The United States’ early‑January military operation to seize Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife has jolted diplomatic capitals and revived long‑running debates about the erosion of post‑war restraints on the use of force. In Beijing and Caracas alike, the images and reports of a cross‑border intervention have been read as proof that the rules of international law are brittle when confronted with raw power and strategic interests.
Jeffrey Sachs, the Columbia University economist, framed the episode bluntly at the United Nations and in a recent interview: the strike was “thoroughly barbaric” and lacked any legal foundation. Speaking to the UN Security Council on January 5, he catalogued a pattern of American interventions stretching back to 1947 and urged the council to act to preserve the integrity of the international legal order.
Sachs invoked a striking historical tally: from 1947 to 1989 alone, he said, the United States attempted some 70 regime‑change operations through force, covert action or political manipulation. He added that in the previous year the US had bombed seven countries without Security Council authorization or a legitimate claim of self‑defense, arguing that recent actions continue a long continuity rather than constituting isolated excesses.
Addressing the immediate crisis, Sachs demanded that the Security Council demand an immediate end to threats or the use of force against Venezuela, lift any maritime blockade and require the withdrawal of US military assets positioned in and around Venezuelan territory. He singled out the presence of intelligence, naval and air assets used for coercive forward deployments as particularly dangerous.
Sachs did not confine his critique to the legality of the operation. He accused President Trump and his inner circle of aiming to “destroy international law and the United Nations itself,” warning that the presidency had recently threatened or attacked a string of countries that included Canada, Mexico, Colombia, Denmark, Nigeria and Iran. The economist drew historical parallels to the 1989 US capture of Panama’s Manuel Noriega and interventions that helped topple or kill leaders such as Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi.
Explaining motives, Sachs offered an unvarnished assessment: Washington’s core interests, he said, are “oil, bullying and vanity.” From this perspective, the Venezuelan operation was less a targeted legal enforcement action than an extractive exercise in power projection, he argued — one that risks undermining regional stability and blocking deeper Latin American integration.
Sachs warned that the intervention is already forcing hesitant regional governments to pick sides, citing pressure on countries from Argentina to El Salvador and a generalized fear among others of becoming the next target. He argued that the net effect will be to fragment security cooperation in the hemisphere, hinder collective responses to migration and organized crime, and exacerbate diplomatic polarization.
For global audiences, the episode matters for three linked reasons. First, it tests the resilience of the UN Security Council and the rules prohibiting extraterritorial seizure and unilateral regime‑change. Second, it recalibrates risk calculations for governments in the Global South that previously relied on norms of sovereignty and non‑intervention. Third, it has tangible implications for energy markets and geopolitical alignments: Venezuela’s oil reserves are central to the calculus invoked by Sachs, and any disruption or external control invites international contestation.
The immediate diplomatic consequences will likely include condemnations from rivals such as Russia and China, appeals to the Security Council, and a sharper campaign by regional bodies to shore up norms against intervention. Economically, renewed instability in Venezuela could spur migration, depress investment and complicate global oil markets; politically, it may galvanize left‑wing movements across Latin America and strengthen anti‑US sentiment among undecided populations.
Whatever the outcome in Caracas, Sachs’s intervention is as much a plea for principle as it is an indictment of policy. He urged the Security Council to reject a binary of regime critique versus rule enforcement: its duty, he argued, is not to pass judgment on the merits of Maduro’s governance but to defend the legal order that prevents powerful states from taking the law into their own hands.
If the council cannot reassert those constraints, Sachs warned, the consequences will extend beyond Venezuela — potentially to “the fate of humanity” if the precedent of impunity for great powers prevails. The challenge for diplomats and statesmen in the coming weeks is whether international institutions can translate that warning into binding action, or whether precedent‑setting force will continue to hollow out legal norms and encourage further unilateral interventions.