the right to use force on the territory of another State against non-State actors, on the ground that the territorial State is unwilling or unable to suppress them itself. Crucially, however, even on its own contested terms, the doctrine presupposes that the conditions for self-defence are already met. It is concerned with where defensive force may be used once Article 51 is triggered; it does not redefine what counts as an armed attack in the first place. To deploy “unwilling or unable” as a way of bypassing the armed attack threshold reverses the Charter’s logic, allowing necessity to generate legality rather than legality to constrain necessity.

Finally, even if one were to assume, contrary to the foregoing, that an armed attack had occurred, self-defence remains constrained by necessity and proportionality, and it entails a duty to report to the Security Council (Nicaragua, paras 176, 194; Oil Platforms, paras 73-77; Nuclear Weapons, para. 41). Necessity requires that force be the only feasible means of halting the attack. Long-standing criminal phenomena historically addressed through law enforcement and cooperation sit uneasily with that requirement. Proportionality requires that force be directed solely at repelling the attack, not at coercing political change. Operations that resemble regime-disabling or leadership removal are difficult to reconcile with defensive proportionality. Finally, in Nicaragua, the Court treated the absence of reporting as a relevant indicator of whether a State genuinely regarded itself as acting in self-defence, even if reporting is not itself a freestanding customary-law condition of legality (para. 200).

Regime Change by Another Name

If Washington’s Venezuela strikes were pitched, even implicitly, to “solve” the problem of narcotics networks by degrading the state apparatus behind them, the argument slides towards forcible interference with another State’s political independence. In Armed Activities, the Court treated a security rationale framed in broad, preventative terms as misaligned with the Charter’s self-defence concept (paras 143-147).

However, since the official premise advanced by US officials is law enforcement, a different body of international law comes immediately into play. The apprehension of President Maduro engages the customary international rule of personal immunity (ratione personae). That immunity attaches to a narrow class of senior state officials, including heads of state, Heads of Government, and foreign ministers, and shields them from foreign criminal jurisdiction and from coercive measures such as arrest and detention for the duration of their term of office (Arrest Warrant, para. 51; Certain Questions of Mutual Assistance, paras 170-174).

Personal immunity is reinforced by the law governing enforcement jurisdiction. International law draws a sharp distinction between the authority to prescribe criminal law and the authority to enforce it. Enforcement jurisdiction is confined to a state’s own territory, subject to limited exceptions such as actions aboard a flag state vessel. On the territory of another state, enforcement action requires that state’s consent (S.S. Lotus, page 18).

The Eichmann episode is a telling case study in this context. Israel’s seizure of Adolf Eichmann from Argentine territory in 1960 prompted Argentina to refer the matter to the UN Security Council as a violation of its sovereignty. The Security Council warned that the repetition of such acts would “involve a breach of the principles upon which international order is founded,” generating “an atmosphere of insecurity and distrust incompatible with the preservation of peace,” and it called on Israel to make appropriate reparation under the UN Charter and international law (SC Res 138).

Once the objective becomes disabling leadership structures, coercing governmental choices, or permanently reordering the target State’s internal authority, proportionality in self-defence becomes extremely hard to maintain. When operations predictably impair the State’s governing capacity, the action begins to resemble what the Court in Armed Activities described as support for efforts to overthrow a government, which it treated as a grave violation of Article 2(4) (Armed Activities, paras 153-165).

Grave Implications for the Anti-Aggression Norm

The significance of the U.S. operation against Venezuela extends beyond the legality of a single use of force. It speaks to the continued viability of the prohibition on unilateral force as a meaningful constraint in international relations. The broader consequences emerge most clearly in the context of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The illegality of Russia’s use of force remains beyond doubt. Yet, the authority of legal condemnation relies on whether States such as the U.S. practice what they preach to others.

The U.S. disregard for the jus ad bellum regime in Venezuela carries far-reaching and, in important respects, still unknown implications. However, it also affects the U.S. role in sustaining the backlash against Russia’s aggression in Ukraine. This impact is political rather than legal. Russia does not obtain a legal “license” through U.S. inconsistency. Yet, reputational credibility still bites, politically and institutionally. The Charter system runs on a fragile currency: States’ willingness to treat the prohibition on the use of force as a real constraint.

Conclusion

The use of force against Venezuelan territory engages Article 2(4) as a matter of first principle. The attempt to relocate that force within Article 51 falters at each of the law’s structural gates: the absence of a qualifying armed attack, the failure of attribution to meet the effective control threshold, the stretching of necessity toward long-term risk management, and a conception of proportionality that cannot comfortably absorb objectives extending beyond the repulsion of an attack. If sustained criminal harm, framed as a security threat, can substitute for an armed attack, then Article 51 risks becoming a standing authorization for unilateral force wherever cooperation fails.

The reported apprehension and removal of a sitting head of State sharpens these concerns further. Leadership capture lies at one of the most contested intersections of international law: sovereignty, immunity, non-intervention, and the limits of enforcement jurisdiction. Even leaving aside questions of personal immunities and extradition law, the forcible seizure of a foreign president through cross-border military action intensifies the jus ad bellum violation by engaging the core protection of political independence.

The broader consequences extend beyond Venezuela. When a State that positions itself as a defender of the Charter’s anti-aggression norm advances expansive justifications for unilateral force, it weakens its own capacity to insist on discipline elsewhere. It thereby accelerates the erosion of shared legal norms.