There is no legal difference between Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine and US President Donald Trump’s attack on Venezuela. Both are acts of aggression, the “supreme crime” according to the judgment at Nuremberg, because leaders who start wars are responsible for all the deaths and destruction that result. The UN Charter of 1945 proclaims its purpose of saving succeeding generations from the scourge of war and Article 2(4) lays down the fundamental rule that a UN member must never invade another except in self-defence.

Illustration by Joe Benke. Credit:

It is absurd to think that Venezuela was about to attack the US, last Friday or in the foreseeable future. So Trump has no legitimate defence. But like Putin, he has nuclear weapons and a veto on any discomforting action (such as a Security Council condemnation) that the UN might take.

In short, the indictment that awaited the Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife in New York conferred no retrospective extraterritorial authority to arrest or imprison them or to occupy or annex their nation. No treaty permitted this and no international court approved it. What occurred was not a “police action” or law enforcement procedure but a unilateral use of armed force to coerce the representatives of a sovereign state.

There can be no quibble about the purpose of the US........

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