Venezuela, Palestine, and the End of International Law

On January 3, 2026, without provocation, cause, or legal justification, the U.S. bombed Venezuela, invaded its capital, killed dozens of people, and violently abducted the President and First Lady of the country, binding, blindfolding, and spiriting them off to the USA.

Surely, such a blatant violation of a whole raft of international laws, indeed, challenging the very centerpiece of the post-World War II legal framework that prohibits acts of aggression, would be met with universal condemnation.

Instead, it has been followed by equivocal whimpers by several Western leaders, a hyper-cautious response from the UN Secretary-General, rhetorical condemnation by members of the Security Council, but no action whatsoever, and enthusiastic cheer-leading by U.S. and Western corporate media.

How could this be? Simply put, we are witnessing the dawning of the age of impunity.

                Slouching towards Bethlehem 

The recent sound of explosions over Venezuela, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, and Nigeria, and over the Red Sea, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Caribbean Sea, is not merely the sound of a momentary imperial spasm by a declining U.S. empire.

It heralds something much more terrifying. A new world is being birthed (or perhaps, reborn, reminiscent as it is of the horrors of the first half of the 20^th Century).

A world wholly unconstrained by international law, or even by the most basic and universal moral principles.

A birth that could have been foretold by anyone paying attention to the machinations of the empire and its allies and vassals in recent decades.

From the mass incarceration and police excesses of the war on drugs, to the renditions, executions, and torture of the war on terrorism, to the systematic immizeration of the many in order to consolidate the wealth and power of the few.

Rhe U.S. empire has been on a decades-long warpath culminating with the extermination of the Palestinian people and this week’s assault on Venezuela.

These ever-expanding ripples of oppression, unchecked, threaten us all. Because, in a world where even genocide is not a red line, there are no red lines.

                           A Child of Impunity

This new world is the child of impunity.

For over two years, the world has watched passively as the U.S.-Israel Axis stampeded across Western Asia, Africa, and Latin America in a blood-soaked rampage of conquest and destruction.

The UN Charter, the Rome Statute, the laws of war, human rights law, the law of the sea, laws on the use of force, all have been trampled underfoot and left in ruin by the actions and pronouncements of the Axis, the complicity of its allies and vassals, and the complacency of other states.

For their part, the international institutions put in place in the wake of the Second World War to prevent and respond to such horrors have been systematically corrupted, cowed, or crushed by the Axis.

The International Criminal Court is largely frozen in the face of illegal U.S. sanctions. The International Court of Justice faces unprecedented harassment and political pressure.

The UN’s human rights rapporteurs are under a sustained campaign of slander and sanction. And even the UN Security Council has surrendered to the U.S. empire, as evidenced by its resolution 2803 in November of 2025, endorsing the wholly unlawful and baldly colonial plans of the Trump administration for Gaza.

States of the Western world, which have long postured as the defenders of human rights and international law, rather than standing up to the excesses of the Axis, have tripped over each other to obsequiously kiss the ring of the emperor and to bow to the blood-soaked stewards of its colonial project in Palestine.

And any presumed checks within the institutions of the empire itself have shown themselves to be wholly complicit, including the courts, which are both politically driven and generally disdainful of international law, the Congress, itself entirely corrupted by the lobbies.

corporations, and billionaires driving U.S. and Israeli crimes in the first place, and the corporate media, which have thoroughly dedicated themselves to running cover for the imperial, extractive, corporate, and Zionist causes at the root of the violence engulfing the world today.

Mondoweiss / ABC Flash Point News 2026.