2026 has begun with a dramatic and rapidly unfolding geopolitical crisis centered in Venezuela. In late 2025, the United States initiated a significant military buildup in the southern Caribbean and off the coast of Venezuela, deploying multiple naval assets—including guided‑missile destroyers—and thousands of personnel as part of what the U.S. government described as an expanded counternarcotics and security operation.
This deployment marked the most substantial concentration of U.S. military power in the region in decades, with carrier strike groups, amphibious forces, and supporting aircraft operating within striking distance of Venezuelan territorial waters. The buildup contributed to heightened regional uncertainty and strained diplomatic relations, particularly as sources from Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, characterized it as a hostile encroachment on its sovereignty.
Tensions escalated further on September 2, 2025, when the United States conducted its first acknowledged strike against a vessel in the Caribbean suspected of transporting illicit drugs originating from Venezuela. U.S. officials framed the action as part of an expanded campaign against transnational crime, but the operation also set the stage for a series of 32 known kinetic strikes on small boats later publicly linked to alleged drug trafficking activities—actions that drew scrutiny from international bodies and regional governments alike.
The escalation reached its climax on January 3. The US carried out a “Large-Scale Strike” on Caracas which culminated with the arrest of Nicolas Maduro. This event has led to a wide range of discussions regarding the role of the US in world affairs and the return of interventionism into Latin America, a region haunted by US intervention in their national affairs, foreign affairs, and an overall lack of respect for international law.
This brief analysis, rather than simply arguing that international law should be respected (a point largely uncontested), will rather focus on a more difficult question raised by the U.S. operations in Venezuela. The paradox at the heart of the international legal order is created: an intervention may appear morally compelling yet remains legally prohibited under existing international law. Furthermore, this text would like to push back on the popular idea of the uselessness or death of international law. International law, as I argue later on, both as a concept and a structure is not dead. Our usual conception of it has reached its boiling point, and new conceptions must be grappled with.
International law as a practice and not just norms.
One of the key issues that differentiates international law from national law is that international law lacks any real way of being enforced. There is no world tribunal that can sentence and punish states for breaking international norms, just in the same way that a national court can prosecute and sentence an individual to prison. The only international institution that manages to fill this niche within international society is the International Court of Justice, yet it also suffers from limitations.
Articles 36 and 59 of the ICJ Statute the Court’s binding power is limited and conditional. The ICJ may issue legally binding decisions only where states have consented to its jurisdiction and once jurisdiction exists, judgments are binding exclusively between the parties and only with respect to the specific case. The Court may also indicate provisional measures under Article 41, which are legally binding, but these do not constitute punitive or coercive enforcement. If a state fails to comply with an ICJ judgment, the Court itself has no enforcement mechanism. Even the institution that most closely resembles a world court cannot enforce all sentences. The idea that international law can and should function like national law shows its limitation.
The Venezuelan intervention invites a reassessment of how we view international law and how we think it functions in practice. International law isn’t solely the norms written in treaties, but also the way these norms operate and are practiced in the real world.
This practice-oriented understanding of law is further developed by the New Haven School of international law, which defines law not as a static system of rules but as a “continuous flow of authoritative and controlling decisions.” In this framework, authority is not derived solely from formal legal sources, but from community expectations regarding who is entitled to decide, by what procedures, under which conditions, and in light of which values. Power refers broadly to the resources used to shape behavior, while authority constitutes the specifically legal dimension of decision-making. A decision is authoritative when it aligns with these shared expectations, even in the absence of centralized enforcement.
In a system without centralized enforcement, the law’s practical force is shaped by power asymmetries which can provide some states the capacity to act unilaterally and resist being held accountable for violating legal rules. The Venezuela case makes this tension visible, revealing the gap between international law’s formal prohibitions and its uneven application in practice. Legal realism offers a framework for understanding this disjunction. Realism argues that law is best understood through the actual practices of legal decision-makers, emphasizing how social, political, economic, and institutional forces shape legal outcomes. Norms, in this view, do not disappear— they derive their operative meaning from how they are interpreted, invoked, ignored, or selectively enforced in concrete cases.
The Venezuelan intervention underscores the need to rethink international law as a set of practices, not merely prescriptive norms. Law is not only what states ought to follow, but how norms are interpreted, deployed, and contested in concrete political contexts. International law emerges through state action, institutional responses, and patterns of justification rather than abstract textual authority alone. If international law is to remain relevant, its dominant conception must evolve alongside the geopolitical realities that continuously reshape it.
Featured/Headline Image Caption and Citation: “Protest against US military intervention in Venezuela,” Image Sourced from Wikimedia Commons | CC License, no changes made