Welcome Back to the Rule of Guns and Lawyers: A Tale of Two Ursulas, From Ukraine to Venezuela

[Nikolas M. Rajkovic is Chair of International Law at Tilburg University, and Senior Faculty at the Institute for Global Law and Policy of Harvard Law School (nikolasrajkovic.com). His research examines how international law is being reshaped by geopolitical, infrastructural, digital, and ecological transformations, drawing on interdisciplinary work across international law, international relations, and critical geography. He is the author of Off the Map: A Critical Geography of International Law (forthcoming CUP, 2026) and co-editor of The Power of Legality (CUP, 2016).]

In February 2022, as Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, Ursula von der Leyen delivered one of the clearest rhetorical defences of the post-1945 international legal order. “War has returned to Europe,” she declared. “This is a clash between the rule of law and the rule of the gun… between a rules-based order and a world of naked aggression.”

The metaphor worked because it was simple and moving. It framed the invasion as a civilizational rupture: law on one side, brute force on the other. International law appeared as a normative bulwark of global politics—violated by Russia, yet still anchoring collective judgement.

Four years later, after the United States’ military operation against Venezuela, the President of the Commission responded again. The contrast was striking. This time, there was no mention of a clash between law and guns. Von der Leyen said the European Union was “closely monitoring the situation in Venezuela,” that it stood “with the Venezuelan people,” and that it supported “a peaceful and democratic transition,” while stressing that “any solution must respect international law and the UN Charter.”

Read side by side, the two statements do more than differ in tone. They show a shift in what law does in geopolitical speech. In 2022, law functioned as a normative boundary. Russia crossed it. In 2026, law reads more like process. It becomes the language through which events are managed. Ukraine was framed as an existential breach of order; Venezuela is treated as a crisis to be processed. 

This is not inconsistency. It is diagnostic.

In an Opinio Juris essay published after Russia’s 2022 invasion—Dead Right: Welcome to the Rule of Guns and Lawyers—I argued that the “rules-based order” invoked by world leaders never operated as law in any robust sense. It had become a professionalised system in which great-power agendas are mediated, rationalised, and normalised through legal expertise. Ukraine, I suggested, was not the breakdown of that order. It was its most violent expression.

By January 2026, that diagnosis looks less like provocation and more like description.

The United States launched a sustained military operation against Venezuela, bombed key cities including Caracas, and captured President Nicolás Maduro. He was transferred to New York to face U.S. indictments. President Donald Trump said the United States would “run Venezuela,” at least temporarily, and signalled readiness for boots on the ground. The justifications shifted—narcotics enforcement, counter-terrorism, democratic restoration, energy security—but the pattern held.

The gun was plainly present. So was legality.

The question, then, is not whether international law was violated. It is how we reached a moment in which a great power can violate it and still present the act as manageable, defensible, even justifiable—because it is wrapped in legal language, legal process, and appearances of legality.

Law vs. Legality: The New Grammar of Coercion

International law was never blind to power. But it rested on a core bargain: force was presumptively illegal, permitted only in narrow circumstances, and judged against prohibitions rather than plausibility. That bargain no longer structures great-power conduct.

Over the past three decades, a new grammar has taken hold. The question has shifted from Is this lawful? to Can this be defended as lawful? This is not semantic drift. It is a reversal.

A turning point came in 1999, during NATO’s intervention in Yugoslavia. When critics warned that military action required Security Council authorisation, the response attributed to Madeleine Albright—“get new lawyers”—captured a new doctrine. Law stopped acting as a brake. It became a toolkit. If the argument could be built, action could proceed.

That mindset travelled quickly. NATO’s intervention lacked authorisation, yet it was surrounded by legal claims about humanitarian necessity and UN purposes. Argument substituted for approval. The Charter’s prohibition on force remained intact on paper, but weakened in use. Violence moved into a grey zone: not clearly lawful, but no longer treated as plainly illegal.

What followed was not lawlessness. It was instrumental legalism. Force was given legal framing—humanitarian intervention, preventive self-defence, counter-terrorism, responsibility to protect. Each relied less on firm authorisation and more on narrative plausibility. “Compliance” began to replace lawfulness in the deeper sense: law’s letter, purpose, and spirit.

This is why “rules-based” language should always have sounded an alarm. It is not harmless shorthand. It reshapes normative expectations. “International law” points to a system that can declare illegality with social force. “Rules-based” ordering suggests something softer and more selective. It invites rule-picking, exception-management, and compliance-crafting. Legality becomes a contest of professional skill.

A clearer way to see the problem is to look beyond public international law in isolation. The Panama Papers and the Credit Suisse Leaks exposed a culture of loopholes—tax evasion, regulatory arbitrage, financial secrecy—built through client-driven legalism. Few notice how closely that culture resembles the legal management of force.

In both settings, law becomes client-service. Lawyers help powerful actors appear “in compliance” with selective norms. The goal is not fidelity to law’s purposes, but defensibility before audiences that demand formal plausibility. This is where “rules-based” talk becomes detrimental and corrosive. It tolerates loophole cultures—and those who profit from them.

Most litigators understand the distinction. Compliance manages risk. Law demands restraint.

Blindness to this difference is reinforced by siloed expertise. Public international law, private international law, and international relations have long been taught and practised in isolation. The result is bunkered knowledge: experts talking past one another, often in public, often online, and often more focused on defending linear narratives than on grasping crises produced by multiple failures at once.

Ukraine pushed this logic to an extreme. Russia’s legal rhetoric was widely condemned. But the grammar was familiar. Great powers have practised versions of it for decades. Venezuela shows that this is no longer a pathology of “revisionist” states. It has become a geopolitical method.

The U.S. operation against Venezuela was not lawless in a crude sense. It was saturated with legal language. Criminal indictments reframed military capture as law enforcement. Security claims were stretched toward self-defence. Resource arguments echoed earlier wars. Individually, the claims strain credibility. Together, they create legibility. The operation becomes narratable as defensible—and therefore survivable.

This is legality at work. Force is not denied; it is legalised. Lawyers do not police boundaries. They manage and aestheticize transgressions.

The deeper problem is normative inversion. Law stops acting as a brake, and becomes a lubricant. Judgment gives way to technique. Responsibility is dispersed through professional process. Illegality becomes an interpretive dispute rather than a condemnation.

That is the mature form of the rule of guns and lawyers.

Why Greenland Is Not an Outlier—It May Be Next

If Venezuela shows how legality can justify coercion after the fact, Greenland shows how legality can prepare the ground in advance.

Greenland is often treated as a future contingency: legally settled, geographically distant, politically insulated. That assumption belongs to an older map of power, one where sovereignty and status did most of the protective work. In a world organised less by borders than by systems, that map is fading.

Geopolitics today is increasingly organised around infrastructures. Control over supply chains, data, and critical resources matters at least as much as control over territory. Strategic advantage flows from shaping the channels through which modern economies function—and from deciding who gains access when pressure rises. This is the basic logic of systems geopolitics: power exercised through infrastructures, access, and chokepoints rather than through territory alone.

By those measures, Greenland is not peripheral but central. Its critical minerals tie directly to manufacturing capacity and the energy transition. Its Arctic position places it near emerging corridors of mobility, surveillance, and connectivity. In systems geopolitics, “territory” increasingly means node-position within infrastructures, not land alone.

Greenland also exposes Europe’s persistent misreading of power.

EU policy often treats law and regulation as substitutes for control. Strategic autonomy is articulated through legal frameworks and institutional process, even as the infrastructures that sustain autonomy remain dependent. Europe’s digital sovereignty rests on systems it does not operate. Its green transition relies on inputs it cannot reliably secure. These are not temporary vulnerabilities. They are structural exposures.

This is why Greenland matters. It is not simply a resource site or a distant frontier. It is a pressure point where Europe’s global ideals collide with a systems geopolitics it does not command.

The New U.S. National Security Strategy makes this systems map explicit. It frames security around infrastructural dominance—resilience, trusted networks, and control over chokepoints. Law is not discarded. It is redeployed. It becomes a way to govern access and manage risk. Alliances are reinterpreted accordingly. Partners matter insofar as they stabilise systems and align with architectures of access and denial.

Once this is the map, Greenland looks less like a remote Danish territory and more like a strategic node. Its governance can be shaped through legality-rich techniques—regulation, licensing, screening, security cooperation—without announcing a sovereignty breach. These moves can be presented as prudent governance inside a legality frame.

Venezuela shows where this logic can end. Its sovereignty was not abolished; it was re-narrated. Maduro’s capture was framed through criminality and risk. Law was everywhere. Constraint was not.

Greenland sits on the same causal chain. It is where legality does not only justify coercion. It shapes the field of possible action before coercion arrives. It defines what counts as security, who counts as reliable, and which arrangements become “necessary.”

That is why Greenland is not an outlier. It is a preview of how systems geopolitics treats legally settled territories: not as inviolable objects of sovereignty, but as governable nodes—managed through legality and, if needed, backed by force.

Guns, Lawyers, and the New Insecurity Order

The emerging order is not anarchic. It is being reorganised around systems geopolitics. Legality has become one of its core operating logics.

Trump’s recent National Security Strategy does not describe a world held together by shared rules and institutions. It describes a world of contestation over critical systems. Security is framed in terms of resilience, trusted networks, and control over chokepoints. This is why the strategy foregrounds supply chains, technology, energy, data, and space. The objective is not merely defence. It is the capacity to structure access and deny rivals.

This agenda is also deeply legalistic. Power organised through systems depends on rule-making and enforcement. Tariffs, sanctions, investment restrictions, and compliance regimes operate continuously rather than episodically. They reshape markets, reorder alliances, and discipline behaviour without a shot being fired.

When shots are fired, legality becomes even more central.

Within this framework, force rarely presents itself as conquest. It appears instead as enforcement, protection, or risk management. Each label demands legal narration—not because legality restrains power, but because it renders power administrable. Legal categories and procedures translate coercion into velvet-textured governance.

This is the enduring legacy of the “get better lawyers” doctrine. It collapses and professionalises the relationship between force and law. The question “Is this illegal?” gives way to “Is this defensible?” and then to “Is this manageable?” Lawyers become engineers of manageability, tasked with converting geopolitical objectives into legally defensible positions.

Legality also solves a political problem. It allows power to move without naming itself as power. It replaces moral argument with technical dispute. It disarms critique by turning opposition into expert disagreement.

This is why “rules-based” language has proved corrosive. It reduces law to rules and legitimacy to compliance, leaving well-lawyered elites to decide which rules bind and when law bends. The result is an order that normalises loopholes in finance, trade, and war alike.

Europe’s difficulty is not its faith in law, but its assumption that law still does the same political work.

In a future order organised around systems geopolitics, regulation matters only when backed by control over the infrastructures being regulated. Without that anchor, Europe can condemn, regulate, and exhort while others act—and still claim legality. This asymmetry helps explain the European Union’s muted response to Venezuela. It also explains why future crises will increasingly bypass the traditional flashpoints of international law.

The decisive struggles will centre on infrastructure, energy, data, minerals, and technology—domains where legality stretches easily and force arrives already legalised.

The rule of guns and lawyers is not only episodic intervention. It is a standing capacity: to shape systems, enforce compliance, deny access, and deploy force wrapped in legality.

Conclusion—A Geopolitics of Guns and Lawyers

Ukraine was not a test of whether law could constrain power. It was a test of whether law would remain the language through which power is judged. Venezuela answers that question.

International law has not vanished. But it no longer sets the limits of great-power conduct. It is being displaced by legality—rules as instruments, not restraints.