Nuremberg – Venezuela

Translated by Aurora Forlivesi

We can state it without hesitation: Nuremberg is a foundational event in contemporary history, and today it is also a film that prompts us to interrogate the present. The work, directed by James Vanderbilt—on his second directorial effort but with extensive experience as a screenwriter—does not merely reconstruct a crucial moment of the twentieth century: it reactivates its fractures. The words spoken by the film’s protagonists do not sound like historical artifacts, but like sentences that could still be uttered today, without any need to change their tone. It is this temporal short-circuit that makes Nuremberg unsettling.

The trial, which between November 20, 1945, and September 1, 1946, for the first time held the leaders of a State accountable for crimes against humanity, represented a historical necessity before it became a fully formed legal construct. It was an unprecedented act, born in the absence of codified international criminal law, and precisely for this reason destined to establish it while exercising it. The figure of Chief Prosecutor Robert H. Jackson—portrayed in the film by Michael Shannon—embodies this ambiguity: not pure arbitrariness, but justice exercised in the name of universal values that still lacked a truly universal authority. Nuremberg was therefore at once justice and exception, foundation and overreach.

Watching Nuremberg in 2025 means doing so at a time when the United States once again claims the right to judge, strike, capture and intervene. From the defendants’ dock of the Third Reich to the Venezuelan crisis, the core issue is not the comparison of crimes – historically and morally incomparable – but the legitimacy of judgment. States that arrogate to themselves the power to put other states, leaders or peoples on trial, in the absence of a truly recognised supranational authority. At Nuremberg, Hermann Göring, Adolf Hitler (posthumously) and the entire architecture of Nazism were judged for the extermination of the Jews; today, Venezuela’s dictatorial government is treated as a deviant body to be corrected, all the way to the capture of its president.

In both cases, the underlying assumption remains the same: we can, you cannot. But international law, precisely because it is incomplete, does not legitimise this asymmetry. There is no tribunal that is truly superior to states. And it is in this vacuum that judgment, once again, risks being transformed into force and domination, exercised not by virtue of a shared body of law, but of the simple superiority of the strongest.

Historically, therefore, the Nuremberg trial emerged as a response to an unprecedented legal vacuum. Great Britain, the United States, France and the Soviet Union established an International Military Tribunal to judge the leading figures of the Nazi regime, laying the foundations of modern international criminal law. War crimes, crimes against peace, crimes against humanity: categories that were new at the time, constructed while they were being applied.

Nuremberg was justice, but also exception. It was law written by the victors, administered by the victors, against the defeated. A historical necessity, but not a definitive solution. The tensions among the Allied powers, the procedural divergences and, above all, the absence of a permanent court capable of surviving the event reveal the structural limit of that experience. It is from that fracture that the current fragility of international law is born: an instrument invoked when it is useful and ignored when it becomes an obstacle.

It is precisely this fragility that makes the parallel with the present anything but forced. The U.S. operation that led to the capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro falls within a grey zone of international law that Nuremberg had attempted—without fully succeeding—to illuminate. As reconstructed by Le Monde, the use of force by the United States was authorised neither by the UN Security Council nor by any shared international mandate, and therefore amounts to a violation of state sovereignty under existing law. Criticism has not come only from abroad: within the United States itself, legal scholars, commentators and political representatives have openly spoken of illegality, pointing to the absence of a congressional declaration of war and to the risk of turning a criminal investigation into a disguised regime-change operation.

The political and media reactions in the United States lay bare the contradiction. On the one hand, the Trump administration claims the moral legitimacy of the operation, arguing that Maduro was not a legitimate president but the head of a transnational criminal organisation. On the other hand, figures such as Kathy Hochul and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have denounced the action as a use of force lacking any legal basis, capable of creating a devastating precedent. If a state grants itself the right to capture a foreign leader by unilaterally accusing him of crimes, what prevents other powers from doing the same? (China or Russia, for example). The question is not theoretical: it is precisely the scenario that Nuremberg sought to avoid, by grounding a universal principle that today once again appears to be suspended.

The core issue, then, is not to determine whether Maduro is guilty or innocent, nor, even less, to absolve a dictatorship responsible for repression and economic collapse. The issue is another, and it is the same as at Nuremberg: who has the right to judge. Without an international court truly superior to states, the boundary between justice and force remains unstable. At Nuremberg, that instability was accepted as the price to be paid to stop the horror. Today, it risks becoming standard practice. And it is in this shift that international law, from a bulwark against chaos, returns to being what it was before 1945: a variable subordinate to the will of the strongest.

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