Andrea Maria Pelliconi, 5 February 2026 7 mins read
The past months have brought back with startling clarity a pattern many international lawyers know all too well. Under the second presidency of Donald Trump, the United States (US) has returned to overt coercion to impose their interests upon the rest of the world. Realist pragmatism has always been present in international relations, but states used to couple their acts “with at least a resemblance of legal justification”. This time, however, practice is matched by words: Trump has completely dispensed with the liberal varnish that usually accompanies US extraterritorial mischiefs and openly admits that his actions and are guided only by his own morality. The attack on Venezuela and the kidnap of Nicolás Maduro and his wife have been followed by repeated threats to annex Greenland by purchase or use of force, alongside renewed intimidation directed at other states such as Panama, Mexico, Colombia, and Cuba. We’re witnessing an accelerated deepening of the global crisis of multilateralism and international law and a return to Great Powers’ “spheres of influence”.
Everyone knows in legal scholarship that the unilateral kidnap of a sitting head of state is unequivocally unlawful under international law, whatever one may think about the Maduro regime and its gross and widespread human rights abuses. The prohibition of the use of force, the principles of sovereignty and non-intervention, and the personal immunity of heads of state vis-à-vis other domestic jurisdictions leave no room for ambiguity. And yet, the responses of some western states and the European Union (EU) have not been so unequivocal. Instead, they have been divided and ambivalent, cloaked in watered-down words of “concern” or “monitoring” or strategic silences. German Chancellor Merz has stated that the legal assessment of the US operation is “complex”. French President Macron has emphasised the need for a transition which is “peaceful, democratic, and respectful of the will of the Venezuelan people”. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni suggested that while the use of force is generally wrong, the US were acting in self-defence against so-called “hybrid security attacks”, referring to Maduro’s supposed weaponisation of drug-trafficking against the US. Reactions were far more decisive when it came to Trump’s threats against Greenland, where the territorial integrity and interests of an EU and NATO state were at stake. European leaders suddenly rediscovered the language of international law and the inviolability of sovereignty and territorial integrity with admirable clarity.
This should not come as a surprise. Over the past years, manifestations of double standards and selectivity have grown exponentially, with the most discussed example being the reactions to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s “plausible” genocide in Gaza, both framed as defensive responses to security threats and terrorism. While one may well argue that Israel’s self-defence claim was more well-founded than Russia’s, it soon became clear that the 7 October 2023 attack was being used as a mere pretext to unleash uncontrolled violence on Palestinians, while preparing the ground for territorial expansion in both Gaza and the West Bank. This expansionist plan continues to develop even now, after the supposed “ceasefire” and the UN Resolution on Gaza, and nothing concrete is being done to bring it to an end. The same double standard surfaced in reactions to the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) arrest warrants against Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu for international crimes. The same European states that rushed to praise the ICC for its investigation of the Russian leader, later declared that Netanyahu enjoys immunity from ICC prosecution.
And yet, once again, this selectivity is not new at all. It follows decades of US (and broader Western) unlawful attacks and interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran – to the extent that exceptionalism is not exceptional anymore. Each time, international law norms were stretched, re-interpreted, or reinvented through securitisation doctrines such as preventive self-defence and the “unable or unwilling” test, or hidden behind ostensible “benevolent motives” such as humanitarian intervention, regime change, and the “exportation of democracy”. In fact, the US has even committed the exact same type of head-of-state kidnapping before in the region, most notably with the capture of Manuel Noriega from Panama. This is the so called “rules-based international order”, meaning the rules that the US and its allies imposed upon the rest of the world (“the West and the rest”), as opposed to what international law actually required. Every time, other western states have been weak in condemning the illegality of these actions, and even weaker in doing anything concrete to prevent, stop, or redress them.
Now, at what feels like the climax of the collapse of the international legal order and multilateralism, everyone has awakened, shouting that this is not a drill. UN experts warn that such actions normalise lawlessness in international relations, and commentators caution that Venezuela sets a dangerous precedent: if powerful states may unilaterally decide when international law applies and when it does not, the legal order collapses into selective enforcement and strategic convenience. Even leading US academics now talk about the catastrophic collapse of jus ad bellum norms and the dangers we all face when “might unmakes right”. They highlight the risk that the Venezuela incident “opens the door to other similar actions by powerful nations in the future”. This fails to appreciate that the door has long been wide open.
A prevalent position now is to acknowledge the flaws of international law but vehemently opposing the abandoning of its normative constraints because they’re the only thing that will save us from debacle. International law can still be mobilised to place constraints on power and if it’s consistently disregarded it’s because of contingent political factors militating against full compliance. A recurring metaphor that I’ve heard a few times lately, including among critical thinkers, is the Sisyphus’ myth: the futility of the task should not deter the discipline. But this, at least in part, obscures how this system was intentionally built to shield the actions of the West and has laid the foundations for the situation we now find ourselves in. International law and the indeterminacy of its content provide a “professional vocabulary” to build plausible arguments. For decades, mainstream scholars were complicit in the legal legitimisation of these actions, coming up with doctrines that served the interests of the moment under a façade of international legal jargon.
The inherent defect of the international legal infrastructure has simply become more visible now. As Rajagopal has put it, “The revival of overt colonial and imperial designs under the Trump regime in Washington is notable not because it has invented new forms of domination, but because it has dispensed with the traditional liberal rhetoric that once accompanied them.” From its colonial origins to its modern doctrines of sovereignty, intervention, and trade, international law has consistently operated in the interests of dominant states and classes, while insulating them from the equal application of its norms. What we are witnessing today are colonial revivals as the logical outcome of a system that never truly decolonised. It seems scarier to European eyes now because it has eventually turned against them.
Of course, legal scholarship is not monolithic. Critical voices, including TWAIL scholars, have raised these concerns all along. Yet they have been unable to bring material change, partly because of the structural hierarchies of international law, and partly because of fragmentation of their own views. Some tried to change the system from within; others were content to critique from the margins; others advocated radical transformation or the complete dismantling of the legal order, often without a clear project – and always with different opinion – for what should come after.
Now, as we stand on the verge of a concrete dismantling of the system, with Trump’s plan to replace the United Nations with his own personal “Board of Peace” and international relations reaching the peak of personalisation and corporatisation, everyone – even critics – seem unsure what to do. If there is a moment to seize, it is now. But seizing it requires more than lamenting Trump’s excesses or the fragility of the system: it demands an honest reckoning with the errors of the past, Western exceptionalism, legal complicity, resource-hungry capitalism, and a system ostensibly built on sovereign equality but consistently seized by vetoes and unilateral reprisals. What is needed are visionary ideas for radical change and possible futures – and I am not sure we – myself in primis – are up for the task.