Völkerrechtsblog (11 March 2026)

Aytekin Kaan KURTUL(*) & Onur URAZ(**)

Prospects After the US “Special Military Operation” in Venezuela

The operation launched by the United States in Venezuela on 3 January 2026, culminating in the abduction of President Nicolás Maduro, has already been analysed through familiar lenses: the legality of extraterritorial enforcement, the limits of intervention, immunities, and the perennial question of regime change under international law. Yet to approach this event merely as another controversial episode in the long history of US uses of force would be to miss its deeper significance. What makes this moment legally and structurally distinct is not that international law has once again been violated, but that the violation no longer appears to require legal persuasion or even the pretence of compliance.

This contribution argues that the Venezuela operation should be understood as a symptom of a broader transformation: the effective downfall of what has conventionally been described as the “liberal international legal order”. The term “liberal” is placed in quotation marks deliberately. Even at its height, this order was never fully democratic and equitable in practice, nor genuinely universal in application. Yet for roughly three decades after the Cold War, international law operated within a shared discursive framework in which power was at least required to speak the language of legality. That requirement now appears to be eroding. What we are witnessing is not simply a crisis of compliance, but the fading relevance of the justificatory architecture that sustained the post-Cold War order itself.

The Post-Cold War Promise: Law as a Vocabulary of Power

The post-Cold War period was characterised by a powerful normative claim: that international relations would increasingly be governed by rules rather than raw power. This promise was embedded in a dense legal architecture —expanding regimes on the use of force, international criminal justice, human rights, trade liberalisation, and investment protection. The US, supported by its allies, assumed the role of both architect and enforcer of this order. This role was never uncontested, but it was broadly tolerated, and even welcomed in ‘core countries’, as the price of systemic stability.

To read the rest of the article, please click: https://voelkerrechtsblog.org/at-the-twilight-of-the-liberal-international-legal-order/

(*) Dr Aytekin Kaan Kurtul is Lecturer in Law and Deputy Coordinator of the Centre for Law, Environment and Rights (CLEAR) at the University of Huddersfield. In addition to his lectureship role in the United Kingdom, Kaan is a Member of the Editorial Board of Athena, a scholarly journal affiliated with the University of Bologna.

(**) Onur Uraz is a Scholar in Residence at the Center for Eurasian Studies (AVİM) and an Assistant Professor of Public International Law at Hacettepe University whose research focuses on genocide, crimes against humanity, and international adjudication, with particular attention to the International Court of Justice and state responsibility.