The most glaring features of the United States’ intervention in Venezuela over the weekend were its lawlessness and its breathtaking logical and political incoherence.

The world has just witnessed Washington use its armed forces to kidnap the leader of a sovereign foreign nation for the stated purposes of subjecting him to the U.S. criminal justice system. Most strikingly, this unilateral action was ordered up by a U.S. president—Donald Trump—whose own impunity has been immeasurably heightened by an extraordinarily pliant U.S. Congress that his Republican Party controls and a landmark 2024 Supreme Court decision that shockingly ruled that U.S. leaders generally cannot face criminal prosecution for their official acts.

The most glaring features of the United States’ intervention in Venezuela over the weekend were its lawlessness and its breathtaking logical and political incoherence.

The world has just witnessed Washington use its armed forces to kidnap the leader of a sovereign foreign nation for the stated purposes of subjecting him to the U.S. criminal justice system. Most strikingly, this unilateral action was ordered up by a U.S. president—Donald Trump—whose own impunity has been immeasurably heightened by an extraordinarily pliant U.S. Congress that his Republican Party controls and a landmark 2024 Supreme Court decision that shockingly ruled that U.S. leaders generally cannot face criminal prosecution for their official acts.

The Trump administration has justified its actions in Venezuela using a mixture of flimsy and puerile rationales. It has ceaselessly called Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro a dictator and decried his alleged corruption. But the premises behind these claims are remarkably weak. However corrupt Maduro may be, the central accusation used to justify the massing of U.S. forces in the Caribbean and his heavily armed extradition—that he was a major drug lord ultimately responsible for countless U.S. deaths—has never been supported with evidence and is strongly disputed by many experts.

What is more, if being a bad guy or even a rank dictator is sufficient justification to remove another country’s leader, this ridiculous standard will hasten the world down a path away from a more principled order—and toward a return to the jungle, where countries drop any pretext of respect for the principles of sovereignty, rules, and the rights of others, and simply do whatever they feel capable of getting away with. (It is also being applied with obvious inconsistency. Where does the list begin and end? Kim Jong Un? Vladimir Putin?)

A major part of Washington’s claim for the operation’s legitimacy lay in........

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