The capture of Nicolás Maduro by the US military has triggered an immediate and polarised international debate. Questions of sovereignty, legality, and precedent have rightly come to the fore, reviving anxieties about the erosion of the rules-based international order and the risks of unilateral military action.
However, Venezuela’s collapse did not begin on the night of the intervention. It is the result of decades of institutional dismantling, systematic repression, and the hollowing out of democratic accountability. Over time, this internal erosion became entangled with external interests, regional power dynamics, and repeated failures of international engagement. The result is a crisis that is at once legal, political, humanitarian, and geopolitical, and one that resists explanation through any single analytical lens.
This expert analysis brings together four perspectives that speak to different, but interconnected, dimensions of the Venezuelan crisis. Laura Vidal, digital rights researcher and civil society observer, centres the human rights reality inside Venezuela, highlighting that legal debates detached from lived experience risk normalising repression and compounding victimisation. Andrew Gawthorpe, FPC Senior Fellow, analyses the emerging US strategy towards Venezuela, arguing that Washington is moving away from ‘regime change’ towards a more coercive model of ‘regime management’, with uncertain leverage and destabilising consequences. Dame Audrey Glover, FPC’s Chair of Trustees, sets out the international legal implications of the US operation, underscoring the dangers posed by selective adherence to foundational legal norms. Stefan Wolff, FPC Senior Fellow, examines the dilemmas facing Europe as it seeks to reconcile its commitment to a rules-based order with alliance politics and shifting power realities.
Taken together, these contributions expose the risks of selective concern: invoking international law only at moments of crisis, privileging geopolitical stability over accountability, or debating legality while disregarding human suffering. If Venezuela is to be understood and addressed in a meaningful way, these dimensions need to be held together, not treated as competing narratives.
The Human Rights Dimension of Venezuela’s Crisis
By Laura Vidal
Any assessment of Venezuela’s current crisis that sidelines human rights is necessarily incomplete. The most visible entry point remains the situation of political prisoners.[1] Detentions continue to function as a revolving door: individuals are arrested, released under opaque conditions, and replaced by new detainees.[2] Deaths in custody, enforced disappearances, and prolonged incommunicado detention remain documented practices.[3] Torture centers continue to operate, and releases are often negotiated, partial, or discretionary rather than grounded in due process or judicial review. The pace of releases has been extremely slow, even as new arrests routinely follow moments of political tension, reinforcing a system based on fear rather than accountability.
This pattern, however, represents only one layer of a much longer process of deterioration. Venezuela’s human rights crisis has unfolded over years through the systematic dismantling of institutions, the erosion of checks and balances, and the capture of the justice system. The result is a complex humanitarian emergency that predates recent geopolitical escalations. Nearly a third of the population has left the country, many under precarious conditions that expose them to exploitation, abuse, and trafficking networks along migration routes. Those who remain face chronic shortages of basic services, including healthcare, electricity, and access to potable water.[4]
The media landscape has been progressively constrained through closures, licensing pressures, legal harassment, and digital censorship. Accessing information online increasingly requires the use of circumvention tools, exposing users to heightened risks of surveillance and criminalisation. Reporting, documentation, and civic organising have consequently become high-risk activities.[5]
This reality is often misrepresented as the consequence of international sanctions alone, despite the fact that economic collapse and institutional erosion began years before sectoral sanctions were imposed. Framing the crisis exclusively through sanctions obscures its structural roots and diverts attention from long-standing patterns of repression, impunity, and state failure.[6] Human rights violations in Venezuela are not episodic; they are systemic, cumulative, and deeply embedded in the country’s governance model.
From Regime Change to Regime Management
The US military operation against Nicolas Maduro represents a novel approach to foreign policy. “Regime change” is out and “regime management” is in. The Trump administration’s intention appears to be to leave the current Venezuelan government formally in place, while coercing it into adopting policies that will benefit US security and economic interests. Washington’s main demands for the government in Caracas include opening up the country’s oil wealth to American investment and control, severing friendly relations with China and Russia, and ending support for the government in Cuba.
Trump’s methods are nakedly imperial – a throwback to the “gunboat diplomacy” of the nineteenth century. It is notable that they even lack the justification, common in previous US military interventions, with the familiar claim that intervention will liberate the Venezuelan people from a dictatorial government. Instead, Washington is proposing to work with that dictatorial government in order to deliver profits for American oil companies.
From the perspective of the Trump administration, this strategy has obvious appeal. It lacks the commitment of resources and potentially lives to a long-term military occupation designed to transform Venezuela’s government, as was attempted in Iraq and Afghanistan. At the same time, it remains unclear whether this approach gives the US enough leverage over the government in Venezuela to achieve its goals.
Venezuela’s new leader, Delcy Rodríguez, has to avoid angering nationalist opinion at home – not least in her country’s military. She cannot go too far in appeasing the US. For their part, American oil companies also have little interest in investing in Venezuela, particularly while the current government remains in place. Meanwhile, President Trump’s attention seems to have wandered, with him now threatening new military action against Iran. As a result, what’s coming next in Venezuela remains highly unclear.
International Law and the Erosion of Legal Restraint
Article 2(4) of the UN Charter states:
“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.”
This article, part of the foundation of the post-Second World War international rules-based order, establishes a core principle against aggression, subject only to narrowly defined exceptions: self-defence and UN Security Council authorisation. This provision is binding on all States, regardless of whether they are members of the United Nations.
The action of US Forces entering Venezuela uninvited at night to detain President Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, and place them in custody in the US to await trial, constitutes a breach of Article 2(4). Under International law, only an assault on another country by military means qualifies as a trigger for self-defence.
The consequence of the US operation is therefore a violation of Venezuela’s sovereignty, contrary to International Law. Furthermore, the intervention has not resulted in an attempt to restore democratic governance in the country. Maduro has been replaced by his Deputy, Delcy Rodríguez, without an election or consultation of the electorate and opposition– particularly significant given that Maduro himself overturned a prior electoral outcome to retain power. Her appointment undermines any argument that the intervention was undertaken in pursuit of democratic principles.
For his part, President Trump has said he will ‘run’ Venezuela remotely, a proposition that raises serious questions about both feasibility and legitimacy. It also prompts broader concerns regarding regional security and the future of Venezuela’s oil sector, including how it might be rebuilt and governed under such circumstances.
Stephen Miller, an adviser to President Trump, has said: “Forget international law. We live in a world that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power”. Such rhetoric reflects an explicit rejection of the legal norms that underpin international stability.
Recent events including the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, have further imperilled the rules-based international order at the core of which are the principles of individual liberty, intellectual and religious freedom, constitutional democracy and free trade. The most damaging has been the rejection of the principles of international law that the US helped to create. Venezuela stands as the latest example of this deterioration. The time has come to save these principles from extinction.
Europe and the Dilemmas of the Rules-Based Order
by Stefan Wolff
The apprehension of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro by the US military on the night of 3rd January is the first time in over three decades that the White House has conducted such an operation. The operation reflects Washington’s new national security strategy and its emphasis on hemispheric dominance, even as it sits in clear tension with international law. For Europe, the operation, and how to respond to it, poses multiple dilemmas.
The first dilemma concerns how to reconcile hitherto unwavering European support for a rules-based international order with the need to preserve what is left of the transatlantic alliance. This includes American security guarantees for European allies and continuing support for Ukraine’s war effort. The display of American capability and the meek reactions not only by Europe but also by Russia and China also demonstrated that for all the talk of a multipolar world order, Moscow and Beijing have few credible options to respond to American assertions of power. From a European perspective, this reality is in some respects reassuring, especially in the context of the Kremlin’s apparently insatiable revisionism in eastern Europe.
Closely related is a second dilemma: US ambitions for absolute dominance in the western hemisphere have revived Trump’s designs for Greenland, returning them to the transatlantic agenda where they spell potential for disruption—both in the sense of distracting attention from the actual threat of the Russian aggression against Ukraine and Moscow’s broader hybrid campaign elsewhere on the continent, and of potentially diverting critical resources away from deterring further Russian adventurism in Europe towards Arctic security, an area long neglected by both Europe and the United States.
The third dilemma is that the removal of Maduro from power is in line with long-stated European preferences for a democratic transition in the country, and as such should be welcomed. However, what seems to have resulted from the US operation is at best a face lift at the top of the Venezuelan regime, followed by internal power consolidation and increased external subservience to the demands of the mercurial incumbent of the White House. This dilemma also has wider implications. Europe may lack the hard power to effect regime change, but not the desire to do so. With probably more than half an eye on the situation in Iran, there are likely some figures in Europe’s political class who would not object too loudly or strongly if the US and/or Israel were adopting a more proactive stance on supporting protesters in Tehran and dozens of other cities. Yet externally driven regime change is hardly ever cost- or consequence-free, as the experiences in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, among others, vividly demonstrate.
European equivocation and prevarication in response to the US military operation against Maduro reflects the difficulty of navigating these dilemmas. Such ambivalence is neither a long-term solution nor will it allow Europeans to avoid discussing two equally unpalatable options: submitting to the whims of Trump, or an attempt to act independently in an increasingly hostile and lawless world. As so often, Europe is likely to fall back on muddling through: seeking to placate and flatter President Trump while ignoring the flaws and dangers of his foreign policy, and simultaneously trying to build towards the mythical promise of strategic autonomy. This approach rests on the hope that unconstrained, illiberal great power dominance within distinct spheres of influence does not become the new normal – one in which Europe is permanently downgraded to Washington’s, let alone Moscow’s or Beijing’s vassal.
For a comprehensive examination of the decades-long institutional erosion, systemic human rights abuses, and profound humanitarian crisis that have shaped contemporary Venezuela, see Laura Vidal’s Op-Ed: International law, institutional collapse, and the danger of selective concern, which situates the country’s current situation within a broader history of democratic decay, international inaction, and the human cost.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this piece are those of the individual authors and do not reflect the views of The Foreign Policy Centre.
[1] Human Rights Watch, Venezuela: Political Prisoners Cut Off From the World, September 2025, https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/09/22/venezuela-political-prisoners-cut-off-from-the-world
[2] Efecto Cocuyo, Efecto Paz #11 – Presos políticos después del 3E, January 2026, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhV_CpfoBpw&t=2821s
[3] United Nations News, Venezuela’s National Guard linked to killings, torture and repression, UN probe finds, December 2025, https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/12/1166565
[4] Human Rights Watch, World Report 2025: Venezuela, 2025, https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2025/country-chapters/venezuela
[5] Puyosa, Azpúrua, Suárez Pérez, How Venezuela became a model for digital authoritarianism, Atlantic Council, July 2024, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/in-depth-research-reports/how-venezuela-became-a-model-for-digital-authoritarianism/; VE sin Filtro, Censura y represión digital en las elecciones presidenciales en Venezuela, 2025, https://vesinfiltro.org/noticias/2025-03-12-reporte-elecciones-presidenciales/
[6] Nizar El Fakih, Aproximación al Régimen de Sanciones Internacionales y al caso de Venezuela, IDB, December 2020, https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://publications.iadb.org/en/node/29550&ved=2ahUKEwiWtLq81IiSAxWFVKQEHW0vBnUQFnoECBYQAQ&usg=AOvVaw3Ega3sYVRtvTyuCerIVUlw
