🆘 U.S. officials have discarded the idea of legal constraints altogether.
The day after the United States kidnapped Maduro and his wife in Venezuela,
the senior Trump aide #Stephen #Miller explained the administration’s thinking in an interview with the CNN host Jake Tapper.
“We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength,
that is governed by force,
that is governed by power,”
Miller said.
“These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”
Neither Miller nor anyone else in the administration offered any real legal justification for launching a military assault on Venezuela
—an operation that killed at least 75 people.
There has been no legal justification, either,
for the plan Trump announced on social media to seize “between 30 and 50 MILLION Barrels” of Venezuelan oil.
Instead, the State Department shared an image of the U.S. president emblazoned with the words
“This is OUR Hemisphere,”
and Trump styled himself in a Truth Social post as the
“Acting President of Venezuela.”
Now, the administration has begun to turn its sights on #Greenland.
A White House statement issued days after the capture of Maduro
claims that the United States
“needs” Greenland
and that acquiring the territory is a “national security priority.”
👉What is so troubling about the Trump administration’s words and actions is not just that the administration is breaking the law.
-- And it is:
⚠️the intervention in Venezuelaclearly violates the UN Charter’s prohibition on the use of force.
But more than that,
❌ U.S. officials have discarded the idea of legal constraints altogether.
The only constraint, Trump said in an interview with The New York Times last week,
is his “own morality.”
There is no real argument to defend the government’s behavior.
No pretense.
No attempt to persuade.
When a policy is announced in an online post,
without explanation or justification,
one has the unsettling sense that its makers see no need to bother cloaking it with a lie.
A system of #rules can survive some hypocrisy,
but #nihilism will bring it down.
At the same time,
the Trump administration is acting as though the threat or use of force alone can grant it legal entitlements.
#Gunboat #diplomacy, roundly renounced when war was outlawed,
has returned.
The United States is using oil blockades, coercive seizures, and military threats
to extract political and economic concessions from other countries.
This is an attempt to assert that power alone creates rights, regardless of reason.
🔥A world in which the powerful no longer feel the need to justify themselves is not merely unjust.
-- It is barbaric:
Operations to kill, steal, and destroy are severed from any claim of right.
That world does not have a legal order at all.
It has only force,
guided by one man’s whims.
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/world-without-rules
