It was New Year’s Eve at Mar-a-Lago. Amid the self-satisfied glow of Florida excess, President Trump wished the world peace on earth. Peace, it turns out, had a very short shelf life.
Within days—by Saturday—the United States had not merely struck Venezuela without congressional approval; it had gone further, much further. U.S. Delta Force operatives abducted President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores from their bedroom inside a military compound, removed a sitting head of state from office, and hauled him before an American court to face five federal charges under U.S. domestic law related to drug trafficking. No congressional authorization. No vote. No declaration of war. Just brute force, briskly administered.
According to reporting by The New York Times, the operation was months in the making. U.S. intelligence activity in Venezuela began in August, when Central Intelligence Agency operatives covertly entered the country to gather intelligence later used to support the military action. The paper reports that a Delta Force team rehearsed a potential extraction using a full-scale mock-up at a facility in Kentucky, while U.S. officials tracked what they described as six to eight locations through which Maduro was believed to be moving.
As Maduro awaits his destiny in U.S. custody at the moment, the reaction from Europe was a masterclass in impotence. Leaders of the EU, including the United Kingdom, murmured gravely about international law and the UN Charter, as though incantation alone might restore order. But there was no blunt truth spoken aloud—no clear statement that international law had been violated, that a dangerous precedent had been set which places every world leader, friend and foe alike, in jeopardy.
Unlike the others, the leaders of Spain, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Uruguay did not hide what they think. They issued a joint statement on Sunday rejecting the U.S. military operation warning against any appropriation of Venezuela’s natural resources, after Trump indicated his people would assume interim control of the country.
The leaders said in the statement that Trump’s actions lack “basic principles of international law, in particular the prohibition of the use of force and respect for territorial sovereignty established in the United Nations Charter.”
Spanish Prime Minister Sánchez, said that Madrid cannot recognize “an intervention that violates international law the same way we could not recognize the Maduro regime.”
Regime change no one voted for
And here in America, we have acquired something that nobody voted for: regime change in a foreign country, executed by force, through what can only be described as a hostile takeover. The President now toys with the idea of “running” Venezuela, as though it were an asset rather than a sovereign nation.
My way or the highway—the only idiom Trump knows, honed in boardrooms and bankruptcy courts does not apply to government. Our is constitutional democracy. Or rather, it was.
The checks and balances designed by the framers now appear optional, waived by Trump loyalists who applaud as Congress abdicates its most basic duty. Yes, Bill Clinton bypassed Congress and the UN Security Council when he bombed Serbia in the 1990s, and to pretend otherwise would be naïve. But even Clinton did not dispatch agents to kidnap a foreign leader and place him in shackles before an American judge.
“This was not an action that required congressional approval. In fact, it couldn’t require congressional approval because this was not an invasion. This is not an extended military operation,” said Rubio attempting to defend their actions. “We will seek congressional approval for actions that require congressional approval. Otherwise, they’ll get congressional notification.”
Rubio has been focused on Venezuela for much of his career and the question today is whether America would be here in the first place if Rubio was not holding the positions of NSA and Secretary of State.
On NBC’s “Meet the Press” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said that this in fact “was a military action, and pursuant to the Constitution, only Congress has the power to declare war to authorize acts that take place in this regard. And we have to make sure when we return to Washington D.C., that legislative action is taken to ensure that no further military steps occur absent explicit congressional approval.”
Let us be clear: the manner in which this was carried out is illegal. What we are witnessing is not merely the collapse of international law and the international order, but the corrosion of America’s own constitutional framework. Congress exists to restrain executive excess. But statements of McConnel and Lindsay Grahm show that they still have not found the war that they did not like.
“Congress needs to own its own role in allowing a presidency to become this lawless. The fact of the matter is that the president’s justification makes no sense here. He says that this was just a law enforcement operation. Well, there are people with warrants all over the world. That doesn’t give the president of the United States the power to launch a billion-dollar invasion of those countries to bring a fugitive to justice,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.)
The only historical parallel routinely cited is the Mossad’s abduction of Adolf Eichmann from Buenos Aires in 1960. But that comparison collapses under scrutiny. Eichmann was a stateless architect of genocide, not a sitting head of government seized in his own country by a foreign power asserting jurisdiction by fiat.
What we see now is something cruder. America does what America wants. There is no decorum, no legal choreography, not even the pretense of adherence to law.
Abuse of power in the name of America
President Trump’s pursuit of regime change through force and kidnapping is illegal, illegitimate, and criminal. This is abuse of power carried out in the name of the United States. Those political leaders who celebrate Maduro’s removal while ignoring the cost to legality are cheering the demolition of the very order that protects them. Members of Congress who applaud this spectacle are discarding the Constitution and the procedures laid down by the framers with reckless ease.
Anyone who believes that a nation can simply waltz into another country, execute a hostile takeover, and suffer no consequences is deluding themselves. The world under Trump leadership has become a board game with no rules—and everyone is now a piece.
We do not have international law anymore. What follows is an open invitation to lawlessness. The world is thrust into a state of permanent flux, where no nation is beyond reach and the supposed guardrails of order are revealed to have been decorative all along.
How did we arrive at a form of expansionist, Wild West governance that no one voted for and that was never presented as U.S. foreign policy?
The idea that the United States can unilaterally seize a foreign leader, prosecute them under U.S. domestic law, and assume control over another country’s resources—now justified as “energy dominance”—marks a profound break with established norms. When senior officials dismiss international law as irrelevant, they are not just rejecting criticism, they are rewriting the rules.
Regime change by force, asset control framed as policy, and power exercised without mandate or restraint are incompatible with the constitutional order and the international system the U.S. helped build.
International law functions through norms, reciprocity, and consequences. When a major power discards those constraints, the system weakens for everyone. What emerges instead is a model of America Inc.: expansionist, transactional, and increasingly reckless, carrying with it a mounting price tag in violated law and shattered precedent.
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