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This year has delivered a nonstop string of humiliations for MAGA isolationists as Trump has increasingly turned towards military measures. A few days ago Tucker Carlson claimed Trump captured Maduro for the explicit purpose of legalizing gay marriage in Venezuela (???). Tulsi Gabbard has arguably had it even worse, as her 2019 opening speech for her presidential campaign criticized Trump's flirting with regime change in Venzeula and Iran, yet she happily serves in the Trump administration and even supports Trump's policies. A report by Bloomberg today states that she was actually excluded from meetings discussing the Venezuela op, with her Director of National Intelligence (DNI) position jokingly being recast as "do not invite". Presumably the rest of Trump's team thought she might leak the details, or even commit outright treason by informing the Venezuelans beforehand.
It's hard to have principles when the MAGA movement is a cult of personality with an extremely narrow window of what's deemed acceptable to criticize Trump for. Over the coming few years I expect more MAGA isolationists to debase themselves with positions that are basically "actually interventionism is fine as long as it's Trump doing it, after all it hasn't turned into an Iraq-tier disaster yet."
I stan'd Tulsi Gabbard, and I've been taking nothing but L's out of her.
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Your user-handle, the tone of your post, and the fact that after 18 hours you still haven't replied to anyone in this thread, give me the distinct impression that you aren't really interested in discussion and are just here to vent your spleen.
However on the off chance that my impression is wrong, I have a few questions for you...
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I’m confused if you’re criticizing the isolationist faction or the interventionist faction here as you’re mixing the two together in your last sentence. And you’re providing examples of criticism while claiming there’s an extremely narrow window of criticism, which doesn’t make sense. In any case, we live in a two party system, so each party comprises strange bedfellows, like those who want American Imperialism and those who want strict interventionism, or those who want it in some cases but not every case.
IMO Venezuela is indeed very different from Iran / Ukraine. We didn’t cause harm to their citizens, whereas our pressure in Ukraine destined hundreds of thousands of young men to perish in absolute agony and demographically destroyed an entire nation. Our intervention in Iran could destroy an ancient and high-science civilization for little reason except that it benefits Israel and KSA. (Just months before Israel killed Persian scientists and their families while they slept in their beds, Iran was publishing about their important nuclear medicine products which formerly only Germany was able to produce). Personally I am all for Venezuela-type resource grabs and even taking Greenland, but I don’t want to see hundreds of thousands of guys just like me be slaughtered in Ukraine, or see science take steps back because of Israeli neuroticism and expansionism. There are reasonable utilitarian grounds for this imo
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I think your model of "isolationists" needs some nuance. Very few people believe in zero US military action anywhere in the world at any time. We have a lot of security issues on our plate as global hegemon. We have a lot of national interests, and a lot of disagreement over what those are.
All presidents preach a less involved foreign policy than they actually produce once they're in office. What voters and "isolationists" seem not to like is long, expensive, bloody, drawn out conflicts. By that metric, Trump's military actions have been notably limited, most of all the Maduro op. The success of the operation sort of cuts out the legs from any isolationists arguing against it. Similar to the Iran bombing, which all the isolationists said would be WW3, and........wasn't.
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You're going to keep posting stuff like this at the top level, and when you finally get another mod warning, you're going to act like you're being targeted for your political views, aren't you?
I mean, it's not great, but have you seen any top-level "DAE the outgroup are evil hypocrites?" posts from the right getting modded? If "OP has to know this offends the local circlejerk, so he must be consciously baiting" is necessary and sufficient grounds for moderator action, we might as well pack up and just call this a forum for right-wingers rather than the bag of niceties that is in the sidebar.
(...and either way, the Gabbard thing seems rather interesting and was new to me, so I don't think you can argue this is just bait.)
I can think of a few long-time users (including at least one former moderator) who ultimately got banned for expressing similar views.
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Yes.
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Eh, I think the substance of what he's saying is basically correct - the MAGA base is inconsistent and hypocritical, has few real principles other than loyalty to Trump, and will revise commitments in order to maintain that loyalty to Trump - but it is not framed in a very constructive way. I'm not sure I'd mod it, but I would want to mildly discourage this kind of posting.
The conclusion that Antipopulist is asserting seems true, to me, at least in broad strokes. But I'd hope for higher standards for opening posts than just "is true".
It should go without saying that this also applies to partisan posts in other directions.
Maybe. The question is whether the MAGA base is pacifists or anti-GWOT democracy building.
If the latter, then no hypocrisy. Venezuela seems very different than Iraq. But time will tell.
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To start with, does an analogous top-level post come to your mind?
If it's just about offending the local circlejerk, why did you call it "not great"?
I dunno, it's kinda hard to have a discussion based on the post. Best I could do is something like "this kinda reminds me of..." the way functor did, which is essentially completely separate from the top-level post.
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This is reminiscent of the Obama era.
Obama campaigned on a paradigm shift from Bush and the forever wars in the middle east. The reality was a surge in Afghanistan, a dirty war in Syria and the destruction of Libya. Most likely Obama was genuine and did not want Dick Cheney style interventionism in 2008. Once he took power the party establishment made sure medical insurance companies could continue to enrich themselves and the military industrial complex kept marching on. By 2011 Obama had his groyper moment with occupy wall street.
Trump was probably genuine with MAGA. Then he got captured by the mainstream republican establishment and he is now going to blow up the deficit with more spending on the military industrial complex. He is going to go all in on big brother government with palantir and integrate 30 million Venezuelans into the US empire.
It will be interesting to see if we get a right wing occupy movement. Occupy was neutered by the great awokening and by shifting the focus from real issues to distractions. Unfortunately it wouldn't surprise me if the Maga base get distracted in a similar fashion.
Obama chose Biden as his VP and Clinton as secretary of state.
Anyone who was fooled into thinking he was anti war or pro civil liberties wanted to be fooled.
And Trump took in Bolton, Rubio and other neo-cons despite running on America first.
Conceded on Bolton, but Rubio came up through the Tea Party how is he not "America first"?
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What are you on about. Pissing away the last 70+ years of soft power is in no way mainstream republican policy (for all their faults).
(that is to say, Venezuela could well have been GOP capture if it happened in isolation, but repeatedly threatening to invade your allies because you looked at a mercator projection and thought Greenland is actually that big is fairly obviously just Trump being a retard)
Greenland is actually that big. I mean, it's not as big as a Mercator projection would have it, but it's BIG. Over 158,000 square miles ice-free (and if you believe the climate change people, this will increase dramatically), almost as large as California. Over 677,000 square miles total, larger than Alaska
(And Trump is trolling about taking Greenland forcibly from Denmark, which I guess counts as being a retard.)
Just like he was previously trolling about Venezuela?
Did someone say he's trolling about Venezuela?
Nybbler claims that Trump is trolling about invading Denmark (as if "haha he's actually not pissing away every drop of American soft power and dismantling their entire alliance structure for some kind of gain, he's just doing it because he feels like it" was some kind of own). I am saying (implying) that if this was actually the case, we should expect him to have been trolling the last time he talked about starting a war for no tangible reason.
I absolutely disagree with this part, which is why I'm asking if you seen anyone claim he was just trolling about Venezuela. If not, that's evidence against your theory.
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Some of the largest demonstrations in the world were when Bush invaded Iraq. Anti Vietnam demonstrations defined a generation. US foreign policy has always been a disaster in terms of PR.
With that said I do agree that threatening Greenland is a new low.
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Good point. The Deep State might have rolled Trump into doing military operations he didn't want to do, but it definitely hasn't rolled him into poasting about military operations that aren't happening.
The poasting about invading Canada, Greenland, and Panama is a character-revealing choice by Trump, as is the poasting about hypothetical kinetic operations against Blue Tribers within the US. And what it reveals is that Trump's objection to Bush-era American imperialism isn't that he opposes imperialism, its that he thinks Bush wasn't evil enough to make it work. And going into Venezuela in order to keep the regime in place, complete with the entire apparatus of domestic repression and regional narcoterrorism, but steal a relatively small amount of oil, is strong evidence that he is serious about this.
Maybe he just thinks Bush wasn't smart enough to make it work.
If Bush had pursued something like Trump's methodology, everyone (in the West) would remember the Global War on Terror as a success, or at least not the failure it is often viewed as now. If Bush had removed Saddam in a lightning strike and then negotiated with the remaining Baathist regime to stop doing dumb stuff under pain of also being removed, tens of thousands of people of deaths would likely have been avoided, along with the rise of ISIS and decades of costly and painful US occupation. (FWIW this doesn't seem very evil to me, but YMMV I suppose.) Same deal with simply punitively bombing Afghanistan and doing SOCCOM raids to snatch AQ leaders.
This basically seems to be Trump's plan in Venezuela. I want to caveat here that THERE IS STILL A CHANCE TO SCREW IT UP and that oftentimes such plans work out in unexpected and often bad ways. Maybe Venezuela will turn out to have been a horrible idea! But supposing a counterfactual where Bush had successfully done what Trump appears to be doing now, I think Bush would be viewed much more differently.
People forget that the US has a fairly successful track record of lightning interventions (arrive, blow everything up, install a new leader if necessary, leave). This may not be ethical or moral, but it "works" from the perspective that the military interventions tend to achieve their goals and be relatively popular or at least not unpopular. The US tends to do poorly (particularly in the public square) when it gets drawn into a prolonged intervention. People are now wary of the former because of the latter, which I think is entirely understandable, but it's important to understand that not all foreign interventions are created equal.
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One small tangent I remember in particular was the media debate over the ethics of military drone usage. Set aside they’re cheap and effective so they were inevitable. But that it was growth of automated warfare that some worried would make the U.S. military more likely to engage in conflict, as there’s no bodies-of-downed-pilot video that can result in a nasty PR blowback with drones shot down — that debate largely ended when Obama succeeded Bush the Younger, and in spite of Obama significantly ramping up drone usage.
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And, for that matter, of the Bush era, as Bush himself campaigned on a humble foreign policy, and no nation building, to contrast himself from Clinton.
Yes, and then just under 8 months into his first term the chickens of neo-liberalism came home to roost. Turns out history doesn't just end because you declare it so.
I don't know if you're old enough to remember 9/11 as an adult, but Bush II wasn't really offered choice. The public was baying for blood and Clinton's people were still in control of the Senate and much of what we would now refer to as the "Deep State".
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IMO we really would have been better off with Lindbergh winning in 1940.
I’m a little bit more worried about having for a president a guy who possibly conspired to have his own son disposed of because the boy had birth defects, and fathered seven secret children with three women in Germany in the 1950s, two of the women being sisters. I think there’s reason to suspect his sympathies for staying out of the war went beyond isolationism.
You’re making him sound like even more of a baller. Having a pair of sisters as babies’ mommas is reaching the pinnacle of capitalizing on female mate-choice copying.
He didn’t even leverage his fame to do so. He operated under the pseudonym “Careu Kent.” I guess bro was a fan of Superman; they both flew and lived double lives.
Careu Kent, Carlos Danger, Ron Mexico. We need a fourth worthy of completing the Mount Rushmore of funny celebrity pseudonyms.
The Old Testament prohibits it as incest.
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The Blob consumes all; it's undefeated.
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At least Bush had 9/11. That justifies breaking some campaign promises IMO.
Afghanistan, maybe; no president could have gotten away with not retaliating. But Iraq? No, that was an unforced error; a target of political opportunity.
I'm pretty sure Iraq was forced by Cheney.
I suspect the same
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Maybe you should have given an example of one then. All you posted were an official and a media personality who both apparently disliked the idea and presumably still do.
Also this whole schtick is kind of dumb and painful. You saw it all over the place on Twitter in the aftermath, people with their little "Trump has gotten us into a foreign entanglement" gotcha speeches that they were just going to doggedly recite into the void even though the "war" was over by the time they heard of it.
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It sounds less ridiculous in the video. Probably Trump wasn't thinking about gay marriage specifically, but this operation has probably been planned before Trump took office. Ousting a conservative communist authoritarian is a big win for liberalism.
It's interesting to watch Tucker Carlson's evolution into a Strasserite conservative leftist. But I think for most of the general public, the reaction to Maduro's capture was similar to when we got Bin Laden. It was a brief moment when neoconservatives and neoliberals could put aside our differences to celebrate a great big American victory against the commies.
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