US intervention in Venezuela

US intervention in Venezuela

Peter Kopa, Prague, February 15, 2026

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpCBIF1Yl4k

Below is the full text of Brazilian lawyer Felipe Hasson, a specialist in international law, explaining why US intervention in Venezuela is legitimate. The subtitles and links are from the editorial team.

Sovereignty is in favor of the people

“Many people ask me for my opinion on the issue of the US and Venezuela, as a professor of international law who has been living in the US for 10 years. Instead of responding one by one, I decided to put my thoughts here. For those who are interested and have the patience to read, here it is.

My opinion is that the debate on Venezuela has been hijacked by a selective—and deeply hypocritical—interpretation of international law. “Sovereignty,” “non-intervention,” and “international legal order” are invoked as if these concepts existed to protect governments, not people. As if state sovereignty were an absolute moral shield, capable of justifying hunger, persecution, torture, mass exile, and the complete suppression of the will of the people. It is not.

Sovereignty is not an end in itself; it never was. It is a functional principle, conditional on the minimum fulfillment of the state’s duties to its population. When a regime turns its own people into hostages—deliberately impoverishing society, destroying institutions, persecuting opponents, rigging elections, and eliminating any real possibility of alternation of power—that regime loses the legitimacy that gives meaning to the sovereignty it claims to defend. The right to life, human dignity, and self-determination of peoples are not optional “Western values” or political rhetoric. They are fundamental norms of the contemporary international legal order. A government that systematically violates these rights cannot demand that the world turn a blind eye in the name of a convenient legal abstraction.

https://thinktanklatam.org/why-the-low-profile-of-politicians/

The tragedy of the Venezuelan people

Venezuela is not a case of “ideological divergence”; it is a humanitarian tragedy. Millions of people have been forced to leave the country. Those who remain live with shortages, repression, and fear. There are no free elections. There is no independent press. There is no autonomous judiciary. There are no effective internal channels for the people to free themselves from tyranny on their own. Arguing that the people should “solve” their situation on their own is, in practice, defending the perpetuation of unjust suffering.

Therefore, external aid—including military aid, when necessary to protect lives and not regimes—is not a moral violation of international law. It is the affirmation of its ethical core. The international community exists precisely to prevent atrocities from being committed behind conveniently closed borders. The reaction of many Venezuelans makes this clear. While foreign commentators, comfortably distant, condemn interventions in the name of abstract sovereignty, those who live in real despair celebrate intervention. They celebrate because they see a concrete opportunity for liberation. They celebrate because they know that “respect for sovereignty” was, for years, the perfect excuse for international inertia and indifference.

Could Hitler invoke sovereignty?

Here, an inevitable historical parallel imposes itself: if, in 1940s Europe, the powers had decided not to liberate the concentration camps out of respect for German sovereignty, today that omission would be remembered as complicity. No serious legal system can demand neutrality in the face of mass crimes against its own population. Invoking international law to defend dictators is an intellectual perversion. It is transforming a system, created to protect human beings, into an opportunistic pretext to protect oppressors. There is nothing positive about it. Nor is there anything human about it. There is only the moral consolation of those who have never had to choose between sovereignty and survival.

International law does not exist to shield authoritarian regimes. It exists to remind us that no government—absolutely none—has the right to destroy its own people in peace.

Another recurring—and intellectually lazy—argument is that the intervention would not be “humanitarian,” but rather motivated by economic interests. Even if there are strategic or economic interests involved—as there almost always have been in any significant action in international politics—this does not invalidate, by any means, the moral legitimacy of the outcome when it responds to a real and explicit demand from the oppressed people themselves.

The central criterion is not the purity of external motivations, but the reality experienced internally. And that reality is unequivocal: the majority of Venezuelans welcome and support intervention because they know who the real aggressor is. It was the dictatorial regime itself that, by choosing to preserve power at the cost of hunger, repression, and social destruction, opened the door to an external response.

When a government systematically attacks its own people, it loses any moral authority to question the motives of those who intervene to end that suffering. In this scenario, even an action driven by interests that are not exclusively humanitarian becomes necessary, legitimate, and morally correct, because the only other concrete alternative would be the continuation of oppression.

Therefore, the reasoning of those who place ideology above all else—and who then search international law for phrases, concepts, and principles useful to the response they have already decided to give—is, at the very least, regrettable. It is not a serious defense of international law, but an exercise in selective cynicism, carried out from a distance and without any empathy for those who are experiencing the collapse firsthand. When ideology comes before human beings and sovereignty is invoked to justify misery, the law ceases to be an instrument of justice and becomes mere empty rhetoric in the service of indifference.

Felipe Hasson, Global Attorney | Ph.D., M.Sc., LLM, FCIArb

Editor’s comments

Democracy itself is also absolutized when the ruler betrays the people who elected him (as is the case with those who fall into corruption and seek only their own advantage), turning democracy into a pretext for clinging to power and persecuting those who rightly oppose him. This abuse can occur even in other areas, such as among judges, parliamentarians, and in the exercise of so many functions of authority intended to serve the good of the people subject to that authority.

But, obviously, the abuse of state authority is the most serious, because it can plunge an entire nation into misery. For this reason, it is necessary to enact laws that allow for the election of reliable leaders with firm ethical principles: https://thinktanklatam.org/como-evitar-gobiernos-traidores/