To be very clear I do not support this -- out leaders should be held to account to their people, not foreign invaders deciding for us. Even if it seems unlikely that they ever will be, it's our process and people.
This argument doesn't really hold water because the jurisdiction of a nation isn't the whole world.
If we have a warrant for a Sovereign or someone else with Diplomatic Immunity we -- at the very least -- should not invade their territory to carry it out. That's not how the civilized society works, and that's not how we want it to work as evidenced by the thought experiment above.
If we are at war with a nation or people, and reject the premise of their fundamental sovereign or diplomatic nature of course it's a different story since we are talking about a fundamental disagreement of reality. There's a separate process for that weighty decision by the US people's representatives.
But it doesn't, so the charges of "possession of machineguns" [0] is an utter bullshit. Talk about kangaroo courts...
[0] https://xcancel.com/AGPamBondi/status/2007428087143686611
How do you reach this conclusion that you can’t help suffering?
Your mistake is in equating the US to other countries. You cannot. It is a superpower.
When other countries act hostile to the US, it can simply ignore their sovereignty at a whim, and this is a huge benefit to living in US.
Is it unfair? Sure. Who cares?
Capturing the de facto leader (elected or dictator) of a country is an act of war.
You could argue the war is justified, or that this dictator was bad for both his country and the US, but it's still an act of war.
How come the US can engage in acts of war without legally declaring it? Shouldn't congress be involved?
We all mocked Putin's "special military operation", why are we not accusing the US of doing the same thing?
Invading a foreign country with military force is a war even if the purpose is to effect an arrest. And when the President claims that the intent is also that the US will run the country afterwards, its even more clearly a war.
> In the same way we didn't need to declare war against Pakistan to go in and get Osama
Congress had already exercised its power to declare war with an open-ended declaration almost immediately after the 9/11 attacks, which covered the operation direct against the head of al-Qaeda.
https://www.congress.gov/107/plaws/publ40/PLAW-107publ40.pdf
For example:
Not taking sides here, just trying to steelman: some Americans might want to sell their relatives into sex trafficking.
This framing implies that the US administration considered US or Venezuelan public opinion before taking this action.
We have no evidence of that.
Some ukrainians welcomed russia,
some polish will welcome russia,
some estonians will welcome russia
etc etc etc.
Look, you don't just regime change, It didn't work in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan. It only really kinda worked in Kosovo, but even then it was touch and go, require lots of troop time and a load of money and ongoing international police.
Has not come to fruition for previous US regime change operations.
This kidnapping operation doesn’t give insight one way or the other into the will of the Venezuelan people. It, in fact, completely disregards it.
Didn't the East Germans later want to be annexed by West Germany?
Don't the people of both Koreas want unification?
we can’t simultaneously say we don’t like corruption of socialist governments while literally bombing another nation and imprisoning political enemies just so we can have its oil for our cronies.
A country is either powerful enough to enforce sovereignty, or it is not actually sovereign; so this hand-wringing about "Venezuela's sovereignty" is meaningless. It's already been proven false, to some extent.
The US is free to do what it wants with Venezuela, or virtually any non-nuclear country in the world. Always has been, really. It simply doesn't exercise said power very often.
To think that some like to pretend HN is better than reddit.
It is definitely not a guarantee that a local enriching elite will at some point lead to something better, but most examples that come to mind about "colonies" (places very far from a center of power), resulted in said places to develop much harder.
