The Collapse of Internal Legitimacy as a Catalyst for the Externalization of Domestic Law Enforcement in Iran and Venezuela in Early 2026
By Lili Bazargan and Yara Chaptini
Introduction
The massacre of 8–9 January 2026 in the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the seizure of
Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro by United States forces six days earlier, are among the
starkest recent illustrations of the relationship between eroding domestic legitimacy and the
external assertion of legal and military power over a sovereign state. In both countries, ruling
elites who had lost the appearance of popular consent turned to increasingly lethal repression
to preserve their hold on power; in both cases, distant states treated that loss of consent as
license to expand the vocabulary through which force against a sovereign government could
be justified. This paper asks: to what extent does the collapse of internal legitimacy,
manifested through lethal state repression, act as a catalyst for the externalization of domestic
law enforcement in the form of foreign intervention?
Part One examines the Islamic Republic of Iran, tracing the erosion of its legitimacy through
the massacre of January 2026 to the joint United States–Israeli strikes that killed Supreme
Leader Ali Khamenei five weeks later. Part Two turns to Venezuela, where the contested
2024 election and Nicolás Maduro’s refusal to concede power culminated in Operation
Absolute Resolve, the U.S. raid that captured him and reframed regime change as a matter of
law enforcement rather than war. A brief comparative reflection on the 2003 invasion of Iraq
closes the paper, situating both cases within a longer pattern in which legitimacy narratives
are mobilized to authorize external force, often so with consequences that outlast, and
complicate, the interventions themselves.
Theoretical Framework: Legitimacy and the Turn to Coercion
Legitimacy can be defined as the population’s belief that its rulers possess the right to rule.
Max Weber conceptualized authority as “legitimate power”, a form of power the subjects
of which accept as justified rather than merely imposed. For Weber, a stable regime
maintains its rule primarily through legitimacy rather than force; as legitimacy erodes,
regimes face crises of credibility and turn increasingly to security organs, surveillance, and
lethal coercion as substitutes for consent.
Nazih Ayubi’s study of Arab authoritarian republics offers a complementary lens. Many such
states, he argues, are “fierce” but “weak”: structurally and ideologically unable to regulate
their societies effectively, and therefore reliant on violence and surveillance to compensate for
what Antonio Gramsci would call a failure of ideological hegemony, or the inability to secure
consent from large segments of society. Where Weber and Ayubi explain why declining
legitimacy produces domestic repression, Hannah Arendt’s On Violence explains why that
repression is a symptom of weakness rather than strength: violence, she writes, “appears
where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power’s disappearance”
(Arendt 56). Read together, these frameworks describe a single underlying logic that
structures both halves of this paper: as regimes lose the popular consent that Weber treats as
the foundation of durable rule, they substitute coercion for legitimacy ; and that substitution,
rather than demonstrating strength, signals precisely the vulnerability that invites scrutiny,
condemnation, and, in the cases examined below, external force.
Part One: Iran’s Legitimacy Collapse and the January 2026 Massacre
A Legitimacy Crisis Decades in the Making
The Islamic Republic’s 2026 crisis did not emerge overnight; it is the cumulative product of
decades of governance by repression. Since the 1979 revolution, the regime has faced
diminishing legitimacy driven by recurring economic crises, political repression, the
suppression of civil and political rights, and disputed elections. As increasing numbers of
Iranians have openly challenged the regime’s right to rule, the state has grown more
dependent on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to enforce control it can no
longer secure through consent.
Iran’s long-term strategy of power projection has combined “geopolitical ambitions and
theological beliefs” (Itzchakov). Building on Ruhollah Ramazani’s argument that the 1979
revolution produced a framework in which ideological goals shape both foreign and domestic
policy, the regime has weaponized Islam from its founding to ground its authority, mobilizing
religious ritual to foster identity and nationalism. Yet Itzchakov’s analysis of Iran’s social
cohesion also reveals the vulnerability underlying this strategy. He identifies six
interconnected preconditions for systemic disruption -- among them institutional decline, the
expansion of protest consciousness, economic breakdown, and catalytic events -- arguing that
authoritarian control can unravel once “multiple destabilizing forces come together,”
reshaping both perceptions of the regime and citizens’ sense of themselves as a political
community.
Although the shift sociologist Doug McAdam terms “cognitive liberation” has repeatedly
swept through Iranian society, the regime has survived each wave by relying more heavily on
violent repression. The death of Mahsa Amini in September 2022 triggered nationwide
protests that Itzchakov describes as revealing “deep-rooted psychological grievances” against
the Islamic Republic — protests that quickly outgrew the question of women’s rights to
become a broader contest over Iranian social identity. The crackdown that followed combined
lethal force, psychological warfare, and the labeling of protesters as foreign agents; months of
sustained repression allowed the regime to reassert control, but the underlying preconditions
for collapse remained in place, awaiting the next catalytic shock.
The Massacre of 8–9 January 2026
That shock arrived in late December 2025. Protests broke out in Tehran on 28 December after
a currency collapse of roughly 40 percent since the June 2025 Iran–Israel war, compounding
years of state spending prioritized toward security over welfare. Bazaar workers went on
strike, and the unrest rapidly escalated from an economic grievance into nationwide calls for
the fall of the regime ; the most significant challenge to Iranian rule since the 2022 Woman,
Life, Freedom movement.
Ayatollah Khamenei ordered the IRGC and Basij to show no mercy, and on 8 and 9 January
security forces opened fire on unarmed demonstrators in cities across the country. Amnesty
International documented how forces stationed on rooftops and in the streets fired live
ammunition and metal pellets into crowds, overwhelming hospitals and leaving families to
search for relatives among the dead. Death-toll estimates vary sharply by source: Iranian
officials initially acknowledged roughly 3,000 deaths, Iran’s Ministry of Health later cited at
least 30,000 killed in the first 48 hours (a scale Britannica compared to the 1941 Babi Yar
massacre) and subsequent reporting placed the toll as high as 36,500. Whatever the precise
figure, independent monitors including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International
agree that the January crackdown was the deadliest episode of state violence in the Islamic
Republic’s history. The regime imposed a near-total internet blackout on 8 January, isolating
Iranians from the outside world and delaying independent verification of the violence, while
state media falsely characterized the dead as foreign-backed terrorists.
The massacre was not confined to Tehran; mass killings were documented in cities including
Rasht and Fardis, and human rights organizations later verified that at least 118 children were
among the dead. The regime’s deployment of foreign militias alongside domestic forces is
itself telling: a state secure in its legitimacy would not need to import external muscle to
suppress its own population. The scale, speed, and indiscriminate character of the killings,
combined with the internet blackout and reliance on foreign forces, exemplify Ayubi’s “fierce
but weak” profile. Repression, in this sense, substituted for legitimacy: power was sustained
not through popular belief in the regime’s right to rule, but because the cost of resistance had
been driven to an unprecedented, and for many, fatal, extreme.
From Domestic Repression to Foreign Intervention
The January massacre reverberated internationally. The United Nations and international
NGOs issued condemnations and calls for investigation; Amnesty International demanded
“global diplomatic action” in the face of what it characterized as potential crimes against
humanity. Reza Pahlavi, son of Iran’s last shah, drew growing support from Iranians inside
and outside the country for a transitional government, while European governments
condemned the killings and imposed further sanctions. Diaspora Iranians took to the streets of
cities worldwide.
Yet, as the theoretical framework above suggests, severe repression does not automatically
trigger foreign intervention; it depends on whether states with the capacity to act determine
that repression justifies force. After more than a month of unsuccessful negotiation, the
United States and Israel launched a joint military campaign against Iran on 28 February 2026,
striking leadership compounds, military infrastructure, and nuclear-related facilities in Tehran
and other cities under the Israeli codename Operation Roaring Lion. In the campaign’s
opening hours, Khamenei was killed in a strike on his residential compound, along with
several senior IRGC commanders and regime officials; President Trump characterized the
killing as “the single greatest chance for the Iranian people to take back their Country.”
Despite the elimination of the regime’s senior leadership, the Islamic Republic itself did not
collapse.
U.S. and Israeli officials justified the strikes by citing regional security, Iran’s advancing
missile and nuclear capabilities, and the January massacre itself. In this sense, lethal domestic
repression supplied part of the public justification for external force. Yet the decision to
intervene was equally shaped by the two countries’ own strategic interests in the region, and
the campaign’s humanitarian costs, including a strike on a girls’ school that killed 168
children, complicated the same humanitarian rationale used to justify it. If the intervention
removed a leadership widely regarded as illegitimate, it did so at a civilian cost that raises its
own questions about whether externalized force resolves a legitimacy crisis or merely
displaces it into a new register of violence.
International Law and Contested Justification
The Iranian case illustrates how declining legitimacy operates not only as a domestic
phenomenon but as an international status, communicated through diplomatic recognition and
institutional engagement. When foreign states or international institutions begin to question a
regime’s legitimacy, the protections ordinarily associated with sovereignty grow fragile, and
diplomatically isolated regimes become more vulnerable to external interference. Under
international law, however, the loss of legitimacy alone does not authorize the use of force.
Article 2(4) of the UN Charter obliges member states to refrain from the threat or use of force
against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, subject only to the right
of individual or collective self-defense recognized under Article 51, or to authorization by the
UN Security Council.
The February strikes were conducted without Security Council authorization and in the
absence of a clearly demonstrated imminent armed attack that would satisfy the self-defense
exception; critics characterized the operation as a violation of the Charter’s prohibition on the
unilateral use of force, and as part of a broader pattern in which powerful states increasingly
treat international legal constraints as optional. Declining legitimacy, in other words, did not
legally authorize the strikes on Iran, but it generated the political narrative that made
intervention publicly defensible, a distinction that is central to this paper’s argument. The
Iranian case therefore stands as a caution as much as a case study: it suggests that while
diminishing legitimacy can catalyze intervention, intervention does not thereby resolve the
underlying crisis of political order.
Part Two: Venezuela — Operation Absolute Resolve and the Legalization
of Extraction
Conceptual Foundations
Legitimacy, understood as conformity to law and as the population’s belief in a government’s
right to rule, is equally central to how outside powers decide whether, and how, to intervene
in another state’s affairs. When foreign governments or institutions such as the United Nations
decline to recognize a government as legitimate, this creates an opening for external
interference that would otherwise be foreclosed by the presumption of sovereignty. Powerful
states have historically invoked humanitarian grounds, such as human rights violations, or
security grounds, such as terrorism or narcotics trafficking, to justify actions that would
otherwise appear to violate the prohibition on the use of force, framing intervention as
defensive rather than aggressive. Venezuela in early 2026 illustrates a further variation on this
pattern: intervention framed not as an act of war at all, but as an act of law enforcement ; the
extraction of an indicted criminal defendant rather than the removal of a head of state.
Legitimacy Crisis: The 2024 Election and Its Aftermath
Venezuela’s legitimacy crisis unfolded over decades, as democratic institutions eroded under
Hugo Chávez and, after 2013, Nicolás Maduro. That erosion reached a decisive point after the
July 2024 presidential election, which independent observers and much of the international
community concluded Maduro had lost to the opposition; his refusal to concede, and the
subsequent repression of opposition figures including Nobel laureate María Corina Machado,
deepened international skepticism of his government’s legitimacy. Numerous states, together
with the European Union, declined to recognize Maduro’s claimed victory and called for the
outcome to reflect the will of the Venezuelan people. By January 2026, Maduro governed a
state that much of the international community no longer regarded as legitimately his to lead,
a status that, as in Iran, made external action politically thinkable even where it remained
legally contested.
Operation Absolute Resolve
That action arrived in the early hours of 3 January 2026. Under the codename Operation
Absolute Resolve, more than 200 U.S. special operations personnel (Delta Force operators
inserted by the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, supported by more than 150
aircraft) raided Maduro’s compound in Caracas and, within roughly three hours, captured
Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, transporting them to the United States. Venezuelan
authorities reported around 100 deaths resulting from the operation, including 32 Cuban
nationals whom Cuba said were present in an advisory military capacity; seven U.S. service
members were injured, none fatally.
Crucially, U.S. officials did not present the raid as an act of war. Maduro had been under a
standing U.S. federal indictment since 2020 for narco-terrorism conspiracy and cocaine
trafficking as the alleged leader of the “Cartel de los Soles,” which the State Department
designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization in November 2025. Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen.
Dan Caine described the special operations troops as providing security for federal law
enforcement officers executing an arrest warrant, rather than conducting a traditional military
capture raid. The framing of the latter as an arrest, and not an invasion, is what elevates
Venezuela beyond a conventional case of great-power pressure on a weak state: it represents
an attempt to reclassify regime change itself as a domestic law-enforcement matter,
temporarily relocated onto foreign soil.
Extraordinary Rendition and the Combatant Framing
This reclassification rests on a deliberate legal maneuver. By designating the Cartel de los
Soles a terrorist organization and treating U.S. counter-narcotics operations against it as a
non-international armed conflict, the Trump administration constructed a legal register in
which Maduro could be treated simultaneously as an indicted criminal defendant and as a
combatant subject to military capture, all without seeking authorization from the UN Security
Council. Commentators, including an op-ed in Le Monde, characterized this maneuver as
functionally similar to “extraordinary rendition” ; the practice, associated with post-9/11
counterterrorism policy, of extracting a wanted individual from foreign soil outside ordinary
channels of extradition or diplomacy. Framed as law enforcement, the operation sidestepped
the vocabulary, and the legal thresholds, that would ordinarily attach to a use of armed force
against a sovereign state’s head of government.
The distinction matters because it exposes how readily powerful states can rewrite legal
categories to bypass sovereignty rather than confront it directly. Where the Iranian case
involved an overt, if contested, invocation of self-defense and humanitarian necessity,
Operation Absolute Resolve avoided that debate largely by declining to characterize itself as
an act of intervention in the first place. The Group of Friends in Defense of the UN Charter, a
coalition of states aligned with Venezuela, condemned the operation before the UN Security
Council on 5 January as an act of aggression and an illegal abduction of a head of state,
rejecting the law-enforcement framing outright. U.S. lawmakers, by contrast, celebrated the
raid as the removal of an illegitimate narco-terrorist dictator. This split in international
reaction underscores that, as with Iran, declining legitimacy did not settle the legal question of
whether force was justified ; it merely supplied competing narratives through which each side
could claim its position was lawful.
International Reactions and the Successor Dilemma
Venezuela’s Supreme Court moved swiftly to preserve continuity of government, directing
Vice President Delcy Rodríguez to assume the presidency on an interim basis; she was sworn
in on 5 January and backed by the Venezuelan military under a mandate initially set at 90
days. Rodríguez’s ascension illustrates what might be called the successor dilemma inherent
in externally engineered regime change: despite the extraction of Maduro himself, power in
Caracas passed not to the opposition that many outside observers regarded as the legitimately
elected government, but to a senior chavista loyalist who had spent nearly a decade defending
the very administration whose legitimacy the operation was meant to repudiate. Rodríguez
has since sought to balance continued cooperation with Washington against domestic pressure
to resist what she has publicly described as Washington’s orders, a tension that illustrates how
intervention, even when operationally successful, does not necessarily resolve, and may
simply relocate, the underlying legitimacy crisis it was meant to address.
Comparative Reflection: Iraq, 2003
Both cases echo a longer pattern visible in the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, in which
officials justified the removal of Saddam Hussein’s government by citing human rights abuses
and, ultimately unsubstantiated, claims regarding weapons of mass destruction. As in Iran and
Venezuela, a narrative of diminished legitimacy was mobilized to justify regime change; as in
both 2026 cases, the intervention produced long-term instability, insurgency, and unresolved
questions about the legitimacy of the governance structures it left behind. Whether the United
States simply requires a pretext to act militarily in regions of strategic interest is a separate
question beyond this paper’s scope, but the recurrence of the pattern across Iraq, Iran, and
Venezuela suggests that legitimacy narratives function less as a genuine legal trigger for
intervention than as a rhetorical resource that becomes available to powerful states once a
regime’s domestic authority has visibly failed.
Conclusion
Diminishing legitimacy increases the likelihood that both internal repression and external
actors will become more violent and more assertive. In Iran, the erosion of the Islamic
Republic’s claim to rule by consent produced the deadliest episode of state violence in its
history, and that violence in turn supplied part of the justification for a foreign military
campaign that killed the regime’s supreme leader without restoring political order. In
Venezuela, a comparable erosion of electoral legitimacy created the political conditions for an
operation that reframed regime change as law enforcement, extracting Maduro through a legal
architecture built specifically to avoid the constraints that would apply to an outright war.
In both cases, foreign actors framed intervention as a response to a legitimacy crisis, yet such
framing remains legally and politically contested, and interventions conducted without
international authorization or consensus tend to reproduce, rather than resolve, the instability
they claim to address. This is visible in Iran’s continued fragmentation after Khamenei’s death
and in Venezuela’s successor dilemma, where a Maduro loyalist, not the internationally
recognized opposition, now governs under close U.S. oversight. The legal implications of
both episodes matter beyond their immediate human costs: interventions pursued without
broad international support risk undermining the very institutions, the UN Charter chief
among them, that are meant to adjudicate the legitimacy of state authority in the first place,
complicating not only the politics of post-intervention reconstruction but the international
legal order within which future crises of legitimacy will unfold.
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