Isaac Chotiner for The New Yorker (soft paywall; Apple News+):

On Saturday morning, President Donald Trump announced that the United States military, working with American law-enforcement officials, had carried out a strike in Venezuela, capturing the country’s President, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores. Maduro was indicted in a federal court in New York for his role in what the Administration claims is a narco-terrorism conspiracy. At a press conference later on Saturday, Trump said, “We are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition.” He also said that he was not concerned about “boots on the ground,” referring to an American military presence.

I spoke by phone on Saturday morning with Oona Hathaway, a professor at Yale Law School and the director of its Center for Global Legal Challenges. She is also the president-elect of the American Society of International Law. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed whether Maduro can legally be tried in American courts, the long history of U.S. meddling in Latin America, and what makes Trump’s decision so uniquely dangerous.

Chotiner’s first question:

What is the legal basis, such as it is, for this action?

Unfortunately, I don’t think there is a legal basis for what we’re seeing in Venezuela. There are certainly legal arguments that the Administration is going to make, but all the arguments that I’ve heard so far don’t hold water. None of them really justify what the President seems to have ordered to take place in Venezuela.

The United States is a rogue state controlled by a dictator and his apparatchiks, with a feckless Congress doing absolutely zilch to stop them.