A crisis that tests the rules

The outlines of the recent U.S. military operation in Venezuela are now well established. In early January 2026, U.S. forces carried out strikes that led to the capture and removal of President Nicolás Maduro, who was transferred to the United States to face federal charges. The episode has brought into sharp focus the widening gap between contemporary crises and the international system designed to manage them. On the one hand, the Maduro regime was ruling without a popular mandate in an authoritarian manner, and it was responsible for significant suffering among Venezuelans.  On the other hand, the American intervention carried out and justified as it was, is deeply problematic in itself.

The Maduro regime and the American intervention

Maduro’s Venezuela was deeply flawed.  Not only had its corruption and mismanagement led a once proudly upwardly mobile country (the wealthiest in Latin America), into destitution, but to maintain its rule in the face of such failure, the Maduro regime had resorted to stealing elections and unrestrained brutality.  This led Venezuela’s citizens in extraordinary numbers (almost one quarter of the country’s population) to flee the country.    

If Maduro’s Venezuela presented significant challenges to a vision of a world order that secures minimum standards of decency for all the world’s citizens, the American intervention presented challenges of its own. The American authorities did not attempt to justify the intervention with reference to the restoration of democracy or the protection of human rights. Instead, they left the regime’s internal political structures largely intact and explained their use of force primarily in terms of U.S. strategic interests, notably access to Venezuela’s petroleum resources, while invoking allegations of the regime’s involvement in transnational drug trafficking—an emphasis that, had it been more squarely and credibly framed, might have improved the operation’s political plausibility without resolving its underlying legal deficiencies.

While the US Administration’s challenges to the global order are well known and beyond the scope of this piece, its intervention in the Venezuela case highlight generally the gloomy binary choice that often exist in the real world today: the continuation of the status quo in repressive regimes or self-interested intervention (even when often justified by reference to high-minded ideals) by the powerful. 

International law does not permit the use of force simply because a government is illegitimate or abusive

The United Nations Charter and international law

Interventions that lack authorization from the UN Security Council and do not meet the strict requirements of self-defence under Article 51 of the UN Charter are illegal under Article 2(4), prohibiting the use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.  This prohibition has long been regarded as a cornerstone of international order, intended to prevent unilateral military action and great-power coercion. Simply put: international law does not permit the use of force simply because a government is illegitimate or abusive.

The Charter’s framework is deliberately formal and procedural. It conditions the lawful use of force on collective authorisation, not unilateral moral judgement. In the absence of Security Council approval, many states have therefore concluded that the U.S. action was unlawful regardless of the character of the Maduro regime. This tension between moral outrage and legal constraint is not accidental; it reflects a system designed in 1945 to restrain power rather than to adjudicate political legitimacy.

Protection, paralysis, and the limits of R2P

This dilemma is often framed through the doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect or “R2P”. R2P affirms that sovereignty entails responsibility and that the international community should act when states fail to protect their populations from mass atrocities. But R2P was never intended to legitimise unilateral military action. It was conceived as a commitment to collective decision-making through the UN, not as a legal override of the Charter’s rules on the use of force.

Venezuela illustrates the unresolved contradiction at the heart of the current system: the international community recognises duties to protect populations, yet it lacks reliable and lawful mechanisms to act when the Security Council is blocked. The result is a pattern of selective intervention, legal defensiveness, and growing scepticism about the credibility of global norms.

Beyond the 1945 framework

What makes the Maduro episode particularly instructive is that plausible alternatives already exist. The Second United Nations Charter, drafted by the Global Governance Forum and published in 2024, was developed precisely to address the gap between normative ambition and institutional capacity. It expands the purposes of the UN beyond the narrow prevention of interstate war, placing economic justice, human rights, and effective governance at the centre of collective security.

Rather than relying on coercive or destabilising action, the Second Charter emphasises prevention, accountability, and multilateral support for political transition. It seeks to narrow the distance between the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and lived reality by strengthening institutional tools to address legitimacy breakdowns, humanitarian collapse, and regional instability before they escalate into crises demanding military response.  For example, it provides for the General Assembly and a new Parliamentary Assembly to override a Security Council veto (which has often been used to block the Council’s ability to act in Venezuela like situations), and it provides the Security Council with greater military and other institutional capacity to carry out such responsibilities.   

Why Article 109 matters now

The Venezuela crisis strengthens the case for convening a UN Charter review conference under Article 109. Repeated Security Council paralysis — evident not only in Venezuela but also in Ukraine, Syria, Yemen, and Sudan — has steadily undermined confidence in the UN’s ability to uphold its own principles. An Article 109 conference would provide a structured and lawful pathway for Member States to modernise the Charter without abandoning its foundations.

Such a process could translate ideas already articulated in the Second Charter into negotiated reforms: clearer criteria for collective action, a strengthened human rights architecture, and institutional mechanisms capable of responding to legitimacy crises without normalising unilateral force. This would not weaken sovereignty but rather adapt it to an era in which peace, justice, and planetary stability are increasingly intertwined.  We realize, of course, that more is necessary to changing geopolitical realities than putting words in a document, even one as important as the United Nations Charter. As Prime Minister Mark Carney’s now famous speech in Davos last week made clear, however, the global geopolitical situation is changing rapidly, and the world’s middle powers have a great incentive to come together to create and backup a stronger United Nations dedicated to effective multilateral and just solutions to global problems.   

Reform, not reaction

Venezuela is not merely a test of U.S. power or regional politics; it is a stress test of an international legal order struggling to keep pace with contemporary realities. The choice is not between rigid adherence to outdated rules and the acceptance of ad hoc military intervention. The alternative is reform: deliberate, collective, and grounded in law.

An Article 109 review process, informed by proposals such as the Second UN Charter, would allow the international community to reconcile the protection of populations with legality and legitimacy. That path offers a more durable response to Venezuela’s tragedy than reactionary force and a chance to restore confidence in the United Nations as an institution capable not only of condemning abuses, but of preventing them.