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The United States of America is now at war with the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. Dozens of Venezuelan military targets have been bombed in the last few minutes, including a major army base just outside the capital. American Chinooks have been seen flying across the Caracas skyline.
This could be the most important geopolitical happening since the Ukraine War. We do it yet know if this will be a limited run of bombing like the Kosovo strikes, or a full on Iraq style invasion and regime change. If it is the latter, it will be an important test of America’s military might, and failure could very well be America’s Suez moment. I have speculated here several times that I thought the US would have difficulty conducting a thunder run of a non-peer or near-peer adversary in its current state, and it looks as though my theory may be put to the test. On a geopolitical and moral level though, I have little sympathy for Venezuela, for the same reason I have little sympathy for Ukraine. If you repeatedly antagonize your neighboring superpower, you get what you get.
This will also no doubt further fracture the Republican base in a major way, as interventionist neocons clash with America-First isolationists.
This is also adds to an intensifying pattern of conflict in multiple theaters that could lead to global war. It also increases the likelihood of a Chinese attack on Taiwan as American asserts are entangled in multiple theaters.
I will post more information as I hear it.
A true gentleman scholar post “inb4 source” and is vindicated in the light of history.
Edit:
There are now multiple airstrikes occurring within Caracas. The United States FAA has issued a NOTAM warning that civilian aircraft should avoid overflying the entire territory of Venezuela.
Reuters is now reporting that there are US ground troops active within the capital of Venezuela.
I wake up and this is really starting the new year with a bang! I have to say I am very surprised, first by the strikes on land targets and second the claim that Maduro and his wife are in custody of the USA.
What does anybody think is going on here? How did it go from "stop drug smuggling" to "regime overthrow"?
Oil. Venezuela has lots of oil, so they got a big dose of freedom. With a US-friendly government in charge, excraction costs will fall, enabling the high-tech petroleum refineries on the US Gulf Coast (which are helpfully in red states) to reap the producer surplus from the increased supply. AI demand for energy will keep the price up. GPT-7 will be powered by Venezuelan oil, brought to you by Exxon, I'm Lovin' It.
The US generates approxmately 1% of its electricity from petroleum. Oil is useful for cars, but electric car sales are going exponential. I guess oil is useful as a manufacturing input, not that the US does much manufacturing any more.
That said, Trump is a mercantilist who hasn't updated his economic views since the 90s, so he may well believe something like that.
In the US, not anymore. Without subsidies (and it seems clear that China is also subsidizing) and without bans (hello Europe), electric cars just aren't so much better than gas cars (if at all) to take over the category.
In spite of Trump's pigheadedness, electric cars and renewables are still going to win. Humanity is undergoing an energy transition from turning heat into electricity or movement (fossil fuel electricity generation and petrol cars) to one where we generate and use the energy directly. Solar power is already the cheapest form of energy globally, followed by wind, and electric cars are cheaper to fuel, cheaper to maintain, faster to accelerate, quieter, easier to fill up (you do it at home overnight) and will soon be cheaper to buy, due to plummeting battery costs. The US can try and turn back the clock, but ICE cars are a mature technology facing off against an already superior, rapidly improving one which is still picking the low-hanging fruit.
The idea that in 50 years, Americans will still be driving petrol cars because the ageing boomer currently in charge thinks that EVs are for hippies is so beyond far-fetched it's hard to describe. It's like someone in the 1960s claiming that we'll never switch to colour TV because black and white TVs have clearer images.
What about when you have to make a six hour (or longer) drive out into a rural area, where almost all of the roadway there are "off the grid" and have no electricity at all — then drive back the same way a day or two later? You know, like we'd do every summer weekend growing up, heading to our cabin in rural Alaska?
Outside of Anchorage, and maybe Juneau or Fairbanks, electric cars simply don't make sense here in Alaska.
I remember pointing this out to a bunch of electric-car enthusiasts at Caltech, back in the early 2000s, several times. I'd explain in detail the geographic and infrastructural realities of life in rural Alaska — the lack of electrical grid, hundreds of miles of wilderness between bits of civilization, Arctic conditions…
The ones who were engineering students working on developing electric cars were the more reasonable ones, mostly responding that, okay, sure, you guys will have to keep using gas cars a lot longer than everyone else, until the technology is someday good enough. Those who were "for the environment"-type boosters? They're the ones who would sneeringly reply about how nobody should be living in Alaska in the first place, and all those hicks will obviously be forced to move south to some big city, as they should be. (Bringing up the Natives got some interesting responses.)
I'm happy to concede that, at least for now, ICE cars make sense for the small niche of people who live in Alaska (about 0.2% of the US' population, by my estimate).
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What I don't get from the second group is the pig-headedness refusal to accept workable compromises. Plug in hybrids are (cost and technical complexity aside, and the first's less a concern on the second hand market) mitigating almost all the issues of electric cars, but no one hates them as much as electric car fans. Daily commutes use no gas or a thimbleful of gas, and longer trips are not limited by infrastructure outside of already implemented gas stations.
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Maybe. But if they were the clear win you're making them out to be, there'd be no need for the subsidies and bans.
That doesn't even make sense. Using energy directly would be something like sailing; we're certainly not doing that with cars. With electric cars and renewables we're capturing solar energy, turning it to electricity, turning it into chemical energy, then back to electricity, and then to movement. Or we're doing the same thing only turning wind to movement, then movement to electricity, then the rest.
As long as you ignore the costs of intermittency.
So I have to upgrade my electric service (and the power company upgrade their grid) to provide myself with sufficient charging capacity for 2 cars... and even then it takes hours? I can fill up a gasoline car in minutes. Gas still wins this one. Charging at home is convenient, but the slowness of fill will cause scaling problems. Further, if most people charge at home, charging stations away from home will have less reason to exist, making them far less available than gas stations are today, thus making long-distance travel less practical.
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I don't know about exponential but sales in 2024 were much bigger than sales in 2023.
https://www.bts.gov/content/gasoline-hybrid-and-electric-vehicle-sales.com
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Venezuela's oil is ultra-heavy crude that currently (because Communism) requires them to import naphtha just to ship to somewhere it can be refined. The US has no pressing need for it. Assuming there's a stable government out of this rather than a civil war, US oil companies will improve their infrastructure enough (including their own refining capacity, at least enough that they can produce enough naphtha to ship the rest without imports) that they'll be making a lot more money from the oil, which will help the US companies some but the Venezuelans more. The oil is just a cherry on top, not a reason.
Is Venezuela even remotely communist? Do the workers own the means of production/their firms?
It looks a lot more like an autocratic narco state
They nationlized the oil and gas industry which was run by a firm wholly owned by the state. That's the model most communists go for so I'm not really sure why it wouldn't count. It even worked pretty well for a couple decades until Chavez came along and decided to gut the state company and fill it with cronies for short term social spending.
Maybe I don't understand communism, but state owned enterprises don't seem like something that was important to the core ethos/concept of communism.
I thought the whole point was workers would all essentially be "shareholders" of the firm.
Maybe you need the state to be the ultimate owner to ensure ownership transfers between workers, but "communism is when the government takes over the firms" seems kind of inaccurate.
It is something a lot of communist countries did/do, but it also strikes me that many communist countries were just dictatorships dressing themselves up as communists to make the local people think they'd get a cut of the prosperity.
I suppose I'm doing a "no true scottman" thing, although I can reconcile it by saying that I don't think communism works very well when exposed to human nature. True communism has never been tried, because groups of humans greater than Dunbar's number basically can't do it. If ants were smart they'd make Marx proud though.
There's endless amounts of ink spilled on what is or isn't communism. The discussion on what does or doesn't count can be interesting. But when the people doing it call it communism and it fits the mold of what a lot of people trying to practice communism are also doing I think it is at the very least a variant of communism even if it isn't the stateless moneyless utopia some theorists imagine. We call the US capitalist despite not being anything like a theoretical perfectly free market and most people who are pro-capitalist don't even want perfectly free markets either.
There are even some arguments for how having a strong state that owns all the productive assets is communism, everyone is a stakeholder in the state and the state owns all the businesses so it's basically like everyone owning their own workplace if you squint. It solves a lot of design problems to do it this way. There are of course problems with this design and Venezuela is a pretty central example of one of the common failure modes, but it's probably fair to call it communism.
Great points
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Sure. Socialism is generally recognized as 'remotely close' to communist, and the Venezuelan government under the PSUV was for about a decade across the 2000s was widely praised as socialist success by other self-identified socialist and communist individuals, parties, and in some cases governments around the world, even as Venezuela's own leaders proudly claimed their own socialist credentials, albeit through the Chavismo mixture of socialism.
Now, the classic motte and bailey is that true communism has never been tried and all the self-identified communists who were recognized as communists at the time really just tried to implement variations of socialism. Or the no true communist fallacy that, in hindsight, they were just right-wing autocrats who betrayed true communist/socialist principles.
Most communist and ideologically socialist states look like autocratic states because they are. Their specific funding source may differ- Venezuela's was and still is oil- but the devolution into criminal states because corruption becomes a requirement to handle the economic disfunction is pretty par for course.
I will happily admit I know very little of Venezuela. Everything I've read about it's governance in this thread sounds more like "dictatorship loots country for its seed corn, country spirals into poverty" moreso than "they legitimately tried to ensure the workers owned the means of production/captured more of the surplus of their labour and then it fells apart for X reason"
I also imagine I probably have a somewhat simplified model of communism in my head, I don't have a deep dialectic understanding of Marx et al, that's for sure.
This rings pretty true to me? Most communist nations may have called themselves communist, but again kind of just did the whole "dictatorship loots country for its seed corn" thing.
I'm not entirely sure how that's a fallacy. I think I'd pre-emptively reconcile it by saying I'm pretty confident communism is an optimistic idea that simply doesn't work when paired with human nature, as we keep seeing when communist countries end up being autocratic shitholes where the workers are just as fucked as they were previously.
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Has that been the case in any communist regime?
If not, then it's not a particularly meaningful yardstick with which to judge how communist a country is.
Are lawyers, doctors, dentists, accountants, and architects in the developed world communist because the workers sometimes own the firms?
I think it is a good yardstick. That sounds like almost every communist country has been a dysfunctional mess that couldn't achieve its stated aims.
Perhaps (very likely), their stated aims simply aren't possible.
This is kind of a snappy point that I don't really understand, the answer is obviously no.
I'm happy to admit that this is something I don't know a ton about (hence commenting, to learn more). But just because a doctor, etc captures most of the value of their labour doesn't make them a communist, as that is a political/economic system. As I understand it, the goal of communism is so that every worker is able to capture their surplus value as well as a doctor does.
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