A Kidnapped President (Nicolas Maduro) and the International Law

The moment the news broke, it sounded unreal enough to be dismissed as rumor. Nicolás Maduro, the sitting president of Venezuela, had been seized on Venezuelan soil by a foreign power. This was not a capture sanctioned by the United Nations nor preceded by a declaration of war. A head of state, removed by force, while the world refreshed its timelines.

The shock was not merely about Maduro himself. He is not widely admired — under him, Venezuela has seen severe economic collapse, including hyperinflation, deep GDP contraction (80% decline 2014–2021), mass emigration (over 7.9M people), widespread poverty (80% population in poverty), severe food insecurity, and collapse of public services (health, education, water/electricity). So, many Venezuelans struggle to mourn him as a symbol of justice.

However, what unsettled observers was something deeper and more fragile: that power is restrained by rules even when those rules are inconvenient.

International law exists precisely for moments like this, when emotions run hot and when moral certainty tempts nations to act first and justify later. The problem is that international law is at its weakest when it is needed most.

To understand why this moment matters, it helps to step back from personalities and ask a simpler question. What is international law supposed to do, and what happens when powerful states decide they can step outside it?

International law did not emerge from idealism. It emerged from exhaustion. After centuries of wars that spilled endlessly across borders, Europe reached a breaking point in the mid-seventeenth century. The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 ended the Thirty Years’ War and introduced an idea that still anchors the modern world: states are sovereign within their territory, and no outside power has the right to decide who governs them. That principle survived empires and world wars because it offered something brutally practical. Without it, no country is safe from the ambitions of another.

The twentieth century hardened that lesson. After World War II, with more than sixty million dead and entire cities erased, states attempted to bind themselves to rules that would prevent unilateral violence from becoming normal again. The United Nations Charter, signed in 1945, prohibited the use of force against another state except in two narrow circumstances: self-defense after an armed attack, or explicit authorization by the UN Security Council. The rule was blunt by design. If every nation could decide for itself when force was justified, the system would collapse into permanent conflict.

That is why the seizure of a sitting president on foreign soil matters regardless of how one feels about that president. If the capture of Maduro can be justified on grounds of criminality or cruelty, then the same logic can be applied elsewhere by actors with far less restraint. International law does not ask whether a leader is good. It asks whether power is exercised within agreed limits.

History offers sobering reminders of what happens when those limits erode.

In 1960, Israeli agents abducted Adolf Eichmann from Argentina, transporting him secretly to Jerusalem to stand trial for his role in the Holocaust. The operation was celebrated morally, but it triggered diplomatic outrage. Argentina protested the violation of its sovereignty, and Israel ultimately acknowledged the breach at the United Nations. Even in the pursuit of justice for unprecedented crimes, the international community insisted that rules still applied.

Contrast that with the gradual normalization of extraterritorial force in the post-9/11 era. The United States has carried out military strikes and covert operations in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and Syria, often without the consent of the host government and sometimes without public legal justification. In Somalia alone, US airstrikes against militant targets have been ongoing since 2007, increasing sharply in recent years, with little evidence that terrorism has been decisively eliminated.

Libya offers another cautionary tale. In 2011, a UN-authorized intervention to protect civilians morphed into regime change. Muammar Gaddafi was killed, the state collapsed, and the country became a corridor for militias and human trafficking. The precedent mattered. Russia would later cite Libya when justifying its skepticism toward Western-led interventions. Once trust is broken, it does not return easily.

Defenders of unilateral action often argue that international law is naive, that it cannot restrain violent actors or failed states, that moral urgency demands exceptions. There is truth in the frustration. International law is procedural and frequently ineffective. There is no global police force. Enforcement depends on political will, and political will is unevenly distributed.

But international law was never meant to guarantee justice. It was meant to limit catastrophe.

When a powerful state removes a foreign leader by force, it signals that legality is optional for those strong enough to ignore it. Smaller states hear this message clearly. So do ambitious ones. If rules bend for the powerful, they will eventually break for everyone.

This is why even imperfect leaders are protected by the norms of sovereignty and immunity while in office. Not because they deserve it, but because the alternative is a world where capture and coercion become acceptable tools of statecraft. The law shields positions, not personalities.

What makes the Maduro episode especially dangerous is not its novelty but its clarity. There is no ambiguity about borders crossed or authority bypassed. It is a reminder that international law survives only as long as states choose to treat it as binding rather than decorative.

None of this absolves domestic governments of responsibility for their failures. International law does not excuse repression, corruption, or brutality. It merely insists that remedies for those crimes must pass through collective mechanisms rather than unilateral force. When that distinction collapses, law becomes indistinguishable from power.

The uncomfortable truth is that international law has always been a compromise between ideals and reality. It functions best in boring domains where cooperation benefits everyone, regulating airspace, shipping lanes, telecommunications, trade standards. It falters where politics intrude. Yet even in its failures, it sets boundaries that slow descent into chaos.

The capture of a president should not be assessed only through the lens of whether that president was competent or cruel. It should be examined as a test of whether the world still believes that rules apply even when breaking them feels convenient.

International law is not a moral referee. It is a fragile agreement among states to restrain themselves in a system where restraint is often the hardest choice. When that agreement weakens, history suggests that violence does not become more just. It merely becomes more common.

The question raised by Maduro’s seizure is not whether he deserved protection. It is whether the rest of the world still believes anyone does.