What is unfolding in Venezuela today demonstrates that the claim of a “rules-based international order” has been effectively abandoned. In its place, a naked politics of power shaped by U.S. interests has once again become dominant. The complete disregard for international law, universal norms, and multilateral mechanisms sets a dangerous precedent that threatens not only Venezuela, but global peace and security as a whole.

This intervention is a clear manifestation of energy geopolitics, great power rivalry, and the convergence of sanctions and military force. Once again, the discourse of democracy and human rights has been instrumentalized to legitimize geostrategic calculations. This approach undermines not only Venezuela’s sovereignty, but also destabilizes the international system in its entirety.

Historical experience leaves no room for ambiguity: no country in which the United States has carried out military interventions has achieved lasting and inclusive stability. The invasion of Iraq led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, the destruction of the country’s social fabric, and widespread regional instability. Libya has effectively been fragmented and transformed into a geography of permanent conflict. Similar interventionist policies, from Afghanistan to Syria, have produced nothing but devastation, civil war, forced displacement, and enduring insecurity.

This latest intervention in Venezuela will not yield a different outcome. On the contrary, it will deepen instability within the country and across the region, increase forced migration, exacerbate the economic crisis, and intensify social devastation. As always, the cost of this process will be borne not by political and economic elites, but by workers, the poor, women, and other vulnerable segments of society. Wars and military interventions create new areas of profit for capital, while generating unemployment, precarity, poverty, and displacement for working people.

As the ILC, we emphasize in particular that remaining silent in the face of such unlawful interventions today will pave the way for similar actions to be repeated more frequently, more recklessly, and in far more destructive forms tomorrow. Silence becomes a de facto mechanism of approval, accelerating the erosion of international law. The politics of force normalized today in Venezuela will be applied to other countries and other peoples tomorrow.

For this reason, we state clearly:

Workers are not the victims of imperial power struggles and geopolitical calculations. No country’s fate can be determined by the military power, sanctions, or coercive interventions of another state. The right of peoples to self-determination constitutes the foundation of genuine peace and social justice.

We call upon the international community-first and foremost the United Nations General Assembly, as well as all components of the international trade union movements-to take a clear and principled stance against double standards, selective application of law, and the politics of force. Upholding the Charter of the United Nations, the principle of state sovereignty, and the universal norms of international law is not a matter of choice today, but a historical responsibility.

Lasting peace, democracy, and social prosperity cannot be achieved through bombs, occupations, or sanctions, but through dialogue, solidarity, and respect for the will of peoples.

The International Labour Confederation will continue to stand in solidarity with the people of Venezuela and with workers around the world, and to pursue its struggle with determination against war, interventionism, and imperial power politics.

International Labour Confederation (ILC)