US intervention in Venezuela was wrong – but now, a Japan-style rebuilding plan must unfold

The intervention by the United States in Venezuela violates the core of the United Nations’ Charter on the use of force and the principle of non-intervention in the sovereign affairs of states.

There was no Security Council authorisation for the air strikes on Saturday and the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, no claim of self-defence and no recognised exception under international law.

Yet once such an unlawful act becomes a fait accompli – once power has already displaced authority – the international community faces a grim dilemma. A Japan-style reconstruction, carefully constrained and constitution-oriented, emerges not as a justification for the intervention but as the only alternative.

In 1945, the US made a decision that reshaped the post-war world. Instead of permanently subjugating a defeated Japan after World War II, it pursued reconstruction – demilitarising the state, redesigning institutions and rebuilding the economy.

That choice transformed a militaristic empire into a stable democracy and anchored a rules-based order across Asia. Invoking that precedent today, however, demands caution. Japan’s reconstruction followed a declared war and unconditional surrender. Venezuela’s predicament follows none of these. The analogy is therefore limited and must not be used to sanitise illegality.

The illegality of intervention

The United Nations charter rests on a foundational bargain: peace is preserved by respect for sovereignty, territorial integrity, and non-intervention, except in cases of self-defence or collective action authorised by the Security Council.

Humanitarian suffering – however grave – does not by itself license unilateral military action. The doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect, endorsed by the United Nations General Assembly in 2005, was never meant to hollow out the charter.

This responsibility refers to the duty of the international community to act collectively through the United Nations “to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity” if the state has failed to do so.

There is no doubt that Venezuela has suffered catastrophic governance failure. Credible United Nations’ fact-finding mechanisms have documented crimes against humanity, systemic repression and policies leading to mass deprivation. These findings are a moral indictment of the Venezuelan state, but they do not erase the legal limits on how external power may respond.

When Responsibility to Protect is detached from the UN authorisation, it risks becoming a clear violation of international law – precisely the abuse the doctrine was designed to prevent. From this standpoint, the US action in Venezuela cannot be defended as a lawful humanitarian intervention.

It weakens the very international order it claims to protect and sets a precedent that authoritarian powers can readily exploit.

The fait accompli dilemma

Yet international law does not operate in a moral vacuum. Once an unlawful intervention has occurred, once a head of state has been captured, a government displaced, and effective control altered, the world confronts a bleak choice.

To insist on doctrinal purity while allowing societal collapse would be to punish the population twice: first through domestic tyranny and then through international indifference. This is the uncomfortable truth: while the intervention was illegal, abandonment would be unconscionable.

Venezuela’s acting president, Delcy Rodríguez, has signalled her willingness to work with the US, tempering her initial confrontational response after Maduro’s abduction. This does not retroactively legitimise the intervention, but it alters the terrain of responsibility.

The question is no longer whether the US should have intervened (there is no doubt that it should not have) but how the damage can be contained and reversed. In this narrow, tragic sense, a Japan-style reconstruction emerges not as a validation of force but as a disciplining of it.

However, there is a crucial operational distinction. The US reconstruction of Japan – and later interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan – were accompanied by large-scale deployment of ground troops and prolonged military occupation. In Venezuela, at least for now, there is no declared occupation and no visible presence of US troops on the ground.

The US must learn from its gravest failures in Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan. Regimes collapsed before institutions were built; elections were rushed before the rule of law took root; resource flows preceded accountability. The result was not democracy, but fragmentation, corruption and proxy warfare.

If Venezuela is not to follow that path, any externally driven reconstruction must be institution-first, time-bound, and under United Nations supervision. Courts, electoral authorities, fiscal systems and civilian control over security forces must precede political competition. Reconstruction must restore Venezuelan sovereignty, not replace it with tutelage.

This is where the Japanese analogy has limited but real relevance. Japan was rebuilt not through plunder, but through constitutionalism; not through permanent occupation, but through institutional redesign; not through extraction, but through reintegration into global markets under clear rules.

The lesson is not that intervention works but that unchecked power destroys, while constrained power can sometimes repair what it has broken.

Escaping the resource curse

Venezuela’s tragedy is inseparable from oil. Resource rents hollowed out the social contract, financed patronage and militarised politics. The resource curse describes the paradox whereby countries rich in natural resources often experience weaker institutions, higher inequality, and greater authoritarianism than resource-poor states.

When governments can finance themselves without taxing citizens, accountability is eroded. Politics becomes a struggle over control of rents rather than a contest over public goods.

US President Donald Trump has vowed to tap Venezuela’s oil reserves, inviting American firms to mobilise the country’s vast but underutilised resources. This approach risks reproducing the very conditions that enabled authoritarianism.

Oil revenues should be constitutionally firewalled into a transparent, independently audited sovereign wealth fund, subject to parliamentary oversight and judicial review. Social stabilisation – food, health, education, and water – must come first; diversification and growth must follow. Without this sequencing, reconstruction will collapse back into the resource curse.

Reconstruction must also guard against the authoritarian axis – a converging ecosystem of authoritarian powers, notably Russia, China, and Iran, that expand influence by exploiting institutional weakness rather than exporting ideology.

Institutional vacuums invite opaque loans, security bargains, and disinformation. Ironically, the unilateral US action strengthens this axis by normalising power without law. The only durable counter is legitimacy: open institutions, accountable governance and reintegration into lawful global markets.

Rebuilding Venezuela today is not an option for the United States – it is damage control after a breach of international law. The task is to ensure that illegality does not metastasise into permanent domination or state collapse.

If reconstruction proceeds, it must do so under multilateral supervision, with a clear exit strategy and a single objective: the restoration of Venezuelan self-government. Anything less would convert an unlawful act into an imperial precedent.

In 1945, America’s rebuilding of Japan helped reshape the world. In 2026, it intervened in Venezuela in defiance of the very order it once built.

Having crossed that line, the least bad option – the Hobson’s choice – is to bind power with law, reconstruction with accountability, and intervention with humility. Whether such restraint is possible under Donald Trump remains the gravest uncertainty of all.

Faisal CK is deputy law Secretary to the government of Kerala. Views are personal.