The seizure of Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro by the United States marks a profound rupture with the legal and normative constraints that have structured international order since 1945. Whatever the moral judgment of Maduro’s regime, the episode raises a far more consequential question: on what grounds can a sovereign head of state be forcibly removed by another country, and what follows when law is replaced by power? The Stated Grounds and the Evidentiary Problem The T