Maduro is not good for Venezuela.
The US should not be the decider of who stays in power on another country.
The president should not have the power to apprehend a countries president IN THEIR COUNTRY without a process thats more than just "I really want it".
The US is giving another clear message that it does not care about global order, just global control. We're back in the 70s.
There is ZERO concern of the current US administration about the welfare of Venezuelans, its a power play, if maduro played by the US rules, he would be in power regardless of crimes. Pinochet, The Brazilian regime are all here as testament to that.
I hope the power change turns out better for the Venezuelans. I hope this is a catalyst of change for a better government. Ideally one that does not sell itself to the US for legitimacy. I don't think that is the likely outcome.
And then a few seconds later: "US oil companies will go into Venezuela"
Never the US has been so honest around so many lies in the same speech.
I am still curious about the whole side bar about Washington being now safest and free of crime.
And all that as official doctrine, not even some secret strategy paper or covert ops campaign.
Edit: I had to chuckle at his "reviewing" of the Monroe doctrine as DONroe doctrine. There is "on the nose" and there is "punching someone in the face"...
I'd make the case it depends on who's defining what is and is not a crime.
Consider that the POTUS is a 34x convicted criminal, and yet he not only has total freedom, he literally has the highest quality personal protection ecosystem on the planet, and so much more.
So, who is the criminal here? Which are the crimes? And what is _actually_ going to happen?
(To be clear I'm not a fan of Chávez or of Maduro.)
> "We're going to have our very large United States oil companies go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure and start making money for the country. And we are ready to stage a second and much larger attack if we need to do so."
> "We're not afraid of boots on the ground if we have to have it"
> "It's gonna make a lot of money"
> "Well, you know, it won't cost us anything because the money coming out of the ground is very substantial"
Reading @atrupar.com 's live transcriptions,
Venezuela is down to 1 million barrels per day, down from 3 million per day from the 2000s because of the sanctions after Hugo Chavez. They own the worlds largest reserve (about 300 billion barrels worth) and it was always my understanding that we worked with them before Hugo Chavez went the route he went and brought a great nation to shambles for a power trip.
I think Venezuela will recover with our aid, but a lot of their old infrastructure is gone, they will need investors. They will also need to deal with their crime problem and hold real elections for once.
I heard that as Trump doing his usual thing patting himself on the back while justifying the continued use of our military for domestic law enforcement.
Its more this: https://www.reddit.com/r/CringeTikToks/comments/1q34556/mill...
The new President of Venezuela will be called Fulgencio Batista...
I get the impression they are concerned at least a bit with the welfare of Venezuelans. Maybe a secondary consideration to drugs and oil but here's what Trump was saying:
>We're going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious
transition. So, we don't want to be involved with having somebody else get
in. And we have the same situation that we had for the last long period of years. So we are going to run the
country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious
transition. And it has to be judicious because that's what we're all about. We
want peace, liberty, and justice for the great people of Venezuela. (https://youtu.be/cQdRlS4uf0E?t=3784)
100x times this!
US administration doesn't care about the welfare of most human beings in the world (including in the US).
We saw it in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lybia, Yemen and now Palestine. Having an assumption that this move was made for Venezuelans and now they're liberated from evil is wrong.
It looks like propaganda. Day after, and then all the American news sites post stories about Venezuelans celebrating? Looks like propaganda. Almost no dissenting stories, no real discussion. Blackhawks and missiles at night, and hooray, spontaneous street parties, and news reporters just happen to be there to capture their "spontaneous" rejoicing. Reuters, Bloomberg, ABC, NBC. Rejoicing, dreams of democracy, yatta. CBS seems like one of the only sites that actually carried somewhat balanced coverage of people burning US flags, and no to American war.
As opposed to what? Who "should" be the decider? China? Russia? Maduro? The Venezuelan Military?
The alternative is not that Venezuelans choose who stays in power democratically. The alternative, as we just saw until now, is that the Maduro dictatorship maintains power through force.
Why they don't attack Saudi Arabia then? Saudi's even had a role in 9/11.
Decades of lies shaped the narrative that all invasions US do is because countries have dictators, it's being the narrative even now when they explicitly say it's because of oil.
International law clearly states that a sovereign nation has the right to self-rule, without external intervention. The UN Charter doesn't differentiate between democractic and non-democratic nations - it's up to the people of a nation to select their leadership.
We've seen this principle violated before, when the Ukrainian people took the streets for months to topple their leader in 2014. Russia to this day takes this as an excuse to question Ukrainian sovereignty, framing the events as a "US coup" to justify their violent invasion of Ukraine.
The argument you make just plays in their hand. "There was a violent coup - we need to remove the coup government and bring back democracy to Ukraine", they say. Because in your framing leaves open who gets to decide what it means to be democratically legitimized.
What if the US decides that it will not recognize the government of Denmark as democratically elected and moves to liberate the people of Greenland from their despotic dictatorship?
You're argument opens the door for unlimited military intervention.
Anything multilateral for starters, and involving multilateral nonviolent interventions first.
How can you say that like it’s a real argument? You’re REALLY, in 2026, defending that the US is “bringing democracy” to other countries by force?
I… How?
Not to mention that the "end" here is first and foremost enriching the administrative "elite" and extending their power. If they cared about democracy, they'd stand firmly behind Ukraine instead of humoring Russia.
The whole "we got him" is a bit fishy. I think the Venezuelan military (and the current vice president) wanted Maduro out. A coup would have been messy. So the US comes in and does them a favor.
This is crony capitalism. This is Trump shoring up support from oil companies.
Mr Trump has purposefully depressed the value of non-petroleum energy sources in the US, which props up the value of US oil Producers and processors.
And now, This is a territory takeover by a mafia don, so he can hand favors to other rich guys. Maduro wasn’t doing the deal Trump wanted, so this is what Trump did.
If solar and wind were thriving in the US (as they could be!) then this new oil territory would be worth less. That’s why Trump hates wind. He cannot convert clean energy into a benefit for himself.
It’s not about drugs or fentanyl. It’s not about democracy or corrupt elections in VZ.
To be fair we did almost exactly this in 1989 in Panama [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_invasion_of_Pana...
Vs. "70s" sounds far more like Vietnam. And a whole load of other bigger/uglier/longer conflicts, under Presidents whose moral and military leadership seemed rather lacking.
A more important question is if he does get sentenced will Trump just pardon him https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9qewln7912o
Genuine question, the decades long dictatorship backed by the US military in 64 or the recent pressure Trump made to try and put Bolsonaro back into power despite his crimes?
All of Maduro's people are still in power and the president just said the woman who actually won the vote is not suitable to be in charge
Good luck with the US running another country when we are cratering ourselves
Impeach him and send him to the Hague for trial if this was so justified
BTW they are now talking about Cuba, we are headed for WW3 by 2028
Depending on how cynical you are, you could say that all American administrations are like that. (I don’t think that’s quite true—I think Reagan/Bush had a genuine ideological vision of using foreign policy to promote democracy and capitalism around the work. But it’s certainly a common criticism.)
Ultimately it's going to be outside actors, and no matter who it was, even the UN, Venezuela could just say we don't recognize your authority and nothing would happen
Lol this is already proven false.
The put the Vice President in power who is now coincidentally supporting what the US is doing, including sending oil companies in to as Trump put it “sell oil to the Chinese”.
Neither was doing that with other countries they ransacked. The other was pouring enough propaganda at you so that you think it is somehow different.
See for yourself: https://maps.app.goo.gl/BctQ7hV798imS4cF8?g_st=ipc
They’re dead and have been for decades. The reason is they had no enforcement arm.
For the UN to ever fix a international issue it would require that country to anger all 5 UN powers. Venezuela has Russia and China on its side, so nothing would have happened.
I don't think this was a humanitarian mission. I'm speculating from Trump's perspective, Maduro was a major de-stabilizing factor. The Western world also seems to tacitly agree that the man had to go -- I don't think Maria Machado's recent Nobel Peace Prize was coincidence.
This is a new opinion. What is your basis for not believing might makes right in an anarchic system?
This is the key. Trump loves dictators, no matter how they got into power. As long as they give him what he wants or he's afraid of them.
What the US have just done is not something new because of Trump.
We are told about "international law" and "norms" so much that we perhaps forget that this is mostly BS.
I guess sometimes you just need WW3.
The US is no longer a credible partner, and without coalition forces the recreational wars in the 2000s would have been a lot less "fun".
I'm not so sure you want a global order based on strength. You don't want small countries with little to loose arming do with nukes. But voting for it is suddenly very attractive.
And yes, this is not something new. It is something old. It is something that we have left behind us and Donald Trump should therefore be condemned.
And right now, the entire right wing is cheering on this situation. These are people who wanted an isolationist America that does not start new conflicts. Spineless Republican senators and legislators are staying quiet as they allow this horrific dictatorial action to go on without any criticism. And meanwhile, tech billionaires like Elon Musk are continuously tweeting sycophantic support for this illegal act of state terrorism.
How will America recover? Its political system is broken. And its international reputation is shattered.
Well, they said they wanted that. But maybe Trump wasn’t lying to them as much as lying alongside them.
Which Venezuelans? I ask because this exact same argument was used to justify the many failed assassination attempts, the Bay of Pigs debacle and sanctions on Cuba where many Cuban Americans were anti-Castro.
Now that might've been true but consider the source: many Cubans in America fled when Batista was ousted or in response to that. A famous example of that is Rafael Cruz, the father of Senator Ted Cruz. Ted Cruz famously said he hates communism because his father was tortured... by Batista [1]. And it's a failure in journalism that he wasn't challenged and lambasted for this idiotic take.
There are a lot of Venezuealsn in the US who justifiably fled the chaos there. But why was it chaotic? The US will try and tell you it's because of Maduro. But what about the sanctions? As a reminder, sanctions are a nice way of starving "we're goign to starve you and deny you medicine in the hopes you do what we want to the administration we can't otherwise topple".
Also, the US doesn't actually care about any of the crimes they accuse Maduro of. This is the same country who deposed Allende and installed Pinochet into Chile, who was a brutal dictator. That too was about resources. Oh and let's not forget Iran, who had their democratically elected government deposed to install yet another brutal dicator, the Shah, in 1953, again for oil. Or the United Fruit Company in Guatemala. The list goes on. This happens so much there's a Wikipedia page on it [2].
So, for anyone who celebates this (and I mean this generally, not at the commenter I'm responding to), you will see no benefit for this. A few billionaires will get richer, probably. The US was probably pour countless billions into supporting some puppet, probably Machado but we'll see. And I would be surprised if the lives of Venezuelans gets any better.
And if the lives of Venezuelans does actually get better, it's probably by lifting sanctions and you should be asking why we were starving them in the first place.
As a reminder, the US knows the effects of sanctions. When confronted by a report on sanctions killing 500,000 Iraqi children in 1996, then UN Ambassador and later Secretary of State responded [3]:
> “We have heard that half a million [Iraqi] children have died. I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima,” asked Stahl, “And, you know, is the price worth it?”
> “I think that is a very hard choice,” Albright answered, “but the price, we think, the price is worth it.”
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/I2AdbLDVb0Q
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
[3]: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/3/25/lets-remember-m...
All which are currently in foreign countries and are free to express their voices without fear of prosecution. I live in spain with my venezuelan girlfriend, and everybody here from her venezuelan bubble is celebrating and cheering - hoping this is a first step towards freedom. You can turn on your TV to "rtve Telediaro", it is a spanish 24h news channel where they also show venezuelan expats getting together and celebrating from within spain. Other cities in latin america are the same, just watch some news channels from the spanish-speaking world.
They were probably also cheering in the streets in the US, if they weren't afraid of ICE deportations.
It was about the Soviet Union. The British convinced the US that Mosaddegh was going to align himself with the Soviet-proxy communist party (Tudeh) to stay in power. The British, on the other hand, did it because Iran had nationalized British oil fields. The US' oil interests were in Saudi Arabia.
Also the way people describe this is rather twisted. The Shah was not installed by the US. The Shah had been in power since 1941. He was installed by the British, same as his father. The coup replaced Mosaddegh with Fazlollah Zahedi, not the Shah.
Moreover, Mosaddegh's government was not remotely democratically elected. There's a rather in-depth State department memo from the era that describes how those "elections" worked in Iran which made clear that the people voting had little to do with who won. Elections were full of ballot stuffing, bribery and just outright manipulation by pretty much everyone - the Shah, Mosaddegh, Tudeh, foreign governments, etc. [1]
Plus, Mosaddegh had halted Parliamentary election counting early to prevent more opposition from getting elected risking his majority (his party controlled the more urban areas of Iran which finished "counting" earlier). He began ruling with emergency powers and jailing his opposition. That led to mass resignations in Parliament - to the point where they couldn't even form a quorum. Mosaddegh then dissolved Parliament and granted himself full dictatorial powers and ruled by decree after another sham election where 10% of the population "voted."
And it's at this point that the coup happened. The Shah, using his power under Iran's constitution, wrote a letter dismissing Mosaddegh. He was replaced with Fazlollah Zahedi and the Shah started to take a far more active role in government.
[1] https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1951-54Ira...
Your perception about Iran in 1953 is badly wrong.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articl...
"I really want it" is not the reason. Come on! Maduro is indicted in the Southern District of New York. Both charged with conspiracy to commit narco-terrorism and import cocaine, possession of machine guns and destructive devices, and conspiracy to possess machine guns and destructive devices against the US.
The military operation was merely to lead the operation to allow FBI to arrest. Now, the oil issue certainly can be argued as the real reason for the strike and capture, but frankly they were OUR oil fields (funded by US companies) before Maduro seized them and nationalized them.
Good thing then that Maduro isn't the president of Venezuela, but a narco-terrorist usurper.
EDIT: Downvoting me will not change that fact, only hide it.
The U.S. has all the oil it needs right now.
The message from the U.S. to the world is: don’t nationalize our businesses infrastructure and then use it against our interests (even if they are on your sovereign territory) - we do not forgive and we do not forget.
Also I presume that it is not OK for the US to have its say on who stays in power in Venezuela, but it's OK for Cuba or Russia to do so?
Second line: You presumed that out of feeling? I did not write anything hinting at that.
This event will also serve as a measure of how strong China actually is. Venezuela is very important strategically for them, they can't let it slide unless they're weak.
Surely, they won't go as far as direct US confrontation, but if they don't make Venezuela into a death trap for any US soldier being stationed there, one can draw the conclusion that China isn't as strong as many make them (including me, I confess).
But it wouldn't be that surprising if Venezuela turns out being a death trap for any US soldier being stationed there...
Without some sort of underlying religious ideology to neutralize being concerned about the likely outcome of hellfires dropped on you from 20k feet if you kill American soldiers, I can’t see many stepping up.
Chinese intervention in Venezuela is a suicide mission by every rule of warfare. You are surrounded, you have no supply line and you can't amass your material at the front since America is already there.
