The most revealing part of this entire exchange is how wildly you've inflated Venezuela's threat just to justify whatever you think the Trump administration might do. You've turned a dysfunctional, corrupt petro-state into some kind of regional supervillain. A narco cartel fortress, Iranian drone platform, Chinese naval staging ground, a Russian hybrid war proxy, and an existential danger to the Panama Canal all at once. That kind of threat stacking isn't foreign policy analysis, it's the exact pattern of exaggeration and fear construction rogue actors rely on whenever they want to rationalize actions they can't defend on legal or strategic grounds. You condemned Russia for doing that in Ukraine. Now you're doing it yourself. Heck Venezuela isn't even the biggest threat to us within a 1000 mile radius.whiterock said:ATL Bear said:whiterock said:ATL Bear said:whiterock said:ATL Bear said:whiterock said:ATL Bear said:whiterock said:ATL Bear said:whiterock said:ATL Bear said:whiterock said:ATL Bear said:whiterock said:ATL Bear said:
So now Venezuela using Russian and Iranian weapons are going to be bombing Brazilian ships with beef on them? You are weaving epic tales at this point because the business case for tariffs is floundering. Higher prices, fewer jobs, and economic volatility. Maybe the Supreme Court will save Trump from himself.
no, I'm making valid geopolitical observations.
-no country wants to be dependent on imported food supply.
-no country wants to be dependent on imported energy sources.
-no country wants to be dependent on imported on strategic products.
-no country wants to allow hostile powers to sit astride it's lines of supply for anything.
That concept undergirds the Monroe Doctrine itself = keep foreign powers away from our trade routes.
No country wants its supply of foodstuffs to have to sail within range of weapons systems of a hostile power like China. And no country will want to stand idle while a trade route free of such threats is placed under them by changes in status quo.
This is the way the world actually works. China doesn't want us out of Asia because they hate us. They want us out of Asia because our geopolitical position places the vast majority of China's trade routes are within striking range of F-18 Hornet squadrons.
You better fix your Ukraine arguments and apologize to Sam Lowry and Redbrickbear, because they've been defending Russia's actions in Ukraine on similar grounds.
Sigh…… that situation is not analogous - Russia and Nato have equal interests in the status of Ukraine. The same cannot be said about our adversaries actions in Venezuela.
It is extremely similar from a unilateral action justification. Unfriendly regime and proximity of adversarial military threat. The cocaine war is a mere justification for that geopolitical objective.
Again, make up your mind.
You are even worse on foreign policy than economics.
Keep ducking and weaving the realities of both.
You certainly do.
NATO and Russia have equal proximity and equal interested in Ukraine. The same cannot be said about Venezuela. To suggest the two are remotely analogous is the classic "tell me don't understate geopolitics without saying you don't understand geopolitics" situation.
You fundamentally misunderstand the question, and are simply providing political cover. The parallel is our actions and Russia's actions. Unilateral. Proximity based. Regime based. Legally suspect. Questionable threat motives.
Uh, no. You are contriving so far beyond your understanding that you are incapable of understanding how laughable your point is.
a) We have not invaded.
b) We have made no territorial demands.
d) Venezuela is not contiguous to us (like Ukraine is to Nato.)
d) Venezuela is not contiguous to any other great power (like Ukraine is to Russia).
e) Our demands are fully within international law
-stop allowing your territory to be used as cartel safehaven
-stop allowing your territory to be a source & transit for human/drug smuggling
-stop interfering in our politics (sending criminals as refugees to destabilize our society)
f) No other great power is even on the same continent, so they are not going to engage directly.
(could go on for a while....)
Venezuela is not about alliances, or territory, or very much of anything driving the Ukraine War dispute. Please go back to the kiddie table and fetch your sippy cup.
I've overestimated your intelligence. You bloviate to cover for your illogical and conflicting positions.
The point is your hypocritical arguments toward the architecture of justification, unilateral authority, regional entitlement, inflated threat narratives, and regime delegitimization. That all follows a disturbingly comparable pattern to Russia's approach that you ad nauseum have argued against (and I ironically agree with). If you condemn that pattern when Russia used it to set the stage for aggression in its neighborhood, you should be equally cautious when early parallels appear in U.S. policy toward Venezuela. History shows these actions build momentum over time. Russia's escalation was not born out in 2022, it accumulated from 2014 or really 2003 onward. The concern is that Trump's rhetoric and early policy signals mirror the first chapters of that playbook. That's exactly why the similarities mattered in Ukraine, but you turn a politically motivated blind eye in Venezuela.
That's a long-winded false equivalency.... "Russia throws its weight around in Ukraine and we throw our weight around in Venezuela, therefore the underlying situations and policy choices by both powers are identical." Not so. Russian troops in Ukraine are a significant threat to Nato; US troops in Venezuela do not threaten any other state at all. I.E. one of those situations risks great power war; the other has zero risk of further conflict. Russia's penchant for escalation was born somewhere back in the 11-12th century. They expand the Russian state until they are repelled. That is not the dynamic is manifestly not at play in Venezuela.
Venezuela does have criminal networks, trafficking routes, and dysfunctional governance. But the leap from "these issues exist" to "therefore we have unilateral legal authority to intervene, coerce, or threaten force" is where the argument collapses. International law does not allow one state to take military or coercive action because another state struggles with crime, migration, or internal governance.
Dead wrong.. One of the oldest and best developed principles of IL is that a state has a responsibility to NOT let their own domestic issues/problems cross borders into other states. (ex: our justification for invading Afghanistan.)
These are real problems, but not problems that grant the U.S. a legal blank check. Russia used the same logic pre-2014 and beyond framing Ukraine as a source of extremism, corruption, and outside interference to justify unilateral escalation. Remember Russia's "anti-terrorist operations" in the Donbas? The parallels matter because both powers elevate legitimate grievances into pretexts for increasingly aggressive actions that fall outside the bounds of international law.
....thereby proving what I've said above. A state takes coercive action when diplomacy fails = "war is a continuation of policy via other means." And it will always do so citing such principles of international law, no matter how flimsy such arguments may be. Most arguments against our support for Ukraine tacitly if not explicitly acknowledge that Russian actions in Ukraine are a textbook example of idealist revanchism - Russia by rights SHOULD own Ukraine. By comparison, there is no revanchism at all at play in Venezuela. Zero. It's all about Venezuelan actions sustained over decades which are measurably harmful to us.
I'll go back to the kiddie table now…
If you are fine with Venezuela emptying its jails into our country, allowing its government to be coopted by cartels running drugs into our country, extending cartel operations throughout our cities, hosting Iranian drone plants, Russian military advisors, and Chinese naval basing at the eastern end of the Panama Canal, etc.... just say so. If you want to let those problems fester while engaging in another couple decades of fruitless diplomatic negotiations, just say so. If not, then stand back and let the adults sort the problem out.
You've actually confirmed my point, not refuted it. Your argument boils down to: "Great powers do what they want when diplomacy frustrates them, and they'll always find legal language to justify it." But that's exactly the justification Russia used in Ukraine. You're just carving out an exception for the United States because you like the outcome and the Administration doing it. Nothing principled about that. It's just your tribalism dressed up as geopolitics, and your continued love affair with unrestrained executive authority.
Your claim that Russia's actions were revanchist and ours are not is irrelevant. Revanchism describes motive, not method. From the start I've been analyzing the method. It is unilateral coercion justified by inflated threat narratives, regional entitlement, and an escalating scale of legal excuses. Russia used real grievances (to them) of extremism, corruption, NATO interference, and exaggerated them into a pretext for bypassing international law. You're doing the same with Venezuela by taking real problems and inflating them into a doctrine of unilateral authority that simply does not exist in international law. And the fact that you jump straight to the most extreme hypotheticals and exaggerations like Venezuelan jails "emptied into the U.S.", Iranian drone factories, Chinese "naval basing", etc. demonstrates the core problem. When you start justifying action with worst-case narratives instead of legal standards (Hello Iraq WMD), you're already in the same rhetorical terrain Russia occupied from 2014 to 2022. Great powers always escalate by convincing themselves that the threat is existential and diplomacy is futile. That logic doesn't become valid just because it's the U.S. using it this time.
And let's be clear, none of the things you list, drugs, trafficking, refugees, foreign advisors, or bad governance constitute an armed attack under Article 51. None meet the threshold for unilateral force. None create a legal carte blanche for intervention. If they did, half the Western Hemisphere would have legal grounds to intervene in the United States over fentanyl precursors, gun smuggling, and political interference, as well as the U.S. intervening further in other nations with similar internal problems (hello Mexico). You don't get to rewrite international law just because reality is inconvenient. You can argue policy all day about how to pressure Venezuela, but pretending that "adults" get to override the UN Charter and international law whenever diplomacy is hard is exactly the mindset that justified every major power escalation of the last century, including the one you've spent years condemning in Ukraine. That's the hypocrisy I'm pointing out. You can deny the parallel, but you can't deny the pattern. Russia escalated because it convinced itself its grievances justified bypassing international law. You're walking down the same path and calling it realism.
So if your position is simply: "We're a great power, we do what we want," then own that. But don't dress it up as legality, consistency, or principle because it's none of those things.
That's a great big steaming pile of leftist moral relativist horseshyte seasoned with profound ignorance of current events - it's always America's fault, we're no better than Russia, no difference between what Russia did in Ukraine and what we're doing in Venezuela, leave poor Venezuela alone because they're not doing anything we should be remotely concerned about, if we'd quit meddling abroad all the world's problems would go away, and on and on and on...... Reality is, Iran does have a military presence in Venezuela complete with operable Shahed drones as well as a production line to make those drones. We are not the only country concerned about that.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=iran+shaed+factor+venezuela&atb=v405-1&ia=web
Iranian military bases and Shahed drone production within the realm of the Monroe Doctrine?
Iranian military bases and Shahed drones in range of the Panama Canal?
Iranian advisors liaising withe the Cartels of the Sun which has infiltration routes and networks inside the USA?
How much unconventional warfare against us are you going to tolerate?
You might also want to google a bit more on Venezuela's very recent threats to invade Guyana (to seize 2/3rds of it). Were you aware that Venezuela has already passed law annexing the territory in dispute (just like Russia did with the Donbas)? Does a rogue state with Iranian military presence and Shahed drone production lines and Russian & Chinese advisors aiming to reshape maps in Latin America not worry you in the least? You don't like a war in Ukraine but it's perfectly fine to have a 6-way conflict erupt in the Amazonian basin?
Reality is, great powers do what they think is in their interest and they cite principles of international law to justify it to the rest of the world, which then makes determinations on whether & how to engage or not. Not one state in the world believed that pre-2022 Ukraine itself posed a threat to Russia, was doing anything to destabilize Russia, or was as rotten with Nazis as Gaza was with terrorists. Similarly, every state understood that a great power moving armies into a neutral country bordering another great power was orders of magnitude more provocative than any/all of Ukraine joining the EU and being a Nato partner (like Finland & Sweden) or even a Nato member (like the Baltics). By comparison, no country is terribly worried about what we are doing in Venezuela. No coalition is coming to their defense. The region mostly appreciates it, because Venezuela is a problem for them as well. And no great power will be alarmed at our actions, because what happens in Venezuela actually does have ZERO impact on countries like China, Russia, Iran, etc.....who have no geopolitical interests in Latin America whatsoever beyond needling the USA.
I mean, seriously. Western countries DEBATING about whether or not Ukraine should join Nato is righteous grounds for a Russian invasion to seize control of the entire country (and we are an aggressor if we do anything to help Ukraine resist), yet we must tolerate everything great powers and regime-allied drug cartels want to do against us in Venezuela because....well, America bad?
Venezuela has been a problem for the USA for a couple of decades and it's getting worse. Finally, we have a President working the problem in a serious way. And then we have you picking up the groyper isolationist argument and waiving it around like it's some kind of profound geopolitical analysis. We overstep boundaries in the Caribbean but it's completely unremarkable for the IRGC to have bases in Americas?
TDS and Tucker's podcast have turned your brain to mush.
You didn't actually engage with anything I said, you just buried it under insults and a laundry list of scary scenarios, and your typical tangential bloviating. Calling my argument "leftist moral relativist horse****", aside from the hilarity of me being defined as leftist, doesn't change the fact that you still haven't addressed the core point. I'm not saying "America is no better than Russia" or "poor Venezuela is harmless." I'm saying the justification framework you're using for unilateral escalation in Venezuela looks a lot like the one you (correctly) condemned when Russia used it to escalate in Ukraine between 2014 and 2022.
You're talking about the wrong framework- yours. Your patently specious argument requires an assumption that the US and Russia have done equally bad things in Ukraine and Venezuela, respectively, with no greater justification or further ramifications whatsoever. That is both lefitst moral relativism and groyper level isolationism "we're no better than anyone else......if we'd just quit meddling everywhere, there would be no conflict."
Take your own examples. Suppose we grant for the sake of argument everything you just listed. Iranian advisors, Shahed production, cartel links, Venezuelan saber-rattling over Guyana, Russian and Chinese presence, all of it. Those are serious concerns. But serious concerns do not magically turn into a new legal doctrine of when another state's internal rot or foreign relationships bother us enough, we can ignore the UN Charter and act unilaterally.
Your argument is quite ignorant of IL and the UN Charter. Neither prohibits a country from unilateral action. IL is not a codebook. It is a generally recognized set of principles and precedence states use to justify actions. The UN Charter (ironically, given the faulty premise of your argument) is just a "framework" for nations to work out disputes, which of course is of more benefit to smaller powers who need help than to greater powers who don't. It also creates a device which allows states to build coalitions to pursue their interests. Perhaps you should survey the landscape and tell us what coalitions have formed against our actions in Venezuela and compare that to the reaction of the international community to Russia's actions in Ukraine. (i.e. what we see rebukes your argument.)
None of what you listed crosses the Article 51 threshold of an armed attack. None of it creates a legal right to use force in Venezuelan territory. If it did, then half the world would have a plausible case to intervene in half the rest of the world, including in us, over drugs, smuggling, weapons flows, and foreign meddling. You're not articulating a rule of law, you're articulating a rule of convenience.
Actually, I did, you just don't understand the subject material well enough to spot it - countries have a duty under international law to keep their internal problems internal. Venezuela has not. But I have to hand it to you - you did get in another jab at the US being as bad as any other malefactor in the world.
You are openly admitting it when you say, "Reality is, great powers do what they think is in their interest and cite principles of international law to justify it." Exactly. That's the problem, not the defense.
Careful now, you're on the verge of making a globalist argument that international institutions should supersede member states.....
That's precisely what Moscow did with Ukraine, stack up grievances, reframe them as existential, and then cobble together some legal language and historical context on top.
Back to groyper-esque moral relativism.
And it's not too dissimilar to how we entered the Iraq quagmire.
More of the same. We had an entire international coalition. Russia doesn't for Ukraine. Our actions in Iraq were actually taken in pursuit of US resolutions; Russia's has no such justification for Ukraine. (I could go on for a while here, binding you up with the shoelaces of your own argument.)
You condemn that as naked aggression in Russia's case,
....because it was naked aggression justified by outlandish and patently absurd claims. Ukraine had taken no action to provoke Russia. It was not interfering in Russia in any way. Quite the opposite. Russia was engaged grey war inside Ukraine! Nothing about the prospects of some kind of Ukrainian relationship with EU or Nato was inflammatory, given that several other countries contiguous (or nearly so) to Russia had already done so. And you know full well Ukraine is not a Nazi state. Russia flatly wanted back land it had under the USSR and made an armored assault on Kiev to get it. Indeed, many opponents of our policy in support of Ukraine actually argue that Russia was entitled to have all of Ukraine back.
and then endorse the same underlying logic when the U.S. does it in Venezuela because you like the target and the president.
.....the moral relativism again. Venezuela actually is a narco-state. It is a cartel of drug lords operating under the framework of a state entity - several cartels headed by senior regime officials working in tandem with each other and state assets. It is well documented that those cartels have infiltrated thousands of their operatives inside our country to engage in organized criminal activity beyond narcotics trafficking. The revenues flowing to the cartels strengthen the Venezuelan state, and weaken the US. And that cartel state is in liaison with designated terror groups and adversarial nations no one contests are seeking to damage our interests...everywhere they can. Unlike Ukraine, Venezuela actually is a problem for a great power, and that's before we get to its regional ambitions (unilaterally annexing territory of a neighbor; threatening to invade said neighbor). But you didn't know all of that before you stepped
Either you think great powers should be constrained by some consistent standard, or you're openly saying we do it because we can, but you don't get to pretend those are the same thing.
There you go again, implying that the international community should cede sovereignty to international organizations. Not even the weakest of world powers, who would benefit most from such a structure, would agree to that. Sovereignty is existence. Great powers are, and rightly should be restrained by their own good judgment about what actions to take. Even when they show good judgment, there will be a cacophony of nonsensical arguments against them (like yours). And when they show poor judgment, they usually pay dearly, as has Russia in Ukraine. Nothing in IL or UN Charter proposes to be a controlling authority on member states. They're just "a framework" for diplomacy, negotiation, and coalition building based on the merits of the arguments presented to them, for the purpose of building/opposing international consensus.
You make the leap from "this is potentially dangerous, and we should be worried" to "therefore whatever the U.S. decides to do is fine and beyond criticism."
We know this for certain: whatever the Trump admin does will be met with histrionic criticism. neverTrumpers gonna neverTrump, as we see here. His tariffs have so wounded your sensibilities that you are now defending the Venezuelan drug cartel state.
Those are not the same conclusion. The fact Venezuela is a problem for the region, or that other states are also annoyed by Caracas, doesn't create a legal or moral blank check for whatever Washington wants to do.
Sigh...yes it does justify the actions taken thus far. That's why we see more outrage from the neverTrumper caucus than we do from the international community.
If "the neighborhood is fed up" were a sufficient justification, could you imagine the pretexts Russia could claim in Central Asia or the Caucasus every time it dislikes a government there?
LOL you should google up "central asia us relations" and read up a bit on the C5+1 process. Russia's spectacularly bad decision on Ukraine has united Central Asia against it, facilitating greater engagement of China and US in the region. Remember how I said "great powers are restrained by their own good judgment"? Russian actions in Ukraine has made them weaker everywhere. Same cannot be said about our actions in Venezuela.
Or China? You recognize how unacceptable that logic is when it's Moscow invoking spheres of influence, you just don't notice you're copying it when you invoke Monroe Doctrine language to wave away any constraint on us.
Again, we see you bumping up against your low ceiling of understanding of geopolitics. I have pointed out that Russia and Nato have equal "sphere of influence" calculations in Ukraine, in that Ukraine is a single-state shatterzone between Russia and Nato. The same is not the case for Venezuela, which is literally on the other side of the world from Russia, China, Iran, etc.... countries which have no inherent interest in Venezuela beyond poking the US in the eye.
And you mocking any pushback as "America bad" or "isolationist groyperism," when I've argued in support of our efforts in Ukraine for the very reasons you need to resist these types of misguided unilateralism you're advocating for us now is beyond ironic. Reality is you're just trying to avoid engaging the argument on its actual terms because you know your blind tribalism has cornered you here.
Getting it right in Ukraine has not prevented you from weaving "America Bad" and "isolationist groyperism" all throughout your arguments on Venezuela.
I'm not saying we should tolerate everything or that Venezuela is harmless. I've pointed out your real position as simply "we're a great power, we'll do what we want and call it law later,". Own it. But don't pretend it's principled, consistent, or fundamentally different in structure from the behavior you condemn when it comes from Moscow instead of Washington. That double standard is the whole point.
The double standard is yours. You are trying to obscure the substance of disputes with idealist arguments about "framework" and specious clams of "tribalism."
If you do not like the policy of a naval blockade to stop narcotics shipments, explain why it will not work. Explain how it makes us weaker. Better yet, propose a different solution other than waiting another 25 years pretending to do something about the problem (hoping it will go away on its own). If you do not see Venezuela as a problem for us or anyone else, make that case. But you can't. So you have fallen into the trap of trying to buttress an pitifully weak policy argument full of moral relativism and mumbo-jumbo about our legal and moral obligations under non-existent superseding canons of law and international institutions which have never done and will never do what you propose.
Venezuela is in the "find out" phase of a FAFO dynamic they created by their own bad foreign policy decisions. They were not constrained by their own good judgment. And they are going to pay for it. Dearly.
And it's impossible to miss that your entire arguments revolve around defending anything Trump chooses to do, as if the mere fact that it's his administration automatically converts a policy into a necessity. Every time you're pressed on legal thresholds, you shift to partisan grievances like "neverTrumpers gonna neverTrump," "his critics are hysterical," "you're defending Venezuela because you don't like Trump." That's your tribal loyalty speaking, not some insightful geopolitical take. You're not even evaluating actions on their merits, you're preemptively sanctifying them because they come from someone you've decided must be supported at all times and at all costs.
Your comfort with unchecked executive power has been the one consistent aspect of your arguments, whether it's this, the economy, etc. Every justification you offer rests on the premise that if a president you like decides Venezuela is a threat, that alone makes unilateral escalation inherently legitimate, and we're going to build narratives around it. No law, no threshold, no charter, no principle actually binds his decisions in your worldview, except when those rules restrain adversaries. You're angry when Russia unilaterally interprets its sphere of influence, but perfectly content to invoke the Monroe Doctrine as though it grants the U.S. divine authority to act however it pleases in the hemisphere. You are using politics not policy to aggressively defend a double standard you can't wiggle away from.
And that's the heart of the issue, your standard is mostly contingent on who is acting, not what they are doing. You are the one distracted by moralism, when its method at question. When Russia claims existential grievances, inflates threats, and asserts regional entitlement, you call it naked aggression, and you're right. When the United States uses the same justification pattern in Venezuela, you insist it's prudence and necessity, and that anyone questioning it must "hate America" or be "isolationist." You're not applying a principle, you're applying a preference. You want the rules strict for them and elastic for us. You want international law as a hammer against rivals, and a formality to waive away when it applies to your preferred administration. You keep calling my argument moral relativism because it's easier than admitting the underlying truth. You only object to power impunity when the wrong power exercises it. Swap the flags, and suddenly what was once illegitimate aggression becomes justified "interest-based action." Swap the president, and what once counted as reckless unilateralism becomes "finally someone with courage." You're not defending the United States, you're defending the idea that presidents you support should operate without constraints while insisting rival powers abide by those very same constraints. If this was Joe Biden pursuing this approach you know damn well you'd be making arguments similar to mine against it.
And the most ironic part is that for all your talk about "good judgment," Russia believed it was exercising good judgment too. Every great power intoxicated by its own narratives, convinced that the threat is existential and the moment is unique, tells itself the same story. We're different. Our actions are necessary. We won't face consequences, or consequences be damned. You're replaying that logic point for point and not because the threats demand it, but because you've decided in advance that whatever Trump does must be correct. Venezuela hasn't forced you into this argument. Your political priorities have. If you want to say openly, "I don't care about legal limits. Trump should do whatever he wants, and the U.S. is entitled to unilateral power," then say it. That's at least honest. But don't pretend that this is a principled or consistent position, or that it bears any resemblance to the standard you've demanded in other contexts. You're defending unchecked authority, inflated threats, and a double standard so blatant you keep trying to disguise it behind insults, slogans, and hypotheticals. If international law and norms matter when Russia violates them, they must matter when we do too. That's not supranational control, it's consistency. The UN Charter is not a "loose framework" or a suggestion board. It is a binding treaty the United States voluntarily signed to limit unilateral uses of force except in self defense against an armed attack or with Security Council approval.
Your final gem of "Venezuela is in the FAFO phase and will pay dearly" is the most honest thing you've said. It strips away all pretense of legality, consistency, or principle and reveals what your argument has been all along. We have great power, we'll do what we want, and the rules bind everyone else, not us. That is exactly the worldview you've spent years condemning in Russia. The fact that you suddenly embrace it when it serves your preferred administration is the clearest evidence of the political blindness you keep projecting onto me.
