The United Nations was founded in 1945 after two world wars had demonstrated that unrestrained great power rivalry and the legal toleration of war as a policy tool were incompatible with human survival. The UN Charter, signed in San Francisco and in force since October 1945, explicitly committed states “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war” and to base relations on sovereign equality and nonintervention. Central to this new order was Article 2(4), which prohibits the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, except in narrow cases of self-defense or when the Security Council authorizes a “force justia,” or a just war.

The Security Council, with the United States as a permanent member, was entrusted with the “primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security,” precisely to prevent unilateral wars of the sort that had twice plunged the world into catastrophe. Over time, the UN also became a vehicle for decolonization and human rights, providing a platform for newly independent states to assert that no power had the right to invade, carve up, or “run” another people’s territory.

UN collapses

The Jan. 3, 2026 operation against Venezuela — largescale US strikes, the seizure of Maduro and Cilia Flores, and the declared plan to administer the country and its oil — meets every classic criterion of a war of aggression. Venezuela did not launch an armed attack on the United States, and there is no Security Council resolution authorizing the use of force, which means there is no Charter-based legal justification for this invasion. In the language that emerged at Nuremberg and has since informed international criminal law, aggression is the “supreme international crime” because it opens the door to all the other crimes — killings, destruction, displacement — that follow.