We Live in Times of Great Change
January 4, 2026
We live in times of great change. The era of fragile peace and relative stability is now in the past, and now humanity faces a whole range of new challenges and threats.
Yesterday, the American special forces unit “Delta Force” carried out a successful operation that ended in the arrest and transfer to the United States of Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro and his wife.
From the point of view of modern international law, this action can be considered illegal interference in the affairs of a sovereign state. But what should be done if the head of that state harms another sovereign state through his illegal actions?
International law has no answer to this question, as it does not have the institutions of coercion in its arsenal that could be used to bring the violator to justice and force him to comply with generally accepted legal norms.
During the invasion of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin also ignored international law and was guided only by his own selfish interests and unhealthy ambitions. As a result, a bloody Russian-Ukrainian war has been going on for almost four years, and it is still unknown when and how it will end.
When deciding to invade Ukraine, the Russian President clearly overestimated his strength and capabilities. Putin thought he was a macho man, but as Donald Trump aptly said about him, he turned out to be nothing more than a “paper tiger”.
In turn, American special forces carried out a successful operation, and now Nicolas Maduro, an enemy of the United States, faces American justice.
This happened because modern international law is ineffective and toothless. It failed to stop Putin when he attacked Ukraine, and it also failed to give the US government a real chance to bring Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro, who is suspected of committing a number of criminal offenses, to justice.
As a result, US special operations forces came to the aid of American justice. It is obvious that the “Delta Force” fighters acted on the orders of their country’s top military and political leadership, and it should be noted that they coped with this task perfectly well.
The conclusion is that today the world is ruled by the law of force, and it is unlikely that anything will change in the near future. At least, this will be the case until international law has its own supranational judicial and law enforcement bodies and appropriate institutions of coercion.
It should be noted that in the recent past, the norms of international law were enforced only thanks to the position of the United States, which then voluntarily assumed the role of international policeman.
Here it is worth recalling the story of Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi troops invading Kuwait. The aggressor was stopped not by a UN resolution, but by the use of force by an international coalition led by the USA.
As a result of this brief review of important international events that have taken place over the past few decades, we can conclude that peace and stability in the world will only come about when there is a full-scale reform of the UN and when the norms of international law become binding, with violators facing fair and inevitable punishment.
Oleh Bereziuk,
Institute for Global Politics
