Kejserens nye Klæder — The Emperor’s New Clothes

There are good reasons for suggesting that the 3^rd of January 2026 is a key date for a new era of politics: Seizing Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores violently by invading the private quarters of the President of Venezuela. Such invasion is remarkable as the reasons for doing so are remarkable.

As today’s political agenda is increasingly occupied by violence it must be asked if there is any legal perspective. In the light of such an analysis we can see some structural shortcomings of the current politico-legal system that are going far beyond the case of abduction.

The Law

By and large the following legal cornerstones are given — here outlined for the case that is claimed as reference for the given case, summarised in the following question:

Which jurisdiction is applicable in the case of an alleged criminal offence committed by a citizen of State A if State B feels threatened by it? Which international regulations apply here?

1. Jurisdiction Principles — State B may assert jurisdiction under specific doctrines:

Protective Principle: Allows a state to prosecute foreign nationals for acts abroad that threaten its national security or vital interests, even if the act occurred outside its territory.

Passive Personality Principle: Grants jurisdiction if the victim of the crime is a national of the prosecuting state.

Universal Jurisdiction: Applies to grave international crimes (e.g., terrorism, war crimes, torture), enabling any state to prosecute regardless of location, nationality, or victim, provided the crime affects the international community as a whole. This is codified in treaties like the Geneva Conventions and the Convention against Torture.

2. State Responsibility

Under the International Law Commission’s Articles on State Responsibility, a state is only internationally responsible for the actions of its citizens if those actions are attributable to the state—such as when committed by state organs, under state direction, or subsequently adopted by the state. Mere nationality is insufficient for attribution.

3. Lawful Responses by State B

If State B feels threatened, it may respond lawfully under international law through:
Retorsion: Unfriendly but legal measures (e.g., diplomatic protests, sanctions).
Countermeasures: Temporary suspension of obligations in response to an internationally wrongful act, provided they are proportionate and reversible.
Self-Defense: Only permissible under Article 51 of the UN Charter if there is an “armed attack” by State A or non-state actors whose acts are attributable to State A.

4. Extraterritorial Prosecution

State B can prosecute the individual if its domestic law extends extraterritorial jurisdiction based on the protective principle or universal jurisdiction, and if the offender is present on its territory. For example, many countries prosecute terrorism or attacks on officials regardless of where committed. (1)

So, even taken a legal perspective in strict sensu, the “intervention” can only be justified by an extremely restrictive interpretation:

1. the classification as felonies (major federal offences) is more than questionable — looking at the legal provisions we see as justification of such state encroachments

• UN Charter, Article 2(4), prohibiting the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of another state — obviously not applicable
• UN Charter, Article 51, permitting the right to individual or collective self-defence when an armed attack has taken place — a mere ‘perception of threat’ is not sufficient – there must be an actual attack — Venezuela or president Maduro cannot be accused of having carried out or threatened to carry out an armed attack
• Geneva Conventions and Additional Protocols can be applied in particular to international or non-international armed conflicts, article 2 contending that it applies

to all cases of declared war or of any other armed conflict which may arise between two or more of the High Contracting Parties, even if the state of war is not recognized by one of them. The Convention shall also apply to all cases of partial or total occupation of the territory of a High Contracting Party, even if the said occupation meets with no armed resistance.

again: not applicable

• Convention against Torture (1984) and Genocide Convention (1948) — aut dedere aut judiciare, but in any case not relevant
• Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), establishing a universal jurisdiction for core crimes, article 5 defining 

Crimes within the jurisdiction of the Court
The jurisdiction of the Court shall be limited to the most serious crimes of concern to the international community as a whole. The Court has jurisdiction in accordance with this Statute with respect to the following crimes: (a) The crime of genocide; (b) Crimes against humanity; (c) War crimes; (d) The crime of aggression.

for different reasons not applicable, not least as it explicitly moves cases out of any national jurisdiction.

From a legal perspective one additional point must be considered: Only in the case of felonies no statute of limitations can be applied.

Before we come to the emperors new clothes we must ask for the relevance of the actual legislation. In legal scholarship, the following dimensions are generally distinguished from a sociological-legal perspective — we apply an

• analytical
• normative-prescriptive
• designing

take.

It becomes clear that none of these perspectives can be applied. Even if and as — as in the case under scrutiny — the USA are breaching international law, the international provisions could be used to keep the USA in check. So far we have legally a situation where (a) the USA is violating national and international legal provisions, and (b) the contracting parties to the international provisions are also disregarding the law by not intervening against the USA. In the latter case, nation states could

• individually
  • insist on the normative-prescriptive role and condemn the illegal acts,
  • apply measures like embargoes and
• collectively, as an international community, appeal to the relevant international courts.

The latter is, of course, problematic, since such an international community does not actually exist, and essentially the treaties constitute at the end individual agreements.

New clothes ?

This is, at first sight, the legal situation. However, there is a legal loophole. Legally, it is sufficient if the perceived threat is classified as a real threat, i.e., a redefinition is applied. In other words, and to illustrate the absurdity: if it is politically declared that a black area is white, then that area is white. As absurd as this is when judged by common sense, it is a formal legal possibility—the fact that common sense then despairs and becomes ill doesn’t change the initial situation. The corresponding legal reference is a (classified or undisclosed) memorandum from October 2025

which declared an armed conflict against narco-terrorist cartels in Venezuela and designated them as unlawful combatants (2)

This means that the alleged drug-trafficking (a) had been undertaken by or on behalf of Maduro and (b) that that it had been real threat, undermining national security — the problem of prejudgment would also need to be clarified in this case.

In other words, define black as white and others as combatants, as soldiers, war opponents and with this they are exactly that and then a legal foundation is given, justifying, even requiring military action. But even here it remains also in a legal perspective highly questionable as

Both chambers have considered but not approved resolutions pursuant to the War Powers Resolution that would direct the President to terminate the use of the U.S. military for hostilities against certain FTOs (S.J.Res. 83 and H.Con.Res. 61) or with Venezuela (S.J.Res. 90 and H.Con.Res. 64) without congressional authorization. On January 8, the Senate voted to advance S.J.Res. 98, which would direct the President to remove U.S. forces from hostilities in Venezuela not authorized by Congress. Congress may consider other legislative and oversight actions. (3)

Here not the “president’s sovereignty” is under scrutiny — not the power to define, but the definition itself — in fact we are confronted with a legal dilemma within the national system of the USA.

And here we come to Kejserens nye Klæder — The Emperor’s New Clothes:

I.

In fact, we see that simply changing the dress, i.e. declaring a different law as relevant or defining the facts in the light of a different piece of law, can be used as means to change the situation fundamentally — and of course, you can wear socks as gloves — for some time you may have warm hands and warm fingers … and as long as nobody looks closely at the outfit it will be OK.

The current case Venezuela is not new — interventions directed against Venezuela have already a tradition, reaching back to the pre-Trump-administration (4); we can look at Chile in 1973, we can look at Cuba from the beginning of the revolution to the embargo today and the invasion of Panama in 1989; we can look at the rather subtle conquest strategies, i.e. the division of the “new world” among the empires; we can also note that in the territories of the former GDR after 1989, goods were sold at full price, even though – as in the German book trade – returns should not be calculated in this way. — In other words, the newness of Trump’s “intervention” should not be overestimated as much as it is wrong to insist on qualifying what happened as purely “Trumpist”. John Heartfield’s photomontage comes to mind: Hitler, holding up his hand, opened over his shoulders, money put into it; or another showing Hitler as string puppet. Indeed, even if also some colleagues on the so-called and claimed left ignore the concept of hegemony, it is a valid analytical concept as much as it is today important to revisit Rosa Luxemburg’s work on the Accumulation of Capital. Here we find tools to analyse the long-term strategic character of what is going on today — individuals people matter, but decisive is the socio-structural question that …

II.

… and here we come to the second point of the applied dress-code: violence as applied in Venezuela and even threatening NATO-partners is not new, bending the law is not new … what is to some extent new is the open application of violence as characterising and dominating the entire political agenda by and with the backing of movements that are not necessarily fascist but that are definitely extreme … — looking into etymology it is difficult to find a really appropriate term:

• extreme conservative? — well, they do not want to conserve anything, but just oppose what exists
• extreme reactionary? — sounds a bit more suitable though it is not simply about “action in resistance or response to another action or power” (5) but in its own way “independent” and “creative”, aiming on the realisation of a world that corresponds to their particular interests and ideas
• extreme retroactive? — understood s “operating with respect to past circumstances, extending to matters which have occurred, holding good for preceding cases” (6), may be this is the most appropriate: the emphasis is not on reacting to what is but on orienting on what had been.

This can also be seen if we look at the Project 2025, The Heritage Foundation’s Document (mind the name: Heritage, not reactionary, but retroactive).

Page 184 of Project 2025 does use the word “re-hemisphering” when discussing Latin America. It uses the word in an economic context rather than a militaristic or interventionist context, with a goal of moving “manufacturing and industry closer to home.” While the next bullet point, “A ‘local’ approach to security threats,” does call for more U.S. intervention in Latin America, it proposes potential military (and other) collaborations with allies in and outside Latin America — not unilateral military operations. (7)

Still, even the term retroactive is not entirely without problems: if we look at Trump himself and his immediate henchmen and followers it may apply; if we include people like Musk or valley dwellers in the south-east of the US, we see a weird amalgamation of two aims: reestablishing and tightening the old power relationships and hegemony going hand in hand with a techno-visionary design of the future.

With all the legitime and necessary critique of the given the excesses of current politics, particularly in the USA and the EU, the following statement, reflecting “everyday’s life” of the hegemons, should perhaps give us even more to think about.

This egalitarian style can clash with the Valley’s reality of extreme in come polarization. ’Many tech companies solved this problem by having the lowest-paid workers not actually be employees. They’re contracted out’, Schmidt explained. ’We can treat them differently, because we don’t really hire them. The person who’s cleaning the bathroom is not exactly the same sort of person.’ (8)

Sure, it is about oil; but it is about much more and as such it is about much more — welcome in the future as described already by H.G. Wells in The Time Machine, written in 1885.

III.

So, the question is a very fundamental one, concerning the relevance of law. Of course, it is not about denying its importance. Approaching it in a radical way means we must question the presumptions of the traditional pattern. Traditionally we find the separation of power with the three pillars legislative, executive and judicial power. It is about enactment, implementation and administration and interpretation. The original, going especially back to Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, formulated in France in the 18^th century; it must be seen in connection with the emergence of the modern nation state. However, today, the validity, reach and scope of the nation state must be qualified — different perspectives can be taken but unquestionable is (i) that various pieces of international legislation exist, (ii) they are still in one or another way bound to the nation state and (iii) most importantly there is no institutional setting that comes even near to the separation of power as outlined before. Subsequently the institutional setting must be radically revised, moving towards “synchronisation” of legislative processes and institutional settings. The United Nations are at this stage obviously not equipped with sufficient power. Do proposals that establish a structure of governance by professional expertise a solution — proposals are made by Teubner et altera — as tempting as they may be at first sight, they face the same problem: the lack of executive power. Looking at different proposals there seem to be only following solutions viable:

• a strong executive global power, possibly subdivided,

• with a leg of administration and
• a leg of implementation
  — then definition can be grounded in Gramsci’s discussion of hegemony and the different forms of control; here it is transposed into the question if — and if so in which way — a supranational hegemony can be established. Important is that this can only be meaningful if it is understood as integrated system of equals, not allowing one superpower and not hiding the need to consensus on essential questions behind a suggested multipolarity (see in this context also the videos)
• the establishment of a supranational (mind: not international) legislative and judicial power, that guarantees the — horizontally and vertically — coordinated processing of enacting and interpretation. This implies that the competencies of such institutional setting must be

• on the one hand extended, i.e. the provisions are strictly enforceable
• while they are on the other hand limited, only dealing with international relations
  as such they would be complementing, nit replacing present international regulative bodies
• finally, juridical issues must take account of underlying economic processes, i.e. it is necessary to find ways that allow clear ways to deal with economic interests, defining definite ways to define economic interests and exclude them as reasons for action.

IV.

Finally, it is easy to say that there are economic interests guiding politics and policies — and with NATO-EU states mobilising troops in Greenland against the NATO-allied USA, still EU and USA making front especially against China, this questions needs more attention. Of course, in the case of Venezuela economic interests can easily be translated into the quest for oil. But answering the question this way falls short of considering the fundamental lines of interest — something that had been as well overlooked as shaping the pre-WW-II-situation: the interest of different industrial fractions/sectors, at the time heavy and light industries, today a much more complex constellation that can only be outlined here, and even this only with a broad brush:

processes of reshaping are moving from right to left, from new to traditional
Heavy Industries			Light Industries			Energy			Finance
trad.	new		trad.	new		trad.	new
reshaping
			reshaping
reshaping

In consequence, we find patterns by which traditional sectors are increasingly shaped and dominated by new technological and energetic developments and subsequently some of the “traditional industries” are developing new forms of accumulation in the “outfit of new industries”, going hand in hand with new patterns of the organic composition of capital. We see an underlying development of politics, in extreme forms exemplified in Venezuela and as threat in Greenland: it is the move towards an eco-nationalism. Make America Great Again — the same claim can be found cum grano salis especially in France, Germany and the UK — is an expression of a direct link between main national corporations and the national administration. Such linkages are well known, especially as military-industrial complex (9) and medical-industrial complex. And they are also known from further back in history:

For much of modern history, multinational enterprises have acted hand in glove with the state. Britain and the Netherlands were bankrolled by their East India companies, and provided military and diplomatic support in return. Germany’s Krupp and Japan’s Mitsubishi aided industrialisation while their governments secured mines and markets abroad. American interventions helped oil firms secure foreign resources. (10)

So, is there anything new? I suggest three features that can be seen as reasonably new:

• The “new industries” are not primarily “sectors” but overall determinants of production, service provision and marketisation. Furthermore, the products from any sector, are shifting themselves towards “service provision” or to be more precise: the “provision of virtual services” — the analysis of Bol’shie Tsiklys is surely helpful: if we really enter a new cycle, it goes far belong the often proposed shift that occurred with the wide-spread of “information technology”, as IT must be seen as concerned with a new set of tools and machines whereas we are today entering a world of virtualised production and virtualised life regime. (11)
• The development is highly contradictory and decisive will be the need to establish a relevant infrastructure. In the same way in which automobiles reshaped the cities — they became car-friendly, thereby displacing pedestrians and the associated communication structures — we are currently confronted with reshaping the global communication structures. The contradictions are given by the fact that “crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” (12) In other words, we are witnessing conflicts between nation state and globalism, analog and digital domains, traditional class structures and new social obliterations, industrialism and virtualism. The legal system cannot, in some way, solve these tensions. We can even say that legal provisions are opposing a solution: the are caught in the traditional patterns; they had been established as answer to nation state, analog domains, traditional class structures, industrialism and alterations to the legal system remained in the traditional framework. It is wrong to conclude that the current general trend to use violence as politics offers a solution. On the contrary, it is a challenge to find new legal structures, structures that are genuinely addressing the issues arising from globalism, digital domains, new social obliterations, and virtualism.
• Oil, after Venezuela Iran ?… isn’t oil as source of everything, central raw material for many products? The eternal ice of Greenland … as strategic point it can be taken metaphorically: a means of freezing the past in a cocoon. History does not repeat itself but we must realise that these and other acts are very similar to the fascist strategy, aiming on the establishment of an “empire of German nations”, now in dressed up as MAGA. Seen in this light, the strategy may primarily not be a matter of subjugation, but rather a matter of incorporation.

From here, a new mechanisms of economic regulation must be established: to the extent to which economic processes transcend the reference to use values, they transcend national boundaries of processes of production; it will be in turn necessary to transcend the control and regulation of the related processes of production. Subsequently, i.e. (i) after public control of the production and distribution of relevant sectors and (ii) the establishment of fast mechanisms of global control a major source of international conflicts ceases to exist.

FOOTNOTES

(1)  https://www.icrc.org/sites/default/files/document/file_list/universal-jurisdiction-icrc-eng.pdf; https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual-1617-extraterritorial-criminal-jurisdiction-18-usc-112-878-970-1116; https://studentbriefs.law.gwu.edu/ilpb/2023/10/25/the-gap-in-united-states-extraterritorial-law-addressing-the-oversight-in-protecting-adults-from-sexual-exploitation-abroad/; https://cja.org/what-we-do/litigation/legal-strategy/universal-jurisdiction/; https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/09/02/qa-international-criminal-court-and-united-states; https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/95215/does-someone-get-punished-if-they-commit-a-crime-outside-of-legal-jurisdiction; https://corporateaccountability.fidh.org/the-guide/judicial-mechanisms/extraterritorial-criminal-liability-of-multinational-corporations-for-human-rights-violations/extraterritorial-criminal-liability-of-multinational-corporations-before-us-courts/the-jurisdiction-of-us-criminal-courts-for-acts-committed-abroad/; https://trialinternational.org/topics-post/universal-jurisdiction/; https://www.un.org/en/ga/sixth/65/ScopeAppUniJuri_StatesComments/Kenya.pdf; https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/RS22497; https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/94-166; https://www.amnesty.org/ar/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/ior530032001en.pdf; and AI; sabato 10 gennaio 2026

(2) this had been stated in various US-media as Associated Press, city Journal etc.

(3) https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IN12618

(4) see e.g. https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IN12618

(5)  https://www.etymonline.com/word/reaction

(6)  https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=retroactive

(7)  https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/venezuela-project-2025-latin-america/

(8)  Freeland, Chrystia, 2012: Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else; New York: The Penguin Press

(9)  see the warning by Eisenhower in his 1961-farewell address: https://www.c-span.org/program/the-presidency/president-dwight-eisenhower-farewell-address/137255; venerdì 16 gennaio 2026

(10)  https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/01/15/americas-gunboat-capitalism-will-make-the-world-poorer; venerdì 16 gennaio 2026

(11)  Contractor, Farok J. June 2, 2025: Misrepresentations about international trade: The case of Apple’s iPhone; ;https://www.business.rutgers.edu/business-insights/misrepresentations-about-international-trade-case-apples-iphone; venerdì 16 gennaio 2026; while Contractor contends it is the “services in the phone” I would suggest that it is the services that are sold with the phone to make them working, connecting etc. — the apple music store is one example:

• Apple Music made approximately $9.2 billion revenue in 2023
• 93 million people subscribe to Apple Music as of June 2023
• Apple Music is the second largest music streaming service in the US and third in Europe
• Apple Music pays artists on average $0.0076 per listen

(https://www.businessofapps.com/data/apple-music-statistics/; venerdì 16 gennaio 2026)

See as well Herrmann, Peter, Shenzhen-presentation , Isar lectures one, two, three, Herrmann, Peter 2016: From 5 Giant Evils to Five Giant Tensions — The Current Crisis of Capitalism as Seedbed for its Overturn — Or How many Gigabyte has a Horse?; sabato 17 gennaio 2026

(12)  Gramsci, Antonio, 1930: Quaderni del carcere, vol. I: quaderni 1.5; Edizone Critica del Istituto Gramsci a Cura di Valentino Gerratana; Torino: Giulio Einaudi, 1975; translation P.H.