The Buddhist Coalition for Democracy issues this declaration in response to the recent military actions by the United States against the sovereign nation of Venezuela and the capture of its head of state, Nicolás Maduro.
These events must be examined through the lenses of Right Speech (telling the truth) non-violence (ahiṃsā), interdependence (pratītyasamutpāda), and the avoidance of harm born of craving, fear, and domination. The use of military force to resolve political conflict reflects a failure of wisdom (prajñā) and compassion (karuṇā), regardless of the moral deficiencies or authoritarian tendencies of the targeted regime. It is ironic that the United States seeks to prosecute the president of a foreign country for alleged crimes committed while in office while the Supreme Court has granted near absolute immunity to our president for alleged crimes committed while in office. The failure of wisdom and right speech here are amplified by the fact that Trump pardoned a former Honduran president who was convicted by an American jury for the major crimes that Maduro is accused of.
History repeatedly shows that similar interventions deepen suffering, fracture societies, and generate karmic consequences that rebound upon both the aggressor and the victimized population. The capture of a leader does not dissolve the structural causes of injustice; it often hardens them and may lead to the rise of worse tyrants. In fact, the United States has intervened dozens of times in Latin America and the Caribbean, invariably to prop up right wing dictatorships or overthrow progressives, and its gunboats have only left a wake of lasting violence, injustice, and inequality. More recently, its military adventures in Vietnam and Iraq, justified as usual with false pretexts, did not lead to any form of Jeffersonian democracy, a product that can neither be exported nor imposed by force, shock, awe, or spectacle.
In addition, this unilateral U.S. intervention in Venezuela strikes at the core prohibitions of modern international law. Article 2(4) of the Charter of the United Nations prohibits the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, permitting exceptions only for self-defense against an armed attack or action explicitly authorized by the Security Council. Venezuela poses no such armed threat to the United States, and no Security Council authorization exists. Humanitarian justifications or claims of democratic restoration, frequently invoked in these contexts, have no settled status as lawful exceptions under the Charter. The result is not a gray zone but a clear departure from the post-1945 legal framework the United States itself helped design.
Such an intervention also functions as a disturbing precedent. Cuba, for example, may be in line for similar treatment, especially when secretary of state Marco Rubio lately has been the architect of the 60-year blockade/embargo on this island nation and is believed to be behind the designs on Venezuela in order to weaken its support for Cuba and facilitate regime change. Panama has experienced forcible intervention justified ex post facto by moral and security claims, and Trump has complained about its relations with China in reference to the canal’s operations. He is already threatening Colombia, from which Panama was carved by Theodore Roosevelt in 1903, because he doesn’t like its leftist president. Greenland—nominally protected by treaty and alliance—and even Canada have been openly discussed by U.S. leaders in transactional, quasi-imperial terms and Trump has declared his intention to make them U.S. states by one way or another. The common thread is the reassertion of hemispheric or strategic entitlement over legal restraint: the Monroe Doctrine, stripped of diplomacy and proudly rebranded for the twenty-first century as “Trump’s corollary.”
The international consequences extend well beyond the Western Hemisphere. When a dominant power disregards the Charter’s core restraints, it signals that those restraints are optional rather than constitutive. Other great powers will draw the lesson quickly. Russia can cite regional security interests to justify aggression in Eastern Europe or the Caucasus. (The administration’s reference to the attacks on Venezuela as a special law enforcement mission is reminiscent of Putin’s euphemism for Ukraine’s invasion as a “special military operation.”). China can invoke historical claims and strategic necessity in the South China Sea or Taiwan to continue taking over various islands and eventually invade Taiwan. The specious legal argument is symmetrical: if spheres of influence excuse force for Washington, they excuse force for everyone else.
The deeper damage is systemic. International law survives not because it is always enforced, but because major powers generally pretend to obey it. Open disregard, especially by its principal architect, invites a return to a world where might makes right, and where smaller states exist by sufferance rather than by law. Venezuela, in this sense, is not merely a regional crisis. It is a stress test for whether the post-war legal order still constrains those capable of violating it.
At the same time, this Coalition does not abide tyranny. We affirm the Venezuelan people’s right to self-determination, free expression, and accountable governance. These ends, however, must arise from internal civic awakening and international solidarity grounded in law, diplomacy, and economic justice, not unilateral violence. It is notable that no American official has called for the recognition as president of Venezuela of the person who is widely recognized as having won the election that Mr. Maduro stole. Instead, Trump speaks of “running” Venezuela from now on to essentially steal its vast oil deposits for the benefit of American corporations.
We therefore call for honesty, an immediate cessation of hostilities, and transparent processes in harmony with American and international law. These wise practices should provide a multilateral path toward reconciliation free of greed, anger, and delusion.