Ushering in the age of impunity: Venezuela, Palestine, and the end of international law 

On January 3, 2026, without provocation, cause, or legal justification, the U.S. bombed Venezuela, invaded its capital, killed dozens of people, and violently abducted the President and First Lady of the country, binding, blindfolding, and spiriting them off to the United States.  

Surely, such a blatant violation of a whole raft of international laws, indeed, challenging the very centerpiece of the post-World War II legal framework that prohibits acts of aggression, would be met with universal condemnation. 

Instead, it has been followed by equivocal whimpers by several Western leaders, a hyper-cautious response from the UN Secretary-General, rhetorical condemnation by members of the Security Council, but no action whatsoever, and enthusiastic cheerleading by U.S. and Western corporate media. 

How could this be? 

Simply put, we are witnessing the dawning of the age of impunity. 

Slouching towards Bethlehem 

The recent sound of explosions over Venezuela, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, and Nigeria, and over the Red Sea, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Caribbean Sea, is not merely the sound of a momentary imperial spasm by a declining U.S. empire. 

It heralds something much more terrifying. 

A new world is being birthed (or perhaps, reborn, reminiscent as it is of the horrors of the first half of the 20^th Century). 

A world wholly unconstrained by international law, or even by the most basic and universal moral principles. 

A birth that could have been foretold by anyone paying attention to the machinations of the empire and its allies and vassals in recent decades. 

From the mass incarceration and police excesses of the “war on drugs,” to the renditions, executions, and torture of the “war on terrorism,” to the systematic immiseration of the many in order to consolidate the wealth and power of the few, the U.S. empire has been on a decades-long warpath culminating with the extermination of the Palestinian people and this week’s assault on Venezuela. 

These ever-expanding ripples of oppression, unchecked, threaten us all. 

Because, in a world where even genocide is not a red line, there are no red lines. 

A child of impunity

This new world is the child of impunity. 

For over two years, the world has watched passively as the U.S.-Israel Axis stampeded across Western Asia, Africa, and Latin America in a blood-soaked rampage of conquest and destruction.

The UN Charter, the Rome Statute, the laws of war, human rights law, the law of the sea, laws on the use of force, all have been trampled underfoot and left in ruin by the actions and pronouncements of the Axis, the complicity of its allies and vassals, and the complacency of other states. 

For their part, the international institutions put in place in the wake of the Second World War to prevent and respond to such horrors have been systematically corrupted, cowed, or crushed by the Axis. The International Criminal Court is largely frozen in the face of illegal U.S. sanctions. The International Court of Justice faces unprecedented harassment and political pressure. 

The UN’s human rights rapporteurs are under a sustained campaign of slander and sanction. And even the UN Security Council has surrendered to the U.S. empire, as evidenced by its resolution 2803 in November of 2025, endorsing the wholly unlawful and baldly colonial plans of the Trump administration for Gaza. 

States of the Western world, which have long postured as the defenders of human rights and international law, rather than standing up to the excesses of the Axis, have tripped over each other to obsequiously kiss the ring of the emperor and to bow to the blood-soaked stewards of its colonial project in Palestine. 

And any presumed checks within the institutions of the empire itself have shown themselves to be wholly complicit, including the courts, which are both politically driven and generally disdainful of international law, the Congress, itself entirely corrupted by the lobbies, corporations, and billionaires driving U.S. and Israeli crimes in the first place, and the corporate media, which have thoroughly dedicated themselves to running cover for the imperial, extractive, corporate, and Zionist causes at the root of the violence engulfing the world today. 

Yes, the people themselves have risen up, and in record numbers, to oppose the crimes of the Axis. But they have been met with systematic and brutal repression inside the empire and across the West, and even within the captured front line states of Western Asia. 

As a result, the Axis has enjoyed absolute impunity, encouraging successively more atrocious acts, in a building crescendo of violence that has included aggression against countries across Western Asia and Africa, a chain of assassinations, the targeting of humanitarian boats in the Mediterranean, transnational terror attacks with booby trapped pagers, unlawful occupation of several nations, and a continuing genocide in Palestine. 

In this context, no one should be surprised by the blatant criminality of the U.S. in imposing brutal unilateral coercive measures designed to starve the population of Venezuela into submission, several coup attempts, a series of extrajudicial executions of boaters in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, the pirating of the country’s oil tankers and the seizing of their cargo, the bombing and invasion of the country, and the violent abduction of the President and First Lady. 

This is how impunity functions. The more you feed it, the hungrier it becomes. And the world has fed this impunity for decades. 

The beastly child born of this impunity brings with it the worst genetic traits of its 20th-century progenitors: racism, imperialism, colonialism, fascism, Zionism, aggression, and genocide. But it is now armed with the terrible 21st-century technologies of surveillance, silencing, and murder. The impacts of this deadly combination are now being felt across three continents in the global South, while the rest of the world teeters on the brink. 

Imperial crimes in Venezuela

If your understanding of events in Venezuela comes from complicit Western corporate media, you may be forgiven for being unaware that the U.S. attack on the country, and its actions in the lead-up to the attack, were entirely unlawful. 

As a matter of law, this could not be labeled a law enforcement operation. Rather, it was a criminal operation, for which the perpetrators, those who ordered it, and those who followed those unlawful orders, should be held accountable under the rule of law. 

Indeed, the complex of international crimes perpetrated by the U.S. in Venezuela is stunning in its scope. 

The sanctions imposed on Venezuela by the U.S. as unilateral coercive measures are unlawful under the UN Charter and international human rights law. The U.S.-supported coup attempts in 2002, 2019, and 2020 were unlawful. Covert CIA action in the country has been unlawful. The murder of boaters in the Caribbean and Pacific is unlawful, constituting extrajudicial executions under international human rights law. 

The U.S. blockade of Venezuela is unlawful. The U.S. pirating of Venezuelan oil tankers was unlawful, as an act of maritime aggression under the UN Charter and the Law of the Sea, and a violation of the legal principles of sovereign immunity and state immunity. The bombing, the invasion, and the subsequent threats of further force are all unlawful under Article 2(4) of the UN Charter, a treaty that binds the United States. 

The abductions of Nicolas Maduro and Cilia Flores were unlawful under the Charter, under international human rights law, which prohibits arbitrary arrest and detention, as well as under the internationally recognized principle of head of state immunity. The violence used during the abduction, based on an unlawful arrest, and resulting in significant injuries to Flores, was unlawful. The public parading and sharing of photos of the bound Maduro was unlawful under international humanitarian law. The imposed sensory deprivation of Maduro (with blindfolds and ear covers) was unlawful. And, because his arrest (abduction) was unlawful, his continued detention is also unlawful, as a matter of international human rights law. 

The U.S. has no credible legal defense for its international crimes in Venezuela. Its violations are self-evident, and its culpability is clear. No doubt aware of this, it is trying to substitute international law with its own domestic law,  and to apply that law extraterritorially, a bald act of imperialism in itself. 

The Trump government is doing so because it knows that U.S. legislation is often at odds with international standards, and U.S. courts are notoriously chauvinistic, extremely deferential to the government on international matters, open to allowing broad discretion to the government when it alleges “national security” concerns, generally disdainful of international law (which they often, derisively and incorrectly, refer to as “foreign law”), and, with politically appointed judges, subject to political influence. 

It also relies on the “magic word defense”, by which the mere recitation of terms like “terrorism” and its newer fictional cousin “narco-terrorism” creates a sense of exceptionality, thereby seeding consent from the public and a portion of the judiciary alike. In such circumstances, while the outcome is not guaranteed, the chance of a fair trial for Maduro and Flores is limited at best. 

The Israeli connection  

In her first public address since the U.S. attacks, Venezuelan Vice-President (and now Interim President) Delcy Rodriguez declared that the attack on the country had “Zionist undertones.” While she did not elaborate, the hand of the Israeli regime in supporting right-wing forces and destabilizing progressive governments in the region is by now well known. Israeli weapons, surveillance technology,  intelligence, training, and influence via Israel proxies in the region have been a constant feature of Latin America for decades. 

For their part, Israeli regime leaders have been giddy in their celebration of the attacks and of the abduction of the Venezuelan President (and have expressed their hope that the next attacks will be in Iran). 

And this is no surprise. Since the election of Hugo Chávez and the launch of the Bolivarian Revolution more than a quarter century ago, Venezuela has asserted its independence, resisted U.S. hegemony, directed its oil and mineral wealth toward improving living conditions within the country, and stood in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for human rights. 

Like Iran, Iraq, and Libya before them, that combination of factors has secured Venezuela’s place in the gunsights of the U.S.-Israel axis. 

What’s more, the Israeli regime has a long history of attacking progressive forces, supporting right-wing regimes, death squads, and dictators, and seeding conflict across Latin America. Over the decades, its blood-stained fingerprints have been revealed in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, and Venezuela.

This, together with the anti-colonial instincts of the region, explains the disgust with which Latin American governments of the left view the Israeli regime. And it also explains why far-right movements and leaders in the region routinely declare their fanatical support for the regime and for the Zionist project, even in the midst of the genocide in Palestine. 

While the progressive governments of the region have condemned the genocide, joined the ICJ genocide case against Israel, and cut off diplomatic relations with the regime, right-wing governments, as well as leaders of Venezuela’s right-wing opposition, have praised the Israeli regime and subserviently pledged even closer cooperation. The regime is, as it has always been, deeply invested in tearing down left-wing governments in Latin America and propping up the right. 

At the same time, Venezuela’s opposition to the Israeli regime, while also holding the world’s largest oil reserves, is seen by the U.S.-Israel Axis as a potential obstacle to their nefarious plans for war on Iran. Iran’s own oil capacities, and especially its effective control over the Straits of Hormuz (and therefore world energy markets), make control of Venezuelan oil especially attractive to the Axis as it prepares to renew its attacks on Iran. 

Thus, the principal drivers of U.S. aggression against countries of the global South are the possession of mineral wealth coveted by U.S. corporations, a refusal to submit to U.S. hegemony, and opposition to the crimes of the Israeli regime. Venezuela has been guilty of all three. And these are the real “crimes” for which it is being prosecuted. 

Life after law

The nascent project of international law has always been both weak and inchoate. But the guardrails established since 1945 offered some hope of a world governed, at least in part, by the rule of law, rather than by force alone. And a global consensus had been established whereby the worst crimes- aggression and genocide- were agreed to be beyond the pale. The U.S.-Israel Axis, so often indicted for violating international law, has lost patience with the entire project, and, with genocide in Palestine, the raining down of Axis bombs in countries across the globe, and now aggression in Venezuela, it has declared to the world that a new order is born. One in which all must bow to the empire or perish. 

It is not too late for the world to stand up to stop the emergence of this beastly new order. Movements of people within and beyond the empire can challenge it with the urgency and unity of purpose it requires. The global majority, led by the free nations of the South, could unite as it did in the 1960s and 70s to challenge the empire and draw a line of principle, centered on collective action for peace, security, self-determination, and the human rights of peoples everywhere. Sadly, to date, there is little evidence to suggest that this is happening. 

In the meantime, the unmistakable, unequivocal message that the U.S. imperial regime, its Israeli attack dog, and its legions of subservient Western vassals are sending to the world, to the nation states in its gunsights, and to all peoples resisting foreign occupation, colonial domination, and racist regimes is this: Diplomacy will not save you. International law will not save you. The United Nations will not save you. And we are coming for you.

Craig Mokhiber
Craig Mokhiber is an international human rights lawyer and former senior United Nations Official. He left the UN in October of 2023, penning a widely read letter that warned of genocide in Gaza, criticized the international response and called for a new approach to Palestine and Israel based on equality, human rights and international law.