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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.
Total aura shift for Trump. He was a lame duck, dead in the water. The Fuentes doomers were winning. Trump had failed. He hadn't met his campaign promises, and his approval rating was in the gutter. But then, in an decisive display of competence and leadership, he ousted a dictator and took over a country that had been a thorn in the US's side for decades. And he did it at almost no cost.
His speech was fascinating and a dramatic shift from anything we have heard in the past 80 years. No "muh democracy." He talked about Venezuela's crumbling infrastructure and the inability of their government (deliberate or not) to stop the drugs. Their mortal sin was not dictatorship, it was incompetence and the negative impact their incompetence was having on the United States. He openly acknowledges that the oil will benefit the US, and says this is a good thing. And it resonates.
Trump wanted a big legacy-defining move, like buying Greenland, and this time he got it. Under his leadership, the United States took over Venezuela in a matter or hours at minimal cost. The outcome is truly astonishing. And he might not be done. He alluded that "something needs to be done" about the Mexican cartels. Destroying them would be a true legacy-maker. We'll see how it all works out in the long-term, and whether it becomes of a legacy of greatness or failure.
I predict we'll see a boost in Trump's approval ratings. The average person knows nothing about Venezuela except that it was bad and a problem. And now they see that Trump appears to have fixed it overnight.
One thing I find interesting about these threads is how the speed itself became part of the legitimacy. Whether real or perceived, “matter of hours” is doing a ton of heavy work here. In modern geopolitics, swift action reads as competence, and slow process as decay. A very post-Iraq, post-Afghanistan inversion where success isn’t measured by institutions built, but by how little time the public has to think about such quagmires. By this logic, it's not even about Venezuela itself. You just need to believe that disorder is contagious and that someone finally hit the off switch. Really shows how much the bar for persuasion has shifted from ideals to outcomes, or at least the perception of outcomes.
"There's three ways to do things. The right way, the wrong way, and the Max Power way!"
"Isn't that the wrong way?"
"Yeah, but faster!"
Or, perhaps more charitable and t
ropically: "I took the canal zone and let Congress debate."The cult of action is not a new thing. It is, I suspect, a deep rooted psychological type. Speed, brutality, decisiveness - action for the sake of action - are conflated with effectiveness by certain kinds of people, while caution, planning, and introspection are viewed with contempt. Of course, it's hardly a universal perspective. You have plenty of people with pretty much the opposite view.
But this action was both. Yes, the incursion itself was accomplished very rapidly, but there were also breathless stories about the exhaustive preparation for the strike; how Delta Force built an exact replica of the building they snatched Maduro from to practice raid tactics and timing on (similar to how the SEALS practiced on a mock-up of Bin Laden's Abbottabad complex); how the administration was monitoring Maduro's comings and goings for months in order to build up a perfect picture of his habits and whereabouts, etc.
I don't think this can be pattern-matched to a fascist-futurist aesthetic "Cult of Speed" thing.
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Not all of these are mutually exclusive. I'm pretty sure some careful planning went into the Maduro extraction at least from the professionals in the Armed Forces. That's why it was so quick and successful.
Quick and decisive execution doesn't have anything to do with rash decisionmaking. A well-prepared operation is more likely to go smoothly and achieve your goals with the minimum amount of action.
I'm specifically talking about perception and the role that plays in legitimizing the actions, per the comment I was replying to. I've little doubt that the raid itself was meticulously planned and rehearsed.
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Yeah, FWIW I would guess that the US has been planning this for years. Or more accurately, we've had a plan in place for years to grab the leader of Venezuela.
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"I have told your names to the Entmoot and we have agreed: you are not orcs." - Treebeard
The example of the Roman dictator Fabius also springs to mind. Sometimes slow and steady wins the race.
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The comparison crossed my mind.
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Hence the term "analysis paralysis".
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I think that the perception is that extremely long occupations (or similar) tend to be corrupted by the bureaucracy, and end up spending hundreds of millions of dollars on doing nothing. It's a very common pattern (at least in Canadian politics, but I imagine that it occurs in American politics too) that something like the following occurs:
There's a major problem with government accountability where any solution to the problem seems to be "sink more money into it forever." Something that meets the criteria of:
Earns a lot of goodwill towards the policy.
It needs to be Fast because the problem is happening now, not later - I've mentioned before that fixing housing prices in 5 years is better than not fixing it in 5 years, but from my perspective, it may as well not matter; I only have one life in which I can start a family, and if I can't buy housing for 5 years, that's 5 more years in which I can't have the family I want to.
It needs to be Intuitive (or at least, more intuitive than the other solutions) for the same reason that we don't introduce more complicated voting methods; because there is a lot of space for people who are good at lying to grift off of it. It is easy to understand "each person gets 1 vote, most votes wins" - it's trickier to understand a situation where one candidate gets 45% of the "I want this guy" votes, a second candidate gets 35%, and the third gets 20% - but the second candidate ends up winning after "shenanigans." (I'm using Instant-runoff voting as an example here).
And it needs to be done because anything that is a process ends up costing way too much money and perpetuating itself for all eternity. After 2 decades in Iraq, the establishment that the US had set up had collapsed within a month of the US pulling out - that extra effort and process was worth literally jack and shit, and all it did was cost more money.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but I think there is separate issue, which is that when bad faith actors want to pretend to be addressing an issue without actually addressing it, they are naturally going to go for slow, deliberate options. This principle applies all the way from high level policy makers all the way down to the scummy local gym which is supposed to process your cancellation and give you a refund.
The upshot of this is that slowness is a red flag.
That is a very good point as well.
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Time is a pretty good proxy for competence. Time is also money. Maduro was a thorn in the US' side, and for a minimal investment of time and money the US is at the very least going to get someone marginally preferable to Maduro running Venezuela. That's a good deal.
Why do you assume the next man up will be marginally preferable to Maduro?
The next man up will probably not be married to Maduro's wife, who was a central power player in the Chavista movement on the policy/coalition side and a queennpin in her own right who had held significant government power.
Flores was a non-trivial part of the political competence of the Chavista movement at the policy maker level, in the 'knows how to systemically setup an apparatus to coordinate harassment and violence against the outgroup' sense. In so much that the Maduro regime was on its way towards becoming an Nicaragua-Ortega-style dynasty, Flores was both the cause and a key parallel.
The US getting Maduro and Flores is probably one of the more significant things about today's raid, and honestly does more to imply a deal with someone- whether Maduro or someone else in the Venezuelan government- such that Flores couldn't step in as acting-president on her husband's behalf.
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