I recently posted on social media about my opposition to the unilateral US invasion of Venezuela. I do not object to the invasion on the grounds that Maduro deserves to be in power. I object because it is a kleptocratic chess move orchestrated by greedy people who are no more deserving of civic trust than the leader they kidnapped. Some conflicts have no good guys.
This irritated a handful of my leftist colleagues, who insist either that Maduro is defensible or that intervention itself can never be moral. I condensed my replies and present them below. They are addressed to people who share my left-adjacent commitments. If you are a nationalist conservative, a strict pacifist, or center your geopolitical analyses entirely around a decolonialist framework, I doubt you’ll find much to like below. But I encourage you to read it anyway if you’re interested, because if you oppose the invasion, we remain functional allies on this topic. I think it’s important for functional allies to understand one another, especially in our overly-fractious times.
I take the view that military force can, for humanitarian reasons, be justified. It is rare, but it happens. I’m thinking of the international bombing campaign against the Serbian government to prevent a genocide of Bosnian Muslims in the ’90s. I’m thinking of the US operation to prevent an ISIS pogrom against Yazidis on Mt. Sinjar and American material support of the SDF in Rojava during some of the Syrian Civil War. In those cases, choosing to isolate rather than intervene would have made for a more cruel, less humanitarian world. Though not by any stretch an IR scholar, I gravitate to thinkers like Michael Walzer (2002) on this topic and recommend the paper referenced below as a starting point if you are interested in his ideas too.
There are two practical problems with the idea of military force for humanitarian reasons. The first is simple hubris: sometimes states over-estimate their ability to help, and military intervention makes whatever problem they hope to solve even worse. The US invasion of Afghanistan is an example. The second is that hegemons can hide partly- or entirely-kleptocratic intent behind fake humanitarian language. The US invasion of Iraq and the Russian invasion of Ukraine are two examples.
I like imagining a currently-implausible but maybe-eventually-possible fix that I call UN With Teeth: a nuclear-armed, conventionally-assertive UN-like supranational force to enforce the decisions of a reformed UN Security Council-like body with true global representation and no advantage for hegemonic powers (e.g. no permanent membership and veto for US/China/Russia/France/GB), grounded by something like the current Article 2 of the UN Charter. Imagine a coordinated assault by an international force — Finns, Ghanans, Mongolians, whoever had the capacity at the time — with a goal of occupying Jerusalem, deposting Netanyahu, and installing an internationally-governed protectorate to defend the rights of all Palestinians and Israelis until the people on the territory agreed to build a state or states, together or apart, capable of upholding universal human rights for all involved. If you share my left-adjacent commitments it’s likely you align with me in seeing that scenario as a good one, if far-fetched in 2026.
In the imaginary world where a UN With Teeth existed, I suspect it would have deposed Maduro and the PSUV in 2019 or at latest 2024, and the Venezuelan people would have applauded. It is this passing resemblance, and only this passing resemblance, that I see as a positive aspect of an otherwise immoral and potentially catastrophic US foreign policy decision.
In the real world we live in, there is no UN With Teeth, and the US uses humanitarian language as a smokescreen for kleptocratic intent. The complexity of this situation arises only because the guy the US removed was an illiberal authoritarian crime boss with BUKs and SAMs and secret police. But now, tragically, even the accidentally-good side benefit of an otherwise-kleptocratic invasion is now unlikely because the Trump administration seems happy to collaborate with Maduro’s colleagues, all illiberal authoritarian PSUV Chavists like Rodriguez. As long as the US gets its oil, there will be no change in regime and no liberation for Venezuela’s people. This is no surprise; the US collaborated with Pinochet in Chile and Videla in Argentina and many others in during Plan Condor in the 1970s. But the problem here is that too few of my colleagues on the left acknowledge the danger of entrenched illiberal regimes like the PSUV using anti-American language as a smokescreen for kleptocracy, just like the US uses humanitarian language. They may be enemies of the US, but they are also kleptocrats, and they even use the same deceptive rhetorical structure. They commit similar crimes, merely shouting “IMPERIALIST!” to hide them instead of “DICTATOR!” They’re not our friends either.
Not everyone is going to share my supranational humanist interventionist fantasy for the future, and that’s fine. But then I’d ask them this, assuming they share basic civic commitments like a belief in human rights with me: In our world of nation-states, how do you imagine we humanitarians successfully defend ourselves and our fellow humans from illiberal authoritarian wannabe hegemons?
At the rate the world changes now, who knows if anything above will make sense in six hours, let alone next week. But I’m leaving it here because I want to help coax fellow leftists away from our tendency to give the enemies of the US an arbitrary ethical blank check. Brazil’s Lula, Colombia’s Petro, and Mexico’s Sheinbaum are worlds away from Maduro, Putin, and Xi, even though they all share anti-American rhetoric. Let’s celebrate that instead of letting an anti-American paint job trick us into clapping like seals for indefensible authoritarians.
Walzer, M. (2002). The triumph of just war theory (and the dangers of success. Social Research, 69(4), 925-944.
https://www.ias.edu/sites/default/files/sss/pdfs/Walzer/TriumphJustWarTheory.pdf
