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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.
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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