00:00Was the U.S. raid that extracted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro illegal?
00:04The answer in a word is yes.
00:06And it's also going to make the United States a lot weaker in the world.
00:11The reason for that is that it undermines fundamentally the rule of law,
00:15which is the tool that the United States has used in the international legal order
00:19to strengthen ourselves throughout the last 75 years.
00:23Why was the raid illegal?
00:24The main reason is that it violates the core principle of international law,
00:28which is that every country is sovereign.
00:31That means you can't go in and grab up the president of a country,
00:34and you certainly cannot purport to, quote-unquote, run that country.
00:38It's up to the people of a sovereign nation to run the country.
00:41Can anyone in the United States or elsewhere find Donald Trump in any meaningful way liable
00:46for the illegality of his actions in this context?
00:49The short answer is no.
00:51The U.N. charter, which is the principle of international law that says you can't invade other countries,
00:56has not been made applicable by Congress in the U.S. courts.
01:00So there's no real way to hold Trump liable in domestic law.
01:04Internationally, the United States would veto anything in the U.N. Security Council that went against us,
01:10and we refuse the jurisdiction of the ICC and don't consent to the jurisdiction of the ICJ.
01:16So given all of that, why does the illegality actually matter?
01:20Illegality matters because nakedly, openly violating the rule of law undermines the basic idea
01:27that law itself should govern in any meaningful way in international affairs.
01:32You might think that international law doesn't do anything if it can't always be enforced,
01:36but that's not right either.
01:37The international legal order that was created mostly by the United States in the post-World War II era
01:42had the specific objective and purpose of regularizing peaceful action
01:46and punishing countries that engage in unlawful action.
01:50And that structure of incentives has mattered for creating international peace,
01:54and it's also helped the United States maintain a globally dominant position at the same time.
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