My very low opinion of the Venezuelan Army aside, I get why the US is pushing for this. And is not only on the inside, even Putin is not looking optimistic:
Even China recognized that throwing good money after bad money just to stick it to the US was a terrible idea, but Putin is looking at 10 billion $ on this and still isn't fully backing off.
While Moscow hasn’t given up its public backing of Maduro, it increasingly recognizes that the disastrous state of Venezuela’s economy is inexorably draining what remains of his public support, said two people close to the Kremlin. At the same time, the army’s reluctance to crack down on its own citizens limits his ability to use force to crush the challenge to his rule, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the issue is sensitive.
I get the sense that the bolded begins with an implied "Unfortunately,"
Wow Maduro is going full Baghdad Bob up there. That cannot inspire confidence that his regime will survive this crisis.
It cannot.
Like there's no end-state where it can possibly hold on to power now, just varying degrees of awful and then he leaves/is murdered/commits suicide.
I'm having flashbacks to predictions from 2011. This same exact post was made about Syria/Assad like 100 times.
Sometimes an authoritarian regime holds onto power even at the cost of the near-total destruction of their country.
Assad was willing to consolidate power around his minority group (Shia/Alawite/Kurd/Christian) base and near genocide/exile the Sunni opposition. To the point that he managed to destabilize Iraq and the EU with the flood of refugees.
Which is as impressive as it is awful. Venezuela doesn't have the same break up of sectarian groups, but Chavez and Maduro were trying to build a militia based Revolutionary Guard to defend themselves against a military coup so we'll see if ideological sectarianism allows a similar strategy.
Jephery on
}
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
The main question is if you think Venezuela can get better with Maduro in charge. The guy got Venezuela to this state, and he's shown no sign of trying to change his policies, so I'm generally not having a problem with the additional sanctions.
Caleb Bond is an UK reporter.
Note that I'm ignorant of the participants, but when you can't answer the specifics about the Venezuelans sanctions, maybe you aren't informed enough to give an opinion.
Also, Chavez didn't nationalized the oil industry, that happened on 1976. That nationalization and it's effects are a different conversation though, can expand if anybody wants to.
Are Mexico and Cuba the only Latin American countries that have not called for new elections? Uruguay called for a new presidential election but has still not recognized Guaido as interim president.
With the country’s economy in meltdown, an estimated 300,000 fortune hunters have descended on this mineral-rich jungle area to earn a living pulling gold-flecked earth from makeshift mines.
Their picks and shovels are helping to prop up the leftist government of President Nicolas Maduro. Since 2016, his administration has purchased 17 tonnes of the metal worth around $650 million from so-called artisan miners, according to the most recent data from the nation’s central bank.
What emerges is the portrait of a desperate experiment in laissez-faire industrial policy by Venezuela’s socialist leaders. U.S. sanctions have hammered the nation’s oil industry and crippled its ability to borrow. The formal mining sector has been decimated by nationalization. So Maduro has unleashed freelance prospectors to extract the nation’s mineral wealth with virtually no regulation or state investment.
The Bolivarian Revolution now leans heavily on ragtag laborers such as Jose Aular, a teenager who says he has contracted malaria five times at a wildcat mine near Venezuela’s border with Brazil. Aular works 12 hours daily lugging sacks of earth to a small mill that uses toxic mercury to extract flecks of precious metal. Mining accidents are common in these ramshackle operations, workers said. So are shootings and robberies.
Venezuela’s central bank has been selling its artisan gold directly to Turkish refiners, according to two senior Venezuelan officials. Proceeds go to the Venezuelan state development bank Bandes to purchase Turkish consumer goods, the officials said.
With the country’s economy in meltdown, an estimated 300,000 fortune hunters have descended on this mineral-rich jungle area to earn a living pulling gold-flecked earth from makeshift mines.
Their picks and shovels are helping to prop up the leftist government of President Nicolas Maduro. Since 2016, his administration has purchased 17 tonnes of the metal worth around $650 million from so-called artisan miners, according to the most recent data from the nation’s central bank.
What emerges is the portrait of a desperate experiment in laissez-faire industrial policy by Venezuela’s socialist leaders. U.S. sanctions have hammered the nation’s oil industry and crippled its ability to borrow. The formal mining sector has been decimated by nationalization. So Maduro has unleashed freelance prospectors to extract the nation’s mineral wealth with virtually no regulation or state investment.
The Bolivarian Revolution now leans heavily on ragtag laborers such as Jose Aular, a teenager who says he has contracted malaria five times at a wildcat mine near Venezuela’s border with Brazil. Aular works 12 hours daily lugging sacks of earth to a small mill that uses toxic mercury to extract flecks of precious metal. Mining accidents are common in these ramshackle operations, workers said. So are shootings and robberies.
Venezuela’s central bank has been selling its artisan gold directly to Turkish refiners, according to two senior Venezuelan officials. Proceeds go to the Venezuelan state development bank Bandes to purchase Turkish consumer goods, the officials said.
There's a lot of bad things there. There's the obvious slave labor, the clashes between guerrillas (the regime factions, Colombian and Brazilian ones, the indigenous communities not taking that shit) that have lead to massacres and the environmental impact since gold mining uses mercury, which is toxic. Whistleblower group SOS Orinoco has been doing work on documenting the effects:
When Bolsonaro (I know) talks about expanding development on the Amazon, he also implies sending soldiers against the guerrillas, which is why people support it.
EDIT: Also the complete collapse of any kind of government authority in a border is kind of a big deal and a reason why ousting Maduro became more attractive.
So then, what is your leverage? The US and other countries have to take "some" kind of a position. We don't want a military response, we know a public/diplomatic denouncement is toothless and regimes can operate with impunity in the face of "condemnation" from other countries all the time. That leaves economic/trade leverage.
So then, what is your leverage? The US and other countries have to take "some" kind of a position. We don't want a military response, we know a public/diplomatic denouncement is toothless and regimes can operate with impunity in the face of "condemnation" from other countries all the time. That leaves economic/trade leverage.
Its extremely cool that every other page those of us who don't want to invade Venezuela have to explain again what we'd like to have happen instead.
I think we should be helping take care of the 3 million some Venezuelan refugees and once the Venezuelans work the situation out themselves we can reevaluate.
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FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
So then, what is your leverage? The US and other countries have to take "some" kind of a position. We don't want a military response, we know a public/diplomatic denouncement is toothless and regimes can operate with impunity in the face of "condemnation" from other countries all the time. That leaves economic/trade leverage.
Its extremely cool that every other page those of us who don't want to invade Venezuela have to explain again what we'd like to have happen instead.
I think we should be helping take care of the 3 million some Venezuelan refugees and once the Venezuelans work the situation out themselves we can reevaluate.
Waiting for the situation to work out itself has it's own echoes of history.
So then, what is your leverage? The US and other countries have to take "some" kind of a position. We don't want a military response, we know a public/diplomatic denouncement is toothless and regimes can operate with impunity in the face of "condemnation" from other countries all the time. That leaves economic/trade leverage.
Its extremely cool that every other page those of us who don't want to invade Venezuela have to explain again what we'd like to have happen instead.
I think we should be helping take care of the 3 million some Venezuelan refugees and once the Venezuelans work the situation out themselves we can reevaluate.
Waiting for the situation to work out itself has it's own echoes of history.
I mean if you think Maduro is going to invade....Guyana in the name of....lebensraum
These are the exact same arguments we hear every single time the US wants to knock over some country.
So then, what is your leverage? The US and other countries have to take "some" kind of a position. We don't want a military response, we know a public/diplomatic denouncement is toothless and regimes can operate with impunity in the face of "condemnation" from other countries all the time. That leaves economic/trade leverage.
Its extremely cool that every other page those of us who don't want to invade Venezuela have to explain again what we'd like to have happen instead.
I think we should be helping take care of the 3 million some Venezuelan refugees and once the Venezuelans work the situation out themselves we can reevaluate.
Waiting for the situation to work out itself has it's own echoes of history.
I mean if you think Maduro is going to invade....Guyana in the name of....lebensraum
These are the exact same arguments we hear every single time the US wants to knock over some country.
Allowing massive internal murder play out has plenty of echoes in history. It isn't like South Africa was constantly conquering neighboring countries during apartheid.
So then, what is your leverage? The US and other countries have to take "some" kind of a position. We don't want a military response, we know a public/diplomatic denouncement is toothless and regimes can operate with impunity in the face of "condemnation" from other countries all the time. That leaves economic/trade leverage.
Its extremely cool that every other page those of us who don't want to invade Venezuela have to explain again what we'd like to have happen instead.
I think we should be helping take care of the 3 million some Venezuelan refugees and once the Venezuelans work the situation out themselves we can reevaluate.
Waiting for the situation to work out itself has it's own echoes of history.
I mean if you think Maduro is going to invade....Guyana in the name of....lebensraum
These are the exact same arguments we hear every single time the US wants to knock over some country.
Allowing massive internal murder play out has plenty of echoes in history. It isn't like South Africa was constantly conquering neighboring countries during apartheid.
there are positions between "no intervention/interference" and "military invasion to depose maduro"
i think its just as unfair to assume that everyone who would like to see maduro gone support a military intervention as it is to assume that everyone who opposes U.S intervention is a crypto-maduro lover
The problem is, if you're a politician sufficiently insulated and with enough power to protect you and yours, general sanctions don't really do anything but harm the populace you are, ostensibly, trying to help.
Which is why, if memory serves, sanctions like the Magnitsky Act tend to be better, because instead of "We're going to sanction all of russia and the people living there" it's "We're basically going to make it so the power players can't do jack shit because all their assets have effectively been rendered out of reach."
But in general there seems to be the idea that if you make things shitty enough for the populace via sanctions, they'll pressure their leader, which seems flawed because the problem in the first place is that the leader is, again, insulated and unresponsive to the populace they're supposed to be serving.
The main international strategy right now seems to be to try to get the Venezuelan higher ups to to stop supporting Maduro with promises of things like amnesty from various groups. "You know this probably isn't going to end well for Maduro so do the thing that will let you get out Scott-Free and end well for you" doesn't require an invasion.
So then, what is your leverage? The US and other countries have to take "some" kind of a position. We don't want a military response, we know a public/diplomatic denouncement is toothless and regimes can operate with impunity in the face of "condemnation" from other countries all the time. That leaves economic/trade leverage.
Its extremely cool that every other page those of us who don't want to invade Venezuela have to explain again what we'd like to have happen instead.
I think we should be helping take care of the 3 million some Venezuelan refugees and once the Venezuelans work the situation out themselves we can reevaluate.
Waiting for the situation to work out itself has it's own echoes of history.
I mean if you think Maduro is going to invade....Guyana in the name of....lebensraum
These are the exact same arguments we hear every single time the US wants to knock over some country.
Allowing massive internal murder play out has plenty of echoes in history. It isn't like South Africa was constantly conquering neighboring countries during apartheid.
I'm sure we'll be welcomed as liberators.
So the people who didn't want to sanction South Africa and argued it was better to work with them were correct? Right now an Iraq War style invasion does not appear to be really on the table despite the refusal to say it isn't off the table.
So then, what is your leverage? The US and other countries have to take "some" kind of a position. We don't want a military response, we know a public/diplomatic denouncement is toothless and regimes can operate with impunity in the face of "condemnation" from other countries all the time. That leaves economic/trade leverage.
Its extremely cool that every other page those of us who don't want to invade Venezuela have to explain again what we'd like to have happen instead.
I think we should be helping take care of the 3 million some Venezuelan refugees and once the Venezuelans work the situation out themselves we can reevaluate.
Waiting for the situation to work out itself has it's own echoes of history.
I mean if you think Maduro is going to invade....Guyana in the name of....lebensraum
These are the exact same arguments we hear every single time the US wants to knock over some country.
Allowing massive internal murder play out has plenty of echoes in history. It isn't like South Africa was constantly conquering neighboring countries during apartheid.
I'm sure we'll be welcomed as liberators.
So the people who didn't want to sanction South Africa and argued it was better to work with them were correct? Right now an Iraq War style invasion does not appear to be really on the table despite the refusal to say it isn't off the table.
I don't support broad sanctions, as to "working with" that is too broad to say.
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TL DRNot at all confident in his reflexive opinions of thingsRegistered Userregular
"But Maduro is also a problem" absolves no one of the pain and misery caused by sanctions.
Well then your choice is thoughts and prayers or military intervention. Pick your poison.
If you can't influence a dictatorial asshole militarily, diplomatically, or economically, what exactly are you going to do to influence them?
All of these actions WILL result in death and suffering. The point is to try to minimize it. Diplomatic waffling kills people too.
The problematic assumption here is that the US has any moral authority to challenge 'dictatorial assholes', that the US has good intentions when claiming an interest in doing so, or that the US chooses which countries to intervene in based upon anything but advancing American hegemony.
The fact that Venezuela is supposedly in dire need of specifically the Trump administration to intervene, but Saudi Arabia and Turkey are fine and even eligible to buy US weapons should give lie to the notion that there's any substance to these interventionist arguments.
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TL DRNot at all confident in his reflexive opinions of thingsRegistered Userregular
So then, what is your leverage? The US and other countries have to take "some" kind of a position. We don't want a military response, we know a public/diplomatic denouncement is toothless and regimes can operate with impunity in the face of "condemnation" from other countries all the time. That leaves economic/trade leverage.
Develop a ten-year plan for reparations for years of previous US foreign policy, in the interest in gaining credibility as having at least begun to atone for the entirety of our involvement in Central and South America, extradite war criminals like Elliot Abrams to the countries in which they facilitated death squads, and adopt a foreign policy based on respecting national sovereignty to the degree that despots don't have a convenient looming, external threat to point to when they want to clamp down on dissent.
For that matter, use that time to tackle our own problems - I imagine that our ability to export democracy would be greater once we achieve it domestically.
So then, what is your leverage? The US and other countries have to take "some" kind of a position. We don't want a military response, we know a public/diplomatic denouncement is toothless and regimes can operate with impunity in the face of "condemnation" from other countries all the time. That leaves economic/trade leverage.
Develop a ten-year plan for reparations for years of previous US foreign policy, in the interest in gaining credibility as having at least begun to atone for the entirety of our involvement in Central and South America, extradite war criminals like Elliot Abrams to the countries in which they facilitated death squads, and adopt a foreign policy based on respecting national sovereignty to the degree that despots don't have a convenient looming, external threat to point to when they want to clamp down on dissent.
For that matter, use that time to tackle our own problems - I imagine that our ability to export democracy would be greater once we achieve it domestically.
So your solution to addressing the current problem of Venezuela, is not to address the current problem. Unless there is a time scale to your proposal that I'm missing?
"Begging forgiveness for national sins" is not the foundation of foreign policy, warranted or not.
So then, what is your leverage? The US and other countries have to take "some" kind of a position. We don't want a military response, we know a public/diplomatic denouncement is toothless and regimes can operate with impunity in the face of "condemnation" from other countries all the time. That leaves economic/trade leverage.
Develop a ten-year plan for reparations for years of previous US foreign policy, in the interest in gaining credibility as having at least begun to atone for the entirety of our involvement in Central and South America, extradite war criminals like Elliot Abrams to the countries in which they facilitated death squads, and adopt a foreign policy based on respecting national sovereignty to the degree that despots don't have a convenient looming, external threat to point to when they want to clamp down on dissent.
For that matter, use that time to tackle our own problems - I imagine that our ability to export democracy would be greater once we achieve it domestically.
So your solution to addressing the current problem of Venezuela, is not to address the current problem. Unless there is a time scale to your proposal that I'm missing?
"Begging forgiveness for national sins" is not the foundation of foreign policy, warranted or not.
If the only acceptable foreign policy is to decide just how much you want to be involved in other nations' internal affairs you've effectively limited the options available to one ideology.
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TL DRNot at all confident in his reflexive opinions of thingsRegistered Userregular
So then, what is your leverage? The US and other countries have to take "some" kind of a position. We don't want a military response, we know a public/diplomatic denouncement is toothless and regimes can operate with impunity in the face of "condemnation" from other countries all the time. That leaves economic/trade leverage.
Develop a ten-year plan for reparations for years of previous US foreign policy, in the interest in gaining credibility as having at least begun to atone for the entirety of our involvement in Central and South America, extradite war criminals like Elliot Abrams to the countries in which they facilitated death squads, and adopt a foreign policy based on respecting national sovereignty to the degree that despots don't have a convenient looming, external threat to point to when they want to clamp down on dissent.
For that matter, use that time to tackle our own problems - I imagine that our ability to export democracy would be greater once we achieve it domestically.
So your solution to addressing the current problem of Venezuela, is not to address the current problem. Unless there is a time scale to your proposal that I'm missing?
"Begging forgiveness for national sins" is not the foundation of foreign policy, warranted or not.
I'm saying that unless the US does serious work to reverse course, we're unable to involve ourselves in any such situation without making things demonstrably worse. Unless you can point to a time after El Salvador and Chile and Vietnam and Iraq and Libya and Yemen when the US underwent a substantial shift in philosophy, which would be a hard sell seeing as we have people like Abrams and Bolton running this show, then I'm entirely unconvinced that any US intervention would be primarily in service of the same sorts of capital interests which sought to carve out spheres of influence in the aforementioned countries.
So then, what is your leverage? The US and other countries have to take "some" kind of a position. We don't want a military response, we know a public/diplomatic denouncement is toothless and regimes can operate with impunity in the face of "condemnation" from other countries all the time. That leaves economic/trade leverage.
Develop a ten-year plan for reparations for years of previous US foreign policy, in the interest in gaining credibility as having at least begun to atone for the entirety of our involvement in Central and South America, extradite war criminals like Elliot Abrams to the countries in which they facilitated death squads, and adopt a foreign policy based on respecting national sovereignty to the degree that despots don't have a convenient looming, external threat to point to when they want to clamp down on dissent.
For that matter, use that time to tackle our own problems - I imagine that our ability to export democracy would be greater once we achieve it domestically.
So your solution to addressing the current problem of Venezuela, is not to address the current problem. Unless there is a time scale to your proposal that I'm missing?
"Begging forgiveness for national sins" is not the foundation of foreign policy, warranted or not.
If the only acceptable foreign policy is to decide just how much you want to be involved in other nations' internal affairs you've effectively limited the options available to one ideology.
There is an entire range of ideas on how the US should engage with the world and practitioners and IR academics have been writing about this for decades. You're grossly over simplifying the range of policy preferences on US foreign policy. It isn't just Neoisolationists and everyone else.
So then, what is your leverage? The US and other countries have to take "some" kind of a position. We don't want a military response, we know a public/diplomatic denouncement is toothless and regimes can operate with impunity in the face of "condemnation" from other countries all the time. That leaves economic/trade leverage.
Develop a ten-year plan for reparations for years of previous US foreign policy, in the interest in gaining credibility as having at least begun to atone for the entirety of our involvement in Central and South America, extradite war criminals like Elliot Abrams to the countries in which they facilitated death squads, and adopt a foreign policy based on respecting national sovereignty to the degree that despots don't have a convenient looming, external threat to point to when they want to clamp down on dissent.
For that matter, use that time to tackle our own problems - I imagine that our ability to export democracy would be greater once we achieve it domestically.
So your solution to addressing the current problem of Venezuela, is not to address the current problem. Unless there is a time scale to your proposal that I'm missing?
"Begging forgiveness for national sins" is not the foundation of foreign policy, warranted or not.
If the only acceptable foreign policy is to decide just how much you want to be involved in other nations' internal affairs you've effectively limited the options available to one ideology.
There is an entire range of ideas on how the US should engage with the world and practitioners and IR academics have been writing about this for decades. You're grossly over simplifying the range of policy preferences on US foreign policy. It isn't just Neoisolationists and everyone else.
Its all shades of "how heavily do we want to get involved in this country's internal affairs". Entire debate swims in those waters in this country.
So then, what is your leverage? The US and other countries have to take "some" kind of a position. We don't want a military response, we know a public/diplomatic denouncement is toothless and regimes can operate with impunity in the face of "condemnation" from other countries all the time. That leaves economic/trade leverage.
Develop a ten-year plan for reparations for years of previous US foreign policy, in the interest in gaining credibility as having at least begun to atone for the entirety of our involvement in Central and South America, extradite war criminals like Elliot Abrams to the countries in which they facilitated death squads, and adopt a foreign policy based on respecting national sovereignty to the degree that despots don't have a convenient looming, external threat to point to when they want to clamp down on dissent.
For that matter, use that time to tackle our own problems - I imagine that our ability to export democracy would be greater once we achieve it domestically.
So your solution to addressing the current problem of Venezuela, is not to address the current problem. Unless there is a time scale to your proposal that I'm missing?
"Begging forgiveness for national sins" is not the foundation of foreign policy, warranted or not.
If the only acceptable foreign policy is to decide just how much you want to be involved in other nations' internal affairs you've effectively limited the options available to one ideology.
There is an entire range of ideas on how the US should engage with the world and practitioners and IR academics have been writing about this for decades. You're grossly over simplifying the range of policy preferences on US foreign policy. It isn't just Neoisolationists and everyone else.
Its all shades of "how heavily do we want to get involved in this country's internal affairs". Entire debate swims in those waters in this country.
"Neoisolationist" is pretty funny though.
It's not my term. What you seem to be espousing as far as American foreign policy aligns really strongly with Neoisolationism.
So then, what is your leverage? The US and other countries have to take "some" kind of a position. We don't want a military response, we know a public/diplomatic denouncement is toothless and regimes can operate with impunity in the face of "condemnation" from other countries all the time. That leaves economic/trade leverage.
Develop a ten-year plan for reparations for years of previous US foreign policy, in the interest in gaining credibility as having at least begun to atone for the entirety of our involvement in Central and South America, extradite war criminals like Elliot Abrams to the countries in which they facilitated death squads, and adopt a foreign policy based on respecting national sovereignty to the degree that despots don't have a convenient looming, external threat to point to when they want to clamp down on dissent.
For that matter, use that time to tackle our own problems - I imagine that our ability to export democracy would be greater once we achieve it domestically.
So your solution to addressing the current problem of Venezuela, is not to address the current problem. Unless there is a time scale to your proposal that I'm missing?
"Begging forgiveness for national sins" is not the foundation of foreign policy, warranted or not.
If the only acceptable foreign policy is to decide just how much you want to be involved in other nations' internal affairs you've effectively limited the options available to one ideology.
There is an entire range of ideas on how the US should engage with the world and practitioners and IR academics have been writing about this for decades. You're grossly over simplifying the range of policy preferences on US foreign policy. It isn't just Neoisolationists and everyone else.
Its all shades of "how heavily do we want to get involved in this country's internal affairs". Entire debate swims in those waters in this country.
"Neoisolationist" is pretty funny though.
It's not my term. What you seem to be espousing as far as American foreign policy aligns really strongly with Neoisolationism.
Yeah except I'm not advocating a modern form of isolationism.
So then, what is your leverage? The US and other countries have to take "some" kind of a position. We don't want a military response, we know a public/diplomatic denouncement is toothless and regimes can operate with impunity in the face of "condemnation" from other countries all the time. That leaves economic/trade leverage.
Develop a ten-year plan for reparations for years of previous US foreign policy, in the interest in gaining credibility as having at least begun to atone for the entirety of our involvement in Central and South America, extradite war criminals like Elliot Abrams to the countries in which they facilitated death squads, and adopt a foreign policy based on respecting national sovereignty to the degree that despots don't have a convenient looming, external threat to point to when they want to clamp down on dissent.
For that matter, use that time to tackle our own problems - I imagine that our ability to export democracy would be greater once we achieve it domestically.
So your solution to addressing the current problem of Venezuela, is not to address the current problem. Unless there is a time scale to your proposal that I'm missing?
"Begging forgiveness for national sins" is not the foundation of foreign policy, warranted or not.
If the only acceptable foreign policy is to decide just how much you want to be involved in other nations' internal affairs you've effectively limited the options available to one ideology.
There is an entire range of ideas on how the US should engage with the world and practitioners and IR academics have been writing about this for decades. You're grossly over simplifying the range of policy preferences on US foreign policy. It isn't just Neoisolationists and everyone else.
Its all shades of "how heavily do we want to get involved in this country's internal affairs". Entire debate swims in those waters in this country.
"Neoisolationist" is pretty funny though.
It's not my term. What you seem to be espousing as far as American foreign policy aligns really strongly with Neoisolationism.
Yeah except I'm not advocating a modern form of isolationism.
You've criticized talk of military force and you've criticized diplomatic and economic actions and unless I've misunderstood you appear to be arguing from the implied position that any foreign policy action taken by the US is inherently bad unless it's just literally handing out money.
So then, what is your leverage? The US and other countries have to take "some" kind of a position. We don't want a military response, we know a public/diplomatic denouncement is toothless and regimes can operate with impunity in the face of "condemnation" from other countries all the time. That leaves economic/trade leverage.
Develop a ten-year plan for reparations for years of previous US foreign policy, in the interest in gaining credibility as having at least begun to atone for the entirety of our involvement in Central and South America, extradite war criminals like Elliot Abrams to the countries in which they facilitated death squads, and adopt a foreign policy based on respecting national sovereignty to the degree that despots don't have a convenient looming, external threat to point to when they want to clamp down on dissent.
For that matter, use that time to tackle our own problems - I imagine that our ability to export democracy would be greater once we achieve it domestically.
So your solution to addressing the current problem of Venezuela, is not to address the current problem. Unless there is a time scale to your proposal that I'm missing?
"Begging forgiveness for national sins" is not the foundation of foreign policy, warranted or not.
If the only acceptable foreign policy is to decide just how much you want to be involved in other nations' internal affairs you've effectively limited the options available to one ideology.
There is an entire range of ideas on how the US should engage with the world and practitioners and IR academics have been writing about this for decades. You're grossly over simplifying the range of policy preferences on US foreign policy. It isn't just Neoisolationists and everyone else.
Its all shades of "how heavily do we want to get involved in this country's internal affairs". Entire debate swims in those waters in this country.
"Neoisolationist" is pretty funny though.
It's not my term. What you seem to be espousing as far as American foreign policy aligns really strongly with Neoisolationism.
Yeah except I'm not advocating a modern form of isolationism.
You've criticized talk of military force and you've criticized diplomatic and economic actions and unless I've misunderstood you appear to be arguing from the implied position that any foreign policy action taken by the US is inherently bad unless it's just literally handing out money.
We've had this conversation like a dozen times, so I'd refer to prior pages of this thread and the FP one.
An anticipated large-scale military abandonment of Hugo Chávez’s heir has not materialized despite Guaidó – who is now recognized as Venezuela’s legitimate interim president by most western governments – repeatedly touting an amnesty for the armed forces.
However, in an interview with Latin American journalists in Washington, the National Security Council’s senior director for Western Hemisphere affairs insisted Maduro’s demise was a foregone conclusion.
“The path we are going down is irreversible … The question is no longer if Maduro accepts this or not, it’s how long it will take him to accept it,” Mauricio Claver-Carone said.
Claver-Carone, a conservative Cuban-American lawyer, renewed US calls for Venezuela’s military top brass to ditch Maduro, claiming the White House would not “persecute” those who backed “a peaceful and democratic transition”. “We are not in the business of revenge, nor are we seeking to settle scores.”
There's several opinions around, but I think that asking whatever Maduro can stay or not misses the point. The problem isn't Maduro leaving, is how he leaves. Because the more violent the intervention, the more the US will have to get involved to deal with the subsequent conflict against the guerrillas (that is an inevitability on all scenarios). So the US wants to get Maduro out with as much of the Venezuelan Army intact as possible, despite everything. Easier to cleanse than to rebuild. Which is why Maduro's play is to increase the cost of removing him to see if the US and the EU back off. They won't, there's already too much political capital invested, but there's quite a bit of participants on crimes against humanity willing to go down with the ship.
While I do want Maduro, I wish the US wouldn't stick it's foot in its mouth. I remember when Assad falling "was only a matter of time".
If the military still backs him, you can't force him out without outside intervention.
This is why some ambiguity is necessary when you're talking about applying pressure on a state. You can't make a costly signal you're not willing to follow through with (Syria) and you can't explicitly state that military force is even to be considered. You're not providing a path for the other state to take to align with what you want, you're limiting yourself and in some cases making a statement which is so rigid you can't quickly adapt to changing context on the ground (Syria, again).
Caleb Bond is an UK reporter.
Note that I'm ignorant of the participants, but when you can't answer the specifics about the Venezuelans sanctions, maybe you aren't informed enough to give an opinion.
Also, Chavez didn't nationalized the oil industry, that happened on 1976. That nationalization and it's effects are a different conversation though, can expand if anybody wants to.
Basically at this point anytime someone brings up US sanctions against Venezuela as a cause of food shortages and inflation I think it's safe to say they don't know what they're talking about.
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ElldrenIs a woman dammitceterum censeoRegistered Userregular
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I get the sense that the bolded begins with an implied "Unfortunately,"
Assad was willing to consolidate power around his minority group (Shia/Alawite/Kurd/Christian) base and near genocide/exile the Sunni opposition. To the point that he managed to destabilize Iraq and the EU with the flood of refugees.
Which is as impressive as it is awful. Venezuela doesn't have the same break up of sectarian groups, but Chavez and Maduro were trying to build a militia based Revolutionary Guard to defend themselves against a military coup so we'll see if ideological sectarianism allows a similar strategy.
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
Went down the rabbit on hole that one and, yeah, looks like Hussein cooked the numbers. I fucking hate propaganda.
- John Stuart Mill
Caleb Bond is an UK reporter.
Note that I'm ignorant of the participants, but when you can't answer the specifics about the Venezuelans sanctions, maybe you aren't informed enough to give an opinion.
Also, Chavez didn't nationalized the oil industry, that happened on 1976. That nationalization and it's effects are a different conversation though, can expand if anybody wants to.
*escorted to mansion for 5 course meal*
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-gold-insight/how-venezuela-turns-its-useless-bank-notes-into-gold-idUSKCN1PZ0BX
Well then your choice is thoughts and prayers or military intervention. Pick your poison.
If you can't influence a dictatorial asshole militarily, diplomatically, or economically, what exactly are you going to do to influence them?
All of these actions WILL result in death and suffering. The point is to try to minimize it. Diplomatic waffling kills people too.
There's a lot of bad things there. There's the obvious slave labor, the clashes between guerrillas (the regime factions, Colombian and Brazilian ones, the indigenous communities not taking that shit) that have lead to massacres and the environmental impact since gold mining uses mercury, which is toxic. Whistleblower group SOS Orinoco has been doing work on documenting the effects:
When Bolsonaro (I know) talks about expanding development on the Amazon, he also implies sending soldiers against the guerrillas, which is why people support it.
EDIT: Also the complete collapse of any kind of government authority in a border is kind of a big deal and a reason why ousting Maduro became more attractive.
Oh cool, using rhetoric around gun control to argue for invading a country.
Its extremely cool that every other page those of us who don't want to invade Venezuela have to explain again what we'd like to have happen instead.
I think we should be helping take care of the 3 million some Venezuelan refugees and once the Venezuelans work the situation out themselves we can reevaluate.
Waiting for the situation to work out itself has it's own echoes of history.
I mean if you think Maduro is going to invade....Guyana in the name of....lebensraum
These are the exact same arguments we hear every single time the US wants to knock over some country.
Allowing massive internal murder play out has plenty of echoes in history. It isn't like South Africa was constantly conquering neighboring countries during apartheid.
I'm sure we'll be welcomed as liberators.
i think its just as unfair to assume that everyone who would like to see maduro gone support a military intervention as it is to assume that everyone who opposes U.S intervention is a crypto-maduro lover
Which is why, if memory serves, sanctions like the Magnitsky Act tend to be better, because instead of "We're going to sanction all of russia and the people living there" it's "We're basically going to make it so the power players can't do jack shit because all their assets have effectively been rendered out of reach."
But in general there seems to be the idea that if you make things shitty enough for the populace via sanctions, they'll pressure their leader, which seems flawed because the problem in the first place is that the leader is, again, insulated and unresponsive to the populace they're supposed to be serving.
So the people who didn't want to sanction South Africa and argued it was better to work with them were correct? Right now an Iraq War style invasion does not appear to be really on the table despite the refusal to say it isn't off the table.
I don't support broad sanctions, as to "working with" that is too broad to say.
The problematic assumption here is that the US has any moral authority to challenge 'dictatorial assholes', that the US has good intentions when claiming an interest in doing so, or that the US chooses which countries to intervene in based upon anything but advancing American hegemony.
The fact that Venezuela is supposedly in dire need of specifically the Trump administration to intervene, but Saudi Arabia and Turkey are fine and even eligible to buy US weapons should give lie to the notion that there's any substance to these interventionist arguments.
Develop a ten-year plan for reparations for years of previous US foreign policy, in the interest in gaining credibility as having at least begun to atone for the entirety of our involvement in Central and South America, extradite war criminals like Elliot Abrams to the countries in which they facilitated death squads, and adopt a foreign policy based on respecting national sovereignty to the degree that despots don't have a convenient looming, external threat to point to when they want to clamp down on dissent.
For that matter, use that time to tackle our own problems - I imagine that our ability to export democracy would be greater once we achieve it domestically.
So your solution to addressing the current problem of Venezuela, is not to address the current problem. Unless there is a time scale to your proposal that I'm missing?
"Begging forgiveness for national sins" is not the foundation of foreign policy, warranted or not.
If the only acceptable foreign policy is to decide just how much you want to be involved in other nations' internal affairs you've effectively limited the options available to one ideology.
I'm saying that unless the US does serious work to reverse course, we're unable to involve ourselves in any such situation without making things demonstrably worse. Unless you can point to a time after El Salvador and Chile and Vietnam and Iraq and Libya and Yemen when the US underwent a substantial shift in philosophy, which would be a hard sell seeing as we have people like Abrams and Bolton running this show, then I'm entirely unconvinced that any US intervention would be primarily in service of the same sorts of capital interests which sought to carve out spheres of influence in the aforementioned countries.
There is an entire range of ideas on how the US should engage with the world and practitioners and IR academics have been writing about this for decades. You're grossly over simplifying the range of policy preferences on US foreign policy. It isn't just Neoisolationists and everyone else.
Its all shades of "how heavily do we want to get involved in this country's internal affairs". Entire debate swims in those waters in this country.
"Neoisolationist" is pretty funny though.
It's not my term. What you seem to be espousing as far as American foreign policy aligns really strongly with Neoisolationism.
Yeah except I'm not advocating a modern form of isolationism.
You've criticized talk of military force and you've criticized diplomatic and economic actions and unless I've misunderstood you appear to be arguing from the implied position that any foreign policy action taken by the US is inherently bad unless it's just literally handing out money.
We've had this conversation like a dozen times, so I'd refer to prior pages of this thread and the FP one.
There's several opinions around, but I think that asking whatever Maduro can stay or not misses the point. The problem isn't Maduro leaving, is how he leaves. Because the more violent the intervention, the more the US will have to get involved to deal with the subsequent conflict against the guerrillas (that is an inevitability on all scenarios). So the US wants to get Maduro out with as much of the Venezuelan Army intact as possible, despite everything. Easier to cleanse than to rebuild. Which is why Maduro's play is to increase the cost of removing him to see if the US and the EU back off. They won't, there's already too much political capital invested, but there's quite a bit of participants on crimes against humanity willing to go down with the ship.
If the military still backs him, you can't force him out without outside intervention.
This is why some ambiguity is necessary when you're talking about applying pressure on a state. You can't make a costly signal you're not willing to follow through with (Syria) and you can't explicitly state that military force is even to be considered. You're not providing a path for the other state to take to align with what you want, you're limiting yourself and in some cases making a statement which is so rigid you can't quickly adapt to changing context on the ground (Syria, again).
This has kind of been my problem with the whole "sanctions caused the Venezuela economy to collapse" argument. All sanctions against Venezuela are listed on the US State Department's website and the earliest sanctions go to 2015 and are just against particular people in the ruling party of the government
But if you look at the wikipedia page about production shortages the timeline goes back all the way to at least 2010 with it really taking off in 2013, with lots of contemporary news reports on the problem, economic assessments, etc.
Basically at this point anytime someone brings up US sanctions against Venezuela as a cause of food shortages and inflation I think it's safe to say they don't know what they're talking about.
It is incredibly disappointing : (