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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.
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.
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.
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. 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. And it's not too dissimilar to how we entered the Iraq quagmire. You condemn that as naked aggression in Russia's case, and then endorse the same underlying logic when the U.S. does it in Venezuela because you like the target and the president. 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. 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." 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. 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? 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.
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.
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.
