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Does it even matter who wins this industrial competition? It might as well be a football game between foreign nations to me, and you. I just want to be, a swiss. To live comfortably without an overlord. If pikes no longer suffice, nukes.
When the japanese and south koreans copied and then bested american cars and german optics and swiss watches, did the americans and germans and swiss subsequently sink into poverty? No, they just got richer. It has never been a zero-sum game. Believers in zero-sum games end up playing negative-sum games.
I don't know what the Swiss thought of it, but Americans absolutely had a psychotic meltdown about Japanese competition. I think you don't get how intoxicating the sense of supremacy is. Switzerland is just a nation, its manufactures are just manufactures, it operates on the logic of comparative advantage. Americans have an ideological stake in being Number One.
Half of congress in the 80s had literally fought Japan in the Second World War, anti-Japanese hostility was far from purely economic.
China was at best a secondary antagonist in the Cold War (and no longer after 1972). Korea is little remembered, before the memory of almost all living Americans and the present state of North Korea means that most people have no idea of how involved the PLA was. So the last ‘real war’ that was USA vs China was what, the Boxer Rebellion?
It could change if Xi panics and decides to abandon the slow game for Taiwan (which would be surprising) by staging the most audacious possible invasion involving a first strike at American bases, but even in the event of a ground invasion (unlikely) I consider that relatively unlikely.
Some grand global game of competition in which AMERICA NUMBA ONE just doesn’t really exist in the minds of most Americans in the way it does for the Chinese or even for, say, the French. American identity is tied to more amorphous things that don’t really have anything to do with global affairs like the Wild West and country music. A Dane or Swiss will gladly lecture you on why Denmark or Switzerland is the best country on earth (both would be mostly correct). Americans don’t really do that except in a very tongue in cheek Team America World Police way and even that is mostly limited to the middle class.
Italians abroad will talk about Ferrari and Columbus and pasta. Americans abroad don’t really lecture anyone about Google and Microsoft and Chevron. It’s not shame in the German way, but it’s not really pride either; global economic and cultural hegemony just isn’t central to American self-conception.
Eh, the political class really does have Main Character Syndrome, in the sense that you hear things like "Venezuela is evading sanctions." Um, yeah? Venezuela is not, in fact, part of the US. US law does not apply in Venezuela.
The deliberate pretension of inability to comprehend this sort of thing is something the political class will have to come to grips with as the relative strength of US power wanes.
But US law does apply to US firms, and those firms are prohibited from assisting Venezuela in any way. The target of this statement is the former, not the latter.
The US is seizing tankers transporting Venezuelan oil in international waters close to Venezuela with neither the ship nor the cargo having any connection to the US. In plain English this isn't sanctions, it's a blockade. The US carefully avoids saying this through official channels, although Trump has used the word in social media posts.
The ship was sanctioned (for Iranian connections, not Venezuelan) and thus subject to seizure. Venezuelan oil exports are sanctioned. If you and (in particular) Europe wishes to use "sanctions" as some sort of intermediate path between pure diplomacy and actual warfare, there has to be enforcement of those sanctions. Otherwise sanctions are a farce.
The wording only matters in that a blockade is an act of war. Certainly Venezuela is free to respond to it that way. But enforcing sanctions isn't generally considered that.
Normally, "sanctions" refers to laws a state makes which restrict its own citizens, residents, businesses etc. (including foreign-owned businesses operating on its territory) from doing business with the sanctioned country, and increasingly to laws which restrict its banks from financing (even indirectly) transactions to and from the sanctioned country. (And it is effectively impossible to transact in USD without a US bank being indirectly involved, which is why US sanctions even in the conventional sense have such a powerful extra-territorial effect). Enforcement of traditional sanctions, like enforcement of the vast majority of laws, is territorial. States enforce laws against activity taking place on their own territory - even if in this case the aim is to produce an extra-territorial effect. The US has a long tradition of effectively enforcing sanctions by prosecuting US-based entities who trade with/finance sanctioned parties, and the EU has a long tradition of effectively enforcing sanctions by prosecuting EU-based entities likewise.
The passive voice is obfuscating what happened here. The US declared the ship "sanctioned" despite the ship being entirely outside its jurisdiction. (The claim that it was sanctioned for Iranian connections is a distraction - the ship was seized because it was trading with Venezuela. The US does not generally seize ships on the high seas based on vague "Iranian connections", because you are not pirates). The ship is "subject to seizure" as a matter of US law, because the US made a law which applies outside its territory. As a matter of international law, it probably isn't. (There are some technicalities here because most of the flags of convenience used by oil tanker operators are US client states - the situation where the US seizes a Liberian or Panamanian-flagged ship and the country of registration doesn't object is messy).
Regardless of legal technicalities, the policy here is seizing ships which export Venezuelan crude. That is the essence of a blockade. Is it an act of war? The Trump administration is deliberately blurring the distinction between peace and war here.
There are also secondary sanctions: US entities cannot do business with an entity in a third country that does business with a sanctioned entity.
Well, you'd hope that the US government follows its own laws first.
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