Comment by svnt
4 days ago
Right, that’s not the issue. The issue is national sovereignty. The US just started taking over South America.
4 days ago
Right, that’s not the issue. The issue is national sovereignty. The US just started taking over South America.
Claims of sovereignty are meaningless, what happens is whether those claims hold up in real life, and in this case they clearly don't.
A country is either powerful enough to enforce sovereignty, or it is not actually sovereign; so this hand-wringing about "Venezuela's sovereignty" is meaningless. It's already been proven false, to some extent.
The US is free to do what it wants with Venezuela, or virtually any non-nuclear country in the world. Always has been, really. It simply doesn't exercise said power very often.
Is this then a call to assassinate local politicians you don't agree with? Some might makes right thing? We're all at least momentarily able to overpower or mortally harm one another, but often don't choose to. Why do you think that is?
You seem to be mistaking my comment for a moral stance.
I am not making a call to do anything, I am simply describing the nature of international relations throughout the vast majority of human history (including the current day), in a framework most commonly defined as realism.
Superpowers act in their self interest, ignoring "international law" when the benefit meaningfully exceeds the cost. They can do this because there is no one to stop them. They will do this because it is in their self interest.
Americans will probably benefit from this action, or at least that is the administration's thesis. Is it moral? No, but discussions of morality are irrelevant on the world stage, which is a zero-sum game defined only by leverage.
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So much of the past decade has been the internet infecting the population with 19th century thinking like this. Alliances are a thing, and might makes right is something we have told ourselves for generations that we oppose. I am so tired of this nihilism dressed as edge.
This isn't "nihilism dressed as edge," this is political realism, and it is the framework under which our rivals operate wrt international relations.
Yes, alliances are a thing, and the framework fully accounts for these.
It's appalling to read that on HN, and there's plenty of comments like this one in this thread.
To think that some like to pretend HN is better than reddit.
Please leave a substantive comment instead of just calling something a "redditism" and "appalling."
You may not like the framework of realism but it is the reality of international relations today (and throughout most of history.)
Rules-based international order has always been a thin veneer over the fact that nations will always act in their self-interest regardless of what they say.
Finally, game theory tells us that as long as one superpower behaves according to the principles of realism, the rest must as well, or risk getting outmaneuvered.
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