Comment by pqtyw

> Best of luck to you and yours in the coming days, here's to hoping that it all lands on its feet.

Imagine some other country kidnaps your country's President and he sends this message to you

Personally, I think most Americans don't give Venezuela much thought.

I think Trump is hoping to get a short popularity boost the way George Bush did with the capture of Manuel Noriega, but people cared more about who controlled the Panama Canal in the 1990s than they care about who controls Venezuela today. And I don't know anybody who expects this to impact drugs coming from Venezuela or Latin America in general.

But, we also still enjoy all of the benefits of being like this. Cheap oil(that impacts you even if you don't drive), globally very high income, resources of all varieties from all over the world, relative security etc. All these things don't happen to use because we're a nation of swell people. They happen because we do awful things to people around the world in a variety of ways in order to maintain our way of life.

The truth is Americans do want this, they just don't like that they want this.

Another comment was discussing how shocked they were with how brazen a move this was for oil, and that in the past the government wouldn't have been so honest. As though the issue were being honest with what we are doing.

As someone originally from a country that would have benefitted from a similar intervention, I wish the U.S. were more like this.

Getting rid if dictators is good, actually.

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This already likely was a coup. They knew exactly where Maduro was and were able to get in and out, with no air defense issues, no alarm issues, and all presumably with just a small commando group. This isn't like grabbing Osama who was relatively alone on a compound - this is the current President of a country, who was already probably quite paranoid, and who now was under active threat and certainly behaving accordingly. Doing all that as an outsider is basically impossible, so they must have had substantial amounts of insider help, which is essentially the definition of a coup.

And the media is already reporting that 'somehow' all of his inner circle seem to have survived.

Venezuela was a functioning democracy until a short number of years ago, when Maduro stole the election through clear and blatant fraud.

Not every country is Iraq or Afghanistan. At least here it's fairly clear that removing Maduro reflects the popular will of Venezuelans.

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Any details/sources on this? I thought it was strange that the airspace seemed almost entirely uncontested. Scrambling fighters take a while of course (particularly if unmaintained and you're corrupt), but I had at least expected some ground-based air defences to be active. Maybe they were being blown up in the first few videos that surfaced? Unless they were disabled by other means, that's another catastrophic display of the Russian systems.

Thats what I'm most curious about right now, did they completely suppress Venezuela's air defenses or were they turned off?

I'd like to stress that Trump not only said this during the conference from his luxury resort, but repeated and belabored the point several times that the United States would be taking over Venezuela.

(edit - whoops)

That might be a while then, it will take some time to get that oil out.

Not quite...

Medieval kings were considered the embodiment of the government, but that didn't make them autocratic. Indeed, they were not only bound by a thicket of obligations and customs, but authority itself is only legitimate when it is just, a view that is traditional; it is modern legal positivism that roots authority in fiat, making it inherently tyrannical.

> 100% of the american people would be screaming for blood.

Absolutely not. I'd be out celebrating.

> 100% of the american people would be screaming for blood.

Honestly, at this point, I wouldn't be one of them.

I would not be screaming for blood. It is the world order he wants, and perhaps the only possible lesson in why we shouldn’t give him that world order.

Capture might not be the aim. The coming decades will see anonymous effective asymmetric warfare with USA infrastructure and the USA political establishment as prime targets. That's the big concern.

Trump is Russia's guy. There is no way I'd be screaming for revenge over a horrifying complicated nightmare becoming even more toxic, even more complicated, and even more nightmarish. If anyone comes and gets Trump it ain't Russia: he is already theirs, and acting in such a way as to further all their aims and all their narratives.

Maybe, but from observing US politics from afar for a decade, 50% would be screaming for Trumps blood to lock in the win.

Sanctions had nothing to do with this?

^ Disputed by NYT:

>While reports circulated that Ms. Rodríguez was in Russia at the time of the attacks, Ms. Rodríguez is in Caracas, according to three people close to her. Russian state media also denied reports that she was in Moscow.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/03/world/americas/maduro-ven...

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c5yqygxe41pt?post=asset%3Aea9f...

(Permalink, since it's on the second page of the live thread now.)

This live format is kind of irritating. Here's another one:

> He claims the oil business in Venezuela has been a "bust", and that large US companies are going to go into the country to fix the infrastructure and "start making money for the country"

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c5yqygxe41pt?post=asset%3A27af...

Certainly I may be wrong. By the moment I just find it hard to believe that Taiwan has been traded for Venezuelan oil.

I mention Taiwan because I think it is the only currency that could make the Chinese government give up those barrels of oil without retaliating.

Just a small reminder that we aren't talking about Epstein much today.

The US has long recognized Edmundo González as the rightful president of the country following the 2024 election. I imagine they will try to install him.

Alternatively there's María Corina Machado who overwhelmingly won the presidential primary for that election but wasn't allowed to run.

Some reports that she is already in Moscow.

I am not sure what you mean by "control the government had"...they are the same thing. It is like the situation with IRA and Sinn Fein, this bizarre roleplay where people (for various reasons) went to massive effort to imply they were separate when it was obvious they were led by the same people. There is no distinction between the government and cartels...the assumption that there is makes no sense at all given the latitude they have to operate.

> It's not obvious Trump will let her stay in charge.

What's he going to do, kidnap her? Oh, wait.

This is a coup and she is part of the conspiracy

Is it?

I'm skeptical, as it seems to have that ring of circa-2003 WMD justification about it, but I won't dismiss it out of hat.

And if the US intends to prosecute Maduro on drug crimes in SDNYC (good!), then they'll have to present evidence to the court, which presumably means they think they have a case.

Personally, I doubt Maduro intentionally ran a narco-state as a primary focus. But I can very much see a sizable narcotics enterprise, with state support, being used as a key way for him to enrich select supporters absent a viable economy. Money to pay the generals has to come from somewhere...

I would include Libya. Gaddafi died, we were happy, Libya became a hellhole with open slave markets. The same can easily happen here if they don't have a good plan.

Afghanistan was a weird "how long to we have to pretend to give a shit before we give it back to the guys we never really wanted to take it from in the first place" situation.

Iraq was a textbook example of why you don't dismantle the entire administrative state.

I don't think either is relevant here. Other central american shenanigans are the better reference points IMO.

On the other hand, Chile was a success. Not ethically, of course, but they accomplished what they wanted.

As of 2025, Iraq looks better than it used to.

No strongman in charge, sorta-kinda democratic government (more democratic than almost anywhere else in the Arab world), violence has subsided, the country didn't disintegrate into pieces unlike Yugoslavia, the economy has grown moderately, and they haven't become an Iranian puppet regime.

Frankly, by the standards of the Near and Middle East, this is very much not an abysmal failure.

The insurgency that preceded this was very bad, though. No denying that. But some other modern nations have such insurgencies in their recent history, such as Ireland, and that didn't stop them from developing towards prosperity.

It took decades for the US to stabilize itself as a nation after its birth.

Why would you think Iraq would find it easy to stabilize itself post Hussein, such that you'd declare their future void already. Iraq is not yet a failure and is dramatically more stable than it was under Hussein (dictatorships bring hyper instability universally, which is why they have to constantly murder & terrify everybody to try to keep the system from instantly imploding due to the perpetual instability inherent in dictatorship).

Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Kuwait, and most of Eastern Europe (which the US was extremely deep in interfering with for decades in competition with the USSR). You can also add Colombia to that list, it is a successful outcome thus far of US interference.

I like the part where people pretend the vast interference in positive outcomes don't count. The US positively, endlessly interfered in Europe for the past century. That interference has overwhelmingly turned out well.

eh, germany and japan seemed to go okay, grenada too. korea kind of a mixed bag (it took decades for it to not suck)

Idk man, if my country was ruled by a dictator who faked elections I would be very happy to see some outsiders removing him. Kidnapping (and hopefully jailing for a long time) anyone who is in power by cheating the election is a big moral win in my book.

> cannot apply consequentialism when the outcome is unknown

Can you not substitute the mean expected outcome where the factual outcome is not yet known?

Recklessness is immoral, and look how the discourse normalizes it so cleverly.

> the puppets in Kabul eventually got swept by the Taliban

Eventually? Withdrawal was announced in May 2021 and was to occur over a few months.

By late August the Taliban had full control.

What a complete fiasco.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020%E2%80%932021_U.S._troop_w...

> there is no invasion. Just a special ops kidnapping

When one nation’s military illegally enters another nation’s sovereign territory to carry out military actions, that’s usually called an invasion.

Surely the best case scenario is the regime collapsing, all collaborators of Maduro ending up dead or in jail and then the guy who actually won the election or a women who would have won it ending up in power?

No - Trump has just announced that he intends for the US to "run" Venezuela for the time being and that that will include ... shock horror... American oil companies taking a significant role in the country's oil infrastructure.

> The president is in late-stage dementia, and his cabinet couldn't put together a peanut butter & jelly sandwich.

Well, they just managed to organize the kidnapping of a head of state!

During the 2024 campaign, oil executives met at Mar-a-Lago and agreed to pay $1B to Trump’s campaign. It is one or more of those men who will be interfacing with the Venezuelan generals about shifting their oil away from China.

I still don’t get these kinds of comments. Is it supposed to be funny because it’s so hyperbolic? I’d hope debates here would at least acknowledge that he’s pursuing some broader aims even if most of it is probably just to benefit his friends. Does anyone really think his actions lack any ulterior motives especially with how the cabinet is selected? You can‘t deny that he has more agency then a Government-by-committee-by-proxy like Bidens final years were like, where it really felt like it was dementia taking over. I feel it’s absurd to claim that a president is incompetent for not serving his people if that is not his goal in the first place.

> which is what Trump wants after it was pretty much confirmed that he's a pedophile.

While there's no shortage of creepy anecdotes about Trump in what's been released, there's been nothing that comes close to showing he had sex with any underage girls, nor have any come forward to claim that.

> Bonus: honors the practice of a republican president invading a country under bullshit premises to capture oil. Bush I and II both did so.

People are missing the point here. This wasn't a regime change, this is psychological warfare against the ruling party to get them to be more compliant. And yes, of course it's all about oil. While this could potentially deny China access to Venezuelan oil in the long term, it also removes the threat to Guyana's production, which is skyrocketing.

This is pure conspiracy, and doesn’t belong in this forum.

Since the prize went to Barack Dronebama before, she looks much better poised.

This seems weird. Do you think somebody who worked to overthrow the Nazis wouldn't deserve a peace prize?

As soon as she won the prize she called up Netanyahu and praised him for what he's done in Gaza. They're not really even trying to make these hollowed out institutions look credible anymore.