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I stand with the people of Venezuela

This is not strength. It is lawlessness.

The U.S. Constitution is explicit. Congress – not the president – has the power to declare war.

3 January 2026 Roswell, https://theaimn.net/i-stand-with-the-people-of-venezuela/

I never imagined I would be writing these words, but here we are:

I stand with the people of Venezuela.

Not with any particular government or leader, but with a nation that has just been attacked – illegally – by the President of the United States, without the approval of Congress, in clear violation of both American constitutional law and international law.

Yet, true to form, Trump will demand universal acceptance. To trust the instincts of a man who has repeatedly expressed admiration for authoritarians, hostility to international law, and contempt for democratic norms. A man whose foreign policy is indistinguishable from impulse, grievance, and spectacle. A man who treats war as performance and human lives as collateral to political theatre.

The precedent here is terrifying

If the United States – a country that never stops lecturing others about the “rules-based international order” – can simply discard those rules when inconvenient, then they cease to be rules at all. They become weapons, deployed selectively against enemies and ignored for friends.

This is how the post-war order collapses: not with a single catastrophic moment, but through repeated acts of hypocrisy that hollow it out from within.

Let’s be honest about who pays the price.

It will not be Donald Trump, safely insulated from consequences.

Strip away the chest-thumping rhetoric and the familiar justifications, and what remains is uncomfortable in its simplicity: a unilateral act of war, ordered by one man, without democratic consent, against a sovereign country that posed no imminent threat to the United States.

This is not strength. It is lawlessness.

The U.S. Constitution is explicit. Congress – not the president – has the power to declare war. That safeguard exists precisely to prevent impulsive, politically motivated, or self-serving military adventures. When a president bypasses it, he is not defending democracy. He is undermining it.

International law is just as clear. The UN Charter prohibits the use of force against another state except in self-defence or with Security Council authorisation. Venezuela attacked no one. No such authorisation exists. Labeling this as anything but an illegal act of aggression demands willful ignorance.

It will not be the architects of escalation in Washington think tanks.

It will be Venezuelan civilians – people who have already endured years of economic pain, sanctions, and instability – who will now live under the shadow of foreign bombs and regional chaos.

Standing with Venezuela does not require romanticising its politics or ignoring its internal problems. It requires recognising a basic principle that should never be negotiable: no country has the right to attack another simply because it can.

For decades, the United States has insisted that sovereignty matters – except when it doesn’t. That democracy must be respected – except when the outcome is inconvenient. That international law is sacred – except when it restrains American power.

This attack strips away the pretence.

If you believe in peace, you must oppose it.

If you believe in democracy, you must oppose it.

If you believe in international law, you must oppose it.

Silence now is complicity. Hand-wringing later will be meaningless.

The world does not need another “coalition of the willing”, another illegal war sold with vague threats and manufactured urgency. It needs restraint. It needs accountability. It needs leaders who understand that power without law is not leadership – it is empire in decay.

So yes, I stand with the people of Venezuela.

I stand against illegal war.

I stand against presidential authoritarianism masquerading as strength.

I stand against the dangerous idea that some nations are entitled to break the rules simply because they wrote them.

And I stand with the people – everywhere – who will suffer the consequences long after the press conferences end.

History is watching. And it will not be kind to those who cheered this on.

January 6, 2026 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics international, SOUTH AMERICA