On January 3–4, 2026, U.S. forces carried out a military strike in Caracas and captured Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. The couple, dressed in tan prison jumpsuits and led in handcuffs, was transferred to New York to face federal drug-trafficking and narco-terrorism charges. Maduro has pleaded not guilty and called the operation a ‘kidnapping’ and a violation of Venezuela’s territorial integrity.
The Trump Administration has also demanded unrestricted access for the U.S. to Venezuela’s oil. As part of that plan, Trump wants U.S. oil companies to invest heavily in Venezuelan oil, for which he told NBC they would be “reimbursed by us or through revenue.”
For decades, the international community has spoken the language of rules, norms, and law. The foundational pillars of the global order are introduced as sovereignty, non-intervention, and self-determination. However, recent developments with the capture of Nicolás Maduro and Venezuela-linked oil tankers and the decision by the United States to control and redistribute the revenue from those oil sales expose a disturbing truth. International law is less and less a rule-based system and more and more a discretionary weapon of the mighty.
When a senior U.S. official, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, said the U.S. will take between 30 million and 50 million barrels worth around $2–3 billion. He clarified that the U.S. intends to sell the oil on the open market and control the proceeds to benefit the interests of both Americans and Venezuelans. There comes a basic question. When any state is able by a unilateral act to take the resources of another state and how the revenue is utilized without the approval of the state concerned or approval by the United Nations, what is left of the international legal order?
At the heart of international law lies the principle of sovereignty. The United Nations Charter explicitly prohibits the use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state and the right of peoples to permanent sovereignty in the overexploitation of their natural resources. These are not symbolic rules but should limit power. But in fact they are weakening against the struggle of strategic interests of the dominant states.
The justification offered in such cases is often moral. The strong states assert that they are acting on behalf of the people and not the regime. Corruption, dictatorialism, and the suffering of human beings are mentioned to justify acts that are otherwise said to be illegal. Nevertheless, the international law does not allow states to become unilateral custodians of the resources of another state just because they claim to be morally superior.
This episode is not an anomaly; it is a pattern. Iraq to Libya, sanctions regimes that make civilian economies grind to a halt. Sanctions, isolation, and intervention are imposed on weaker states whenever they break international norms. Once great powers do it as well, the law discourses are reframed, exceptions are created, and the enforcement mechanisms are mute.
The realist scholars have continuously contended that the international law is not a universal law, but it is an embodiment of the interests of the powerful states. It is not a failure of international law that we are witnessing today, but its exposure. The so-called rules-based order can only be effective when the rules are in balance with the interests of people with military, economic, and political superiority. This leads to another more disturbing question, whether or not international law fails to safeguard the sovereignty and resources of weaker states, what is its purpose? Is it a true global governance framework, or is it just a rhetorical cloak that strong states deploy when convenient and discard when costly?
Others say that international law should not be abandoned at all, as it would lead to chaos. But there is chaos already, only it is not evenly distributed. In most cases, equal protection by the international system has never been assured to many states in the Global South. Rather, it has provided conditional legality—on the one hand, rights on paper, but on the other, they vanish on the ground due to the geopolitical pressure.
To bid farewell to the illusion of the neutral, rules-based world is not to say that lawlessness should be accepted. Rather, it demands honesty. It also needs to be recognized that the existing system favors power above principle and that no reform can take place without addressing the imbalance. International law has to either develop into something truly enforceable and bind all states in an equal manner or it has to acknowledge its shortcomings as a language of power and not law.
The Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall is a reminder that it is geography and power that are better at constraining states than international law. The Maduro arrest is a good case in point of the fact that today sovereignty is not a legal fact but a privilege of a geopolitical character. The heads of strategically marginal states may be kidnapped and tried. Such imbalance is highly noticeable in the example of President Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela. a In Maduro’s own framing, “I am the president of Venezuela, and I consider myself the prisoner of war.” when I was captured by the US at my home in Caracas. while leaders of strategically indispensable allies remain insulated even amid allegations of crimes against humanity. Speaking about Israel’s campaign in Gaza, Netanyahu declared that there is no way Israel will halt its war in Gaza… We can make a ceasefire for a certain period of time, but we’re going to the end.
Taking over oil tankers and taking the resources of another state without their consent or the chance to negotiate is not only a legal debate but also a time to reckon. It compels the international community to adopt a rather straightforward yet unpleasant reality: a legal order that prescribes itself to be weak is no order at all. It is tyranny, in legal language.
