The Daily Populous Sunday January 18th, 2026 morning edition
Authored by thenation.com and submitted by Normal_Imagination54

World / The US Is a Rogue State That Deserves to Be Sanctioned Where is the international outrage over the US assault on Venezuela and kidnapping of Maduro?

President Donald Trump, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe monitor the US military assault on Venezuela from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club. (Molly Riley / The White House via Getty Images)

The United States of America is a rogue nation, run by a violent criminal who operates outside the rule of law. The bombing of Venezuela and kidnapping of its president, Nicolás Maduro, so that he can stand for a show trial in New York, is a flagrant violation of international law. It is proof positive that the United States, under Trump, is the biggest “bad guy” on the international stage and should be treated accordingly. It’s a new low point in the era of lows we call the Trump administration. And it’s a return to the imperialist posturing and interventionism that have defined this country’s garbage treatment of Latin America for two centuries.

The United States should be condemned by the international community and all peoples of this earth. Decent countries should sanction us economically, and our leaders should be charged as war criminals and have their assets frozen. These sanctions should not just be directed at the top level of our government but also against our feckless Congress and the complicit politicians in both parties who support our illegal actions. The US should be treated like the global pariah it is, and that includes bringing all of the soft-power and shame the world can bring to bear on us: Our embassies should be closed and our diplomats expelled, our games and tournaments boycotted, including the upcoming World Cup and Summer Olympics. And everybody else should be issuing travel advisories to the US in an attempt to crash our tourism industry. Everything the international community did to Russia after it invaded Ukraine should be done to us now that we’ve invaded Venezuela and are trying to install a sham government there.

Just like Russia, we have violated the UN charter with this unlawful use of force against a sovereign nation. Those rules can be broken only in cases of self-defense, but it should be pretty clear that the United States has no legitimate self-defense case. Venezuela did not attack us, or our allies. Drug trafficking, no matter how you construe it, is not an “armed attack.” It is not a justification for the use of military force against a sovereign nation. Nobody who takes drugs in the United States is forced to do so at Venezuelan gunpoint. There is no line that can be drawn from a Trump supporter taking a bump at Mar-a-Lago back to a declaration of war on Caracas. The drug-trafficking-as-armed-attack line simply doesn’t work—not as a justification for bombing fishing boats in international waters in the Caribbean, and not for invading a foreign country and kidnapping its president.

The argument that the abduction of Maduro was a simple “law enforcement” action is also legally ridiculous. The United States has no jurisdiction over Venezuela, even though the Supreme Court has said that it retains jurisdiction over foreign nationals charged with crimes in the United States. Vice President JD Vance said, “You don’t get to avoid justice for drug trafficking in the United States because you live in a palace in Caracas.” Vance only went to Yale Law School, so maybe he didn’t learn this, but that is pretty much how it’s supposed to work: You don’t get to kidnap people living outside your country just because you want to bring them to trial. The only legal way to bring Maduro over the United States to stand trial would be with an extradition treaty between the US and Venezuela, which we do not currently have. And even if we did have some kind of mutual assistance agreement with Venezuela, Maduro should enjoy criminal immunity as a leader of a sovereign state (a concept Trump, the convicted felon, should understand well). Fundamentally, sending in our own military to make the arrest on foreign soil without the consent of the other country would still violate international law and the sovereignty of Venezuela.

Just to close the loop on this ridiculous “law enforcement” argument, at his illegal arraignment in New York on Monday, Maduro (and his court appointed lawyer) revealed that he did not know his rights before the US District Judge Alvin Hellerstein informed him during the hearing. The arrest of Maduro fails “normal law enforcement” 101.

MAGA sycophants have pointed to the arrest and trial of Gen. Manuel Noriega of Panama as precedent for this illegal action. In 1989, the US invaded Panama and eventually abducted Noriega, then forced him to stand trial in Miami where he was convicted of drug trafficking.

First of all, citing some risibly illegal shit we did 35-odd years ago to justify some risibly illegal shit we’re doing now is not a “legal argument” so much as proof that illegal activity will be repeated if it is unpunished. We had no right to invade Panama in 1989, just as we have no right to invade Venezuela now. We do these things because we are a nuclear superpower that treats all Latin American countries as our misbehaving colonies, not because we have moral, ethical, or legal ground to stand on.

That said, even the Panama invasion had more of a veneer of legality than the Venezuelan one. For one thing, Noriega’s government had technically declared a state of “war” against the United States, and an attack had left a few unarmed American soldiers dead. That’s not a lot of legal justification for George H.W. Bush to abduct a foreign ruler, but it was a lot more than what Trump has now.

Despite that thin lacquer of legality, the United Nations condemned US actions in Panama.

Hopefully, they’ll condemn our actions again, but (newsflash to Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries) we’re going to need more than a strongly worded letter from bureaucrats. Speaking of Schumer, Jeffries, and the cadre of feckless Democrats, they seem very bent out of shape that Trump didn’t go to Congress to ask for a declaration of war before kidnapping a foreign ruler. But let’s be clear: Having congressional authorization to violate the peace of the world would not make those violations “more legal.” As I said: The entire international community should rise up against us.

They won’t. Already the leaders of Europe are stammering out platitudes meant to avoid Trump’s wrath. UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer said that he “regarded Maduro as an illegitimate president and we shed no tears about the end of his regime.” French President Emmanuel Macron initially said that Venezuelans “can only rejoice” at the ouster of Maduro, evidently ignoring Venezuelans’ feelings about the bombing of their capital by a foreign power. Later, he walked it back somewhat and said he “neither supported nor approved” of Maduro’s abduction. Good to know that kidnapping is still generally frowned upon by the French government. Meanwhile, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz made the most Weimar Republic statement possible: He said the legality of the US operation was “complex” and that “international law in general” should be followed. “In general” is doing a lot of work here.

I cannot be surprised that many of the leaders of the traditional European powers are willing to let the United States play colonial master over a Latin American country. Europe hasn’t had the strength or the will to seriously oppose US policy in Latin America since 1812, and starting an economic war with us over yet another example of US imperialism is not something the European imperialists are likely to do.

I also can’t be surprised that many of the non-white and wannabe-white countries whose economic interests align with the United States have also offered support of yet another American attempt at regime change in Latin America. From Japan to India to the American puppet government in Argentina, standing against the US is evidently too expensive.

These countries should oppose us, but imperialists generally stick together. The world will still come to participate in our reindeer games, and the United States will spend a whole year congratulating itself over the 250th anniversary of our Declaration of white male Independence without even pausing to consider the irony that independence for white people here has meant two and a half centuries of subjugation for everyone else we share the hemisphere with.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that this is why no leader in the Global South should respect the United States or the white international community at any level. US leaders have proven time and again that they are racist hypocrites who do not stand for freedom or liberty, only the rape and pillage of resources their countries don’t have enough of. Whether those resources are oil, wealth, or even human beings, it doesn’t matter: The white world sticks together when it comes to stealing stuff from non-white countries.

The US is a rogue state, but it is a rogue white state menacing its non-white neighbors, and that’s always OK. Even non-white countries understand that. Everybody on the global stage knows that the rules are different when white nations take what they want, particularly when they’re taking it from non-white nations. They’ve been doing it for literal centuries.

In this way, Trump’s actions against Venezuela are far from unprecedented. Violent, illegal actions by this country against sovereign Latin American states are the norm. Trump, as is his wont, is just doing the normal thing without the usual white niceties that come with imperialist machinations.

By taking off the US’s mask, Trump has simply revealed what non-whites have always known to be true: US foreign policy is as colonialist, imperialist, and racist as anything ever put out by Europe, and most of Europe will continue to support it.

SomewhatInept on January 18th, 2026 at 00:40 UTC »

Who is going to sanction the US over Maduro of all people? China? Russia? Iran?

0fiuco on January 17th, 2026 at 23:17 UTC »

aren't they technically already sanctioning by themselves with all the tariffs?

dacommie323 on January 17th, 2026 at 22:23 UTC »

How do you sanction the largest economy, the reserve currency, or a consumption based economy?

I feel the only thing you can do is to stop trading with the US, but that would most likely hurt the sanctioning economy more than the US as it would probably lead to a local recession and/or increased unemployment.