Taking out tyrants this way can’t be celebrated
Hossein Zohrevand photo
The United States cannot keep breaking the rules of international law and then congratulate itself for the results. That is the uncomfortable truth exposed by the 2026 military operations in Venezuela and Iran. Both actions removed brutal, destabilizing leaders — one captured and jailed, the other killed. Many around the world understandably welcomed those outcomes. But the way the United States achieved them violated the very legal order that keeps the world from sliding toward permanent conflict.
On Jan. 3, 2026, U.S. forces launched a major strike in Venezuela, seized President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, and transported them to the United States to face what President Trump described as a “narco-terrorism” trial. International law experts were unequivocal: the operation “runs afoul of the United Nations Charter that prohibits unjustified uses of military force by one country against another.”
The Feb. 28, 2026, attack on Iran followed the same pattern: no armed attack triggered self-defense, and the UN Security Council did not authorize force. By any measure, these were unauthorized uses of force against sovereign states.
The law is clear — and the U.S. helped write it.
After the devastation of two world wars, the UN Charter drew a bright line: states may not use force against one another except in self-defense or with Security Council authorization. That rule is not a technicality. It is the backbone of global stability. It protects weaker states from stronger ones and prevents powerful nations from deciding unilaterally which governments may live or die.
When the United States violates that rule, it does more than break international law. It undermines the very system it helped build — and the one it relies on to restrain the ambitions of other major powers.
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The U.S. Constitution is just as clear. Article I gives Congress — not the President — the power to declare war. The War Powers Resolution requires congressional approval for sustained hostilities. Yet neither the Venezuela operation nor the Iran strike received such approval. Constitutional scholars cited in early 2026 noted that the Venezuela attack violated both international and domestic law, including the requirement that Congress authorize the use of force abroad.
When presidents bypass Congress, they do more than ignore a procedural formality. They erode democratic accountability and concentrate war-making power in a single pair of hands. The Framers feared exactly this kind of unilateral executive action.
The paradox: good ends, dangerous means.
There is no need to pretend that Maduro’s fall or the removal of Iran’s hardline leadership is a tragedy. Both regimes inflicted enormous suffering on their own people and destabilized their regions. Their departure from power may well improve international peace and security.
But if powerful states can remove tyrants whenever they choose, the world becomes less safe, not more. Every aggressor claims noble motives. Every unlawful intervention can be dressed up as liberation. The UN Charter exists precisely to prevent that slippery slope.
The end may be laudable. The means must be discredited. A precedent the world cannot afford.
When the United States violates the rules it helped create, it hands a gift to authoritarian powers. Russia’s foreign ministry immediately labeled the Venezuela strike “an act of armed aggression,” warning that the pretexts used to justify it were “unfounded.”
This is not mere diplomatic theater. The United States cannot credibly condemn Russia’s aggression in Ukraine — or any future act of unlawful force — while normalizing its own.
A world governed by law or by power?
The US faces a choice. It can recommit to the principles it helped establish: peaceful dispute resolution, collective security and constitutional governance. Or it can continue down the path of unilateral force, joining the ranks of states that treat military power as a routine instrument of foreign policy.
The fall of tyrants may be worth celebrating. But the United States cannot make the use of force a habit, nor can it ignore the legal limits that protect global stability. If America wants a world where law restrains power, it must restrain itself first.
(David Crane is a retired U.S. Army Officer and lives in Maggie Valley.)
