The New York Times even cited Mark Nevitt, a professor of law at Emory University and a former Navy lawyer, to say the U.S. hijacking Venezuelan oil tankers was legal because they were enforcing the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea without noting, rather importantly, that the U.S. never signed the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. But it needed to feel vaguely rules-based and international-y, so unilateral U.S. dictates were passed off as ersatz international law.
This pro bono PR for Trump also came in the form of several articles and headlines that heavily implied Venezuela had broken some type of international law by trading its oil and evading U.S. piracy, complete with the breathless reports into Venezuela’s so-called “dark fleet” or “shadow fleet” — which, again, is only “dark” and “shadow” to one of the 193 U.N. member states: the United States. Despite Trump paying little attention to international law or even bothering to reference it — all while proudly boasting of stealing Venezuelan oil and trumpeting the Monroe Doctrine — the idea that the U.S. could be engaging in such shameless might-makes-right power projection was apparently too unseemly to mention. Instead, unilateral U.S. claims, almost in unison, became international law through vibes.
Left unmentioned is that it is indeed quite unusual for countries to follow the laws of other countries, and Venezuela is under no more moral or legal obligation to follow U.S. law than the U.S. is under a moral or legal obligation to follow Venezuelan law, or Iranian law, or Serbian law. By trading oil and refusing to submit to U.S. piracy, Venezuela was breaking no Venezuelan law and no international law — a fact almost never mentioned by anyone in the U.S. media.