While Nicolas Maduro appears this Monday before a federal court in Manhattan accused of drug trafficking and arms trafficking, Europe is witnessing—uncomfortable and fragmented—the final collapse of a consensus that had already been eroded: that of international legality as an effective limit to the use of force by the great powers. The judicial scene in New York and the diplomatic confusion in Brussels, Paris or Berlin They are not isolated episodes, but rather two faces of the same phenomenon: the accelerated transition towards a global order where political legitimacy is redefined by the ability to impose accomplished facts.
The image of Maduro in handcuffs, transported by US special forces after a military operation that left at least 40 dead in Caracascondenses a brutal paradox. For years, much of the West denounced the authoritarian and fraudulent nature of his regime, ignored its electoral legitimacy and endorsed increasing sanctions. But the step that Washington has taken now—capturing it on foreign territory, bombing strategic targets and announcing that it will “temporarily” administer the country and its oil industry—crosses a border that international law, at least in theory, continues to consider impassable.
The indictment brought by federal prosecutors describes Maduro as the head of a “corrupt and illegitimate government” that would have used the state apparatus to facilitate drug trafficking and other criminal activities. The charges—narcoterrorism conspiracy, importation of cocaine, possession of weapons of war—are not new: they date back to the first term of donald trump. The novelty is not legal, but political and military: for the first time, the United States carries out an arrest of this type under the argument of “self-defense” against drug trafficking, a doctrine that, if accepted, would empty the basic restrictions of the UN Charter of content.
In Washington, the controversy is open. Democratic legislators denounced that the Executive circumvented Congress and violated the War Powers Resolution of 1973which requires consultation and obtaining legislative approval for major military operations. Trump himself, who during the campaign promised to avoid wars abroad, described the offensive as “an assault the likes of which has not been seen since World War II” and did not rule out deploying ground troops. Even more: he announced that American oil companies will “fix” the Venezuelan infrastructure and begin to exploit it. The language does not refer to an international police operation, but to a de facto occupation.
Europe, meanwhile, became trapped in its own contradiction. Since 2024, the European Union has not recognized Maduro as legitimate president after widely questioned elections. This precedent opens a legal loophole: if Maduro is not the legitimate head of state, he may not enjoy sovereign immunity before US courts, as happened with Manuel Noriega in 1989. But this argument—technically sophisticated—does not resolve the central problem: the legality of the use of force to capture him.
European reactions exposed a deep fracture. The Italian Giorgia Meloniideologically aligned with Trump, described the intervention as “defensive.” At the opposite extreme, the French chancellor Jean-Noël Barrot He was categorical in pointing out that the operation violates the principle of non-use of force. Between both poles, ambiguity predominated: generic calls for a “democratic transition”, abstract appeals to international law and a notable silence about the methods used.
That caution is not naive. With the war in Ukraine still raging and European dependence on American support intact, few leaders are willing to openly confront Trump. The head of community diplomacy, Kaja Kallasand the president of the Commission, Ursula von der Leyeninsisted that any solution must respect the UN Charter, but avoided commenting on whether that principle had already been broken. The German Chancellor Friedrich Merz He spoke of a “complex legal evaluation”, a formula that, in diplomacy, usually amounts to buying time.
The background is more disturbing. As the academic Oona Hathaway warned, if drug trafficking becomes sufficient justification to intervene militarily in another country, the exception of self-defense ceases to be an exception and becomes the rule. Under that criterion, almost no peripheral State would be safe. Today it is Venezuela; tomorrow, any country identified as the origin of illicit flows that affect a power.
The Maduro case also exposes the limits of multilateralism. For years, The International Criminal Court investigated crimes of the Venezuelan regime without producing a single specific accusation. The sanctions and statements did not achieve a negotiated transition. That vacuum was now occupied by the most stark unilateral action. As Nizar El Fakih pointed out, the failure of multilateral avenues fueled the temptation to resolve the problem by force.
Maduro’s appearance in New York, presented as a triumph of justice, thus occurs in a context where the very notion of international legality is fraying. Europe knows this, but it cannot – or does not dare – to say it clearly, because this also exposes its own failure. But celebrating the end of a dictatorship while looking the other way in the face of methods that undermine the global legal order is a discursive pirouette that is difficult to sustain over time.
Perhaps that is why this scene marks something more than the fall of an authoritarian leader. It also signals the burial of a world in which law sought to contain power. On the new board, the law continues to be invoked, but increasingly as rhetoric after the fact. And while Maduro sits in the dock, Europe watches as the principle he claims to defend becomes, once again, a footnote in history.
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