On 5 January 2025, the big story from the United States was that a dog called Cecil had eaten $4,000 in cash. On 5 January 2026, the news from across the Atlantic was that, having abducted the president of Venezuela, the US president was considering invading Greenland. The news can take a few tries to get started after the Christmas break, but in 2026 it roared back into life.
It’s already shaping up to be a bumper year for impotent political handwringing. “I want to establish the facts first,” declared Keir Starmer, studiously avoiding the facts in front of him: that America sent its military into another country to capture its president, Nicolás Maduro. It did this without providing any justification under international law – of which the international lawyer Keir Starmer is a big fan. “I always say,” Starmer added, “we should all uphold international law.” That’s Keir! He really is always saying that – in meetings, at parties, when making awkward conversation at a urinal – “We should all uphold international law”, he’ll say, and if anyone’s listening they’ll nod and shrug at the same time. Show him a flagrant breach of the United Nations Charter, though, and suddenly he’s coy.
What a legal head-scratcher: does bombing another country, killing an estimated 80 people, blindfolding its head of state and bundling him and his spouse into a helicopter to face lifetime’s imprisonment abroad count as “use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state”? It’s a tough one!
In the Commons, the Foreign Secretary, Yvette Cooper, was asked repeatedly by Labour, Lib Dem and Tory MPs if America’s attack on Venezuela broke international law. Cooper said it was “for the US to set out the legal position behind those actions”. Good idea! If anyone can tell us if those explosions were illegal, it’s the guy who said “fire when ready”.
Cooper told the Commons that it had long been the UK’s policy on Venezuela to “press for a peaceful transition from authoritarian rule to a democracy”, which sums up the problem: the world is yet to see a dictatorship that has noticed another country frowning at it before admitting, “Fair play – that’s enough corruption and extrajudicial killings for me”. Maduro, who was unquestionably a brutal dictator, was unlikely to step down just because he realised he was a disappointment to Ed Davey.
Nor was Maduro’s regime without friends in Britain. To Cooper’s right sat Diane Abbott, who in 2012 helped oversee Venezuela’s elections and returned convinced that under Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez, it had a democracy that was “less liable to fraud and impersonation than the British election process”. Jeremy Corbyn, who went with her, congratulated Maduro live on Venezuelan TV when he won in 2014 – a win that the Labour MP Richard Burgon, who called the UK’s response “cowardly” and “craven”, had described as a “victory for the Labour movement”.
It is not only the UK government that is finding it hard to say whether killing another country’s soldiers and seizing its president constitutes an act of aggression. Germany’s Friedrich Merz said he would “take the time needed” to engage in the “complex” task of “passing legal judgement”. Kemi Badenoch declared that she was “not going to rush into judgement” – what a relief for the Trump administration that must have been – although 48 hours later she had arrived at the judgement that America’s attack was absolutely fine.
Fortunately, a legal expert was on hand to define clearly whether the attack on Caracas really amounted to the aggressive takeover of another state. Donald Trump, from his Mar-a-Lago golf resort, told the global press: “We’re going to run the country.” He then added: “We are going to run the country,” before clarifying: “We’re gonna run it.” In case anyone was still having trouble understanding how an invasion works, he added that America will attack Venezuela again, on a much larger scale, if its people resist his plan to send in “United States oil companies” to take over “the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country”. He didn’t specify which country he meant by “the country”, but it’s probably not Venezuela.
Perhaps it would have been easier to give Trump the Nobel Peace Prize. It is, after all, a pointless bauble that has been handed to some terrible people in the past, and doing so might have saved some lives. Instead the prize went to the Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, who was barred from standing in the 2024 presidential election and had been forced into hiding. Trump, who was apparently not distracted by the inaugural Fifa Peace Prize, seems to have decided that if opposing the Maduro regime was the way to win the big gold medal he wanted, he’d send in some military helicopters and show those bastards what peace looks like.
The committee in Stockholm should probably bear this in mind for next year. If they don’t give Trump the Nobel Peace Prize, he’ll invade the winner’s country and demand it from them. That is basically what’s now happening in Venezuela. Machado, having reportedly angered Trump by accepting the Nobel prize, is now considered unsuitable for the Venezuelan presidency. She is, Trump told the press, “a very nice woman, but she doesn’t have the respect” – by which he meant she doesn’t have his respect, because she took the big gold medallion and the certificate and the million dollars that he wanted. And so Machado, who has spent 15 years dodging violent reprisals against her fight for democracy in Venezuela, is now offering to share the Nobel prize with the man who appointed himself “in charge” of her country in the hope that he might allow her to win the election that she would have won if the previous dictator hadn’t prevented her from doing so.
It’s at times such as this that Britain and other middle powers can really leap into inaction. Canada’s foreign minister, Anita Anand, said her country would respond to the attack by “engaging with its international partners and monitoring developments closely”. Emmanuel Macron committed to “exchanging with our partners in the region”. Ursula von der Leyen said she was “following very closely the situation in Venezuela”. What else are they going to do? No one wants to condemn the US too severely (no one wants to end up blindfolded in the back of a helicopter), so most leaders were left to react as most of their citizens did: by reading the news, messaging each other and trying not to panic. Strident condemnation was left to the likes of the Russian foreign ministry, which bemoaned “an act of armed aggression” based purely on “ideological animosity”, something which of course Putin would never dream of doing.
For a preview of what this means for America, we might return briefly to Cecil, the hungry goldendoodle who briefly found fame this time last year. His owners enjoyed the adrenaline rush of headlines, but then they were left with a mess to clean up. It will take many years of very expensive intervention for the US to benefit from Venezuela’s vast oil reserves, and before that happens it may be that its actions have geopolitical consequences that are far more serious, particularly in Taiwan. As happened to Cecil’s owners, the excitement of the news event may soon be replaced by the realisation that someone is going to have to deal with a very expensive pile of shit.
[Further reading: Maduro won’t satisfy Trump’s hungry ego]
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This article appears in the 07 Jan 2026 issue of the New Statesman, What Trump wants
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