Noah Feldman, Columnist

Call U.S. Move on Venezuela What It Is: Regime Change

The legal justification used by the State Department to recognize the opposition leader doesn’t hold water.

January 24, 2019 at 4:20 PM UTC

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

Capture the Flag rules don’t apply.
Photographer: Carlos Becerra/Bloomberg

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The U.S. and about a dozen other countries recognized opposition leader Juan Guaidó as the legitimate president of Venezuela on Wednesday, even as President Nicolás Maduro maintained his grip on the office.

But is that even a thing? Under ordinary principles of constitutional and international law, can one country simply declare that someone who manifestly isn’t the president of the country actually is, and act accordingly?