The Marilyn Monroe Doctrine and the International Rules Based Order
11th February 2026
The ‘Rules Based’ International legal order, that convenient phantom, had its coffin nailed at Nuremburg in 1945. Yet the accepted mainstream news take on Venezuela was that Maduro’s flight of fancy to the US was something crashing the norms of the ordered world of modernity. A usurpation of the decent normalcy of the twentieth century. Please. As Cicero opined “In time of war, the laws are silent” (Inter arma enim silent leges).
On 3 January 2026, United States armed forces carried out a military operation in Venezuela that resulted in the capture of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, who were transported to the United States to face federal criminal charges. The intervention has since generated intense legal debate, centring on whether the actions violated international law, constitutional constraints on the use of force, and longstanding principles of sovereignty and immunity.
Legal scholars and international law authorities rolled out the usual verbatim responses. That the use of force by one state against another is tightly circumscribed by the United Nations Charter, particularly Article 2(4), which prohibits the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state absent Security Council authorisation or a valid claim of self-defence. According to international law expert Geoffrey Robertson KC, the operation’s conduct “was contrary to Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter” and constitutes a ‘crime of aggression’, describing it as ‘the worst crime of all.’
Unfortunately they can’t take their football and go home because their football is imaginary.
Critics also point to wider implications for sovereign immunity and the protection afforded to sitting heads of state under international law. As articulated by the panel of UN human rights experts, the unprovoked use of armed force on Venezuelan sovereign territory is a breach of international law and may ‘also constitute the international crime of aggression attributable to the individual political and military leaders involved.’ They further noted that under international law, a sitting head of state like Maduro enjoys immunity from the criminal jurisdiction of foreign courts while in office, complicating the legal basis for his abduction and prosecution.
And yet the “International Community” (specifically the U.N.) has done fuck-all about it. They recognize that Trump knows that the football is imaginary and has decided to rub their noses in the dirt.
The broader concern among legal scholars is that permitting such actions without robust legal justification weakens international legal norms. If one state can use force on another’s territory based on indictments or alleged criminal conduct, the prohibition on the use of force that underpins the UN Charter would be severely eroded, potentially inviting reciprocal interventions by other powers. These are the juridical arguments for and against the intervention.
Remind me how long the Russian war against Ukraine has been going on. I read somewhere that the Russians have been fighting the Ukrainians longer than the Russians fought the Germans during either World War.