That U.S. intervention in Venezuela runs contrary to international law, or that Donald Trump’s claims to control Greenland are legally specious, is evident to any student of the subject (and not only to academics). The territorial integrity and political independence of a State, the right of peoples to self-determination, the principle of non-intervention in the internal affairs of States, the absence of any right to use force aimed at coercively changing a State’s government, the fight against drug trafficking through cooperation among States as established by the relevant treaties, the rules on diplomatic immunity and so on, are all elements of a minimal normative and institutional architecture that is widely consolidated and shared by the international community—especially, for some of those principles, starting from the years following the Second World War.

But dusting off the textbooks does not help us get to the heart of the matter. If there is little or nothing to debate about the applicability of individual rules or principles, and about their violations, the fact remains that what is under attack, or being undermined, are divergent visions of the very idea of international law.

On the one hand, the Trump administration seems to repudiate it because it is deemed contrary to American sovereignty and to the national interest. All this is done in the name of a generic appeal to realism, anti-globalism, and jurisdictional maximalism: the capture of Nicolás Maduro as an enforcement operation of U.S. law, rather than as an armed attack against a sovereign State. But it is also driven by the ambition to pursue and consolidate zones of influence of a neo-imperial and neo-colonial kind, set down in black and white in the National Security Strategy of November 2025. The same ambition—incidentally—that Trump would like Vladimir Putin to waive (but is that really the case?). In short, a fruit salad of concepts generally centered on the principle of protecting one’s own sovereignty rather than that of others.

On the other hand, however, the defense of international law is not infrequently grounded in the protection of an order perceived in public debate—especially in political discourse—as “liberal” and “Western” (an order that indeed Trump would seem intent on breaking up). One thus accepts, albeit tacitly, the idea that “liberal internationalism” represents not only a historically superior model, but in fact the only model worth pursuing: a kind of liberal legal neo-Kantian-inspired globalism. Beyond certain inaccuracies or paradoxes in this reading (for example, emerging countries in Africa and Asia in the 1950s and 1960s drew extensively on international law and human rights to forge their independence, and the many violations of international law by Western countries are well known), there is no doubt that the more radical expressions of this vision, extending to extreme forms of neoliberal cosmopolitanism, harbor a deep political and legal hostility towards anything that smacks of statehood, nation, people, or territory, as well as diversity or individuality. Hence, the short circuit and clash between a crude and unappealing sovereignty and the exacerbation of “global law” understood as a black hole of history.

Trumpian, or more broadly speaking conservative, Americans respond by arguing that international law is, in any case, an instrument lacking enforcement capability, that is, lacking mechanisms of implementation or sanctions, and often in the hands of those who violate it systematically. In the Venezuelan case, it is argued that it is better to violate a (purportedly) non-existent law than to allow a dictator to invoke it pretextually. It is true that, irrespective of any U.S. military intervention in Caracas, the parameters governing certain areas, such as the use of force, have long revealed, well before Trump, serious shortcomings stemming from the substantial inability of the United Nations and other organizations to provide adequate responses to multiple conflicts and crises. But even here, the catch is rather meagre. The expansion of the institutional infrastructure of the international legal order over recent decades has been unprecedented, beginning with the proliferation of courts and judicial cooperation aimed at protecting individuals and States. “Sovereigntist” claims instead reflect a reaction to the effects of this constant, albeit imperfect, expansion, rather than to its absence. An expansion, moreover, far more advanced than that notion of minimal reaction to State violations which Hans Kelsen already considered sufficient to regard international law as a sanction-bearing system. From another perspective, the implementation gaps of international law—often more sector-specific than pervasive—are not always different from those found in many other areas of law: who would ever dream of disregarding criminal law or tax law because of the daily occurrence of crimes, fraud, or tax evasion within a State?

And even if one were dealing with a hypocritical appeal to legality by a ruthless dictator, by the representative of an “illegitimate” government, or by a “rogue” State, would that be enough to strip away those basic guarantees of international legal coexistence such as territorial sovereignty, diplomatic immunity, or the right to a fair trial? This must be said, of course, not only with reference to Trumpian actions (Maduro at least appeared before a federal court), but also to all those that preceded them (one need only recall the Obama administration’s raid to eliminate Osama bin Laden in Pakistan). The Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet faced proceedings before a Spanish court long after leaving office as head of the military junta in Chile, as a result of a decision by the English courts to allow his extradition. In short, political and moral judgment, and even the grave responsibilities of rulers toward those they govern, do not authorize the law of the jungle or legal illiteracy in international relations.

International law does not arise in order to replace domestic law, but rather to shape some of its content and to mitigate the excesses of national sovereignty. It is a system that no one, not even the United States, can do without, risking a decline in relations among States into a condition of costly, permanent crisis marked by the re-emergence of raw power balances and/or a nineteenth-century belief that “might is right.” The Trump effect seems to point toward this potential regression, which one hopes can be stopped from within, that is, by American politics itself. For their part, those who care about law and rights must work to strengthen, not weaken, States and the identity of peoples in their plurality and capacity for cooperation, setting aside the illusion of a single post-national model that by its very nature is conducive—no less than the model embraced by those who overtly detest international rules—to other forms of domination.

Cover photo: A man looks at the front page of a newspaper reading “He fell” and depicting Venezuela’s ousted president Nicolas Maduro in Cucuta, Colombia, on the border with Venezuela, on January 4, 2026, a day after a US strike. (Photo by Schneyder Mendoza / AFP)