When American aircraft struck Venezuela in early January, abducting President Nicolás Maduro and killing more than a hundred people, the attack was widely framed as a unilateral act of US power. That is misleading. British industry, British diplomacy and British silence all form part of the story.

According to reporting by the British advocacy group Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT), US forces used F-22 Raptors and F-35 Lightning IIs in the assault.

But those jets are not merely American.

Around 15% by value of every F-35 is made in Britain. The rear fuselage comes from BAE Systems in Lancashire; targeting lasers from Leonardo in Edinburgh; bomb-release cables from L3Harris in Brighton; lift systems from Rolls-Royce; refuelling pods from Mission Systems Wimborne.

Yes, the aircraft itself is assembled by US-giant Lockheed Martin. But the supply chain is emphatically multinational: Britain is part of that chain.

Why does this matter? Because the strike on Venezuela was a clear breach of Article 2 of the UN Charter. This prohibits the use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of a state. Britain’s own export-control rules require arms transfers to be suspended where there is a clear risk of serious violations of international humanitarian law.

The government has already accepted that this legal threshold has been crossed in relation to arms exports to Israel. Yet it continues to permit the export of F-35 components to Israel, arguing that the jet’s global supply chain is too integrated to interrupt without endangering “international peace and security”.

Phrases such as that risk ringing increasingly hollow.

The US interpretation of peace and security, as CAAT notes, appears to involve the abduction of foreign leaders, the bombing of sovereign states and the open pursuit of regime change in oil-rich countries. Britain, by remaining embedded in the F-35 programme, becomes complicit in these actions.

The political backdrop is no less troubling. As Declassified UK has documented, Britain’s role in destabilising Venezuela did not begin this month. In 2002, during a right-wing coup against President Hugo Chávez, the British embassy in Caracas declined to assist him, despite appeals to help preserve his life. Officials worried instead about the reaction of Caracas’s “wealthier residents”. Chávez survived only because mass mobilisation forced his reinstatement.

More recently, Britain has aligned itself closely with Washington’s campaign to unseat Maduro. In 2019 it recognised Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s “interim president”, froze more than $2bn of Venezuelan gold in the Bank of England, and quietly established a Venezuela Reconstruction Unit inside the Foreign Office to plan for the day after Maduro’s removal.

It has been reported that such sanctions, strongly backed by London, have contributed to tens of thousands of excess deaths, even as British diplomats explored future involvement in Venezuela’s energy sector.

Against this record, Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s refusal to condemn the latest US attack is not caution; it is complicity.

Yes, he has been quick to denounce Russian aggression in Ukraine, but has has been conspicuously reluctant to apply the same legal standards to America. The result is a rules-based order that functions selectively. It is an order that is enforced against adversaries and waived for allies.

This makes it no order, but something far darker.

We must acknowledge that modern warfare is not only about who drops the bomb, but also who designs the aircraft. Who forges the components, Who provides the diplomatic cover.

Britain cannot plausibly claim impartiality or a moral high-ground while its factories supply the hardware and its government backs that up with silence.

CAAT, rightly, calls on the UK to leave the F-35 programme, halt exports of its components, and open an investigation into Britain’s complicity in breaches of international law.

Those demands deserve to be taken seriously. If international law is to mean anything, it cannot stop just because it is being abused by an ally.

To fail to respond to what happened in Venezuela will make that incursion not an aberration but the beginning of an unravelling – where military aggression tied to unhidden resource extraction, justified in the bland language of security, and enabled by the British arms economy.

Britain is not a bystander to this unravelling. It is, quietly and profitably, part of the machinery.

AOAV report