Al Jazeera has been super loud and vocal about how US aggressions towards Venezuela is all about oil. It makes sense since Venezuela’s future oil exports in case the current regime falls will hugely impact the price of oil which funds Qatar which funds Al Jazeera.
When US supports dictators, US bad. When US topples dictators, US bad…
To me the similarity with Iraq is that it is run by a ruthless dictator that destroys the country. I don’t care that much which pretext is used to topple him. The reason why the Iraq war was a bad idea isn’t that the pretext used turned out to be bullshit, it is that Saddam’s brutal regime was keeping a lead on ethnic tensions, that ended up killing over a 100k people. Though it isn’t clear it wouldn’t have happened ultimately when Saddam would have died of natural death.
Oil is unconvincing since it took years before production recovered, so that clearly wasn’t the priority.
But I see no such risk in Venezuela. Not that it is likely to become a wealthy Switzerland, the voters elected Chavez after all. But a poor democracy is better than a poor dictatorship.
Not sure how Trump will still claim he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize if he starts an unprovoked war (and also rewards the dictator having started an unprovoked war in Ukraine) though.
When US initiates aggressive unilateral military action on other sovereign countries, US bad yes, of course.
Old-school UN-led "police action" as in Korea is one thing, at least there's a somewhat universal institution making judgements on which countries need to be "saved" under a consistent legal framework, but that's such a slippery slope too.
The US does not have the authority to make such decisions and definitely does not have a good track record of them. It's just vigilantism at a large scale, at best. Even when being charitable about intent, US has done some things in legitimate good faith, at least partially, the results are always catastrophic. There's been no instance of actually positive outcomes for the local population, it has always destroyed the country for decades to come and set the stage for significantly worse regimes.
No just the first part, China ain't doing no ground invasion for oil, minerals and power half around the world. Iraq and whole surrounding region became a hellhole due and only due to US failed invasion, gave the world ISIS and screwed entire region badly for decades to come. Afghanistan became (again) a hellhole due to failed US invasion too, 0 positive long term things achieved, just death all around.
US military-industrial complex (aka the republicans in power but not only) will try and force any way US will spend trillions on military equipment again and again, thats glaringly obvious to literally whole world and not something new or secretly done behind many curtains.
If US would actually want to have an image (and not just self-image) of somebody standing up to tyranny and genocide and protecting the weak and just, they would support Ukraine and not backstab it frequently as they do. Thats a fine litmus paper for this in current times, don't need anything else. The fact that enemy there is a mortal enemy of US itself and all principles US holds (held?) dear like freedom, democracy, capitalism or right to self-determination is just the proverbial cherry on the top of the cake. No amount of words can bullshit around this simple fact.
Also in the process US is losing its by far biggest and strongest ally in whole world on all existential, moral and societal levels - Europe. An army of expert spies and hackers wouldn't be able to achieve in decades what current potus achieved in less than a year.
Sounds like you are pleading for an international intervention in the US as Trump tramples all over the constitution, indulges in blatant corruption and sends troops onto the streets :-)
Fortunately most countries think it's a US internal matter for the US people to sort out.
Like grabbing conscription age men on the streets, put them in a van while they are screeming "I want to live" and send them to the front line after two weeks of "training"?
Apparently, yes, that's what the US does if you look at the Ukraine.
The problem with your argument is there are dictators all over the world the US ignores. If anti-dictator is enough, why the tepid response for Ukraine? What about the various African nations? What about Haiti and the violence there?
The difference is oil, and Trump's also very petty and Maduro has told him to pound sand.
> Oil is unconvincing since it took years before production recovered, so that clearly wasn’t the priority.
Haliburton, Exxon, Chevron, etc... made a ton of money rebuilding the infrastructure and continue to make money on the oil reserves.
This doesn't mean that they are wrong. We should not have another was for the petrodollar. We have enough suffering in this planet. We should not only not create more, but actively try to reduce it.
It's not that easy/clear. Venezuelan oil is really poor quality, needs lots of refining, and is thus only profitable only when the price per barrel is on the higher end.
So Qatar (which mostly exports natural gas anyways), Saudi Arabia, etc. can just dump oil at a cheaper price to make it unprofitable to extract and refine Venezuelan oil.
US decision makers salivating over war/oil/whatever def don't take that into account, but it really doesn't matter either.
The data you linked doesn't show that. If I were on my computer, I would download crude oil prices/US shale oil extraction data and look for correlations.
My intuition seeing this is that the lack of openness of Venezuelian economy made it impossible to recover from the crude oil price drop circa 2014, because of a lack of access to capital and new tech (and probably corruption). Also, if you want to nationalizes, you better have a plan like Norway had, and Venezuela didn't. If your goal is only profit, better let a private company take care of it, that's the thing they're good for.
From what I understand the root cause is racism and classism.
Venezuela was in a deep economic crisis for a very long time before Chavez was elected. The then ruling elite were pretty happy living in a bubble, extracting oil, selling to the west, embezzling the proceeds and ignoring most of the population.
The reason I say, the root cause is racism and classism, is because they totally underestimated the power of the people to overthrow their corrupt regime.
You clearly don't know anything about the history of the country. It was never about classism or racism, venezuelans are racially diverse with lots of mix between the original indigenous inhabitants, colonial europeans, african slaves and then the second wave of european immigrants after the WWII.
> The reason I say, the root cause is racism and classism, is because they totally underestimated the power of the people to overthrow their corrupt regime.
There was no 'regime', there was a democracy with corruption problems but that was still functional. Nor it was 'overthrown', a populist was elected due to disenchantment and the populist dismantle the state institutions and turn it into an oligarchy ran by his circle.
Trump has been begging for a peace prize, got his FIFA pretend-prize, and immediately threatens war on a country over pretense after illegally killing their citizens over dubious claims. They've been pressuring Ukraine into handing over valuable resources, and now they're going for a country over Oil. Okay, enjoy your peace prize Mr. Global FIFA Peace Man.
It is shocking how openly US planning a war of aggression against Venezuela and the whole civilized world is just fine with it. EU could grow a pair and show the US that this type of behaviour is not accepted. Sanction the fuck out of the US regime, boot off Swift, kick American companies out of the EU market, barren American citizens from travelling to EU. EU can prevent this war, while it is not too late.
While I like the sentiment, we have to be somewhat pragmatic. The sanctions on Russia have had a deep impact on the EU economy, mainly the energy crisis and other connected systemic consequences. Germany and much of central and eastern EU became highly dependent on Russian natural gas over the last 20 years, and higher energy prices in general have been quite harmful to the already precarious industrial and agricultural sectors (high-tech farming as in NL, while quite profitable, is very energy intensive and sensitive to tightening margins).
Most of EU (and UK) is on (or near) recession right now, except for some southern EU countries which are doing surprisingly well, although relative to a long period of hardship after the 2008 crisis. It's not an acute recession, but there's no clear way out of this stagnation on the horizon, and the people are really starting to feel the squeeze.
Of course, the root cause of this is much deeper, the Russia situation was just the spark. EU industry has been complacent for decades, believing that while less competitive on costs and scale we still had the technological edge, which ironically led to severe underinvestment in R&D. And giving up on nuclear is backfiring badly too.
I do think the (shrinking) majority still believes that the (limited) actions against Russia were worthwhile, since they are not threatening sovereignty in general, they are threatening EU's territorial integrity at our doorstep. It is unacceptable, and while it is a heavy price, not retaliating would have much more catastrophic consequences.
But cutting off trade with US over Venezuela? Forget about it, EU's dependency on US is orders of magnitude higher than it was with Russia, it would be absolutely deadly to the EU economy.
Not with this kind of attitude for sure. EU can at least send a strong signal by doing concrete actions. Sanctions against American corporations and individuals, travel restrictions, SWIFT ban. These will make Trump think twice before waging acts of unprovoked aggression.
Trump and the US has never shown to care about this. The current US gov seems fixated on attacking the EU and trying to break it up. If they want to go to war, EU won't be able to stop them. Perhaps if they gift Trump a plane, though.
The EU has consistently been anti-Chavez and anti-Maduro, probably because the corrupt Venezuelan elites who escaped with their stolen millions after Chavez was elected, have been whispering in their ears ever since.
War is bad .. yes very, of course, but look closer at life in Venezuela, it’s really gotten bad for people there.. millions left, just saying: regime change if it works might .. be good?
No. Currently it's still better than in Syria and Libya before their regime change. If a insurrectionist force existed, you would have a point, but even then it doesn't work when too much foreign meddling happens, just look at Libya. But Syria is probably the best example: foreign power meddling made everything worse for years. Foreign power switch target because of October 7th, let free reign to insurgent group, the regime change took what, 8 weeks? And it seems way more stable than expected.
The EU is fine with it, because there are no principles in geo-politics. All their hue and cry about Ukraine is also because of their own security, not any virtue. Laughably it was the EU that went along with US plans to deorbit Ukraine from Russia's influence.
The only way for Venezuela to survive is to play dirty and be cunning/resourceful just like their Ukrainian counterparts fighting for their life.
You make it sound like it's a bad thing, being the subject of weekly nuclear threats and invasion threats like the EU is is a valid reason on its own to support Ukraine.
I also wonder why the EU should invest a significant amount of political, economical and hard military power to protect a failing dictatorship?
Make no mistake, the EU is not "fine" with the war in the sense that they will express diplomatic criticism of the US when Trump finally starts his idiotic (and narcissistic, and corrupt, but I already said "Trump") war. They are "fine" with it in the sense that they won't self-implode their collective political careers and perhaps the EU itself by sanctioning the US and destroying the economy of the entire EU for fucking Maduro. Doing that would be idiocy.
The export charts appear to have been taken from OEC[0]. They appear to be CC0 from the source but they've applied CC BY-NC-SA and put their own logo on it. A bit odd.
https://youtu.be/C5QGzYFjVaU?si=09nRUo_ddUd5H3D7
The Daily Show segment on comparing them.
https://youtu.be/C5QGzYFjVaU?si=lr30ZcfhKQgGCe1t&t=597
To me the similarity with Iraq is that it is run by a ruthless dictator that destroys the country. I don’t care that much which pretext is used to topple him. The reason why the Iraq war was a bad idea isn’t that the pretext used turned out to be bullshit, it is that Saddam’s brutal regime was keeping a lead on ethnic tensions, that ended up killing over a 100k people. Though it isn’t clear it wouldn’t have happened ultimately when Saddam would have died of natural death.
Oil is unconvincing since it took years before production recovered, so that clearly wasn’t the priority.
But I see no such risk in Venezuela. Not that it is likely to become a wealthy Switzerland, the voters elected Chavez after all. But a poor democracy is better than a poor dictatorship.
Not sure how Trump will still claim he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize if he starts an unprovoked war (and also rewards the dictator having started an unprovoked war in Ukraine) though.
Old-school UN-led "police action" as in Korea is one thing, at least there's a somewhat universal institution making judgements on which countries need to be "saved" under a consistent legal framework, but that's such a slippery slope too.
The US does not have the authority to make such decisions and definitely does not have a good track record of them. It's just vigilantism at a large scale, at best. Even when being charitable about intent, US has done some things in legitimate good faith, at least partially, the results are always catastrophic. There's been no instance of actually positive outcomes for the local population, it has always destroyed the country for decades to come and set the stage for significantly worse regimes.
Yes FIFA as in the football/soccer league.
there is a third option.
US military-industrial complex (aka the republicans in power but not only) will try and force any way US will spend trillions on military equipment again and again, thats glaringly obvious to literally whole world and not something new or secretly done behind many curtains.
If US would actually want to have an image (and not just self-image) of somebody standing up to tyranny and genocide and protecting the weak and just, they would support Ukraine and not backstab it frequently as they do. Thats a fine litmus paper for this in current times, don't need anything else. The fact that enemy there is a mortal enemy of US itself and all principles US holds (held?) dear like freedom, democracy, capitalism or right to self-determination is just the proverbial cherry on the top of the cake. No amount of words can bullshit around this simple fact.
Also in the process US is losing its by far biggest and strongest ally in whole world on all existential, moral and societal levels - Europe. An army of expert spies and hackers wouldn't be able to achieve in decades what current potus achieved in less than a year.
(You may also want to look into the US' track record for installing dictators throughout the Americas. It's not great.)
Fortunately most countries think it's a US internal matter for the US people to sort out.
Like grabbing conscription age men on the streets, put them in a van while they are screeming "I want to live" and send them to the front line after two weeks of "training"?
Apparently, yes, that's what the US does if you look at the Ukraine.
> 90% comments are about Ukraine and US
:^)))
Or maybe the US should start with instituting regime change in its allies in the Persian Gulf?
The difference is oil, and Trump's also very petty and Maduro has told him to pound sand.
> Oil is unconvincing since it took years before production recovered, so that clearly wasn’t the priority.
Haliburton, Exxon, Chevron, etc... made a ton of money rebuilding the infrastructure and continue to make money on the oil reserves.
The US also destroyed the country in the process and caused more deaths than Saddam.
So Qatar (which mostly exports natural gas anyways), Saudi Arabia, etc. can just dump oil at a cheaper price to make it unprofitable to extract and refine Venezuelan oil.
US decision makers salivating over war/oil/whatever def don't take that into account, but it really doesn't matter either.
https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/venezuela/crude-oil-ex...
My intuition seeing this is that the lack of openness of Venezuelian economy made it impossible to recover from the crude oil price drop circa 2014, because of a lack of access to capital and new tech (and probably corruption). Also, if you want to nationalizes, you better have a plan like Norway had, and Venezuela didn't. If your goal is only profit, better let a private company take care of it, that's the thing they're good for.
Venezuela was in a deep economic crisis for a very long time before Chavez was elected. The then ruling elite were pretty happy living in a bubble, extracting oil, selling to the west, embezzling the proceeds and ignoring most of the population.
The reason I say, the root cause is racism and classism, is because they totally underestimated the power of the people to overthrow their corrupt regime.
> The reason I say, the root cause is racism and classism, is because they totally underestimated the power of the people to overthrow their corrupt regime.
There was no 'regime', there was a democracy with corruption problems but that was still functional. Nor it was 'overthrown', a populist was elected due to disenchantment and the populist dismantle the state institutions and turn it into an oligarchy ran by his circle.
Like sanctions?
Most of EU (and UK) is on (or near) recession right now, except for some southern EU countries which are doing surprisingly well, although relative to a long period of hardship after the 2008 crisis. It's not an acute recession, but there's no clear way out of this stagnation on the horizon, and the people are really starting to feel the squeeze.
Of course, the root cause of this is much deeper, the Russia situation was just the spark. EU industry has been complacent for decades, believing that while less competitive on costs and scale we still had the technological edge, which ironically led to severe underinvestment in R&D. And giving up on nuclear is backfiring badly too.
I do think the (shrinking) majority still believes that the (limited) actions against Russia were worthwhile, since they are not threatening sovereignty in general, they are threatening EU's territorial integrity at our doorstep. It is unacceptable, and while it is a heavy price, not retaliating would have much more catastrophic consequences.
But cutting off trade with US over Venezuela? Forget about it, EU's dependency on US is orders of magnitude higher than it was with Russia, it would be absolutely deadly to the EU economy.
> Checks registration date and comments
Ah, right, another Russian bot.
The only way for Venezuela to survive is to play dirty and be cunning/resourceful just like their Ukrainian counterparts fighting for their life.
You are trying very hard to make the situations sound similar, but they are not.
Ukraine is a democracy, Venezuela is not.
The scope of the attacks are entirely different. Still doesn't justify what Trump is doing, of course.
Make no mistake, the EU is not "fine" with the war in the sense that they will express diplomatic criticism of the US when Trump finally starts his idiotic (and narcissistic, and corrupt, but I already said "Trump") war. They are "fine" with it in the sense that they won't self-implode their collective political careers and perhaps the EU itself by sanctioning the US and destroying the economy of the entire EU for fucking Maduro. Doing that would be idiocy.
[0] https://oec.world/en/profile/country/ven