The year 2026 began with a geopolitical shock when, on January 3, reports emerged that the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores, had been apprehended in Caracas during a US military operation authorised by US President Donald Trump.
According to accounts presented at the UN, the pair were transferred to New York City to face long-standing drug-trafficking indictments. The apprehension of a sitting head of state through a foreign military operation is without precedent in modern international relations and sent shockwaves across the world. South Africa was among the first countries to call on the UN to convene an emergency Security Council meeting, citing violations of international law under the UN Charter.
The UN’s 15-member Security Council convened on January 5. The US defended its actions as a narrowly targeted law-enforcement operation aimed at protecting national security against what it described as a “narco-terrorist” network. The US representative portrayed Maduro as a dictator who had terrorised his own people, driven millions into exile, and denied Venezuelans democracy by refusing to relinquish power after losing the July 2024 elections. On this basis, the US argued that Maduro was an illegitimate leader and insisted it was neither at war with Venezuela nor occupying the country, but merely enforcing long-standing indictments.
Several states echoed the view that Maduro lacked democratic legitimacy, citing independent assessments suggesting he had lost the 2024 election to opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate María Corina Machado, but that the state-controlled National Electoral Council falsified the outcome. These states declared their solidarity with the Venezuelan people.
At the heart of this debate lies the concept of legitimacy. In governance, legitimacy is both foundational and constitutive: it rests on the belief that a governing authority has the right to rule. This belief extends beyond legal authority to include ethical justification and moral acceptance. In democratic systems, legitimacy is derived from the will of the majority, expressed through elections that confer recognised authority to govern.
Yet democracy is not the only framework through which legitimacy has historically been conferred. Across political traditions, legitimacy has taken different forms. In traditional systems, monarchs rule by virtue of divine sanction or natural order. In constitutional systems, legitimacy is grounded in adherence to rules, procedures and judicial constraints designed to protect minority rights and individual liberties. Anglo-Saxon traditions emphasise popular participation, accountability, and checks and balances secured through free and fair elections.
By contrast, systems influenced by French republican thought place greater weight on collective identity, civic commitment and loyalty to institutions and their representatives. In such systems, patriotic and civic nationalism, rather than procedure alone, sustains legitimacy.
Context-dependent legitimacy
These distinctions suggest that legitimacy is not universal but context-dependent. The claim that Maduro is illegitimate therefore rests primarily on democratic expectations — expectations that, while dominant today, are not the sole historical or theoretical basis for political legitimacy.
This helps explain why, even as many Security Council members echoed the US view that Maduro violated democratic norms, most rejected the US intervention as unlawful. Several states characterised the operation as a “crime of aggression” against a sovereign state. Brazil, China, Colombia, Cuba, Eritrea, Mexico, Russia, South Africa and Spain argued that reported bombings on Venezuelan territory and the capture of its president and first lady crossed an unacceptable line, setting a dangerous precedent by undermining international law.
These views were not unanimous. Argentina and Paraguay, among others, defended the action as justified, framing it as a necessary intervention to impose accountability on an authoritarian ruler. Venezuela’s ambassador to the UN described the events as an illegitimate armed attack lacking legal basis, and accused the US of violating Venezuelan sovereignty and abducting the country’s leadership.
In principle, the Security Council exists to adjudicate such disputes and uphold international law. In practice, its ability to act is constrained by the veto power of its permanent members — a post–World War 2 compromise designed to prevent great-power conflict, but one that now routinely paralyses accountability. As a result, the institution tasked with enforcing international norms is often unable to act when a powerful state is implicated.
Power evades ethical purpose
This dynamic is not abstract for South Africa. The Nkabinde Inquiry exposed similar tensions when national director of public prosecutions Shamila Batohi withdrew from cross-examination mid-testimony, invoking procedural grounds in a manner that was legally defensible yet deeply unsettling for public confidence in prosecutorial accountability. The episode reinforced concerns that power can comply with the letter of the rules while evading their ethical purpose.
A profound contradiction emerges. If legitimacy is defined purely by procedural compliance, power may override sovereignty or escape scrutiny against the objections of the majority and still be deemed legitimate because the rules permit it. In effect, the US risks doing precisely what it accuses Maduro of doing: disregarding the will of the majority because it possesses the power to do so. The difference is that while Maduro is widely labelled illegitimate, the US remains shielded by a system that equates power with authority.
Trump is thus modelling a conception of legitimacy in which might, rather than moral restraint, determines what is permissible. Ethics become optional — desirable, perhaps, but ultimately subordinate to power. This is not merely a crisis of Venezuela or of US foreign policy. It is a stress test for global and domestic governance alike. If legitimacy can be claimed without moral accountability, international order risks sliding from rules-based co-operation into rule-enforced domination — a shift that should trouble all who still believe that power must answer to principle, not merely to itself.
• Dr Vilakazi is an academic and organisational developer whose work focuses on building ethical, human-centered systems in business and institutions
