Fwd: Attacks on Venezuela - A New World Order?
Chandana Liyanapatabendy
Attacks on Venezuela — A New World Order?
The enduring myth of the “invisible college” suggests a harmonious global legal order where practitioners act in concert, transcending national boundaries.
by Dr. Ruwantissa Abeyratne
January 3, 2026
13 mins read
President Nicolás Maduro
The one thing man fears is the unknown. When presented with this scenario, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well-being granted to them by a World Government, a New World Order. ~ Henry A. Kissinger
Introduction
The phrase “New World Order,” coined in the twilight of the Cold War by Presidents George H. W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev, entered diplomatic vocabulary in the early 1990s with an almost messianic resonance. It was a rhetorical construct born of optimism, forged in the crucible of geopolitical transition, and nurtured by the belief that history itself had turned a corner. In its ascendancy, the phrase was embraced by diplomatic circles as emblematic of a new discipline in international relations, one that promised predictability where there had been chaos and legality where power politics had long prevailed. It was perceived as the emergent leitmotif of United States diplomacy, suggesting that the unilateral excesses of the Cold War would yield to a system governed by rules, institutions, and collective responsibility.
Conceived during the Persian Gulf crisis of 1990, the New World Order was articulated as being fundamentally anchored in the rule of law. It claimed to offer the international community a novel pathway toward harmonious cooperation among States in matters of shared global concern. At its conceptual core lay the principle of collective security: the idea that aggression against one would be met not by isolated retaliation, but by a concerted response of the international community acting through legitimized institutional mechanisms. The use of force, though not abjured, was to be disciplined, exceptional, and, above all, authorized collectively. In this sense, the New World Order was less about the absence of military power than about its juridical containment.
Historically, this paradigm was not without precedent. The United Nations Security Council had authorized enforcement action during the Korean War in 1950, and again four decades later in response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. In both instances, military force was clothed with multilateral legitimacy, framed as an enforcement of international law rather than an assertion of national will. These episodes were frequently invoked as exemplars of how collective security could operate in practice, reinforcing the narrative that the post-Cold War order would be one in which legality prevailed over unilateralism.
Yet, with the passage of time, the promise of the New World Order – as it then was perceived – has increasingly revealed itself to be fragile, contingent, and unevenly applied. The United States’ military attacks on Venezuela on 2–3 January mark a particularly stark moment in this gradual unravelling. Whatever the political or moral judgments passed upon the government of Venezuela, the resort to unilateral military force, absent authorization from the United Nations Security Council, stands in uneasy tension with the very principles that once animated the New World Order. The operation, justified by the United States as a protective measure accompanying the capture of a sitting head of State, appears less as an act of collective security and more as an assertion of sovereign prerogative by a dominant power.
In this context, the New World Order seems to have undergone a subtle but profound mutation. What was once presented as a rules-based international system premised on collective decision-making now risks being recast as an order in which rules are invoked selectively and enforced asymmetrically. The legitimacy once conferred by Security Council authorization has, in practice, been supplanted by domestic legal rationales and executive interpretations of national interest. This transformation raises troubling questions about whether the New World Order has ceased to be a genuinely international construct and has instead become an idiom through which power is rationalized rather than restrained.
The Venezuelan episode underscores a deeper structural dilemma. If collective security is bypassed whenever it proves inconvenient or politically unattainable, the institutional authority of the United Nations is progressively hollowed out. The veto-induced paralysis of the Security Council, often cited as justification for unilateral action, was never intended to license States to substitute themselves for the collective will. Rather, it was a political compromise meant to preserve peace by preventing great power confrontation. To reinterpret this paralysis as a mandate for unilateral enforcement is to invert the Charter’s logic and erode the normative foundation upon which the post-war international legal order was constructed.
Thus, the attacks on Venezuela invite a sober reassessment of what remains of the New World Order. They suggest not the emergence of a disciplined, law-governed international society, but the persistence of an older reality in which power continues to shape legality. The danger lies not merely in the act itself, but in the precedent it sets: a world in which collective security is invoked rhetorically while unilateral force becomes normalized. In such a world, the New World Order risks devolving from a promise of shared governance into a euphemism for hierarchical authority, undermining the very harmony and cooperation it once aspired to achieve.
The Attacks
The sudden eruption of U.S. military force upon Venezuelan territory on the night of 2–3 January 2026, culminating in a large-scale aerial strike and the claimed capture and removal of President Nicolás Maduro, constitutes an inflection point not merely in inter-American relations, but in the very fabric of what the international community has striven to erect as a normative architecture governing the use of force among sovereign States. The spectacle itself — explosions rocking Caracas, reports of smoke rising from military installations, the president of a regional State spirited away under the aegis of a foreign power — recalls, with unnerving clarity, the somber dirges of Panama in 1989 and, more structurally, the United States’ expansive writ over the norms of intervention since the Cold War’s denouement.
At the core of the U.S. explanation lies a constitutional claim that resonates within domestic American jurisprudence: that the President of the United States, vested with executive authority under Article II of the U.S. Constitution, possesses inherent powers to protect the nation and its citizens, including the execution of arrest warrants against foreign nationals who threaten U.S. security. Article II, in its first lines, articulates:
“The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America. … The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States … and he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”
This constitutional canon, exalted in domestic constitutional law as the font of executive initiative in matters of national security, has been cited by U.S. officials — in this instance — to justify extraordinary actions abroad, contending that the capture of Maduro was an extension of the Commander-in-Chief’s duty to execute the law and protect the homeland from transnational criminality and drug trafficking allegedly emanating from Venezuelan soil. Such invocation, however, raises fundamental questions as to the scope of executive power in foreign policy, and whether an arrest warrant for a foreign head of State, even if judicially sanctioned within the United States, can domestically authorize hostile military action in another sovereign territory absent congressional authorization or international legal grounding.
Teleological Justification and Debate
The aerial strikes on Venezuela were, according to U.S. statements, intended to “protect the military operations and personnel engaged in the capture of Maduro.” The conceptualization of aerial bombardment as a protective shield for an arrest operation, rather than as an act of war, echoes earlier instances where force was interwoven with quasi-law enforcement objectives. A classic historical antecedent is the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama, which targeted General Manuel Noriega; the United States justified that intervention on a multifaceted basis that included the protection of U.S. citizens, defending democracy, and capturing Noriega on drug-related charges. Like the Noriega episode, the current Venezuelan operation blends coercive force with criminal prosecution goals, rendering a binary distinction between war and law enforcement increasingly porous.
Yet the counter-argument — robustly articulated by the Republic of Colombia and echoed across Latin American capitals — is unambiguous: Venezuela is a sovereign State, and no other State, including a military superpower, has an unfettered license to transgress its territorial integrity, let alone to launch military strikes and apprehend its head of government. The Colombian request for an urgent meeting of the United Nations Security Council to debate what it deems a flagrant act of aggression underscores a central tenet of modern international law: the prohibition of unilateral uses of force except in narrowly defined circumstances. The Security Council, however, remains deeply polarized, with permanent members possessing the veto, and geopolitical fissures between Western powers and Russia, China, and other States complicate the prospects for meaningful collective action. Whether such a Council debate can yield anything beyond symbolic censure — or paralysis — is precisely the predicament envisaged by the Charter’s architects when they entrusted peace and security to a body where great power concurrence is a non-negotiable if elusive predicate for action.
This impasse is rooted in the United Nations Charter, particularly Article 2(4), which obliges all Members to “refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State.” The Article’s plain language leaves little room for exceptions outside Security Council authorization or self-defence under Article 51. On one view, the Venezuelan operation appears to contravene this cardinal proscription: no Security Council resolution authorized the use of force against Venezuela, and no clear self-defense justification has been offered that would align with the Charter’s stringent conditions. The invocation of domestic arrest warrants and counter-narcotics aims — even if sincere — does not, in itself, satisfy the threshold of an “armed attack” emanating from Venezuela warranting defensive force. Indeed, international legal scholars have long distinguished between transnational criminality and State-sponsored armed aggression; they are not coextensive categories under the Charter. The international community’s reaction — ranging from outright condemnation by Russia and Iran to acute anxiety in Latin American capitals — attests to the perception that a foundational pillar of the normative order has been imperiled.
Some Points – Going Back and Forth
In calibrating the legality and legitimacy of this military operation, it is instructive to compare it with the so-called Bush Doctrine that emerged in the early 21st century. The Bush Doctrine, articulated explicitly in the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks, posited that the United States would not require a “permission slip” from international bodies to protect its citizens anywhere in the world. This paradigm underpinned the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and the 2003 invasion of Iraq — actions that forcibly reinterpreted self-defense to include pre-emption and preventive war against perceived threats. In both instances, the United States acted, with varying degrees of international support, on a broad interpretation of security interests. Notwithstanding differences in context, the Venezuela operation reflects a similar assertion of unilateral prerogative, premised on an expansive executive understanding of America’s obligations to its citizens and its interests.
Yet, there are critical distinctions. Afghanistan and Iraq unfolded within a global environment shaped by the American response to terrorism and involved complex multilateral resolutions — albeit contentious ones — as well as significant international debate. By contrast, the Venezuelan operation proceeds absent clear multilateral sanction and directly targets a sitting head of State, raising profound questions as to whether the United States is now projecting a norm where great powers supplant international adjudication with forceful exemplariness. If so, the threshold for what constitutes legitimate use of force is being recalibrated in fundamental ways.
What is more, the very notion of sovereign responsibility, a concept propounded in recent years by figures such as the head of the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations and others, begs rigorous interrogation. Sovereign responsibility, in its normative variant, suggests that States may incur obligations to the wider international community — and potentially justify external intervention — when they egregiously fail in their duties to protect their populations or when they abet transnational harms. This concept finds echoes in the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine, which emerged in the early 21st century to address mass atrocities. However, sovereign responsibility, unlike R2P, has not crystallized into a binding legal norm. It remains, at best, a political doctrine, subject to interpretive contestation and selective application. In the present Venezuelan context, the United States appears to operationalize a unilateral interpretation — that rampant criminal networks and alleged narco-terrorism emanating from Venezuelan territory justify forcible intervention. But international law, as constituted, does not sanction unilateral military action on this basis. The problem is not merely the ideology of interventionism, but the erosion of legal thresholds that once constrained it.
The erosion of these thresholds prompts a broader and sobering inquiry: Is international law international anymore? Once a mosaic of treaty obligations, customary norms, and collective security mechanisms, international law now confronts power politics in its rawest form. States with great power capabilities increasingly act on their own strategic imperatives, invoking legal pretexts that are at best contested and at worst inimical to long-standing principles of sovereignty and non-intervention. The Venezuelan operation underscores a crisis of legitimacy within the system. If legality is fashioned by power, then the normative shield for weaker States becomes ever more tenuous.
Further complicating the present moment is the reaction of regional actors and global powers who view the U.S. actions as imperialist overreach. Latin American States — even those critical of Maduro’s governance — are wary of a precedent in which external powers can unilaterally effect regime change. Analogies to Canada being subsumed as the “51st State” or discourses about the United States “taking over Iceland” are rhetorical but illustrative of anxieties about the reconfiguration of a new world order wherein might overrides consensual rule-making. These hyperbolic metaphors gesture toward a fear that smaller States may find themselves at the mercy of great power geopolitics, wherein sphere of influence logic supplants the post-World War II commitment to sovereign equality.
It is worth recalling that even the United States, in its own foundational history, articulated a strong doctrine of national sovereignty and non-intervention in the Monroe Doctrine, which warned European powers against entanglement in the Americas. Ironically, the current intervention looms as a perverse inversion of that original tenet, raising the spectre of hegemony under the banner of security. In this sense, the Venezuelan crisis is not merely a bilateral dispute but a structural challenge to the global order — one that tests whether the normative edifice of the United Nations, the Charter, and customary international law can withstand unilateral assertions of force.
It must also be underscored that sovereignty, far from being an archaic relic, remains a living principle of international law. The Charter’s preamble aspires to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war” and to establish “conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained.” A large-scale military operation in a sovereign State, absent Security Council authorization or a defensible self-defence claim, contravenes not only the letter but the spirit of these foundational commitments.
Moreover, if the veneer of legality is stretched to accommodate unilateral arrest operations as legitimate grounds for force, then the prospect of parallel universes of legality emerges: one legal for great powers and another for everyone else. States without similar capabilities are left to rely on the discredited mechanisms of international adjudication, powerless to enforce norms against those who flout them. In this context, the Colombian appeal to the Security Council, though symbolically necessary, may prove functionally futile. Yet, it remains an essential assertion that disputes about legality should be resolved through collective mechanisms mandated by the Charter, not unilateral force.
My Take
I view this issue as a matter of law.
In this context, I must begin with a quote attributed to Former President Joe Biden who is reported to have said: “ Thus, in setting an American agenda for a New World Order, we must begin with a profound alteration in traditional thought. The U.S. military action against Venezuela — proximate causes notwithstanding — is emblematic of a deep normative fracture in the international legal order. Constitutional claims by the executive of a powerful State, historical precedents of intervention, and geopolitical contestations cannot, without profound erosion, displace the legal principles enshrined in the United Nations Charter. Sovereignty and non-intervention are not merely political conveniences; they are the warp and weft of the international legal fabric. If they are to be rescinded, it must be through collective, consensual evolution of norms, not unilateral coercion.
This notwithstanding, international law is indeed international in aspiration and structure, but it is plural in practice. Its meaning and efficacy are refracted through the prism of national interests, cultures, and economies. A State that views sovereignty as sacrosanct will approach treaty obligations with suspicion, reserving to itself the right to prioritize domestic law. Another State, seeking integration into the global community, may embrace international law as a badge of modernity. International law does not exist in splendid isolation; it is filtered through domestic legal cultures, institutional imperatives, and jurisprudential traditions. Anthea Roberts in her book “Is International Law International” (Oxford University Press: 2017) says: “I suggest that international lawyers may be better understood as constituting a divisible college whose members hail from different states and regions and often form separate, though sometimes overlapping communications with their own understandings and approaches, as well as their own distinct influences and spheres of influence”.
The metaphor of the “invisible college” presupposes a unified interpretative enterprise. Yet the examples above reveal that international law is better conceived as a “divisible college.” Judges and lawyers, steeped in their domestic traditions, bring their national jurisprudential commitments to bear in international contexts. The result is not a seamless international legal system, but a patchwork of overlapping, sometimes contradictory, interpretations.
The enduring myth of the “invisible college” suggests a harmonious global legal order where practitioners act in concert, transcending national boundaries. The reality of aviation law, however, reveals something else entirely. It is a “divisible college,” in which courts and lawyers remain tethered to domestic traditions, producing a body of law that is fractured rather than uniform. For aviation—a sector that demands certainty, predictability, and universality—this fragmentation undermines the very objectives international treaties were crafted to achieve. The challenge for the future lies not in perpetuating the myth of invisibility, but in acknowledging divisibility, and in finding mechanisms to manage and, where possible, reconcile the divergences that inevitably flow from it.
International law, contrary to the perception fostered by its aspirational rhetoric, is not a single, cohesive entity seamlessly woven into the global fabric. It is, rather, a patchwork quilt, stitched together by the myriad backgrounds, cultural inheritances, and professional exposures of those who practice and interpret it. International lawyers come not from a uniform mould, but from diverse traditions—some influenced by the civil law systems of continental Europe, others by the common law traditions of the Anglo-American world, and yet others by hybrid legal regimes that have developed under the pressures of colonial history, post-colonial emancipation, or contemporary geopolitical alignments. Their professional trajectories are inevitably shaped by local institutions, national priorities, and regional imperatives. Thus, instead of being a unified science of law, international law manifests as a composite of intersecting fields, each reflecting the peculiarities of its adherents and the circumstances in which they operate
The Venezuelan crisis thus catalyzes a pressing imperative: to reaffirm and revivify international law as genuinely international — anchored not in the power of a few, but in the shared commitment of the many to peaceful coexistence, justice, and the rule of law.
Dr. Ruwantissa Abeyratne DCL, PhD, LL.M, LLB, FRAeS, FCILT
Senior Associate, Aviation Law and Policy
Aviation Strategies International
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