Good morning, Happy Monday, and Happy New Year! Thanks for starting your day with me today.

Welp, it’s a brand new year and, once again under the Trump administration, I am at a loss for words. Needless to say, I did not have “deposing the President of Venezuela and taking control of the country, then also threatening Mexico and Greenland” on my bingo card. At least not for the first week of January.

So where do we even begin unpacking this one?

I guess we can start with the legality of kidnapping a foreign President, corrupt though he may be, and dragging him back to New York to face trial. While I don’t claim to be an expert in international law, I did clerk for the United Nations Centre for Human Rights in law school, and I wrote enough legal summaries to grasp the basics. So, if we look at the applicable international law, the US’s actions in Venezuela are only legal if one of the following three conditions is met:

1) The action was supported by the UN Security Council (it was not);

2) The government of Venezuela consented to the action (it did not); or

3) The US acted in self-defense (we didn’t).

It’s that third prong that the Trump administration is hanging onto like grim death, making the (already rejected) argument that the US is somehow “at war” with Venezuelan drug traffickers due to the influx of narcotics coming into the US.