Once done, it remains, by nature and fact, irreversible. The precedent of indicting and abducting a serving head of state and his spouse, dropping them into the jurisdiction of another country to face criminal charges of inventive pedigree (narcoterrorism foremost among them), is the stuff of nightmares in international statecraft. With the now former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores facing such charges in New York, other world leaders are doubtless feeling a prevailing gloom. Is there anything stopping US President Donald Trump from deploying the US military and law enforcement agents from nabbing the next sitting leader in the middle of the night? Even more broadly, is there anything stopping other States from doing the same?
This is something that has excited discussion in various political quarters, notably in East and Southeast Asia. Regarding the sullen, fleshy North Korean despot, Kim Jong-Un, the question is a pressing one. Certain lawmakers certainly think so. South Korean Rep. Lee Jun-seok, leader of the Reform Party, noted the brazen indifference the Trump administration had taken to renaming Maduro as a “leader of a transnational crime ring” instead of accepting him as a legitimate head of state. “The logic applied to President Maduro could also be applied to the North Korean leader,” reasoned Lee on Facebook. The US Justice Department had, after all, indicted North Korean hackers in 2021, using rather hyperbolic language in describing them as the “world’s leading bank robbers”.
The former mayor of Daegu, Hong Joon-pyo, was similarly confident that the North Korean leader “must have been startled by this.” Here, we were witnessing “a return to the logic of power and the era of imperialism”. That said, the tendency of brutish US power to apprehend and dispose of sovereign heads of state, was not spanking, new exercise. “There was the invasion of Panama in 1989, the arrest of [Manuel] Noriega in 1990, and the United States has also played the role of world’s police in events such as the case of Chile [the overthrow of the Allende government in 1973] and the execution of [Saddam] Hussein.” A truly sterling record.
Kim Dong-yub of the University of North Korean Studies also considered the Maduro precedent “deeply concerning” for Pyongyang, offering the following, tormented formulation: “When an adversary believes decapitation can arrive without warning, under the guise of policing or asset recovery, the rational response is to automate retaliation and compress decision time.” Leaving aside the torturous prose, the nervousness at the prospect of such a fate inflicted by so fickle a world leader is bound to be palpable.
The North Korean leader, for his part, responded to the events in Venezuela with military drills involving the firing of two hypersonic missiles into the Sea of Japan. The activity in question was, according to him, “clearly aimed at gradually putting the nuclear water deterrent on a high-developed basis”. This was “necessary” because of “the recent geopolitical crisis and complicated international events”. Kim also expressed pride in the “important achievements” that had been made in preparing the country’s nuclear forces “for an actual war”.
North Korea’s Foreign Ministry was less oblique in a statement on Maduro’s fate. “The incident is another example that clearly confirms once again the rogue and brutal nature of the US, which the international community has so frequently witnessed for a long time”.
In Southeast Asia, the abduction precedent particularly troubled the Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim. “The leader of Venezuela and his wife were seized in a United States military operation of unusual scope and nature,” he brooded in a social media post. “Such actions constitute a clear violation of international law and amount to an unlawful use of force against a sovereign state.” Irrespective of the reasons behind the move, “the forcible removal of a sitting head of government through external action sets a dangerous precedent”, eroding “fundamental restraints on the use of power between states and weakens the legal framework that underpins international order.”
Malaysia’s neighbour, Indonesia, was similarly troubled by the Maduro precedent. A January 5 statement from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs expressed “grave concern over any actions involving the use or threat of force, which risk setting a dangerous precedent in international relations and could undermine regional stability, peace, and the principles of sovereignty and diplomacy.”
In the Philippines, the official response, given the security ties between Manila and Washington, was less testy. It was left to various lawmakers to state a few troubling truths. Rep. Perci Cendaña of the left-wing Akbayan Party-list saw the actions of the Trump administration as birds of a feather with the “similar aggressive acts of Russia in Ukraine and China in the West Philippine Sea”.
Mamamayang Liberal Party-list Rep. Leila de Lima considered the operation against Venezuela one of disturbing redux, the US having again morphed “into an aggressor state” and sabotaging the rules-based international system. In doing so, its conduct had normalised the actions of Russia in the ongoing Ukraine War, Chinese expansionist aggression in the South and East China Seas, and Israel’s genocidal policy against the Palestinians. It was time, she opined gravely, to consider her country’s reliance on the US “for moral leadership on the world stage and as an ally for regional security and a rules-based international order.”
With the thuggish Donroe Doctrine running with strapping vigour, and the Trump administration hungering for additional scalps in its name, de Lima’s sentiments, along with those of her colleagues, are hard to fault.