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Notes -
https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/white-house-admiral-approved-second-strike-boat-venezuela-was-well-within-legal-2025-12-01/
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/some-us-republicans-want-answers-venezuela-strikes-despite-trump-2025-12-01/
Aaand (after previously denying it?) the White House confirms that a second strike killed survivors of an initial strike on an alleged drug smuggling boat. (Hegseth is joking about it) It even seems the purpose of the second strike was solely to leave no survivors.
Curious that the targeted smuggling boats have large crews, rather than conserving space and weight capacity for drugs...
Anyone have a read on whether or not there are still "Trump is the anti-war President" true believers and, if so, how those people are trying to square the circle?
The stupider this becomes, the more likely it seems that this conflict is a result of Trump's fixation with spoils of war and that he actually thinks we can literally just "take the oil."
1: Droning a drug boat isn't a war. Obama droned more weddings than Trump has boats.
2: "Trump's fixation with the spoils of war"? Did you just make that up? Or are we supposed to take that as a given?
My experience is that people who reason from their own ability to read the minds of people they hate are rarely anywhere near the mark.
Trump had said US should have taken (meaning stolen) Iraqi oil on multiple occasions.
I mean, maybe we should have. It's hard to imagine a counterfactual world where Iraq had a thriving US-financed and operated oil infustry employing locals and generating economic activity/tax revenue is worse for the Iraqi people than what they currently have.
A western-backed petrol state is vastly preferable to a failed state, for essentially everyone except the jihadis. Just ask the Kuwaitis.
The main thing that I got out of https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-new-sultan is that most of the people in Islamic countries really are very devout muslims, who want the same in their leaders. There's a reason that most of the Arab Spring countries turned into Islamic theocracies - people want those, they don't want to be ruled by The Great Satan or by Moloch. Secularism in the Middle East is and always has been a project of the sultan and/or the army, it's pretty much never bottom up. Be careful before you make assumptions.
I'm not sure if it's an assumption about what Iraqis wanted in 2003, so much as a claim that after a generation of two of being ruled by a secular US-propped government they'd learn to like it and the islamic death-cult would die out. Which other experiments eg Afghanistan have of course shown to be… optimistic at best. But it's something, and it's probably the best we've got if you don't want to despair of human nature.
That’s the point of the Erdogan biography though. Turkey had secular democratic government for generations (under the oversight of the army who were mostly strict but not despotic).
That is, they had a democratic government in which it was against the constitution to advocate for explicitly Muslim policy.
Erdogan rose to power in large part as an expression of deep fury by the Muslim majority whose desires and way of life were being discounted.
Personally I do not despair of human nature because other people have different religions and preferred ways of running society. What I do require is that they do so in their own countries and far away from me, which is why I am a firm advocate of very low immigration.
I think the belief that everyone, given time, will approach something that liberalish Europeans are comfortable with is load-bearing for immigration advocacy and also that it is mistaken.
I do not think this set of preferences is compatible with tolerating a religious movement which aspires to world domination and glorifies achieving that end through holy war. You may not be interested in what fundamentalists do in their own countries, but the fundamentalists in far-off countries are interested in you. Or, at any rate, will grow interested in you once they've secured their power-base at home.
Now, of course, in practical terms I'm no kind of Middle-East hawk. In the aggregate, interventionism in the Middle-East has proven counterproductive when it comes to curbing the threat of muslim extremism - infamously so. But in the truly long term, "let them sort themselves out" can only be a temporary solution - it is an inherently unstable state of affairs unless you believe majority-Muslim nations are inherently incapable of ever advancing to a point where they pose a serious military threat to the West. Barring that assumption, if we're letting them be for now, it can only be for one of two broad reasons:
with #2 further subdividing into a comparatively peaceful "we'll figure out how to do secularization in a way that sticks" option and a maximally pessimistic "we'll crush them and salt the earth if it comes down to it" option.
Plus an AGI-truther "we'll hit the Singularity before we need to worry about any of this" addendum, I guess.But it cannot be because we should just reconcile ourselves to the existence of fundamentalist islamic theocracies for the truly long term, as an acceptable state of affairs for the planet Earth. That's just shaking hands with that nice Mr Hitler in 1938.
(Setting all this aside, I do have a basic moral objection to the existence of muslim theocracies qua muslim theocracies. But I think that's really neither here nor there. "Just close the borders to immigrants from muslim theocracies" remains a bad plan even if you value the welfare of Middle-Eastern women, homosexuals, Jews, Christians, etc. at exactly 0.)
Point taken. I must admit I cannot imagine fundamentalist Islam advancing to technological and economic parity with the West without becoming something quite different, so that doesn’t concern me hugely right now.
(Caveats: yes, there was a very advanced Muslim society pre-Renaissance, but they were cosmopolitan and borrowed heavily from Greek and Roman writings, as opposed to being insular and traditionalist.)
In general I think that advocating (even slow, non-violent) regime change for anyone who might one day be a threat is both deeply impractical and exactly the kind of behaviour that makes people perceive America and the West as relentlessly hostile! I’m no dove, but ‘we’ll figure out how to exterminate you some day’ does not strike me as a good basis for foreign policy.
I am also increasingly dubious about the use of Munich as an intuition pump for foreign policy. Yes, one time a country signed a peace treaty with somebody they were capable of beating militarily, and the other party didn’t hold to it. There must surely have been loads of other times when a peace treaty was signed and the other party stuck to it, or got distracted making war elsewhere, or busied himself with internal affairs. Likewise, there were lots of times when two countries didn’t sign a peace treaty because they each thought they could win, and one found to their horror that they were mistaken. The lesson from Munich cannot be ‘even if a warlike nation offers peace, you must set your sights on destroying them. Only once everyone who dislikes you is dead can there be peace’. Humanity is a warlike race and we will never be short of potential Hitlers; some distrust and hoarding of one’s own strength is appropriate but meeting each with a campaign of elimination will cause far more bloodshed than it solves.
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