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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."
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.
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)
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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