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The Trump administration’s massive military attack on Venezuela, launched with 150 aircraft, reportedly killed upwards of 80 people, including civilians.

In utter defiance of the mandates of the United Nations Charter, U.S. forces launched the attack as they kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, First Lady Cilia Flores, who have been transported to New York, where they face drug trafficking charges.

After two world wars claimed more than 100 million lives, 50 countries came together and enacted the UN Charter to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind.” The United States, one of the drafters of the Charter, is a party to that treaty.

Under the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution, treaties are the supreme law of the land, and judges across the country are bound by them. Article 2 (4) of the Charter declares, “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.”

The only two exceptions to that prohibition are when a country acts in self-defense after an armed attack or when the UN Security Council approves the use of force. The attack on Venezuela and the kidnapping of Maduro and Flores did not constitute self-defense nor did the Security Council authorize it.

Venezuela had not launched an armed attack on the U.S. or any other country, nor did it pose an imminent threat. In a stark example of the tail wagging the dog, Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in the press conference following the invasion that the U.S. military engaged in “multiple self-defense engagements as the force began to withdraw out of Venezuela.”

Indeed, it is Venezuela that has the right to exercise self-defense in response to the armed attack by the United States.

Illegal Aggression

Donald Trump’s January 3 attack constituted illegal aggression. In its 1946 judgment, the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg held: “To initiate a war of aggression … is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of whole.”

Under the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court, an “‘act of aggression’ means the use of armed force by a State against the sovereignty, territorial integrity or political independence of another State, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Charter of the United Nations.” That includes “the invasion or attack by the armed forces of a State of the territory of another State.”

The U.S. military attack violated the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and political independence of Venezuela, and thus constituted aggression.

Trump attempted to justify his aggression by claiming that Maduro was the kingpin of an operation that brought drugs into the U.S., saying in his press conference after the abduction that Maduro “sent savage and murderous gangs, including the bloodthirsty prison gang, Tren de Aragua, to terrorize American communities nationwide.”

But an assessment by U.S. intelligence agencies from February 2025 determined that Tren de Aragua was neither controlled by the Venezuelan government, nor committing crimes in the U.S. on its orders.

And most of the cocaine coming into the U.S. is thought to travel........

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