Will NATO Send Arms to Venezuela to Defend Its National Sovereignty?
COMMENT | VENEZUELA
The kidnapping and announced trial of Nicolás Maduro represents more than a dramatic escalation in the U.S.-Venezuela relations—it also exposes the mechanics of legal imperialism, where courtrooms become theaters for enforcing hemispheric dominance. This is not unprecedented: the 1989 invasion of Panama and subsequent trial of Manuel Noriega established the playbook for how Washington transforms regime change into juridical spectacle.
What connects these events across decades is not simply lawlessness, but a systematic application of what the late Venezuelan anthropologist Fernando Coronil identified as geography-dependent imperial control—open military force against nearby challenges to US hegemony, dressed in the language of international law and narcotics enforcement.
Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores were kidnapped by American special forces after an outdrawn prologue leading up to the American trespass of the integrity of a sovereign state and UN-established international law.
Now, it is claimed that Maduro will be put on trial in the United States. In fact, it looks like New York City—the city where US President Donald Trump blackmailed his way into vast richness by utilizing the metropolis’s fiscal crisis of 1975—will be the centerstage of yet another American “Nuremburg,” against any progressive force in their own backyard, tainting the property of US businesses and geopolitical stability.[1]
Maduro will most likely be charged as a “narco-terrorist” in a judicial context that is established, controlled, and narrated by American legal experts, American credibility as a state where every prosecuted is guaranteed the rule of law, tried against an American chain of evidence.
Here, we have a historical precedent to lean to to understand better what context and probable outcome that awaits Maduro in an American court.
In the late 1980s, Panamanian despot ruler Manuel Noriega was known to smuggle drugs, weapons, and dollars from South to North America via the Central American region. He was a documented CIA-asset, trained at the School of the Americas—a notorious university of torture skills, paramilitary actions, and anti-communism—and a classic Washington puppet that happened to turn around and bite his Master’s hand. Noriega’s crime, according to Washington and US President Ronald Reagan, was not the atrocities and repression submitted to the Panamanian people, but rather his open flirting with the possibility of a premature nationalization of the Panama Canal, thus threatening the entire capitalistic order with implemented tariffs during the passage from the East to West.[2]
In mid-December 1989, the White House used Noriega’s annulment of the recently held elections as an excuse to invade Panama and oust its previous ally, who was humiliated and hauled to Miami where a trial on drug trafficking, money laundering, and racketeering awaited him. The verdict stated that Noriega was guilty and he was sentenced to 40 years imprisonment.
The political farce was a televised spectacle that displayed how far political powers, even those who proposed themselves as democratic, are determined to go to secure a rule of law that suits their purpose. Myles Malman, one of three prosecutors of Noriega, exposed that “secret negotiations were conducted between high-level Justice and State Department officials and Noriega’s lawyers” and that the legal outcome lacked anything that could be labeled as “normal” jurisdiction.[3]
Malman’s conclusion, that the trial was a “never before, never again” kind of legal case, may turn to be incorrect.
The US attacks against so-called “drug cargo boats” in the Caribeean—where human lives have been spilled and no-one is yet to be put on trial for their deaths—is expected to be used as evidence in the upcoming trial, which underlines the political context which will surround any legal process against Nicolás Maduro on American soil.
Without the Noriega example as a precedent and the various laws implemented during the administrations of especially Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, it is doubtful that the United States could put foreign leaders of sovereign states on trial on charges such as “narco-terrorism” without any credibility.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, it was executed upon a pile of accusations of “illegitimacy” and regional stability, a narrative that has been echoed by the United States towards Venezuela ever since the first election win of former President Hugo Chávez, and certainly since the West found a darling in Juan Guaidó.
Despite not being an actual member of the NATO military alliance, Western states have poured financial and military aid to the leadership in Kyiv. It is not expected that NATO will utter any word of solidarity or assure any shipments of either financial aid or arms for the Bolivarian state to defend its population and sovereignty against its bullying neighbor.
Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver, and Jaap de Wilde—all international relations experts—write that “by equating “security” with “military,” the Western—particularly the U.S.—political establishment exposed itself to an objectivist, externally determined definition of security that was extraordinarily difficult to break.”
That definition, they conclude, “drove the logic of nuclear parity with the Soviet Union, paved the way for the disaster in Vietnam, and legitimized the self-mutilation of McCarthyism”—in the end, leading to a “military understanding of security” that “all but forecloses the option of fundamentally questioning any securitization.”[4]
In a historical sense, the United States’s illegal removal of Maduro and his wife from Venezuelan soil is a blatant continuation of the Monroe Doctrine, proclaimed in 1823 to defend the Americas from “foreign intervention,” which ever since the late 1800s has been utilized as an established and cemented excuse for any White House occupant to intervene in Latin America whenever American interests considered intervention a necessary evil.
“The US Empire,” wrote the late Venezuelan anthropologist Fernando Coronil, “became the invention of Latin America, just as Europe, as Frantz Fanon famously put it, was the invention of America.”[5]
What United States deems is lacking in a Western Hemisphere where too many states—be it Socialist Cuba, a Colombia run by a left-wing president, or when even Paraguay turned left during the first progressive decade of the 21st century—challenge North American hegemony, or even worse, U.S. control of its natural resources, the only solution goes via a return to status quo.
When pluralism of ideologies and economic models challenge U.S. dominance, adds Coronil, Washington developed “different forms of control.”
“In areas geographically closer, the United States would be more inclined to use rather open military might, while in—those farther away, the United States would rely more on economic pressure, diplomatic influence, and concealed force,” wrote the Venezuelan anthropologist.[6]
The ousting of Maduro is contradictory to international law, but in tandem with historical patterns, where Washington seldom thinks twice before intervening in the business of others, despite it cementing their role as a global bully, presented in tomorrow’s history books as the judge, jury, and executor in the affairs of sovereign states.
References
Boudreaux, R. (1987) “Panama’s Domestic Strife Spilling Over Into Canal”, Los Angeles Times (7 September 1987).
Buzan, B., Wæver, O. & de Wilde, J. (1998) Security: A New Framework for Analysis. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers.
Coronil, F., Skurski, J., Wilder, G., Dubois, L., Eiss, P., Murphy, E. & Pedersen, D. (eds.) (2019) The Fernando Coronil Reader: The Struggle for Life Is the Matter. Durham & London: Duke University Press.
Goldbaum, C. (2025) “Ford, NYC’s Financial Crisis and Trump’s Threats”, The New York Times (30 October 2025).
Malman, M.H., (2002) "United States v. Manuel Noriega: Never Before, Never Again", Litigation (Winter 2002, Vol.28, No.2, pp.13–20).
[1] Goldbaum 2025.
[2] Boudreaux 1987.
[3] Malman 2002 (pp.13–20).
[4] Buzan, Wæver & de Wilde 1998, pp.211.
[5] Coronil 2019, pp.431 (in Coronil et al. 2019).
[6] Ibid.
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