This isnt chess. The government and military are still intact, the VP seems vehemently against rolling over, it just pisses off America’s enemies more and lets them know that kidnapping a head of state is now on the table and they’d better close the Kidnapping Gap and be more ready for that possibility and look into how to do it themselves. That just leads to holding foreign kings for ransom again, it’s not done cause under a system that isnt absolute monarchy the snake works just fine without the head, no one does this cause it’s pointless and opens up equally dirty retaliation, if a head of state orders the kidnapping of another head of state the target could be more on them personally than before, which usually people who want to stay alive try to avoid. How does this advance American Interests as opposed to a more normal act of aggression? Seems like really bad strategy to me.
It signals to Russia and China that any investment in Venezuela will disappear and be a net loss. This keeps Venezuela in a position where no one will help them and the sanctions will eventually deteriorate their popular support until someone who is willing to work for the US is in charge.
It also signals to all of Latin America that if they choose leaders who are not US puppets, their country will be destroyed until they do.
Not only that, what comes after the beating is the dangling of the carrot - from WSJ Finance Industry Eyes Investment Opportunities in Venezuela:
The trip will feature about 20 officials from the finance, energy and defense sectors, among others, Myers said. The tentative plan is for the group to travel to Venezuela in March and meet with the new government including the new president, finance minister, energy minister, economy minister, head of the central bank and the Caracas stock exchange.
Classic abuser tactic. It will place the new Venezuelan leadership in a bind: “you can keep on opposing us, and we will destroy your new leaders just as we did to Maduro, or you can come to terms with what we’re offering and maybe get some crumbs in return. Think about your own people.”
It’s going to be ideology versus economic reality.
Capturing Maduro is also a much more difficult endeavor than mere decapitation strikes. The US is sending the signal that we can take out each and every one of you, but chose not to. So, consider what we have to offer carefully.
Perhaps most importantly, it sends a clear message to the Global South countries that are having second thoughts: China and Russia are not coming to save you.
you can come to terms with what we’re offering and maybe get some crumbs in return
Any PSUV leadership that tries this will absolutely get merc’d. You don’t create a rethoric device for decades about US imperialism and interventionism, as well as shine a light on Chavez and his influence only to try and sell out the country. That is an immediate mark for insurrection.
Capturing Maduro is also a much more difficult endeavor than mere decapitation strikes
Maybe, but Venezuela is nowhere near as hermetic and defended as say Iran, that had been preparing for this scenario for decades. I would bet most countries’ leaderships are just as vulnerable as Venezuela’s. A kidnap might be hard but I don’t think its extraordinarily hard, nor would the US pass up the propaganda win, even at the cost.
Perhaps most importantly, it sends a clear message to the Global South countries that are having second thoughts: China and Russia are not coming to save you.
Only big Trvth nuke here. Although I think this is not planned with that ends, at least that explicitly.
Absolutely. We should not expect the new leadership to accept the US offer immediately. The goal here is to sow political division.
At some point, it will be ideology versus economic reality as I said. The government will have to address its people for the deteriorating economic situation. The staunchly ideological proponents will of course want to continue the resistance, but some will begin to be swayed. The US simply have to wait and monitor the situation and dial up the knob as needed.
After all, the empire can afford to wait. Look at how the US waited 10 years before carving up Syria in an instant last year. A superpower can always outlast a small economy, this is simply a reality we have to accept. Without assistance from other equally powerful forces, there is only so much that a small economy can do.
The government will have to address its people for the deteriorating economic situation
If this were an effective tool it would have already worked, don’t forget Venezuela has been heavily sanctioned for decades now. This would have also been the case for Iran, or Cuba.
Syria’s issue is a bit different, Assad played his hands wrong. Attacked his allies, went to bed with his enemies, and ended up not taking a particular side while maintaining his country in a terrible state. Venezuela is a marked contrast, they are as of today at their highest levels of economic growth in years, and the control over the military is much more solid than Assad had hoped for Syria.
Economic blockade has been the longest used tool in the US arsenal, it hasn’t really worked in the big majority of cases. Venezuelaa went though the mythical hyperinflation and survived. That really counts for something.
All of these are different situations, but like you said it did work with Assad for various reasons, it worked with Burkina Faso, it succeeded with Ghana, etc.
It is not a sure thing, but I also wouldn’t dismiss how fracturous this plan can be.
Maybe, the point is more that this is not a sure shot that will topple the regime and if anything has already been tried so there doesn’t seem to be a clear indication that this time it will work.
This and the extended thread seems most likely to me
That is the nominal message. But the leaders in latam, especially those that matter (Colombia and Brazil) will not bend the knee.
They have also been under sanctions for literal decades and have started to pull through in spite of them.
Yes it might not work but I seems to be the point. Hopefully it has the opposite effect and teaches LatAm left to embrace the purge and steel their revolutionary spirits
I think that as of today this is the case, let’s hope it holds
As one of the users closest to this situation, I wish you and your comrades all the best
Death to America
America getting the opposite effect than they intended through military action does have a lot of precedent. They just also tend to kill a lot of people as well
That does make the most sense out of any replies ive had
I guess yeah, banking off of a complete lack of international solidarity is playing the odds well, unfortunately.
It’s very possible they committed a big strategic error here in thinking they could just easily coup a country by kidnapping its leader. Based on what Trump has been saying publicly, it seems like they thought maybe they could make a deal with Venezuela with Maduro out, but that’s clearly not the case. Will be interesting to see what happens next.
VERY likely the US attacks again
Oh that is a guarantee.
Considering Trump has already threatened to do just that if things don’t end up going the empire’s way, I wouldn’t be surprised at such depravity.
If this is a big fuck up on their part, and they do decide to go in again, then I imagine the optics of that would be worse than their first attack. They already have Maduro, the guy they’ve been manufacturing consent against for years. Going after a bunch of people the average normie has never heard of would be much harder to defend.
Not that it would scare the empire from doing what it wants, because who’s gonna stop them.
What’s missing in this analysis is the massive potential of creating a wacky prison reality show with Diddy, Maduro and Luigi as the stars. Trump yearns to be back in entertainment television
Or the best Escape From New York soft reboot ever!
THE WARDEN :trump-drenched: COMING SOON to your TV screen
We have captured the capitol city; Philidelphia. As I am sure you are aware this means we have per the rules won the war.
We have captured the capitol city; Philidelphia.
It’s over, they got Netanyahu’s city. The US has no choice but to abandon zionism.
It’s a theatrical power-play. The fascist agenda loves to idolize resistance members and then assassinate them to discourage other members of the group. It looks good to their fascist propaganda-fed population who is their main concern. Because those are the closest people who would, in fact, benefit from cutting their heads off.
In reality, it creates a shitload more resistance. But the populace of colonialist projects don’t typically appreciate the feelings of other people in other countries. They’ve been taught to believe they are different from the proletariat of other countries. So they justify it when people just like them are killed across the planet by the same system enslaving them. Because at least it doesn’t effect them in a way they can’t ignore yet.
These people do not go away, however, despite how they are ignored. Their feelings are real. Their love of liberty is real. Just like their love of their lives and families.
What’s not real are the feelings of libs and “cons” in the colonial projects like the U.S. and Israel. The excuses last for five minutes even though they’re repeated for years. The evil that was done lasts forever and will never be forgotten.
Fascist propaganda is like a shitty old shirt left out in the sun. It fades rapidly and falls apart rather quickly. But real humanity never ends. It always remembers. Real humanity is the old, torn raincoat Stalin first wore to political meetings. Fascism is the fleeting high Adolf Hitler was shoving up his nose while being a useful idiot for the U.S. a hundred years ago.
Underdevelopment is, itself, a goal of imperialism.
I don’t see what this has to do with my post.
Removing heads of state is a factor of underdevelopment? It doesn’t have to destroy the government, just weaken it.
What’s interesting is they went for a kidnapping instead of an assassination, but it’s otherwise the same playbook.
They have to have the show trial to justify it after the fact and/or manufacture consent for the next round.
Yeah I wonder if the capture is to keep him as some kind of bargaining chip / leverage
You have to take the rest of the government down as well for that to work usually
If you don’t think actions like these will destabilize/weaken and open up opportunism (and hopelessness) in the people, military, and government then you are very optimistic. If right wing coup happens, great for US, if left wing (or even just progressive) gains more support just rinse and repeat, maybe push to isolate even more. US (as a power) loses nothing as it is very clear American people and international community will do very little of note.
If this ends up creating “blowback”, it becomes “see we need to intervene more”. Until US actions leads to boots on US soil, and US getting bombed to hell it stays winning (but guess what, US got nukes so even if the most advanced military isn’t a deterrent the world would tremble… so it really has to come from the people in the US which won’t happen).
All of this can and has been achieved by less weird means before.
They don’t have to take down the government to hinder national development, they merely need instability and internal conflict.
This is a weird way of going about it, but that might come down to Trump’s idiosyncrasies. Trump probably thinks he can have a reality TV show trial where he’ll get to yell “You’re fired!” when they execute Maduro on the electric chair or something fucking stupid.
I really wouldn’t put it past the current admin to assume that removing maduro is enough to cause the government to lose all support. If what other users are saying about the strike actually targeting maduro and his top three successors (VP, minister of the interior, and minister of defense) is true - and apparently that’s what the media is reporting, though I haven’t checked for myself - then I think it’s very likely this actually was a botched attempt to take down the Venezuelan government. I can definitely see the current US government believing that removing maduro and his successors would essentially end the Venezuelan government.
It might be overly optimistic, but I’d like to imagine that they did a Bay of Pigs again, buying their own propaganda and acting on it despite it not making any sense.
That is very much a possibility
Maduro is personally the world’s greatest oil rig worker. They’re going to put him to work and double the country’s oil output.
He’s the reason why Venezuela has so much oil to begin with
They can parade the guy around, televise the trial and whip up nationalism.
this is what gets me, there’s no way making a media circus around trying to ram a foreign president through an american criminal court is going to make Trump look good.
the false pretenses to attack Venezuela traffick perfectly fine in the propaganda sphere, and if they’d killed the man most the US would shrug. but for some fucking reason they decide to run a legal comb through their entirely-made-up narrative???
bro he had a machine gun
When Trump crosses the DC beltway under triumph, Maduro will be presented as a king of a conquered foreign land
The mere fact that its Trump doing it means it won’t work
Trumps plan is to legally takeover much of the oil reserves, with Maduro out of the way he thought it would be easier to bribe the remaining government to go along with it. Trump also thinks that the rest of the world won’t really care - in the long run - about this. He may be right in that one, people have short memories, and that once it’s done the ramifications will be minimal. Again, he may be correct on that.
The problem now for him in the present, is whether or not he can convince the rest of the world that the president of the country with the most oil reserves in the world ($303bn worth) is more into organising drug runs instead of oil. If he can’t convince everyone of that, he’ll probably still run with it. He was president when Epstein was found dead and probably still claims it was suicide, regardless that nobody on the planet believes that.
You seem to think this was a unilateral and spontaneous decision made by Donald Trump and not a military action proposed to him that he approved
If there’s a guy in the administration who is personally pushing this it’s much more likely to be Rubio than Trump, anyway (and even so these things don’t happen because of one guy).
Based solely on how well most america military operations have gone vs this one, they must have been cooking this up when Biden was president. No fucking way they came up with anything thst worked in under 2 years
I’m sure they’ve been cooking up this kind of thing for years. I was more saying if there was a specific guy that was acting as a champion for the cause of carrying it out, it would be the top gusano. As you said, obviously none of these people personally develop these plans on their own - which I’m now realizing is what the user you were replying to seems to have been saying, lmao.
This from 2019 - https://streamff.com/v/626db426
It makes Trump look like he’s doing something. It really is that banal. This is Trump’s version of banning extra large drinks at 7/11.
That seems to give a lot of unilateral decision credit to trump
Well the pressure is on the whole government to look like they’re doing something since they haven’t solved anything, and I think they landed on this as something they could do to signal to their base that they are doing something even if what they’re doing is murdering fishermen, piracy on the high seas, and now kidnapping a world leader.
But why this and not something less weird?
Honestly I think this is just another example of the modern US government having rotted away beyond any function. Anyone who knew why you don’t just kidnap world leaders is retired, so Trump and his failson gang roll in and go “fuck it, let’s just kidnap Maduro, it’ll be just like the old days where you hold a king for ransom, it works folks, everyone else is just too scared to do it these days!”
The US bought into their own propaganda and think that Venezuela would collapse because they got Maduro. Having said that, the US actually had 4 targets. If they got all 4, then it would’ve been a real decapitation strike. But they only got one person, so they didn’t actually succeed in what they set out to do. It’s like the ending of The Godfather except only one of the mob boss got whacked.
Do you have a source on them wanting 4 targets? Them fumbling that bad would be great for my mental health
The news mega mentioned 4 people:
- Maduro
- VP Delcy Rodriguez
- Minister of the Interior Diosdado Cabello
- Minister of Defense Vladimir Padrino Lopez
The three after Maduro are important because they would be the ones to replace him should he be killed. NATOpedia posted fake news that Lopez got killed because apparently his house got hit.
The trial is going to be a shitshow, guess they really really wanted perp walk pics
I proposed a theory in the news mega.
It’s possible that after Bolivia’s failed coup, where Morales escaped to Mexico instead of being successfully killed as they would have planned for the US learned some lessons.
What happened after this? The left in Bolivia split into two factions. One that wanted to restore Morales and one that wanted to move on and thus supported Arce. This ultimately occurred because Morales survived and it has led to the right taking power there.
Perhaps then the US is attempting to create similar circumstances, create two factions within the Venezuelan left, one that wants to restore Maduro and one that wants to move on. Aim for this to split the left and bring the right to power.
Had Morales died, the right wing coup would have failed and the right would in fact not have later taken over the country. It is plausible to me that someone drew from this the idea that generating multiple leftwing leaders preys on the left’s tendency to split.
The big problem for this strategy is that Maduro is being held hostage by American terrorists. Evo was exiled but was able to return home once the dictatorship fell. But in the case of Maduro, as long as he remains in the great Satan’s dungeons, which he will unfortunately be for a very long time as nobody has the means and motives to force the regime to release the hostages, there’s no way for a hypothetical Maduro wing to actually get him back and there’s no pressing need for a hypothetical anti-Maduro wing to strip him of his formal position. There might be factional infighting over policy but I don’t see how there could be over Maduro as a person and a symbol, he’s a martyr now and bot factions would have reasons to claim him as their own.
