When Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez condemned the 3 January abduction of her president as bearing a “Zionist tint,” Western commentary dismissed the phrase as rhetorical overreach. That reflex evades the substance. The question is not who flew the helicopters. It is who legitimised the act—and what that legitimisation does to an already fragile international order.

Israel’s response was immediate and unmistakable. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised Washington’s “bold and historic leadership,” celebrating the operation as a moral achievement. Israel’s foreign minister, Gideon Sa’ar, framed the kidnapping as the conduct of the “leader of the free world,” aligning Israel with a spectacle that bypassed multilateral consent and due process. This was not careful alliance maintenance. It was a public endorsement of barbaric force.

Endorsement matters. In international politics, norms are not upheld by statutes alone; they are sustained by habits and expectations. When powerful states applaud breaches, those breaches become templates.

Maduro may be at fault. His rule was marked by economic shortcomings, curtailment of free speech, and elections seen as neither free nor fair. Yet even deeply flawed leaders are shielded—at least in principle—by a core norm of the post-1945 international order. The abduction ordered by Donald Trump crossed that line. A sitting head of state, Nicolás Maduro, was seized without a United Nations mandate, without an international arrest warrant, and without any judicial process recognised beyond American indictments. However objectionable Maduro’s governance, the precedent is unmistakable: sovereignty was treated not as a right, but as a revocable condition—withdrawn by a single power acting alone.

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