Hi Crowd!
Me: I’m going to start off the new year spending less time scrolling social media!
US Govt: lol
So like everyone else I woke up this morning seeing the Venezuela news and like everyone over 40 immediately clenched my eyes and started rubbing my temples thinking “oh Jesus fuck this again?” As of right now it’s being reported that as part of this operation Venezuelan “President” Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, were in US custody and being indicted on narco-terrorism charges. (President in quotes for obvious reasons)
Based on the pressers and social media posts from key players this morning, this is about a dictator oppressing his people (Rubio), about drugs posing an imminent threat to the US (Hegseth), or about taking over the oil industry and making a lot of money (Trump). You could argue that those aren’t mutually exclusive and can all be true at the same time, sure. But keep in mind that Trump just pardoned Honduran dictator Juan Orlando Hernandez who had been convicted for trafficking hundreds of tons of cocaine into the US, and has good things to say about North Korea’s Kim Jong Un so at the very least we know trafficking drugs into the US and being a dictator aren’t really big problems for Trump. Or rather, as is more likely the case, their classification as problematic depends on which side he personally benefits from.
Trump posted this image (among others) on his Truth social account without credit or context. The assumption I guess is that this is the situation room with focused and high stakes monitoring of the ongoing operation. It could also just as easily be a fort made out of some bedsheets during a sleep over with someone checking to see if their shitpost is getting a lot of likes yet. Yes that’s X up on the big screen that Trump is locked in on. Jesus fucking christ.
I really am trying to stay off social media (to write this, and some other unrelated thing) so it’s entirely possible these points have already been made by other smarter people but I’m having serious flashbacks to Noriega and Mission Accomplished. Like seriously, we’ve been here before. What is the point if history if we don’t learn from it. We know exactly how these things play out.
Anyway, as you’d imagine there’s lots of chest pounding and grand standing from various politicians and the big names have all issued statements which seem mostly upset that they weren’t notified ahead of time. There’s also a lot of people proclaiming this is illegal which is an almost laughable claim at this point because first of all, what is the basis for what is legal or isn’t? The US only cites international law when it benefits, and ignores it (or outright rejects it) when they or their allies are implicated. If international law mattered to the US, Netanyahu wouldn’t be basking in the afterglow of his 5th US visit since Trump was reelected and ICC Judge Kimberly Prost would still be able to ask her Amazon Echo to turn on the livingroom lights. Even federally the claim is a joke because thanks to 2001’s AUMF a president has an almost blank check to order strikes without telling anyone as long as they slap “terrorism” on the after the fact justification. And this isn’t a left/right thing either, the 2001 joint resolution passed almost unanimously (only one vote against) and since then both D and R presidents have taken full advantage of it for any number of different actions.
So if you see a politician saying this action is illegal check to see if they’ve called for the AUMF to be repealed or if they were in office then how they voted at the time. Because the sad fact is most US politicians are very much opposed to many policies when their opponents use them, but very much in favor of those same policies when they get to use them. At the moment though Trump is doing all kinds of press and essentially saying that the US is going to be heavily involved with what happens next in Venezuela (especially in regards to the oil industry) so my guess is that in pretty short order they move to install Machado as leader. We’ll see,
The international community is certainly going to have their own takes and statements. Maybe they already have and I just haven’t had a chance to read them yet. Buckle up I guess?
-s