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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.
Instead the oil rights got bought largely by China IIRC. The US military has essentially been securing China's energy imports.
(And the '''grand strategists''' in the Pentagon/State Department blob never got purged or anything, they're still around)
At the time (pre tar sands and fracking), the US was securing an orderly global oil market with plentiful supply, something that as a matter of domestic politics benefitted you more than anyone else, even if as a matter of economic logic the EU benefitted more than the US as a larger net oil importer. Retail gasoline prices are ultra-sensitive politically in the US, and vary directly with world oil prices in a way which European prices don't because most of the cost is a per-litre tax.
Now the US is a net oil exporter, the US benefits economically from high world crude prices, but the US government probably still loses politically because voters care more about pump prices than they do about oil company profits or oil industry jobs. (Various people have said that the Biden administration was trying to mitigate any upward pressure on oil prices from the Ukraine war because of the US domestic political consequences, despite this working against his climate policy, his foreign policy, and objective US economic interests). In addition, the US benefits geopolitically from the world being a place where the easiest way to get oil is to trade US dollars for it in a liquid market.
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