A crime of unprecedented and criminal, epic proportion
The United Nations was founded in 1945 after two world wars had demonstrated that unrestrained great power rivalry and the legal toleration of war as a policy tool were incompatible with human survival. The UN Charter, signed in San Francisco and in force since October 1945, explicitly committed states “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war” and to base relations on sovereign equality and nonintervention. Central to this new order was Article 2(4), which prohibits the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, except in narrow cases of self-defense or when the Security Council authorizes a “force justia,” or a just war.
The Security Council, with the United States as a permanent member, was entrusted with the “primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security,” precisely to prevent unilateral wars of the sort that had twice plunged the world into catastrophe. Over time, the UN also became a vehicle for decolonization and human rights, providing a platform for newly independent states to assert that no power had the right to invade, carve up, or “run” another people’s territory.
UN collapses
The Jan. 3, 2026 operation against Venezuela — largescale US strikes, the seizure of Maduro and Cilia Flores, and the declared plan to administer the country and its oil — meets every classic criterion of a war of aggression. Venezuela did not launch an armed attack on the United States, and there is no Security Council resolution authorizing the use of force, which means there is no Charter-based legal justification for this invasion. In the language that emerged at Nuremberg and has since informed international criminal law, aggression is the “supreme international crime” because it opens the door to all the other crimes — killings, destruction, displacement — that follow.
When a permanent member of the Security Council itself commits such aggression, flaunting it on television and promising to “take the oil,” it does more than violate a rule; it demonstrates that the state charged with upholding the Charter treats that Charter as scrap paper. The UN may continue to meet, debate, and issue resolutions, but if its foundational norm against conquest is openly shredded by one of its guardians, then the organization has been effectively abolished as a brake on war, retaining only the shell of a diplomatic forum. This latest invasion stands in a long line of US interventions in Latin America and beyond, from the occupations of Haiti and Nicaragua to the CIA-backed coups in Guatemala and Chile and the 1989 invasion of Panama. More recently, the 2003 invasion of Iraq — launched without Security Council authorization on false claims of weapons of mass destruction — marked a major rupture in the post-1945 legal order, showing that Washington was prepared to wage regime change war in defiance of the Charter. The operation in Venezuela repeats this pattern: economic strangulation and political pressure followed by direct military action, with open talk of controlling oil fields and refashioning the political system from outside.
Target
Venezuela has long been a particular target because it holds some of the world’s largest proven oil reserves and has, under successive governments, challenged US dominance in the region. The current intervention strips away decades of euphemism about “democracy promotion,” replacing it with blunt admissions that the United States will “run” Venezuela and that US companies will exploit its oil, making explicit the imperial logic that the UN system was supposed to bury.
That Maduro has been sending illegal drugs to the US not just makes no sense but illogical. Why would he deal with drugs when he control the biggest oil reserves in he in the world? Why he would be kleptocrat like Marcos Sr. when as an autocrat, as the Americans themselves have been claiming, he could steal from state coffers as much he wants.
C’mon, there is two-fold reason why Maduro was shanghaied to face an American court. He is ideologically anti-American leader in the western hemisphere, which a State Department statement the other day declared “This is OUR hemisphere, and President Trump will not allow our security to be threatened.”
Second, Trump sees a huge business opportunity in jailing Maduro, and taking over the development of its oil reserves. He sees his family diversifying from property energy.
Whatever the internal failures, corruption, or authoritarian practices of the Maduro government, these are issues for Venezuelans to resolve through their own political struggle, not for a foreign army to settle by bombardment and arrest. By overthrowing the government through force, flying its leaders to a foreign court, and planning to administer the country, Washington is denying Venezuelans their basic right to self-determination and treating their statehood as a revocable license dependent on US approval.
This is neocolonialism in its clearest form: a powerful state uses its military to subordinate another state, appropriate its resources, and remake its institutions under foreign tutelage. To describe such an arrangement as “running” Venezuela is to return openly to the vocabulary of protectorates and mandates, erasing the progress symbolized by decolonization and the UN’s affirmation that all peoples are equal in rights and dignity.
Human cost
Already, the invasion has produced explosions in Caracas, power outages, and a wave of fear and instability in Venezuela and along its borders, with neighboring states putting their forces on alert and bracing for refugees. History shows that such operations rarely remain limited: infrastructure is destroyed, supply chains collapse, and ordinary people — workers, the poor, the sick — bear the brunt of violence and deprivation. In a country already devastated by economic crisis and sanctions, war multiplies hunger, disease, and social breakdown, making any future democratic recovery harder, not easier.
As missiles fall and soldiers advance, the rhetoric of “precision” and “liberation” is revealed for what it is: a mask for the imposition of foreign will through organized mass violence. Each further day of occupation deepens regional tensions, encourages arms races, and normalizes the idea that powerful states may simply take what they want, while the UN watches helplessly from New York.
To condemn the invasion of Venezuela is, therefore, to defend not only Venezuelan sovereignty but the entire fragile edifice of law and restraint that humanity has constructed since 1945. If a permanent member of the Security Council can wage open aggression, topple governments, and seize resources without consequence, then the promise that “never again” would wars of conquest be tolerated has been exposed as a lie, and that United Nations has been abolished in everything but name.
What remains is a stark choice: either states, movements, and peoples mobilize to reject and resist this aggression — demanding withdrawal, accountability, and a restoration of Venezuela’s right to determine its own future — or the world accepts a return to an international jungle where law yields entirely to force.
A 2022 analysis of Congressional Research Service data found 469 distinct instances of US military interventions abroad between 1798 and 2022, with 251 of them after 1991 alone.
On the other hand, The Military Intervention Project at Tufts University similarly concludes that the US has carried out over 500 international military interventions since 1776, most of them after 1950.
Of all nations, we Filipinos should be vociferous in condemning the American latest crime. Just when were close to joining the community of independent nations, the Americans invaded us, and with their superior guns and cannons defeated us that from 1899 to 1902. Some scholars claim that including deaths from disease and famine, Filipino casualties exceeded 1 million.
The Americans created an economic, social and political structure that persist through the generations to lock us into poverty which they, advertently not, will also create of Venezuela. What kind country will be left after Trump, as has boasted he will do, give its oil resources to US firms? No doubt as chaotic and a violent society as Afghanistan and Iraq, which have become failed states, with warlords incessantly fighting for control of government.
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A crime of unprecedented and criminal, epic proportion
Source: Breaking News PH
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