Now, with the likelihood of unrest and government crackdowns continuing, the possibility of a second U.S. attack remains viable. Iran’s people deserve international support as they endure what may prove to be the most brutal suppression in the history of the Islamic Republic. But the quick pivot to considering military force without serious domestic debate in the United States or clarity about what force is meant to achieve, and whether this is the best way to help the Iranian people, is alarming. The President and other senior officials have offered mixed messages on the purpose of military threats, suggesting goals ranging from the protection of protesters, the possibility of regime change, the promotion of freedom and democracy, striking more favorable diplomatic deals, and the need to reassert U.S. credibility. Such varied aims leave the strategic objectives of a potential strike unclear—and raise the risk that military action becomes a substitute for strategy. Moreover, military tools are unlikely to achieve any of these objectives, and may only make the situation worse. 

 Military Force is Unlikely to Advance U.S. Goals in Iran   

The most urgent rationale for using military force is to protect Iranian civilians. Reports on the death toll from the current unrest vary, but even cautious estimates suggest casualties in the thousands. Even with the government imposing a total internet blackout, the reports that have emerged make it clear the leadership sees the current protests as existential and has chosen to use the full force of the state’s security forces against its people. President Trump has repeatedly threatened Iranian leaders if they use force against the protesters, posting early in the crisis that the United States. is “locked and loaded” and would come to the protesters “rescue” if the killing continued. He later told Iranians to “keep protesting” and that “help is on the way.” 

But military strikes are unlikely to prevent Iran’s security forces from killing civilians. Striking the headquarters of the IRGC or other state institutions responsible for the killing may rattle the leadership. But as Israel’s previous killing of top IRGC officials has demonstrated, it is difficult to dismantle an expansive security apparatus through external military intervention alone. Moreover, previous attacks only led to more repression as paranoia about external intelligence infiltration led to mass arrests and executions. In this respect, military strikes can backfire and lead to even more indiscriminate killing of innocent civilians.

What if the objective is more expansive, aiming to not only protect protesters but to topple the regime itself? Trump’s statements moved in this direction as the protests gained momentum, encouraging the Iranian people to “Make Iran Great Again.” Senator Lindsey Graham and other U.S. officials have even been donning ‘Make Iran Great Again’ hats, branding Iran’s uprising as a MAGA movement. Though initially reluctant to meet former Iranian crown prince Reza Pahlavi, who has been actively encouraging protesters to overthrow the regime, senior White House envoy Steve Witkoff reportedly met Pahlavi last weekend. However, Trump has questioned Pahlavi’s support inside the country, suggesting he might be seeking information about potential alternative leaders should the Islamic Republic fall.

But the use of external military force to topple regimes has a poor track record historically. Without armed opposition forces on the ground, airpower alone has rarely succeeded in ousting governments. Peaceful protesters on the streets are not an army. They are not organized to take on the massive security capabilities of the Iranian state. This is not Syria, where an armed opposition had been organizing for years and exercising autonomy in parts of the country during the civil war before the surprising opportunity to advance to Damascus and overthrow Bashar al-Assad. Without defections and other signs of splintering among Iran’s security forces and leadership, regime collapse is unlikely. So far, such fissures have not emerged, even after the significant military setbacks during the Israeli and American attacks in June.

Another goal often linked to overthrowing the regime is the desire to see Iran transition to democratic governance, which is the aspiration for many Iranians inside and outside the country. Trump’s social media postings at times refer to his support for freedom in Iran, but the actions of his second administration suggest little interest in such objectives. The Venezuela model, that some fear may be in store for Iran, demonstrated that the administration was content with a change of leadership, not a change of the regime or its repressive machinery. Even if democracy, human rights and accountability were higher priorities for this administration, research on foreign military interventions suggests they tend to bring more repression and violence than democracy. There is little reason to believe Iran would prove an exception.

Another argument for military force is that it can advance diplomacy, forcing Iran’s leaders to accept terms they previously refused, such as the permanent suspension of uranium enrichment within the country, which has proven a major sticking point in nuclear negotiations. However, the use of military force in June did not move the Iranians to more accommodating positions. Instead of returning to the negotiating table, Iran’s leaders focused on restoring military capabilities, particularly missile capacity, to deter future attacks and make such attacks more costly for the United States and Israel. And in the aftermath of such unprecedented bloodshed in Iran, the political appetite for a deal in Washington is likely diminished. Military escalation tends to disrupt diplomatic processes, not encourage them, as evidenced when the June attacks derailed the Omani-mediated nuclear talks after five rounds of meetings.  

Finally, what if the objective is a show of force to maintain credibility, allowing Trump to claim he acted on his threats without risking prolonged military engagement. Trump prefers military operations that are decisive and short, and that do not require ground troops that could risk quagmires like Afghanistan and Iraq. But just because military operations may be conceived as limited does not mean that they are without risks. Iran has already threatened to retaliate against U.S. bases in neighboring countries if attacked. There are also secondary impacts, including the prospect that even limited strikes lead to unanticipated escalation, spilling over the borders to neighboring states and destabilizing global oil markets. Such concerns, which are not hypothetical as we saw during the June war, explain why regional states, particularly in the Gulf, lobbied Trump to refrain from an attack. 

A Smarter Way to Stand with Iranians

While it is still unclear what the administration is trying to achieve in Iran, military strikes are unlikely to advance any conceivable U.S. objective. The most immediate priority should be to help the Iranian people, and there are more effective and less dangerous ways to do so than resorting to force. 

One way to support Iranian protesters is to improve their ability to communicate with each other and the outside world during internet shutdowns and ensure that reliable information about the protests is available. Internet censorship circumvention tools like Starlink satellite terminals are already being utilized to send videos and images of the protests out of the country, and SpaceX has allowed for free access during this emergency. But relying only on private sector companies and the discretion of its leadership can be risky, and should not replace funding for governmental and nongovernmental organizations working in the internet freedom area, funding that the Trump administration has cut and is under pressure to restore. Funding for NGOs that help investigate and expose AI manipulated media that can be used by the Iranian government and other external actors to distort the nature of the unrest is also critical to document crimes and allow for accountability in the future. 

Another useful step to help Iranians who may be facing increased dangers within the country would be to reverse the current visa restrictions on Iranians who are seeking asylum in the United States and halt deportation flights of Iranians already in the country. The Trump administration sent two planeloads of Iranians seeking refuge in the United States back to Iran before the current protests, Iranians who were sure to face persecution upon their return. Future deportation flights at this perilous time in Iran would be particularly callous.

Finally, this is a moment for a global response, not unilateral military action. The U.S. government should be activating mechanisms like the United Nations, the Human Rights Council, and trans-Atlantic forums to hold those responsible for the killing to account. This is particularly difficult as the administration has withdrawn the United States from dozens of international organizations that press for accountability and rule of law across the world, not to mention the dismantling of U.S. agencies and nongovernmental organizations focused on supporting civil society and democratic governance. 

Ultimately, if the aim is to help the Iranian people, the best approach is to empower them to do it on their own without the complications and dangers of external military intervention. This is an Iranian uprising, and it is up to the people of Iran to decide their own future.

The post Military Force Will Not Help the People of Iran appeared first on Just Security.

The Maduro capture gives credence to Trump’s own subsequent boast that when he is exercising his commander in chief authority, he is constrained by no law, but only by “his own morality” – whatever that might be. Indeed, Maduro’s capture constituted an act of military aggression and the initiation of an international armed conflict, all in violation of the U.N. Charter’s prohibition against the non-authorized use of force. It also runs against more than 80 years of U.S. post-war diplomacy designed primarily to create and reinforce a rules-based international order geared to the prevention of war. In ordering the capture, Trump also disregarded Congress’s constitutional authority to declare war and the related consultation requirements imposed by the War Powers Act. His statements regarding Greenland constitute clear signals of his determination to continue with his scofflaw behavior.

Unfortunately for Trump’s imperial ambitions – but fortunately for the rule of law, the U.S. national interest, and international stability – Trump’s ability to execute any act of military aggression against Greenland is constrained by an additional statute: 22 U.S.C. 1928f. This statute – which was not applicable to Venezuela because it is not a NATO member — was adopted by Congress pursuant to Section 1250A of the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act and was designed to prohibit the president from materially altering the U.S. government’s relationship with NATO and the North Atlantic Treaty (the diplomatic instrument that gave rise to NATO) without prior congressional approval. 

How Section 1928f Applies to the Use of Force against Greenland

In addition to its consultation and notification requirements, the statute – which is titled “Limitation on Withdrawal from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization” – contains two principal provisions: first, as the title implies, a broad prohibition against withdrawal from NATO or taking other analogous steps that would materially damage the U.S. relationship with the organization and, second (and critically), a limitation on the use of appropriated funds such that the president would be precluded from using such funds to implement the actions prohibited by the statute. 

The texts of these two provisions are the following:

§ 1928f. Limitation on withdrawal from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization

(a) Opposition of Congress to suspension, termination, denunciation, or withdrawal from North Atlantic Treaty

The President shall not suspend, terminate, denounce, or withdraw the United States from the North Atlantic Treaty, done at Washington, DC, April 4, 1949, except by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, provided that two-thirds of the Senators present concur, or pursuant to an Act of Congress.

(b) Limitation on the use of funds

No funds authorized or appropriated by any Act may be used to support, directly or indirectly, any decision on the part of any United States Government official to suspend, terminate, denounce, or withdraw the United States from the North Atlantic Treaty, done at Washington, DC, April 4, 1949, except by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, provided that two-thirds of the Senators present concur, or pursuant to an Act of Congress.

The applicability of this statute stems from Greenland’s status as an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark and Denmark’s status as a member of NATO. As Mike Schmitt has explained, “[i]t is clear that Greenland falls within the geographical coverage of Article 5.” 

While the administration will undoubtedly claim that, because it has no intent to formally “withdraw” from the North Atlantic Treaty, the statute is not applicable to the current situation, this assertion would be false. A U.S. attempt to seize Greenland militarily would constitute an attack on Denmark and, through the operation of Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, an attack on each of the other 30 NATO members (excluding of course the U.S.). Not only would this attack instantaneously breach, either directly or constructively, each of the four prohibitions in clause (a) of Sec. 1928f (meaning it would invariably constitute or lead to the suspension, termination, denunciation, and withdrawal of the U.S. from the Treaty), it would necessarily also lead to the destruction of the organization in its current form as the U.S. wages war on our former allies. 

Because these consequences are inevitable, any order by President Trump to launch an attack on Greenland necessarily triggers the automatic cutoff of authorized or appropriated funds that would be required to execute the assault. In addition, because the administration has clearly not only engaged in “deliberation” about taking military action against Denmark and NATO, but, indeed, has reportedly already ordered that military planning be initiated, the consultation and notification requirements of Sec.1928f have already been triggered.  

The consultation and notification requirements are:

(c) Notification of Treaty action

(1) Consultation

Prior to the notification described in paragraph (2), the President shall consult with the Committee on Foreign Relations of the Senate and the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the House of Representatives in relation to any initiative to suspend, terminate, denounce, or withdraw the United States from the North Atlantic Treaty.

(2) Notification

The President shall notify the Committee on Foreign Relations of the Senate and the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the House of Representatives in writing of any deliberation or decision to suspend, terminate, denounce, or withdraw the United States from the North Atlantic Treaty, as soon as possible but in no event later than 180 days prior to taking such action. [Emphasis added.]

It has not been reported that the Trump administration has yet complied with either of these two statutory requirements. If that is the case, it is already in breach of them.

The Constitutional Dimension

The division of constitutional authorities between Congress and the Executive in foreign affairs, including the authority to withdraw from treaties (on which the Constitution is silent), has historically been a matter of legal dispute between the two political branches. While this is a complex topic and the executive branch has been accorded great deference in the post-ratification management of treaties, with respect to the North Atlantic Treaty there is a strong argument that Congress’ assertion of a measure of legislative control so as to protect the U.S.-NATO relationship should be given preeminence over the administration’s intent to destroy the organization. 

First, Congress has a long history of deep and consistent legislative involvement in the U.S.–NATO relationship generally and with the North Atlantic Treaty specifically. Second, according to the Congressional Research Service in a Jan. 6, 2025, Legal Sidebar, the enactment of Section 1928f “is the first statute in which Congress has prohibited unilateral presidential withdrawal from a treaty.” And third, Congress has coupled its treaty termination prohibition with the Section 1928f(b) limitation of funds provision, thus coupling its unchallengeable constitutional power of the purse with the legislation designed to protect NATO. 

These factors led the CRS to conclude that if the Trump administration were to refuse compliance with the Section, it may well find that its presidential power relative to that of Congress is at “at its lowest ebb” under the Youngstown framework. Thus, if Congress were to seek to challenge Trump’s aggressive designs on Greenland, the invocation of Section 1928f would provide a strong foundation for the challenge.

Moreover, as practitioners and scholars have argued, the North Atlantic Treaty’s status as an advice-and-consent treaty and its subject matter also counsel towards congressional authority to regulate withdrawal, suspension, or denunciation: 

As the North Atlantic Treaty is an Article II treaty adopted with two-thirds approval by the Senate, requiring congressional authorization for withdrawal places limitations on withdrawal that are consistent with the degree of authorization needed to enter the treaty. Such limits are also consistent with the subject matter of the treaty, which relates to the war powers shared between Congress and the president.

The Reaction of Denmark, Greenland, and Other European Countries

The governments of both Denmark and Greenland have repeatedly stated that they oppose the annexation or sale of Greenland to the United States, a stand that is reinforced by a large majority of the public, as evidenced by public opinion polls in both countries. In addition, Denmark has announced that it is bolstering its military presence in Greenland and will consult with European allies to potentially solicit additional military support. Sweden, France, and Germany have already sent troops and the U.K. is considering it. Other EU-member countries, such as Spain and Italy, while not yet committing troops to Greenland have condemned the threatened aggression.

Danish authorities have stated that they would fight back if invaded. 

The Foreign Policy and National Security Dimensions

The repercussions of Trump’s threats against Greenland and Denmark have already been severe inasmuch as they have demonstrated to NATO and all other European nations that the United States cannot be trusted as an ally, partner, or even a good neighbor; and, worse, that the United States actually presents a military threat. 

Should the United States actually seek to accomplish its Greenland landgrab, the consequences would be infinitely worse. With NATO shattered, the European Union – along with the U.K. and Canada – would likely react by summarily: terminating all military and intelligence cooperation; closing its airspace to U.S. flights; terminating all U.S. basing rights in their territories; detaining and disarming all U.S. military personnel and assuming custody of all U.S. military equipment; and interning all U.S. intelligence, diplomatic, and other personnel. 

Beyond those immediate security consequences, economic sanctions would be levied quickly, financial cooperation and European investment in U.S. debt instruments would plummet, and Europe would seek to lessen its dependency on the dollar. Sales of U.S. products or services to Europe would sharply decline, including sales of military weapons, and the U.S. defense industry would shrink. Tourism in both directions would also decrease. There will be global economic repercussions as well. And this would only be the start.

As harmful as these security and economic countermeasures may be to the United States, the negative impact of U.S. aggression may even be worse across the Atlantic. Beyond the damage to Denmark, the most immediate impact will be felt in Ukraine and Europe as a whole. While President Trump insists that U.S. possession of Greenland is imperative for the protection of the U.S. and Europe from encroachments by China and Russia, that claim is bogus. 

In business terms, the value proposition that President Trump seems to be advancing is the following: The United States will acquire Greenland, which although vast, is barren and frozen, for the costs of waging a war of aggression on Denmark and Greenland; destroying NATO; severing our economic, military, and political relationship with the EU, the U.K., and Canada; enduring economic and commercial sanctions; and abandoning the heretofore fruitful collaborative effort to build a rules-based international order. If this is the proposed deal, most Americans will have no trouble concluding that it is a fool’s bargain, particularly from a security standpoint. 

To be clear, the principal beneficiary of Trump’s aggression will be Russia, which will no longer have to contend with NATO’s defensive barrier. What Trump has actually done by threatening Greenland and Denmark is to open up a “second front” to help relieve the pressure on Russia’s military, finances, and society created by Ukraine’s stout defense of its sovereignty and by the growing European support for Ukraine. Trump’s threats to Greenland both complicate Ukraine’s effort to strengthen its supply chains to compensate for the decrease in American support and Europe’s effort to rebuild its own military (in light of the growing U.S. indifference to Europe) and to simultaneously increase its level of support to Ukraine. 

Ironically, Trump’s second front mirrors the second front launched by Roosevelt and Churchill during the Second World War, with the difference being that the Allies launched D-Day to help save democracy while Trump’s assault is designed to advance autocratic objectives that are inimical to America’s national interest but congenial to Russia’s imperial ambitions. If Russia continues to advance, Europe may well be faced with the very difficult choice of allowing Russia to absorb Ukraine or, instead, to integrate Ukraine and its very capable military into Europe and enter into the defensive war against Russia on Ukraine’s side. This could spiral into an even more dangerous global war. If it does, the Trump administration will share a very large portion of the blame.

Conclusion and Recommendation

President Trump’s threats of military aggression towards Greenland and Denmark are madness. If carried through they will betray American values, make the world less safe, shatter NATO, destroy our historic relationship with our European partners, and cause other incalculable damage to the U.S. national interest. Congress should immediately wrestle from the president his power to launch his threatened unprovoked, unauthorized, and pointless war of aggression against NATO. It can do so by depriving him of the financial means to do so by triggering the application of 22 USC 1928f and ensuring that the administration complies with its requirements.

The post How Congress Can Preserve NATO and Greenland: Using 22 USC 1928f to Protect the Peace appeared first on Just Security.

Consequently, in this article, we will focus on the lawfulness of the seizure of the Marinera, and in particular jurisdictional and maritime law enforcement authorisation under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), a treaty that is widely recognized to reflect customary international law binding on States that are not party to it, including the United States. (A forthcoming article will analyse the applicability of a second rule set under which the boarding and capture can be potentially assessed – the law of naval warfare.) We conclude that, based on the publicly available information to date, it is difficult to sustain the lawfulness of the U.S.-led and UK-supported seizure of the Marinera.

The Fundamental Issue – Did the Marinera Have a “Flag”?

On the claims as currently reported, the lawfulness of the seizure of the Marinera in terms of UNCLOS-based maritime law enforcement authorities turns primarily on whether the vessel was without nationality. This is because the law of the sea requires every vessel to hold a nationality – it’s “flag state,” which is the state in which it is registered. The flag state has jurisdiction over the vessel, and protection rights in relation to the vessel. If a vessel is without nationality, then this is tantamount to there being no jurisdiction over the vessel apart from (in a conduct management sense) the nationality jurisdiction of the crew members. This is unacceptable to states in that it creates the possibility of places where no state can exercise sufficient jurisdiction over wrongful activity – effectively, a place of impunity. Thus, when a warship (or other appropriately authorised sovereign immune vessel) comes across another vessel that it reasonably suspects of being without nationality, and that vessel is outside the territorial sea of all States, then that warship can exercise the UNCLOS Article 110 right of visit to board that vessel to determine the situation.

The U.S. claim regarding the Marinera appears to be that she was without nationality at the time of its seizure, based on the fact that she had previously been registered in Guyana (as Bella 1) but that this registration had since been rescinded by Guyana. At the time of the first attempted boarding in December 2025, the justification provided was that “[i]t is flying a false flag and under a judicial seizure order.” 

But the jurisdictional situation then shifted with the Dec. 31, 2025 indications of Russian registration, and a diplomatic note from Russia asking the United States to cease pursuit – presumably on the basis that Russia was now the flag state of the vessel. However, within this altered context, the U.S. administration’s explanation of the legal basis for the Jan. 7, 2026 boarding was more ambiguous than the original December 2025 claim: 

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said at a news briefing that the Marinera was “deemed stateless” after “flying a false flag.”

Another subsequent report explained that 

Officials with knowledge of the matter said the Trump administration was unimpressed by the ship’s sudden change of flag and there was a desire to send a wider message that such a ploy would have no practical effect.

It is not clear whether the “flying a false flag” assertion related to a claim that Marinera continued to use the Guyana flag after de-registration, or to a claim that the use of the Russian flag at the time of seizure was not effective. Nor has the being “unimpressed by the ship’s sudden change of flag” been unpacked or explained in any legal sense, although one commentator has indicated that it “would have set a bad precedent in a lot of ways if this ship would have been allowed to essentially re-flag mid journey and become a Russian vessel… They wanted to prevent this tactic from being repeated in the future.” There is also a report that “the Trump administration rejected the claim of a Russian flag and considered the vessel to be stateless, according to two sources familiar with the matter, paving the way for the vessel’s capture.” 

The United States also reportedly continued to refer to the vessel as Bella 1. If this is accurate, it would lend support to an argument that the United States simply rejected the Russian claim to have registered Marinera and that the United States therefore continued to view the tanker as stateless based on the de-registration by Guyana. It is notable that statelessness also appears to be the basis for the U.K.’s support to the operation, with the U.K. Defense Secretary stating that 

The tanker … had changed its name “five times in the last five years” and had been falsely flying the flag of Guyana when it was called Bella 1 and arrived in the Caribbean.

A stateless vessel, the defence secretary said, “may be lawfully intercepted and subjected to the law of the interdicting state.”

By contrast, as reported by the BBC, Russian claims made at the time referred to the tanker being “granted temporary permission to sail under the State Flag of the Russian Federation, issued in accordance with Russian legislation and the norms of international law.” One industry news site indicated that:

By December 24, 2025, the ship had changed its name to Marinera and flag to Russia, showing a fresh coat of paint after getting a temporary registration from Russia’s Maritime Register out of Sochi.

The Russian claim of jurisdiction and the U.S. counter-claim as to statelessness therefore raise three specific UNCLOS-governed issues: how a vessel may effectively change its registration; what is required for a “genuine link” to be recognized between a vessel and a flag State; and the question of a vessel’s status when it is viewed to be operating under “two flags.”

Was there a Changed Registration?

To be sure, changing registration mid-voyage is an unusual practice and one that is viewed with suspicion. As to registration processes, Jen Parker has correctly observed:

Article 92 [of UNCLOS] makes clear that a ship may not change its flag during a voyage except in cases of a genuine transfer of ownership or formal change of registry. Simply repainting a flag or asserting a new nationality mid-voyage has no legal effect. However, as technology has allowed for the registration of vessels online at sea, there is an open question about whether it was formally registered to Russia at the time of boarding.

As noted above, and despite the ambiguous use of the term “temporary,” the reported Russian claim appears to be that a switch to Russian registry was completed in accordance with Russian domestic law and “the norms of international law.” On the sparse information available, it is therefore more likely than not that the Marinera’s registration by Russia would be considered, as a matter of international law, to be prima facie effective. This is in large part due to the second issue we need to assess – the law of the sea and its approach to “genuine link.” As Parker points out, the “genuineness” of the formal change of registry from Guyana to Russia is the key to whether the Marinera’s re-registration was effective. 

Genuine Link

States generally have wide latitude to determine what will be required as a matter of their domestic law to permit a ship to be registered in their State and, accordingly, fly their flag. Article 91(1) of UNCLOS provides that:

Every State shall fix the conditions for the grant of its nationality to ships, for the registration of ships in its territory, and for the right to fly its flag. Ships have the nationality of the State whose flag they are entitled to fly. There must exist a genuine link between the State and the ship.

The 1986 UN Convention on Conditions for Registration of Ships details a range of more granular aspects around the concept of “genuine link” (for example, in Articles 5 and 6), setting out detailed requirements for flag states regarding their obligations to register, monitor, and take measures in relation to vessels under their flag. However, this treaty has not entered into force (it has not achieved the number of states and percentage of world fleet tonnage entry-into-force requirements as set out in Article 19). The orthodox interpretation of “genuine link” thus remains as stated in the relevant jurisprudence of the International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea (ITLOS), which in practice sets a pretty low bar. In the 2014 Virginia G case, ITLOS explained:

110. The Tribunal considers that article 91, paragraph 1, third sentence, of the Convention requiring a genuine link between the flag State and the ship should not be read as establishing prerequisites or conditions to be satisfied for the exercise of the right of the flag State to grant its nationality to ships…
111. … As stated by the Tribunal in the M/V “SAIGA” (No. 2) Case, “[t]here is nothing in article 94 [of UNCLOS, concerning the duties of the flag state] to permit a State which discovers evidence indicating the absence of proper jurisdiction and control by a flag State over a ship to refuse to recognize the right of the ship to fly the flag of the flag State.”

In other words, the concept of “genuine link” does not have a lot to say about what a State must require to permit a vessel to fly its flag, but is nevertheless quite clear that other states can’t use an argument about lax or scant flag state activity as a basis for asserting a lack of that genuine link.

A fair conclusion – on the admittedly slim facts at hand, but noting the official Russian claim – is that (1) the Russian registration is likely to be, prima facie, effective, and (2) the United States’s apparent rejection of that Russian assertion of registration, on the implied basis of non-genuineness, is difficult to promote. 

It is of course possible that the United States has other information that undermines the Russian claim. But on the publicly available information at the moment, the Russian claim of flag state jurisdiction, and thus protection rights over the Marinera, based on fulfilment of Russian domestic law requirements for registration and the limited international law approach to genuine link, appears to be effective. 

This then raises the third issue – could the effectiveness of this registration and Russia’s attendant assertion of jurisdiction and protection rights be overcome by a U.S. claim that the Marinera was in fact still registered by some other state as well as Russia at the time of the seizure?

A Two Flags Argument?

Article 92(2) of UNCLOS is very clear that:

A ship which sails under the flags of two or more States, using them according to convenience, may not claim any of the nationalities in question with respect to any other State, and may be assimilated to a ship without nationality.

The object of this provision is that a vessel in this situation is barred from claiming the protection of any of these flags, and thus becomes a vessel without nationality. The consequence is that the vessel is therefore liable to the right of visit (boarding without flag state consent) as per UNCLOS Article 110(1)(d) as a “ship without nationality.” This is where the ambiguity in U.S. statements complicates the analysis, because it is unclear which of the following (if either) is being asserted by the United States:

(1) The Marinera was not properly registered by Russia, and had no other nationality, so she was a vessel without nationality simpliciter.

(2) The Marinera was, at the time of the boarding, still registered by some other state as well as by Russia, and thus was a vessel without nationality by operation of Article 92(2).

As already noted above, the vessel without nationality simpliciter argument will fall at the hurdle of an orthodox interpretation of the flag state’s (rather slim) obligations in terms of achieving the necessary Article 91(2) “genuine link,” including the conditions for an Article 92(1) “real transfer of ownership or change of registry” during a voyage.

This would mean that the only “statelessness” justification the United States could make is the two flags argument. However, there has been no elaboration of any claim that the Marinera was operating under two flag registries at the time of the seizure, so this justification also seems likely to be ineffective.

Concluding Thoughts

It is possible, of course, that there has been a course of diplomatic dealings that remains confidential in nature that has muted Russia’s protest and given the United States (and UK) confidence to assert the statelessness of the Marinera. Russia’s reference to having given the vessel “temporary permission” to fly under its flag could, in such a scenario, be a face-saving means of asserting that the vessel was not in fact properly registered in Russia at the time of its boarding (or to allow the United States to claim as much). 

The Marinera was brought to the UK to take on fresh supplies, according to recent reporting. The UK’s involvement is significant. Given the UK recently stopped sharing intelligence with the United States that could be used in its lethal strikes against suspected drug ferrying vessels in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, likely to avoid complicity in internationally wrongful acts, it is significant that the UK joined with the United States in support of this action, and may suggest there is at least a colorable basis in international law for the seizure. 

On the other hand, the information available to date would give rise to a very different conclusion. Indeed, it is very difficult to see how the boarding and seizure of the Marinera was lawful in terms of UNCLOS-based maritime law enforcement authorization. This then raises a separate question as to the legal basis – the law of naval warfare (LoNW). We will examine this issue in our next essay.

The post A Law of the Sea Assessment of the U.S. boarding of the Bella 1 / Marinera appeared first on Just Security.

The catalog below organizes our collection of articles primarily about the war into general categories to facilitate access to relevant topics for policymakers, researchers, journalists, scholars, and the public at large. The archive will be updated as new pieces are published.

We welcome readers to use this catalog to follow the unfolding situation and generate new lines of analysis. To search headlines and authors, expand one or all of the topics, as needed, and use CTRL-F on your keyboard to open the search tool. The archive also is available in reverse chronological order at the Russia-Ukraine War articles page.

The post Just Security’s Russia–Ukraine War Archive appeared first on Just Security.

Just last week, Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller warned, “Nobody’s going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland.” In justification, he claimed, “For the United States to secure the Arctic region, to protect and defend NATO and NATO interests, obviously, Greenland should be part of the United States.” Less bombastically, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told members of Congress that the United States is attempting to purchase Greenland. Yet he caveated that desire by noting to reporters, “If the president identifies a threat to national security of the United States, every president retains the option to use military force.” 

And on Wednesday, President Trump told the New York Times the only limit to his international actions was “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me…. I don’t need international law.” Two days later, Trump appeared to apply that approach to Denmark, warning he was “going to do something on Greenland, whether they like it or not,” and that while he “would like to make a deal the easy way, but if we don’t do it the easy way we’re going to do it the hard way.” As to justification, Trump warned, “If we don’t do it, Russia or China will take over Greenland.” However, it was unclear why current or expanded agreements with NATO Ally Denmark, such as the Defence Cooperation Agreement finalized last June, and the renewed commitment by other States to enhancing Arctic security (e.g., here and here), would not suffice to secure the strategically important territory.  

These threats have led some to wonder whether NATO would have to defend Denmark if the United States attempted to seize Greenland forcibly (see, e.g., Washington Week). This article explores that issue.

Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty

The 1949 North Atlantic Treaty (also called the Washington Treaty) established the NATO Alliance and set the terms according to which the Parties to the instrument (the “Allies” in NATO parlance) would respond to an “armed attack” on an Ally in collective defense. The key provision is Article 5:

The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.

As expressly confirmed in Article 5, the authority to act collectively derives from Article 51 of the UN Charter, which had been adopted four years earlier. In relevant part, Article 51 provides: “Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security.” Since Article 5 is grounded in the Charter’s Article 51, action taken based on the former is subject to, at least, the same conditions and limitations as self or collective defense under the latter.

The Article 5 Geographic Limitation

The Article 5 commitment is limited to action taken against allies in “Europe or North America.” Article 6 clarifies that this includes “an armed attack on the territory of any of the Parties in Europe or North America.” As Greenland is part of North America, the sole question vis-à-vis the geographical limitation is whether military operations into Greenland would be an armed attack on Denmark.

Much has been made of Greenland’s unique status. The territory enjoys broad autonomy under Denmark’s 2009 Self-Governing Act, especially in internal affairs. However, that autonomy is an issue of domestic law. Under international law, Denmark undeniably enjoys sovereignty over Greenland. In 1933, the Permanent Court of Justice, in a dispute between Norway and Denmark, found that Greenland was a Danish possession (Legal Status of Eastern Greenland). Subsequently, Denmark listed Greenland as a non-self-governing territory under Chapter XI of the UN Charter. In 1953, Greenland was incorporated into Denmark through domestic legislation, a status recognized by the General Assembly the following year (GA Res. 849). The United States has long acknowledged Danish sovereignty over Greenland (see, e.g., the 1916 Secretary of State declaration, the 1951 Defense of Greenland Agreement, and the 2004 Amendment to the Defense of Greenland Agreement). It is clear that Greenland falls within the geographical coverage of Article 5.

The Article 5 Trigger

Only an “armed attack” triggers the Article 5 obligation. Lesser unlawful actions do not suffice. For instance, the U.S. actions are already in violation of the prohibition on “intervention” into the internal or external affairs of another State. As noted by the International Court of Justice in its Paramilitary Activities judgment, intervention occurs when a State coerces another with respect to its “domaine réservé,” that is, matters left by international law to States (¶ 202). Trump’s “easy way or hard way” threat is paradigmatically coercive, for, as the Court noted, the use of force is a “particularly obvious” form of coercion (¶ 205). Moreover, the Court singled out “choice of a political … system” as a paradigmatic example of a matter falling within a State’s domaine réservé; whether a State retains sovereignty over territory is perhaps the most extreme manifestation of political choice. Despite this clear violation of international law, the U.S. intervention does not trigger Article 5.

Nor does the U.S. violation of the prohibition on the threat of the use of force set forth in Article 2(4) of the UN Charter: “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations” (emphasis added). To violate the prohibition, the threat must be to engage in force that violates international law (Nuclear Weapons, ¶ 47). Such a threat must also be coercive, communicated, and credible to be unlawful (see my discussion of intervention here).

It is manifest that the U.S. threat to use force to seize Greenland is unlawful. After all, Article 2(4) specifically cites a use of force against “territorial integrity” as a basis for qualifying as a prohibited action (see also Friendly Relations Declaration). There are two bases for the lawful use of force against another State: UN Security Council authorization, which has not been granted, and self-defense under Article 51. Although the administration has claimed to need Greenland for defensive purposes, forcible defensive actions under Article 51 must respond to an imminent or ongoing armed attack. In this case, Denmark (and no other third State) has engaged in no hostile action against the United States. The threatened use of force by the United States is, as explained, coercive; multiple senior officials have communicated it; and in light of recent U.S. operations against Venezuela, the credibility of such threats cannot be dismissed as purely rhetorical. 

But again, this U.S. violation of international law against Denmark is completely insufficient to activate Article 5. Nevertheless, Denmark could communicate a request for assistance from other Allies below the level of a use of force pursuant to Article 4 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which provides for consultations among the Allies whenever, in the opinion of any of them, an Ally’s territorial integrity, political independence, or security is threatened. Doing so is not a precondition for action taken pursuant to Article 5.

The condition precedent to taking measures under Article 5 is strictly limited to situations in which there has been an “armed attack.”  The United States has traditionally adopted an expansive interpretation of “armed attack,” taking the position that any unlawful use of force qualifies as such (DoD Law of War Manual, §1.11.5.2; Taft, p. 300). This position diverges from that of most States in the world, including NATO members, and from the jurisprudence of the International Court of Justice, which limits armed attacks to the “most grave” forms of the use of force (Paramilitary Activities, ¶ 191).

That difference in approach is immaterial in this case. Any military operation sufficient to seize Greenland would unquestionably meet even the higher “most grave” threshold, thereby qualifying as an armed attack for Article 5 purposes. Indeed, the UN General Assembly’s Definition of Aggression Resolution, which was adopted by consensus, labels the “invasion or attack by the armed forces of a State of the territory of another State, or any military occupation, however temporary, resulting from such invasion or attack, or any annexation by the use of force of the territory of another State or part thereof,” as “aggression” (Res. 3314, art. 3(a)). Moreover, NATO’s own explanation of collective self-defense observes, “[a]n obvious example [of an armed attack] would involve an invasion by one state of the territory of another.”

A Legal Obligation to Assist?

According to Article 5, Parties to the North Atlantic Treaty “agree” to assist States that are the victims of an armed attack. This is a legal obligation, not a merely hortatory one. As a legal obligation, it must be fulfilled in good faith and in a manner consistent with the object and purpose of the North Atlantic Treaty (Vienna Convention, arts. 26 and 31(1); Gabčíkovo–Nagymaros, art. 142). Accordingly, a refusal to assist Denmark in the face of a U.S. attack would amount to an “internationally wrongful act” (Articles on State Responsibility, art. 2). In this sense, Article 5 differs from Article 51. Whereas the latter is permissive, the former is obligatory. In other words, while States could individually voluntarily agree to assist Denmark on an ad hoc basis, including by the use of force, under Article 51 of the UN Charter, they shoulder the obligation to “assist” under the North Atlantic Treaty. A key question, then, is whether the obligation to assist includes the use of force. As explained below, it does not.

Significantly, Article 5 imposes no limitations on whom collective defense may be directed against. In fact, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on the United States, NATO invoked Article 5 for the only time in response to an attack by a non-State actor, al-Qaeda. There is no basis for concluding that the obligation would not extend to a U.S. attack on Denmark in the form of operations to seize control of Greenland.

As with any action in collective defense under the Charter, the State facing the armed attack, in this case, Denmark, has to request assistance (Paramilitary Activities, ¶¶ 196 and 199; Oil Platforms, ¶ 51) before other States may act in collective self-defense. For the Alliance, that request typically would be made to the North Atlantic Council (NAC). The Allies, in their role as members of the NAC, would be obligated by the principle of good faith to act on the request in a manner consistent with the treaty’s object and purpose–to lend assistance that renders the defense of an Ally against an armed attack effective. The nature and degree of assistance afforded by the other States would be limited to that requested by Denmark. 

Who Authorizes Action under Article 5?

The NAC is the body that would authorize a response executed under NATO command and control. It should be noted in this regard that the North Atlantic Treaty neither expressly designates the NAC as the entity authorizing collective action nor requires decisions to be taken by consensus. It merely establishes “a Council, on which each of [the Allies] shall be represented, to consider matters concerning the implementation of this Treaty” (art.  9). 

However, NATO practice has consistently treated the NAC as its core decision-making body. Moreover, the NAC has always operated on a consensus basis (see NATO’s description here and here). Importantly, because no procedural requirement of consensus appears in the treaty, a colorable argument might be fashioned that the NAC could act over U.S. objection, if only because it conducted the armed attack. That said, doing so would be institutionally unprecedented (as would an attack by one Ally against another). 

It is essential to emphasize that the absence of NAC authorization would not extinguish the Article 5 obligation to provide assistance in collective defense. That obligation could be satisfied through coordinated or unilateral action outside NATO command structures. If the assistance involved the use of force, it would be subject to the self-defense requirements of necessity and proportionality (Paramilitary Activities, ¶¶ 194, 237; Nuclear Weapons, ¶ 41; Oil Platforms, ¶¶ 43, 73-74, 76). 

What Assistance is Required?

While assistance is a binding obligation (subject to the request of the victim State) in the event of an armed attack, Article 5 does not require any particular form or level of assistance. This is clear from the “such action as [the assisting State] deems necessary” text in the article. In particular, it need not involve support at the level of a use of force or otherwise involve participation in the hostilities. The practice of individual Allies in the aftermath of the NAC’s determination that Article 5 applied to the 9/11 attacks is illustrative, as support ranged from overflight, intelligence sharing, and airspace surveillance to robust military action.

As I have noted elsewhere, such flexibility is not a defect in the treaty but instead a structural feature that allows the Alliance to function despite differing national threat perceptions and domestic legal and political processes for providing assistance. Thus, while a failure to provide any assistance to the victim State upon request could not be reconciled with Article 5 as a matter of treaty law, there is no quantitative or qualitative threshold of assistance beyond the requirement that the Allies act, as described above, in good faith in an effort to restore and maintain the security of the designated region.

Could the United States be Expelled from NATO?

Unlike the UN Charter, which provides for the expulsion of a member that has “persistently violated the Principles” of the UN Charter (art. 6), the North Atlantic Treaty, while allowing States to withdraw (art. 60), contains no comparable provision (on the issue of NATO expulsion (see Aurel Sari‘s excellent analysis). Therefore, the sole course of action other Allies could take in the face of the U.S. threats or subsequent military operations against Denmark would be to suspend or terminate the operation of the treaty on the basis that the United States is in “material breach.” The relevant law appears in Article 60 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, which reflects customary international law (Gabčíkovo–Nagymaros, ¶ 46), an important point given that the United States is not a Party to the instrument.

A material breach involves “the violation of a provision essential to the accomplishment of the object or purpose of the treaty” (art. 60(3)). To the extent that the object and purpose of the treaty is the maintenance of “stability and well-being in the North Atlantic area” (preamble), and States have committed to assist each other to defend against armed attack, threatening an armed attack, let alone engaging in one, self-evidently amounts to a material breach. The decision to suspend or terminate would have to be unanimous (art. 60(2)(a)), although Denmark, as a “party specially affected,” could invoke the breach as a ground for suspension of the operation of the treaty as between itself and the United States (art. 60(2)(b). Suspension would entail the termination, in whole or in part, of rights and obligations under the treaty as between the United States and all other Allies; termination would permanently extinguish those rights and obligations. In such a case, North Atlantic Treaty obligations would continue in force for all other Allies.

Of course, suspending or terminating the obligation to assist the United States pursuant to Article 5 would be meaningless in the face of a U.S. armed attack on Denmark. However, it would probably sound the political death knell for U.S. participation in the Alliance. More immediately, it could help counter any argument that a U.S. objection in the NAC could bar NATO action. 

Concluding Thoughts

That this essay addresses whether other Allies would be obligated to assist in the collective defense of Denmark should the United States launch an armed attack against Greenland is astonishing. But it is no less remarkable that the United States would even threaten to use force against a NATO Ally that has fought at its side in recent conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere. Indeed, it is worth remembering that the per capita death rate of Danish troops in Afghanistan was on par with that of the United States, and those troops were there in the collective defense of the United States.

But considering recent events, it sadly makes sense to understand what Article 5 requires of Alliance members, and what it does not. Whether the Allies would come to Denmark’s defense if the United States attacked Greenland is uncertain, as is the manner in which they might do so. Nevertheless, it is clear that, in the event of a (hopefully unlikely) U.S. armed attack, the North Atlantic Treaty obligates other Allies to assist Denmark in collective defense should Denmark so request. That obligation would have to be performed in good faith and in light of the treaty’s object and purpose, although it leaves States discretion as to the form that assistance takes. Neither the identity of the attacker nor NATO’s internal decision-making practices negate that obligation.

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Legal Background: The War Powers Resolution

The War Powers Resolution provides the statutory framework for the unilateral use of military force by a president, such as the ongoing maritime strikes and the U.S. operations in Venezuela. Congress enacted this law over President Richard Nixon’s veto in 1973 to reassert the body’s constitutional prerogatives with respect to war and peace. In essence, Congress sought to forestall any president from taking the country to war without congressional authorization or even without congressional awareness (as had allegedly been the case for aspects of the wars in South-East Asia, such as the incursion into Cambodia). Congress attempted to do this through a framework requiring transparency before forces are in harm’s way, and mechanisms for automatic termination of unilateral presidential uses of force absent specific congressional authorization. 

Reporting: To this end, Section 4(a) of the Resolution establishes reporting requirements to prevent the president from taking the country to war in secret. In the absence of a declaration of war or other statutory authorization, the executive branch is subject to multi-tiered obligations to report to Congress within 48 hours of certain activities by U.S. armed forces. 

First, under subsection 4(a)(1) the Executive must report when U.S. military forces are introduced into “hostilities” or introduced into “situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances.” Such hostilities reports are the focus of this essay. 

Second, even if U.S. forces are not engaging in hostilities, subsection 4(a)(2) requires the Executive to report the introduction of “combat equipped” forces into a country (the executive branch defines “combat-equipped” as forces equipped with crew-served weapons such as machine guns requiring more than one person to operate and mortars). The goal of this provision is essentially to avoid putting U.S. forces into a position that could lead to imminent hostilities without congressional awareness.

Third, pursuant to subsection 4(a)(3), the president must also report a substantial enlargement of such combat equipped forces in a country where such forces are already present.

Two mechanisms to terminate unilateral deployments into hostilities or imminent hostilities: Notably, under Section 5(b) of the 1973 Resolution, the submission of a report under the first of these scenarios — introduction of U.S. forces into hostilities or situations of imminent hostilities — starts a 60-day clock for the withdrawal of U.S. armed forces from such situations unless Congress declares war or otherwise enacts specific statutory authorization for the use of force. No further action needs to be taken by Congress for the termination to become effective (though in practice, presidents have found numerous ways to try to circumvent the termination requirement or argue its inapplicability). 

When enacted, the War Powers Resolution provided a mechanism in section 5(c) for Congress to order the removal of U.S. forces from hostilities through a concurrent resolution—that is, a resolution passed by both houses of Congress but not presented to the president for his or her signature or veto. Particularly following the Supreme Court’s 1983 decision in INS v. Chadha that ruled unconstitutional the so-called legislative veto, section 5(c) is widely viewed as unconstitutional. Following Chadha, Congress enacted expedited procedures for joint resolutions requiring the removal of U.S. armed forces from hostilities, which does require presentment to the president.

As one of us previously wrote (with Stephen Pomper), one of the consequences of Chadha was to “encourage[] a lingering (and in our view incorrect) impression that other provisions of the War Powers Resolution are constitutionally infirm — an impression that the executive branch has sometimes encouraged.” It is to that issue that we now turn. 

Constitutionality of the War Powers Resolution

Although it is sometimes asserted (including recently by Vice President J.D. Vance) that every presidential administration has claimed the War Powers Resolution is unconstitutional, that claim is inaccurate. (Charlie Savage recently wrote in the New York Times about the administration’s misleading claims on this front.) 

Although it is true that prior to Chadha, the executive branch regarded the concurrent resolution mechanism for terminating introductions into hostilities as unconstitutional based on the Supreme Court’s analysis of the Presentment Clause (Article I § 7 of the Constitution), that is distinct from claims regarding the constitutionality of the resolution as a whole, or any of its other specific provisions. As the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) noted in 1979, “the only provision that this Administration has suggested presents constitutional problems related to the right of Congress to act by concurrent resolution.” 

Under administrations of both political parties, OLC has repeatedly accepted that other provisions of the resolution are constitutional at least on their face, including the reporting requirements, 60-day clock, and the revised joint resolution mechanism for withdrawing U.S. armed forces from hostilities. Harold Hongju Koh, Legal Adviser to the Department of State during the Obama administration, testified with reference to the War Powers Resolution that “[t]he Administration recognizes that Congress has powers to regulate and terminate uses of force.”

What’s more, in practice presidents have endeavored to comply with these requirements. First, all presidents since Ford have submitted the 48-hour reports described above. Second, while presidents have certainly stretched or narrowed their interpretations of the statute’s terms to avoid the termination requirement, they have attempted to make arguments under the law for why it does not constrain their activity in a given case, rather than arguing that the law itself is unconstitutional. 

In our view, the constitutionality of the War Powers Resolution is on firm ground. Congress holds the preponderance of the war-making, and war-adjacent, powers in the Constitution. Moreover, Congress has since the founding regulated when and how the United States may use force abroad (from the late 1700s to the frameworks in place today that are the subject of this essay). In sum, both the text and historical and modern practice make the statute’s constitutionality clear. 

Multiple Hostilities (and 60-Day Clocks Running) in Latin America

The first set of hostilities involves the administration’s campaign of lethal strikes against suspected drug ferrying boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific—Operation Southern Spear—in which the administration claims (erroneously) that it is involved in non-international armed conflicts against an unreleased list of 24 criminal gangs and drug cartels but, paradoxically, that it is not in “hostilities’ for WPR purposes (despite submitting a report implying that it was so involved 48 hours after the first Sept. 2 strike, as required by the WPR). These hostilities appear to be ongoing following 35 strikes and over 100 people killed. On Jan. 4, Secretary of State Rubio stated that “we continue to reserve the right to take strikes against drug boats that are bringing drugs towards the United States that are being operated by transnational criminal organizations.”

The other set of hostilities involves the administration’s unlawful use of force against Venezuela—Operation Absolute Resolve—including the seizure of its president and commander in chief, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores, in a military raid. That operation took place in the context of an immense military build-up in the region, continued threats of military force, and a naval blockade against U.S. sanctioned oil shipments from the country that remains ongoing. 

Congress has already voted on a series of measures under the War Powers Resolution that would require President Trump to remove U.S. forces from hostilities related to the boat strikes as well as in or against Venezuela. Another such vote is expected this week in the Senate. 

We now turn to explaining the two sets of hostilities, how each is governed by the War Powers Resolution, and what opportunities this creates for Congress. 

The Maritime Strikes Termination Clock

Consistent with section 4(a)(1) of the War Powers Resolution, the White House reported the first maritime strike (which occurred on Sept. 2, 2025) to Congress in a Sept. 4 letter. This report triggered the start of the Resolution’s 60-day clock—which was due to expire on Nov. 3.

But as this deadline approached, the Trump administration shifted its view on whether these strikes constitute “hostilities” under the 1973 law. The head of the OLC reportedly informed a small group of lawmakers that the maritime strikes did not constitute “hostilities” despite having initially reported them under the law. 

An anonymous senior administration official told the Washington Post that the War Powers Resolution doesn’t apply to the maritime strikes because, “even at its broadest … [it] has been understood to apply to placing U.S. service-members in harm’s way.” According to this official, “[t]he operation comprises precise strikes conducted largely by unmanned aerial vehicles launched from naval vessels in international waters at distances too far away for the crews of the targeted vessels to endanger American personnel.” Thus, “the kinetic operations underway do not rise to the level of ‘hostilities,’” according to the administration.

Contrary to the administration’s arguments, the War Powers Resolution’s clock has been ticking since Sept. 4th of last year, and exceeded the 60 day deadline in early November. Based on the text, legislative history, and past executive branch practice, the better view is that airstrikes, even when U.S. armed forces are not exposed to significant risk, are hostilities under the Resolution.

As one of us (Finucane) has previously explained:

There are many flaws with the Trump administration’s reported interpretation of hostilities. As indicated in the legislative history, Congress understood the term “hostilities” to apply broadly, more broadly than “armed conflict.” The Obama administration’s prior attempt to restrictively interpret the term garnered strong bipartisan congressional opposition.

Moreover, the War Powers Resolution was enacted not only against the general backdrop of the Vietnam War, but more specifically President Nixon’s legally contested aerial bombing of Cambodia in 1973 (Operation Freedom Deal) which Congress sought to terminate through funding restrictions. As Representative Zablocki (a key architect of the War Powers Resolution) explained, “[w]hat really helped the war powers legislation was the arrogance of the executive branch in saying ‘We’ll bomb Cambodia as long as we desire, regardless of what Congress says.’” It thus beggars belief that Congress somehow intended the War Powers Resolution not to cover U.S. airstrikes.

Indeed, in October 1973, to prevent a resumption of the Cambodia aerial bombing, Congress enacted (just weeks before the War Powers Resolution itself) a funding restriction barring “the involvement of United States military forces in hostilities in or over or from off the shores of North Vietnam, South Vietnam, Laos, or Cambodia, unless specifically authorized hereafter by the Congress.” (emphasis added) On November 16th—a week after the War Powers Resolution was enacted over Nixon’s veto—the Defense Appropriations Act of 1974 was signed into law with the exact same prohibition on “hostilities” but effective upon enactment. From this context, it appears clear that Congress meant to capture aerial bombing within the scope of the term “hostilities” and thus the restrictions of the War Powers Resolution. 

Although the Trump administration’s attempt to circumvent the 60-day clock is legally unconvincing, it is hardly the first administration to resort to “creative” lawyering to continue hostilities past the deadline. In recent years, both the Obama administration (in Libya) and the Biden administration (in Yemen) relied on strained interpretations of the War Powers Resolution to continue hostilities notwithstanding the law’s restrictions and the absence of congressional authorization. 

But the Trump administration’s reported theory goes even further than the arguments from past administrations in suggesting that any standoff airstrike by the United States is outside the scope of the War Powers Resolution by claiming that the resolution is inapplicable even when the president believes the strikes are part of an ongoing armed conflict, which purportedly includes hostile actions against the United States (the notion of an armed conflict with cartels and gangs and of hostilities against the United States by such groups are both facts we dispute, but which the administration has consistently claimed). Such an interpretation would allow the United States to wage an air war indefinitely without congressional authorization. 

The Venezuela Hostilities – Operation Absolute Resolve

There is no doubt that Operation Absolute Resolve constitutes “hostilities” within the meaning of the WPR. And while WPR reports to Congress have almost never specifically stated so, this was implied in the report President Trump sent to Congress. In the context of explaining why the president needed congressional authorization to undertake the operation, one of us (Bridgeman) recently outlined (with Brian Egan and Ryan Goodman) the extensive nature of the military engagement:

On Jan. 3, President Donald Trump ordered a military operation that bombed Venezuelan air defenses and other targets in the country, seized Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores from their home, killed approximately 75 or 80 people, caused the injury of around six or seven U.S. service members, and potentially resulted in regime change Venezuela. As described in the War Powers Report subsequently provided to Congress, “the Armed Forces of the US conducted targeted and limited military strikes within the territory of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.” The operation was more extensive than this brief sentence would indicate, distinguishing it from other contested unilateral uses of force that relied on unmanned “over-the-horizon” strikes (Syria in 2017 and 2018) or other types of one-off kinetic strikes (Iran in summer 2025). 

Numerous officials in the Trump administration have publicly acknowledged that this named military operation was inherently risky (calling it “very dangerous” and “audacious”). It involved approximately 200 U.S. personnel on the ground in Caracas. There were, as would be expected in an operation of this nature, fire fights between U.S. forces and opposing forces, involving both Venezuelan and Cuban military forces. What’s more, the operation took place in the context of an extensive military build-up in the region, coupled with threats against Maduro to cede power, as well as an ongoing U.S. naval blockade of Venezuelan oil tankers. (The threats and blockade continue today.)

These facts are also important for the analysis of whether the operations constituted “hostilities” for WPR purposes. Based even on OLC’s exceedingly narrow view (a view contrary to the statute’s legislative history) on what types of military engagements constitute “hostilities” for WPR purposes, all of the hallmarks are present. To focus on the most salient and long-held criterion for the executive branch as to what constitutes hostilities – actual “exchanges of fire” between U.S. and hostile forces – this operation clearly did so. Indeed, the combat resulted in dozens of fatalities amongst Venezuelan and Cuban combatants as well as Venezuelan civilians, and injuries to seven U.S. servicemembers. Reportedly, one of the U.S. helicopters that took hostile fire during the operation almost didn’t make it out of Caracas. 

The U.S. Senate also took the position that the military incursion into Venezuela constituted “hostilities.” On January 8th, the Senate voted 52-47 to advance a joint resolution to block further U.S. military action in Venezuela. That resolution specified in pertinent part that “use of military force by the United States Armed Forces within or against Venezuela constitutes the introduction of United States Armed Forces into hostilities.” 

The Venezuela Termination Clock

At a minimum, the 60-day clock started running on Sunday Jan. 5th—48 hours after the operation to capture Maduro occurred. (Depending on the facts, there may be an argument that the clock should have started earlier in connection with the drone strike on Venezuela disclosed by President Trump.) 

The Trump administration will most likely argue that there are no ongoing hostilities. Unlike the argument advanced in relation to the strikes on suspected drug trafficking vessels, which rested on the idea that the hostilities were essentially not intense enough insofar as they did not pose risks to U.S. personnel, in the Venezuela context the administration is instead likely to argue that Operation Absolute Resolve was a one-time engagement that ended as soon as US aircraft left Venezuelan airspace, taking all US personnel with them.

There are reasons to contest any such claims. 

The U.S. military incursion into Venezuela, aerial bombardment of the country, attacks on Venezuelan and Cuban forces, and seizure of the commander in chief of Venezuela’s armed forces constitutes an “international armed conflict.” In contrast to the standard for a non-international armed conflict, the standard for an international armed conflict under international law is low. As explained by the International Committee of the Red Cross in its 1952 commentary on the Geneva Conventions, “Any difference arising between two States and leading to the intervention of armed forces is an [international] armed conflict within the meaning of Article 2, even if one of the Parties denies the existence of a state of war.”

This international armed conflict appears to be ongoing, including the prospect for further hostilities. Rather than proclaim the attack of January 2nd/3rd a “one and done affair,” President Trump has threatened another round of airstrikes, threatened the acting Venezuelan president with a fate “worse” than Maduro, and left open the possibility of U.S. “boots on the ground” in Venezuela. Notably, the War Powers report submitted by the White House to Congress in connection with the raid does not specify that U.S. military operations have concluded, as most reports of limited engagements (such as hostage recoveries, evacuations, rescue missions, and the like) have in the past. Instead, it is silent on the expected duration of the operations, although the president is statutorily required to provide that information. Moreover, U.S. armed forces remain stationed in the region and continue to support the interdiction of sanctioned oil tankers.  [Update: In a statement of administration policy opposing and threatening a veto of the Senate Venezuela resolution, the White House asserted that there were ‘’ongoing national security threats posed by the Maduro-led Cártel de los Soles and other violent drug-trafficking cartels.” This characterization by the administration reinforces the conclusion that “hostilities” remain ongoing.]

For these reasons, the 60-day clock for Operation Absolute Resolve appears to still be ticking.

How Should Congress Respond?

The Senate has now voted to discharge Senator Kaine’s joint resolution from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, teeing up a floor vote on the resolution itself as well as potential amendments. In the House, Congressman McGovern has also introduced a concurrent resolution to remove U.S. armed forces from Venezuela without specific congressional authorization. (As a concurrent resolution would not be presented to the President for signature or veto, the Supreme Court’s decision in Chadha renders it highly unlikely it could be binding even if passed by both houses of Congress.) 

In addition, measures in both the House and Senate have been introduced to exercise Congress’s ultimate war power—the power of the purse—to block funding for U.S. military operations in or against Venezuela. At present, it is unlikely that Congress could muster the votes for these various measures to overcome presidential vetoes even if they passed both houses. 

Longer term, both sets of unauthorized hostilities and the willingness of the White House to disregard the 60-day clock with respect to the boat strikes should serve as a forceful reminder that Congress needs to reassert its constitutional prerogatives and responsibilities over the use of military force. Among other things, such congressional action should entail reforming the 1973 War Powers Resolution to close loopholes in that law and give it more teeth. Such reforms would include defining key terms, shortening the termination deadline for any unauthorized hostilities, enhancing transparency requirements, and, crucially, imposing mandatory funding cutoffs. 

Regardless of the near term prospects for meaningful legislative reform, Congress must also engage in more rigorous oversight. This should include using all of the tools at its disposal (from the nominations process to use of its subpoena power, among others) to demand that the administration answer for its unilateral uses (and abuses) of U.S. armed forces and shine a spotlight for the American people on the gravity of the situation. 

Conclusion

The U.S. Constitution assigns the power to Declare War and related war powers to the Congress for good reasons that remain as relevant today as ever. It is precisely because going to war is one of the most consequential choices a country can make that decisions on resorting to the use of force were intended to be difficult—to be made after public debate and deliberation by the people’s elected representatives. Although the President would have authority as commander in chief to repel sudden attack, other military actions would require the collective decisionmaking of the legislature. The Constitution does not authorize one person taking the country to war based solely on that individual’s policy or personal preferences.

Obviously, presidential administrations of both parties have departed from this constitutional model by using military force without congressional authorization in situations outside of immediate self-defense. But even by the standards of prior executives, the flurry of unilateral military actions by this administration is striking and deeply troubling to members of Congress and the public across ideological lines. Since returning to office, President Trump has overseen military strikes in Yemen (against the Houthis), Iran, the Caribbean, the Pacific, and Venezuela, all without any plausible congressional authorization (Nigeria might be added to that list, depending on the administration’s justification). (This is an addition to military actions in Syria, Iraq, and Somalia notionally pursuant to the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force.)

The last year of unauthorized, discretionary military interventions and the president’s threats of more to come—including even against a NATO ally—should spur the Article I branch of the U.S. government to reassert its constitutional prerogatives and indeed constitutional responsibilities over the use of force.

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Less noticed, however, was the continued progress made by the Trump administration, working with allies, on a framework to support Ukraine’s security in the event of a ceasefire in the war with Russia, a plan that could include European and even U.S. forces in Ukraine.

With all that, Trump’s foreign policy remains an inconsistent array of initiatives and adventures: bold but seemingly ill-considered assertions of strength in Latin America, wanton threats of aggression against a democratic member of NATO and withdrawal from international bodies and the U.N. climate treaty, but also work with friends and allies that — with some glaring exceptions — was often constructive to thwart the aggressive designs of Russian President Vladimir Putin in a way that sounds almost as if the United States still believed in the “free world.”

The Bold: Venezuela

The Jan. 3 military operation to capture Maduro was a clear violation of the U.N. Charter and questionable under U.S. domestic law as well. It resulted in at least seven injured U.S. service members and likely killed as many as 80 people in Venezuela to capture two people indicted under U.S. law. And it also set an enormously dangerous precedent for removal of a sitting head of state – albeit a dictator – through unlawful military force. But on one score, it was astonishingly successful – Maduro and his wife have already been presented to a U.S. court for prosecution. It is not clear, however, what happens next in Venezuela.

The closest analogy to Trump’s move against Maduro was the much larger and longer invasion of Panama by the administration of President George H. W. Bush in December 1989. As with Trump’s move, the United States captured and put on trial Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega. And, like the Venezuela raid, the Panama operation had questionable legal basis and generated wide international opposition (including condemnation by fellow U.N. members – at the Security Council in the case of Venezuela and the General Assembly in the case of Panama).

The Panama invasion was ultimately successful, however: Panamanian opposition leader Guillermo Endara, who had probably won Panama’s presidential election earlier in 1989, assumed power. The transition was relatively orderly; in that sense at least, while deep antipathy about U.S. military intervention in the region remained (and remains today), this actual “regime change” worked so well that few in the United States recalled the U.S. invasion of Panama until this week’s events.

It is not clear whether the Venezuela operation will end up so well. So far, the operation has removed the head of Venezuela’s regime but, unlike in Panama, the regime remains in place, and the Trump administration seems in no hurry to remove it. Unlike the Bush administration in Panama, Trump has belittled the head of Venezuela’s opposition, Nobel Peace laureate Maria Machado, and done nothing to support her political ally, Edmundo Gonzalez, who probably won Venezuela’s 2024 presidential elections. On the contrary, the Trump administration appears to be prepared to work with acting President Delcy Rodriguez, a stalwart of the Maduro regime. Trump himself has focused on U.S. access to Venezuela’s oil reserves rather than a stable transition to a viable and productive government.

While it is early to draw conclusions, the United States may intend to work with the Maduro regime minus Maduro for the sake of U.S. access to Venezuelan oil. Rather than “run” Venezuela directly, as Trump mentioned, the U.S. may be counting on Rodriguez being a pliable client. This would risk putting the United States on the side of an unpopular and repressive regime that lost (and had to steal) national elections in 2024 after running Venezuela’s economy into the ground. U.S. policy in Latin America has often followed the course of supporting one or another dictator who promised to take care of U.S. business and other interests. It seldom ended well. In the case of Venezuela, the massive investment in its oil industry that Trump says he seeks and would be needed to restore the country’s economic health requires a degree of internal stability and predictability that the old regime, even with U.S. backing, may not be able to provide.

A better alternative would be for the United States to help organize a transition to a more sustainable government through free elections. There is precedent for negotiated transitions from dictatorship to democracy in Latin America, though not under the coercive hand of foreign intervention. Such a wiser course could yet emerge from the Trump administration, although it will require a significant step back from its current threats and promises on Venezuela’s oil. (Going after “shadow fleet” tankers, especially those with ties to Russia, may be a useful tactic, if combined with an effort to regularize Venezuela’s oil exports as part of a transition to a democratic and responsible government.)

It is likely that the administration did little planning for “day-after” scenarios in Venezuela; for good operational reasons, knowledge of the raid against Maduro was kept to a small group and the confusion in U.S. policy since Maduro’s removal may reflect Trump’s improvisational style, which might yet be righted at least to some extent, rather than a bad course set in stone.

The Bad: Greenland

There is no reasonable case to be made for the Trump administration’s demands to acquire Greenland. Trump has claimed, without evidence, that the United States needs to annex Greenland because Russian and Chinese warships were concentrated near it and offered other security rationales. But U.S. security interests can be addressed under the 1951 Defense of Greenland Agreement, which gives the United States extensive military basing rights on the island. Denmark’s government has made clear that it would be open to greater U.S. military presence on Greenland. But neither Trump nor his administration have presented any example of unmet U.S. security requests. Neither has the Trump administration cited any specific requests it has made of Denmark that Denmark has refused either with respect to security or Greenland’s minerals.

In an interview with CNN, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller made another case for U.S. acquisition of Greenland: the “iron laws” of the world, he asserted, include strength, force, and power, and little else, and that therefore the United States can take Greenland if it so decides. Miller thus bases his claim on might-makes-right, an assertion of the rights of power without restraint or relationship to values. Instead, he argues that sovereignty and might are their own justification. In doing so, he negates the foundational principle of the United States, from the Declaration of Independence, that sovereign rights and power are subject to higher principles, including the consent of the governed and respect for the self-evident truth of human equality. His argument for U.S. conquest of Greenland is thus un-American.

The renewed U.S. threats against Greenland triggered alarm in Denmark, whose prime minister issued a statement about the consequences of U.S. aggression against her country. Denmark found support among not only its Nordic neighbors but also other key European countries such as the U.K., France, Germany, Poland, Spain, even including Italian Prime Minister and otherwise Trump ally Giorgia Meloni — they issued a statement expressing commitment to Arctic security (addressing the ostensible U.S. concern about Greenland) while backing Denmark’s sovereignty.

European resistance – and hopefully U.S. congressional resistance – to the prospect of such U.S. aggression may deter the Trump administration from acting on its threats with military force, though the latest statements still refer to buying the territory. But the impact of any such takeover threats will trigger mistrust in allies and partners around the world that will last at least as long as the Trump administration is in power, likely longer. The situation in which NATO allies need to defend themselves against potential attacks against their own NATO ally and key member of the alliance since its founding, the United States, is profoundly damaging. In U.S. threats toward Greenland, there is no upside or mitigating circumstance.

The Constructive: Security for Ukraine

In the United States, the news about Venezuela and Greenland obscured continued constructive talks about a framework for Ukraine’s security. Leaders from the U.K.- and French- led “Coalition of the Willing” met in Paris on Jan. 6, with special envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner representing the United States. The meeting resulted in a statement that indicated significant progress in outlining European and even U.S. backing for Ukraine’s security in the event of a ceasefire in Russia’s now nearly 12-year assault on the country, beginning with the 2014 seizure of Crimea and parts of the eastern region of Donbas. The statement outlined general pledges including a U.S.-led ceasefire monitoring mechanism, long-term military assistance for Ukraine; a “multi-national force for Ukraine” that would be European-led and with “proposed support of the U.S.” including for deterrence; and “binding commitments” to support Ukraine in case of future armed attack by Russia.

These arrangements fall short of NATO’s article 5 commitments of collective defense for its own members, and there continues to be no near-term prospect of Ukraine gaining membership. The commitments also are not “Article 5 like,” as Steve Witkoff has extravagantly suggested. And they have the weakness of being contingent on a ceasefire, a condition that gives the Kremlin an incentive to avoid a ceasefire altogether.

But they are much more than anything Ukraine has had before. The notorious Budapest Memorandum of 1994 that provided U.S. and U.K. security assurances for Ukraine in return for its agreement to give up its nuclear arsenal included nothing like this announced framework. Putting the United States in the lead of a ceasefire monitoring mechanism inside Ukraine would be a significant deterrent to future Russian aggression against Ukraine. Having European forces in Ukraine would be another.

Doubts about U.S. reliability as an ally have grown, especially since the current round of threats against Greenland. But having two inner-circle Trump allies representing the United States suggests that Stephen Miller’s “might-makes-right” defense of U.S. aggression is not the only word within the administration. The constructive meeting in Paris also indicates that the Kremlin attempt to derail the NATO talks about security for Ukraine through bogus charges of a Ukrainian attack on a Putin palace has failed. That Russian attempt, ill-prepared and hasty – suggests alarm within the Kremlin about the progress being made among the United States, key Europeans, and Ukraine about post-conflict security. The test before the United States will be whether Putin’s refusal to take seriously Trump’s efforts to end the conflict will trigger a U.S. reaction, such as increased economic pressure, for which there are many options.

Melding Different — and Incompatible — Traditions

So at the end of the first week of 2026, U.S. foreign policy is an inconsistent collection of initiatives and threats. The Venezuela operation still has potential to lead to a stable Venezuelan government with a democratic mandate, but the Trump administration risks aligning itself with the regime it supposedly acted against. The United States and Europe are making steady progress for Ukrainian security, far beyond what the Biden administration even considered, but Trump’s commitment to Ukraine’s security and to staring down Putin’s stonewalling has yet to be tested. And U.S. aggression against Greenland remains a possibility, which is a shameful and dishonorable situation for the United States to be in.

The Trump foreign policy includes different and incompatible traditions of U.S. strategic thinking over the past 100 years. One of them is isolationism in its original, “America First” guise, which was anti-European and indifferent to the fate of democracies facing aggressive dictators such as Hitler and Stalin. Another is fortress America, a related school of thought that held essentially that the United States could strengthen its hemispheric position — including through raw power — and thus shut out the dangers that the world might pose. These foreign policy options led to disaster: U.S. indifference to the rise of Hitler and thus to World War II.

On Dec. 7, 1941, the folly of such options was laid bare. On Dec. 9 of that year, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave one of his radio “fireside chats” that included the following:

“There is no such thing as security for any nation – or any individual – in a world ruled by the principles of gangsterism. There is no such thing as impregnable defense against powerful aggressors who sneak up in the dark and strike without warning. We have learned that our ocean-girt hemisphere is not immune from severe attack – that we cannot measure our safety in terms of miles on any map any more.” 

America’s interests are best served by opposing gangsterism. In Venezuela, the United States needs to rediscover its values and side with the people there; in Greenland, the United States needs to pursue its interests without threat of aggression; in Ukraine, the United States should push forward for the sake of security, working with friends and allies against gangsters. And the United States should never, as it contends with gangsters, become one.

The post Trump’s New Year Foreign Policy: The Risk that the Bold and the Bad Outweigh the Constructive appeared first on Just Security.

But the Appeals Chamber rejected this view by a narrow majority (3-2). Instead, it accepted the OTP’s position that a 2021 notification regarding the investigation of certain alleged crimes occurring since 2014 in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict fulfilled the formal duty to notify. Two judges disagreed and opined that the Pre-Trial Chamber that first reviewed Israel’s claim should have examined the impact that numerous new referrals submitted by ICC member-States after October 7 had on the duty to notify. Furthermore, one of the majority judges wrote that the Prosecutor should continuously monitor the need to provide an updated notification when circumstances change. Still, he was not convinced that in the present circumstances the Prosecutor failed to properly exercise such discretion.

The upshot of the decision is that, as a practical matter, the arrest warrants issued by the ICC in 2024 against Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Gallant remain in force. In effect, the judgment marks a choice by the Court not to take an exit ramp, which could have put on hold the controversial warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant. Still, two other preliminary motions challenging the validity of the arrest warrants remain pending: One is based on the unclear legal status of the State of Palestine and its lack of jurisdiction over Israeli nationals; a second motion involves Israel’s request to disqualify ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan from the case due to a lack of perceived impartiality and quash the warrants he requested the Court to issue. A third motion to suspend the arrest warrants while the question of jurisdiction is being considered was rejected by the Pre-Trial Chamber on Oct. 17.

Beyond its importance to the Netanyahu and Gallant cases, the judgment is also notable for the Court’s narrow interpretation of the complementarity principle – a principle that envisions the ICC as an institution that is supposed to complement national criminal systems, not replace them. Article 18 of the Rome Statute, the Court’s founding treaty, lays out the formal notification procedure required when an investigation begins, in order to facilitate giving the right of way to domestic investigations. Arguably, the recent judgment detaches this procedure from its stated purpose of affording States a reasonable chance to claim jurisdictional primacy and undertake their own criminal investigations of conduct that falls under the scope of the ICC Statute. This outcome arguably goes against the Court’s declarative embrace of positive complementarity, and adds another layer of apprehension to an already troubling sequence of events surrounding Khan and the investigation (see e.g., here). When added to the Court’s rejection of non-members’ head of state immunity, the picture that emerges from the recent judgment is one of limited protection afforded by the ICC to sovereign rights and legal interests of non-ICC States.

The Court’s Judgment

In its judgment, the Appeals Chamber walked through the relevant chain of events: the 2018 Palestinian referral of a situation to the ICC, Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda’s 2021 decision to open an investigation and notify Israel, Israel’s evasive response to the initial notification, the post-October 7 referrals to the Court by several States, Israel’s May 1, 2024 request for deferral (which was rejected by the OTP for being allegedly submitted after the deadline), and the Pre-Trial Chamber’s rejection of Israel’s Article 18(1) challenge (issued in November 2024). It then moved to review Israel’s three objections to the 2024 decision.

First, the Court addressed Israel’s claim that the 2018 referral and 2021 notification did not cover post-October 7 events since the referral and notification were not intended to cover all crimes committed during an ongoing armed conflict. In particular, the 2021 notification referred only to Israel’s settlement policy and to two specific episodes (the 2014 Gaza hostilities and the violent clashes along Gaza’s border with Israel that took place in 2018). The Court held that the reference in the 2021 notification to war crimes implied a legal position that an armed conflict exists, and that the notification identified the parties to the armed conflict (Israel and Palestinian armed groups, including Hamas). Hence, it held that an armed conflict was one of the defining parameters of the 2021 notification. With regard to the claim underscoring the temporally defined nature of that notification, the Court noted that the Palestinian 2018 referral, against which the notification should be read, was not time limited. It cited an earlier decision in support of the proposition that “there is no expectation at this stage of the proceedings that the Prosecutor should notify States of every act he or she intends to investigate.” It also held that the 2021 notification alluded to crimes allegedly committed in 2014 as merely illustrative of patterns and forms of criminality, and stated that it should not prejudice the future scope of investigation of crimes falling under the same situation.

This formulation reflects, according to the Court, “the relationship between the provisions in the Court’s legal texts regulating the threshold for commencing an investigation under Article 53(1) of the Statute, the requirement to provide sufficiently specific information to a State for the purposes of Article 18(2) of the Statute, and the Prosecutor’s prerogative to continue the investigation within the parameters of the Palestine Situation.” As a result, the Court accepted the OTP’s position that the post-October 7 investigation covers “conduct committed in the context of the same type of armed conflicts, concerning the same territories, with the same alleged parties to these conflicts,” to which the 2018 referral and 2021 notification alluded.

Second, regarding Israel’s claim that the post-October 7 referrals triggered a new situation that would reset the clock, the majority of the Court held that Israel did not directly raise the matter before the Pre-Trial Chamber. Furthermore, the majority took the position that the post-October 7 referrals were connected to the 2018 referral and were designed to encourage the Prosecutor to advance the pre-existing investigation. It surmised that “[s]uch references are, thus, compatible with the notion that, in the early stages of the investigation, the Prosecutor is not in a position to identity or anticipate all potential cases for investigation and that, as the investigation progresses, it may come to encompass alleged crimes not previously identified or anticipated.”

Third, with respect to Israel’s claims that the factual context changed dramatically after October 7 and that the 2021 notification was not specific enough to cover it, the Court noted that the Pre-Trial Chamber found in 2024 that the 2021 notification was sufficiently specific and that the request for arrest warrants fell within its defining parameters. It also noted that defining parameters are case-specific and have to be considered against the scope of the original referral (which in the present case was broad in nature and encompassed both war crimes and crimes against humanity). It further concluded that “the alleged crimes display a continuity in pattern, even though a certain shift in circumstances may have occurred as a result of the events on and after 7 October 2023.” Put differently, the alleged crimes are sufficiently linked to the situation of crisis referred to the Court in 2018.

The Dissenting Opinions and the Concurring Opinion

Judge Luz Del Carmen Ibáñez Carranza dissented from the majority. She accepted Israel’s claim that the Prosecutor failed to inform the President of the ICC of the post-October 7 referrals in apparent violation of Regulation 45 of the Court’s regulations and that this failure – which might have prevented the Court from determining that a new situation and a new duty of notification to Israel exists – was not properly considered by the Pre-Trial Chamber. Specifically, the Pre-Trial Chamber should have considered whether the new referrals gave rise to a new situation, and the majority should not have reviewed the question de novo. She also criticized the Pre-Trial Chamber for failing to consider whether, as a non-State party, Israel was even required to meet the one-month deadline for requesting deferral set out by Article 18(2) of the Statute. She wrote that “where a non-State party is involved, the principle of complementarity must be observed with particular rigour.”

Ibáñez Carranza also held that Israel’s Regulation 45 claim was central to its complementarity claim, and that the Prosecutor’s failure to inform the ICC Presidency that new referrals had been received post-October 7 prevented the Court from properly implementing its ensuing legal duties. The failure of the Pre-Trial Chamber to engage with this claim and to give reasons for its rejection of this part of Israel’s appeal “rendered the outcome of the Impugned Decision unreliable.” Hence, she would have remanded the question regarding the post-October 7 referrals to the Pre-Trial Chamber. She refrained from addressing the other grounds for challenge raised by Israel until this initial matter was resolved.

Judge Solomy Balungi Bossa, the second dissenting judge, was also of the view that given the significance of the post-October 7 referrals, the Pre-Trial Chamber erred in not addressing directly whether they gave rise to a new situation of crisis. Since she could not identify the legal basis on which this aspect of the lower decision was rendered, she also voted for remanding the case, and, like Judge Ibáñez Carranza, expressed no view on the other two grounds for challenge.

The most curious view is the concurring opinion of Judge Gocha Lordkipanidze. Although voting with the majority, he wrote that the Prosecutor should exercise due diligence and continuously assess whether an updated notification should be issued. Regular assessment “would strike a balance between two concomitant interests, on the one hand, providing a meaningful opportunity to a State to exercise its rights under Article 18(2) of the Statute and, on the other hand, ensuring the progression of the Prosecutor’s investigation without unwarranted interruption in accordance with the principles set out in the Court’s jurisprudence,” he wrote. Two factors are particularly relevant for the exercise of discretion, he averred: the lapse of time from the previous notification and diverging patterns and forms of criminality. He noted, in this regard, that new referrals may be indicative of such a divergence. He concluded with the following statement:

[I]n the specific circumstances of the present situation, no information has been placed before the Appeals Chamber that would compel the conclusion that the Prosecutor omitted to take the aforementioned factors into account in considering whether a new situation had arisen that would require a new notification under article 18(1) of the Statute to be issued. Should the Prosecutor, in a different scenario, arrive at the conclusion that changed circumstances give rise to a new situation upon receiving one or more referrals, he would be then duty-bound to decide whether to initiate an investigation into the new situation pursuant to articles 13(c), 14 and 53 of the Statute.

Complementarity and Mirroring

One notion that is completely missing from the Court’s decision on Israel’s Article 18 challenge is the concept of mirroring – the idea that a national investigation must be sufficiently comparable to a planned ICC investigation in order to render an ICC case inadmissible.  Still, for a State to effectively mirror an ICC investigation, it needs a certain level of detail from the ICC about the scope and focus of the intended investigation. This concept appears to have been central to previous Article 18 cases issued by the ICC. In a 2023 judgment on complementarity in the Philippines case, the Appeals Chamber held that:

[F]or the purpose of admissibility challenges under article 18 of the Statute, a State is required to demonstrate an advancing process of domestic investigations and prosecutions of the same groups or categories of individuals in relation to the relevant criminality, including the patterns and forms of criminality, within a situation. The domestic criminal proceedings must sufficiently mirror the scope of the Prosecutor’s intended investigation (para. 106)

It further held that the Prosecutor’s Article 18 notification must include situation parameters that are sufficiently specific as to enable the Philippines to demonstrate “the degree of mirroring” – that is, a high level of comparability of domestic and ICC investigations.

In the same vein, in a 2024 judgment issued in the Venezuela case, the Appeals Chamber held with respect to crimes against humanity charges:

[I]f a State does not investigate the factual allegations underpinning the contextual elements of the alleged crimes against humanity that were sufficiently notified to it, it follows that it will not be able to demonstrate, in the proceedings under article 18(2) of the Statute, that the domestic criminal proceedings sufficiently mirror the scope of the Prosecutor’s intended investigation (para. 281).

The idea of “sufficient mirroring” is also mentioned in the OTP’s 2024 Policy Paper on Complementarity and Cooperation, noting that domestic proceedings should investigate “substantially the same conduct.”

We believe that it is against this standard (i.e., that complementarity depends on “sufficient mirroring”) that the Court’s approach to the specificity of the Article 18 notification and to the need to issue a new notification when the direction of the OTP investigation changes should be evaluated. The majority cited with approval the Venezuela decision in support of the proposition that the Article 18 complementarity test is whether the domestic investigation involved “the same groups or categories of individuals in relation to the relevant criminality, including the patterns and forms of criminality, within a situation.” Yet, it also cited with approval the same decision for the proposition that “there is no expectation at this stage of the proceedings that the Prosecutor should notify States of every act he or she intends to investigate, especially in those situations referred to the Court which cover a large number of alleged criminal acts,” and upheld “the Prosecutor’s prerogative to continue the investigation within the parameters of the Palestine Situation.”

It is generally accepted that the principle of complementarity operates as a balancing mechanism, designed to ensure that the Court’s legal powers do not excessively interfere with the sovereign right and legal interest of States to investigate serious crimes. As Judge Ibáñez Carranza correctly noted, such a balancing act should be applied with particular rigor when the rights and interests of non-member States are implicated. The principle of complementarity is also supported by practical considerations regarding the limited capacity of the Court and normative considerations regarding the many advantages of close-to-home legal proceedings. The centrality of the principle is manifested in the ICC Statute in that it involves an assessment of investigation mirroring at two separate points in time, at two different levels of precision: 1) at the investigation stage – “same group and categories of individuals” and “substantially the same conduct” or “patterns and forms of criminality” under Article 18; and 2) at the individual pre-trial or trial stage: same person/same conduct under Article 19 of the ICC Statute.

The Article 18 notification is intended to ensure that relevant States are put on alert that a full-fledged legal investigation of an international crime is about to take place before the ICC. The notification is intended to provide them with sufficient information that would allow them a reasonable opportunity to generate a mirroring domestic investigation at the Article 18 level of precision. This is why the Philippines judgment examined whether the notification was sufficiently specific. The need for a specific notification is therefore analytically separate from the question whether or not the new direction of the intended ICC investigation is tied to a new situation of crisis referred to the Court, or whether it is conducted under the same situation of crisis which gave rise to the previous notification. The critical test, in our view, is whether a previous notification is sufficiently specific to allow for a mirroring investigation. Put differently, the prerogative of the Prosecutor to expand an investigation into an existing situation, including into new events, is distinct from the ongoing duty – alluded to by Judge Lordkipanidze – to evaluate whether the change in direction requires a new notification that would facilitate mirroring at the domestic level.

It is difficult for us to see how, in the case of Israel, application of the majority’s approach effectively provided Israel with such a reasonable opportunity to generate a mirroring domestic investigation. As we have explained before, the 2021 notification and the related preliminary examination focused on three issues: West Bank settlements, hostilities in Gaza in 2014, and clashes on the Gaza border in 2018. It did not refer, obviously, to the sharp escalation of the armed conflict on and after October 7, nor did it invoke any crimes against humanity, or any of the specific patterns or forms of conduct for which arrest warrants were eventually sought – that is, starvation-related war crimes and crimes against humanity. While the Court is correct that the Prosecutor could have expanded the investigation, provided that he remained within the boundaries of the 2018 referrals, it fails to explain how Israel could generate a mirroring investigation without receiving more information of the specific conduct, and patterns and forms of criminality that the developing OTP investigation is planning to focus on.

Paying Only Lip Service to Complementarity

The Court’s refusal to engage with Israel’s post-October 7 investigative activity is also troubling. Only seven months passed between the start of the October 7 war and the Prosecutor’s request for arrest warrants. Yet, by August 2024, the IDF reported that 74 criminal investigations into potential crimes occurring during the war had already commenced and that more than 1,000 incidents were being examined by the IDF’s operational fact-finding assessment mechanism. Such investigative activity – which appears at first look to be extensive in scope – should have been reviewed under the Article 18 sufficient mirroring standard and compared to the (unnotified) specific parameters of the ICC’s post-October 7 investigation. This is particularly so, since Israel formally asked the Court on May 1, 2024, to defer the investigation, a request flatly rejected by the OTP for Israel’s failure to meet the one-month deadline established by the 2021 notification. This underscores our point: The OTP denied Israel a reasonable opportunity to claim that a mirroring investigation regarding post-October 7 policies and practices exists because Israel refrained from seeking a deferral in 2021 with regard to allegations involving pre-October 7 policies and practices.

This radical reading of complementarity as a one-off mechanism, impervious to changes in time, circumstances, patterns and forms of criminality, and domestic political and legal changes, does not represent, contrary to the Pre-Trial Chamber’s position, an approach that emanates from the “very object and purpose of the statutory complementarity framework;” rather, it entails the hollowing out of complementarity in the face of open-ended referrals and ongoing armed conflicts. In fact, the majority’s approach effectively confers unlimited power on the Prosecutor to proceed without notification to investigate any issue emanating from an open-ended referral of an ongoing armed conflict. The judgment broadly read the “defining parameters” of the 2021 notification – reading them together with the 2018 referral (despite the fact that referrals simply serve to authorize OTP investigations and delineate the outer limits of their scope, but not to determine what specific issues falling within the said scope would actually be investigated and would require a mirroring investigation). It cited with approval the Prosecutor’s position that it suffices, for the purpose of relying on a past notification, that the crimes occurred in the context of the same armed conflict.  It also referred to the unprecedented events post-October 7 as “a continuity in pattern, even though a certain shift in circumstances.” The upshot of this  approach is that a notification relating to one episode occurring in the beginning of an ongoing armed conflict, which is covered by an open-ended referral, would result in the loss of Article 18 complementarity for all subsequent episodes occurring later in the conflict (provided that the first notification did not lead to deferral).

The potential abuse of this approach manifests itself here. Israel did not, and could not realistically ask for a formal deferral in 2021 regarding settlement-related crimes, given its traditional opposition to Article 8(2)(b)(8) of the ICC Statute and its ambiguous domestic law approach on the legality of settlements. This has no bearing, however, on Israel’s capacity to invoke complementarity with regard to other investigations actually launched by the OTP. The invocation of the earlier failure to obtain deferral in respect to one set of alleged war crimes (which as a non-member State it was not legally bound to do), for rejecting complementarity in respect of a very different set of war crimes and crimes against humanity occurring years later, appears to us unreasonable and running contrary to the basic tenets of the complementarity regime.

We note, in this regard, that Judge Lordkipanidze’s principled position on a case-by-case review of prosecutorial discretion is more reasonable than the one-off approach proposed by the OTP, which was implicitly endorsed by the other two majority judges. We do not understand, however, why after offering this approach, Lordkipanidze rejected Israel’s position. Given the passage of time from 2018 and 2021 to 2024, the dramatic shift in circumstances following the events of October 7, and the existence of new referrals, it is hard to justify a discretionary decision by the Prosecutor to deny Israel of its right to claim Article 18 complementarity – especially, given that the OTP did not cite any investigatory interests that would be seriously harmed by a new notification (and a one-month period allocated to respond to it by requesting a deferral – a request which the Court may accept or reject).

Although Israel (and Netanyahu and Gallant) may still claim before or at the commencement of the trial Article 19 complementarity – that is, that a domestic investigation of the same persons for the same conduct exists – the implications of barring Israel from invoking Article 18 are significant  First, an article 18 deferral would have prevented the issuance of arrest warrants against the two Israeli leaders. Second, under Article 19, Israel also needs to meet a higher degree of mirroring. Hence, denying Israel Article 18 complementarity has real implications for the legal rights and interests of Israel and the two defendants.

A Long-Term Blow to the Court

The refusal of the ICC to effectively defend the rights of non-member States such as Israel, by denying them a reasonable opportunity to claim Article 18 complementarity, raises serious concerns about the Court’s commitment to the principle of complementarity. From a policy perspective, it is striking that the Court never explains how and why granting Israel another one-month period to claim complementarity under Article 18 would have derailed the OTP investigation in the Palestine case. Nor does it explain why, as a matter of general policy, issuing new notifications when “shifts in circumstances” occur would disrupt the mission of the Court and undermine its goal of ending impunity, a goal to whose implementation the principle of complementarity importantly contributes.

Instead, the majority adopted an interpretation of Article 18 that hollows out the principle as a practical matter. It adopted a most forgiving approach toward the Prosecutor’s failure to notify the Court’s Presidency of the new post-October 7 referrals (it considered its invocation by Israel as a “formal aspect.”). And although Judge Lordkipanidze offered a reasonable middle ground for addressing a change in circumstances, he never explained why the tests he proposed for OTP discretion did not apply to the case before him.

Significantly, the hollowing out of non-member States’ complementarity rights – by punishing them for not meeting a deadline in a treaty they never ratified – is reminiscent of the Court’s doubling down on the rejection of head of state immunity of non-member States, an issue that exceeds the scope of this note (see for a discussion here and here). In both cases, the Court is nominally operating within the ICC Statute framework but is prioritizing the Court’s prosecutorial power over the legal rights of non-member States under international law. Note, the Court is doing this while it is facing sanctions by third states for alleged jurisdictional over-reaches, and while the OTP is facing its worst-ever ethics crisis. Arguably, the future legitimacy of the Court is bound to suffer if it stays on this confrontational course.

To conclude, we consider complementarity to be a central pillar of the legal regime created by the ICC Statute. The Court’s failure to effectively protect this principle and to afford Israel, the deferral-requesting State, an opportunity to show that it is genuinely investigating allegations of deliberate starvation in Gaza, is not likely to increase support for the Court and its operations. Given all the controversy around the case and the OTP’s handling thereof, doubling down on an extremely narrow – and in our view, untenable – legal construction of the duty to notify under Article 18 does not bode well for the Court. The judgment is likely to further exacerbate the conflict between the Court and its powerful enemies, and further jeopardize its ability to operate (as the post-judgment sanctions imposed by the United States on members of the panel illustrate).

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Can the U.S. lawfully board and seize Russian‑flagged merchant ships? What do international maritime law and the law of naval warfare have to say about actions like these? To unpack the legal and geopolitical stakes, host Tess Bridgeman speaks with Rob McLaughlin, professor at the Australian National Centre for Ocean Resources and Security and the ANU College of Law, who previously served as both a Seaman officer and Legal officer in the Royal Australian Navy, including in senior roles such as Fleet Legal Officer, Strategic Legal Adviser, Director of Operations and International Law, and Director of the Naval Legal Service. 

Show Note: 

• Elizabeth Hutton, Maritime Law Enforcement on the High Seas: Authority, Jurisdiction, and the Seizure of The Skipper An Expert Backgrounder (Dec. 22, 2025)
• Rob McLaughlin and Connor McLaughlin, Was the Visit and Seizure of the Skipper off the Coast of Venezuela Lawful? (Dec. 17, 2025)
• See also Question 31 in Tess Bridgeman, Michael Schmitt, and Ryan Goodman, Expert Q&A on the U.S. Boat Strikes (Dec. 13, 2025)
• Michael Schmitt and Rob McLaughlin, Blockading Venezuela: The International Law Consequences (Dec. 18, 2025)
• Michael Schmitt, Ryan Goodman and Tess Bridgeman, International Law and the U.S. Military and Law Enforcement Operations in Venezuela (Jan. 4, 2026)
• Just Security’s Collection: U.S. Lethal Strikes on Suspected Drug Traffickers, Operation Southern Spear, Operation Absolute Resolve

The post The Just Security Podcast: Can the U.S. Seize Russian Flagged Oil Tankers? appeared first on Just Security.

The collection now also includes analysis of more recent boarding and seizure of vessels, including U.S. sanctioned oil tankers, and the U.S. military operation in Venezuela that removed President Maduro from power.

Informational Resources

• Jeremy Chin, Margaret Lin, and Aidan Arasasingham, Timeline of Boat Strikes and Related Actions (continually updated)

Operation Absolute Resolve and Threats of Force against Venezuela

• Jeffrey Rogg, U.S. Intelligence in a Post-Maduro Venezuela (Jan. 9, 2026)
• Brian Egan, Tess Bridgeman, and Ryan Goodman, Congress, the President, and the Use of Military Force in Venezuela (Jan. 7, 2026)
• Chimène Keitner, Head of State Immunity and Maduro on Trial (Jan. 6, 2026)
• Michael Schmitt, Ryan Goodman and Tess Bridgeman, International Law and the U.S. Military and Law Enforcement Operations in Venezuela (Jan. 4, 2026)
• Ryan Goodman, Maduro Capture Operation and the President’s Duty to Faithfully Execute U.N. Charter Assessment of 1989 OLC Opinion (Jan. 3, 2026)
• Michael Schmitt, U.S. Saber Rattling and Venezuela: Lawful Show of Force or Unlawful Threat of Force? (Nov. 4, 2025)

Seizure and Blockade of Vessels (Domestic and International Law)

• Rob McLaughlin and Connor McLaughlin, A Law of the Sea Assessment of the U.S. boarding of the Bella 1 / Marinera (Jan. 14, 2026)
• Rob McLaughlin and Tess Bridgeman, The Just Security Podcast: Can the U.S. Seize Russian Flagged Oil Tankers? (Jan. 8, 2026)
• Elizabeth Hutton, Maritime Law Enforcement on the High Seas: Authority, Jurisdiction, and the Seizure of The Skipper An Expert Backgrounder (Dec. 22, 2025)
• Michael Schmitt and Rob McLaughlin, Blockading Venezuela: The International Law Consequences (Dec. 18, 2025)
• Rob McLaughlin and Connor McLaughlin, Was the Visit and Seizure of the Skipper off the Coast of Venezuela Lawful? (Dec. 17, 2025)
• See also Question 31 in Tess Bridgeman, Michael Schmitt, and Ryan Goodman, Expert Q&A on the U.S. Boat Strikes (Dec. 13, 2025)

Operation Southern Spear and Related Operations Legal Analysis (Domestic and International Law)

• Michael Schmitt, Using an Unmarked Aircraft to Attack an Alleged Drug Boat: Is it Perfidy? (Jan. 20, 2026)
• Michael Schmitt, Marko Milanovic, The International Law Obligation to Investigate the Boat Strikes (Dec. 15, 2025)
• Tess Bridgeman, Michael Schmitt, and Ryan Goodman, Expert Q&A on the U.S. Boat Strikes (Dec. 13, 2025)
• Mark Nevitt, The Law on Targeting Shipwrecked Drug Traffickers: Expert Backgrounder (Dec. 11, 2025)
• Michael Schmitt, Ryan Goodman and Tess Bridgeman, Operation Southern Spear: Why the Crews, Drugs, and Boats are Not Targetable (Dec. 7, 2025)
• Michael Schmitt, Ryan Goodman and Tess Bridgeman, Unlawful Orders and Killing Shipwrecked Boat Strike Survivors: An Expert Backgrounder (Dec. 1, 2025)
• Daniel Maurer, Hypothetical Legal Review of Narcotrafficking Strikes (Nov. 18, 2025)
• Michael Schmitt, Marko Milanovic, and Ryan Goodman, The International Law Obligation of States to Stop Intelligence Support for U.S. Boat Strikes (Nov. 17, 2025)
• Brian Finucane, Dissecting the Trump Administration’s Effort to Circumvent the War Powers Resolution for Boat Strikes (Nov. 3, 2025)
• Rebecca Ingber and Jessica Thibodeau, Expert Backgrounder on War Powers Resolution 60-Day Clock for Boat Strikes Expiring Monday (October 31, 2025)
• Ryan Goodman, Michael Schmitt and Anna Jimenez, Irreconcilable Presidential Determinations: On Tren de Aragua and the Venezuelan Government (October 29, 2025)
• Michael Schmitt, Attacking Drug Cartels in the Territory of Another State (Oct. 17, 2025)
• Marty Lederman, Legal Flaws in the Trump Administration’s Notice to Congress on “Armed Conflict” with Drug Cartels (Oct. 3, 2025)
• Daniel Maurer, US Servicemembers’ Exposure to Criminal Liability for Lethal Strikes on Narcoterrorists (Sept. 24, 2025)
• Marty Lederman, The Many Ways in Which the September 2 Caribbean Strike was Unlawful … and the Grave Line the Military Has Crossed (Sept. 10, 2025)
• Michael Schmitt, Striking Drug Cartels Under the Jus ad Bellum and Law of Armed Conflict (Sept. 10, 2025)
• Mark Nevitt, Using Labels, Not Law, to Justify Lethal Force: Inside the Venezuelan Boat Strike (Sept. 5, 2025)
• Brian Finucane, Legal Issues Raised by a Lethal U.S. Military Attack in the Caribbean (Sept. 3, 2025)

Congressional Actions and Oversight

• Tess Bridgeman, Margaret Donovan and Ryan Goodman, U.S. Boat Strike Campaign: Questions Congress Should Ask Executive Branch Officials (Dec. 4, 2025)
• Stephen R. Weissman, Will the Intelligence Committees Meet the Challenge of CIA Covert Action in Venezuela? (Oct. 31, 2025)
• Mary B. McCord and Tess Bridgeman, What the Senate Judiciary Committee Should Ask A.G. Bondi on Drug Cartel Strikes (Oct. 3, 2025)

Policy Analysis and Opinion

• Mark Nevitt, Killing Shipwrecked Survivors is Not Just Illegal—It Endangers U.S. Servicemembers (Dec. 1, 2025)
• Eugene R. Fidell, Daniel Maurer and Steven J. Lepper, Professional Responsibility and the Boat Strikes (Dec. 1, 2025)
• Brett Max Kaufman, From Secret Law (2001-2024) to None at All (2025-present) (Nov. 21, 2025)
• Sarah Harrison and Mark Nevitt, The Caribbean Strikes and the Collapse of Legal Oversight in U.S. Military Operations (Oct. 23, 2025)
• Ben Saul, The United States’ Dirty War on “Narco Terrorism” (Sept. 22, 2025)
• Annie Shiel, John Ramming Chappell, Priyanka Motaparthy, Wells Dixon and Daphne Eviatar, Murder by Drone: The Legal and Moral Stakes of the Caribbean Strikes (Sept. 17, 2025)
• Brian Finucane, Asserting a License to Kill: Why the Caribbean Strike is a Dangerous Departure from the “War on Terror (Sept. 15, 2025)

Podcast Episodes

• Tess Bridgeman, Rob Mclaughlin, The Just Security Podcast: Can the U.S. Seize Russian Flagged Oil Tankers? (Jan. 8, 2026, also available on YouTube)
• Tess Bridgeman, Rachel Goldbrenner, Rebecca Ingber and Brian Finucane, The Just Security Podcast: Murder on the High Seas Part IV (Dec. 2, 2025)
• Tess Bridgeman, Brian Finucane, Rebecca Ingber, The Just Security Podcast: Murder on the High Seas Part III  (Oct. 21, 2025, also available on YouTube)
• Tess Bridgeman, Brian Finucane, Rachel Goldbrenner, Rebecca Ingber, The Just Security Podcast: Murder on the High Seas Part II — What We Know about U.S. Vessel Strikes One Month In (Oct. 7, 2025)
• Tess Bridgeman, Brian Finucane, Rebecca Ingber, The Just Security Podcast: Murder on the High Seas? What You Need to Know about the U.S. Strike on the Caribbean Vessel (Sept. 9, 2025, also available on YouTube)

The post Collection: U.S. Lethal Strikes on Suspected Drug Traffickers, Operation Southern Spear, Operation Absolute Resolve appeared first on Just Security.