[riazrizvi]

I don’t see that at all. Lots of good things will come from this IMO. The old wet-kneed approach to shenanigans going on in our own backyard is a disastrous message to people around the world. Just as a resurgently effective law enforcement body can restore a local community that has gone to the dogs, so too it works at an international level.

The paradoxical thing about these actions though, is that when they are run by humble mission-oriented and very effective people, they quickly disappear from the public consciousness. So we are all biased to when it goes wrong, ie to when we have incompetent leadership at the helm.

[throwaway1389z]

Yes, because that is exactly what happened in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Libya, Syria, and on and on and on and on.

[which]

Venezuela was not a society held together by a strongman unlike Iraq/Libya/Syria. It also does not have the religious or tribal divides those places did. The country was already on the brink of collapse from a combination of sanctions and truly astronomical levels of corruption. There has been a roughly 70% economic decline over the past decade and while there is no longer hyperinflation, inflation in 2025 was at least 200%. Panama would be a more appropriate reference point.

[throwaway1389z]

The administration is pretty clear that this is about oil. So i am not sure why people are making up other excuses?

[gretch]

You made the exact point of the parent comment.

Everyone remembers the bad ones only.

What about Germany and Japan after WWII? What about South Korea?

[schmichael]

Germany was a split country for 50 years.

Korea is still a split country.

I guess I have to give you Japan, although now you could say "clearly the solution is nukes" if you're just going blindly on data.

Even if you think it's going to go well this time, you have to admit this sort of thing does not have a good track record.

[throwaway1389z]

Germany is still split in so many ways. Just look at any map of demographics, pension, income, anything "social/society scale", the borders are clearly there still, somehow.

[jacquesm]

Indeed, and not just on maps. If you drive through Germany on secondary roads the border is as visible as it ever was.

[Jolter]

So you admit it didn’t go smoothly.

[throwaway1389z]

The intervention in those countries wasn't explicitly for oil. And do you wonder why do you have to go so far back?

[gretch]

> And do you wonder why do you have to go so far back?

I'm wondering why you don't think they count.

[ImPostingOnHN]

Newer information should cause you to update your Bayesian priors formed with older information.

[throwaway1389z]

Relevance is relative.

In the presence of more similar experiments, only with pure dogma or dishonesty that one can opt to infer the outcome based on far less similar and even less contemporaneous experiments.

[Epa095]

So you think USA will go into Venezuela and do a complete takeover, rewrite it's constitution, and have troops there for 50 years to enforce the new order?

[LastTrain]

Because those things aren’t comparable to this.

[johnnyanmac]

The US did not care at all about Japan had all kinds of nazi clubs in the country.

It only gave a damn from Japan to retaliate against it... And let's not pretend it became all sunshine and rainbows for Japan post WW2. Internment camps. No standing military. Huge cultural disruption.

SK who remembers the war doesn't have the best opinion of the US either. They essentially pulled out and did a half assed job. Who's even to say that a communist Korea wouldn't have been the best long term plan? It might have destabilized faster than what we know today as North Korea.

[cols]

Good point. I could be wrong. I hope you are right.

[bongodongobob]

This is a good take if you know nothing about the history of the US meddling with other countries. For those who do have some knowledge here, this is fucking just stupid and naive.

[which]

How much worse could you get from a society where 80% of people are living in extreme poverty and where in a good year inflation is 250%? Maduro was not some great guarantor of stability who kept a divided society together. For instance about half the prisons are run under the so called pranato system which means they are literally run by the inmates. I think it's reasonable to say that almost anyone would be better than him.

Pretty much everyone who wasn't in on the CADIVI scam or the subsidized gasoline racket or selling $0.05 screws to PDVSA for $75 stands to benefit from a new government. Many corrupt dictators understand that stealing a small percentage of a bigger pie is a more stable arrangement that can ultimately be more profitable in the long run but the clan that ran Venezuela was so greedy they wanted to take everything as fast as possible.

[shigawire]

>How much worse could you get from a society where 80% of people are living in extreme poverty and where in a good year inflation is 250%?

That plus a power vacuum. So maybe Haiti?

[johnnyanmac]

The US has had a successful campaign for a few decades winning the "how much worse can it get" game. Let's not play anymore.

[bongodongobob]

[flagged]

[tomhow]

We've banned this account for repeatedly posting abusive comments and refusing our multiple requests to stop.