The attack on Venezuela seems to have used a cyber attack to take out the city’s electricity and over 150 aircraft. The US suppressed Venezuelan anti-air capability by suppressing and destroying them. Many military targets were struck, most by relatively small and targeted weapons, and most anti-air assets. There wasn’t an attempt to more broadly destroy Venezuela’s military capabilities. The US may have used new one-way attack drones that are cheaper than missiles.
This US operation represents what is possible, but also required luck. Shoulder fired anti-air rockets were launched, and one helicopter was hit in the leg three time and still managed to land the helicopter on the attack. If those hits hit the helicopter or person a little differently, the operation may have gone differently. The US may have had to send more waves, giving Venezuela more time to respond. Success was not inevitable.
The Maduro regime is not gone. The US took the leader, but the rest of the regime stayed in place.
The attack was not authorized by Congress, and therefore unconstitutional.
“Greenland’s party leaders rejected President Trump’s repeated calls for the U.S. to take control of the island, saying that Greenland’s future must be decided by its people.
“We don’t want to be Americans, we don’t want to be Danes, we want to be Greenlanders,” Greenland Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen and four party leaders said in a statement Friday night.
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Eighty-five percent of Greenlanders say they oppose a takeover by the U.S., the BBC reported. Most also say they favor independence from Denmark, though the Nordic country provides subsidies, military support and more for the autonomous territory.”
While Venezuela has a lot of oil, they don’t produce that much, and it will take a decade to really ramp up their production. The US doesn’t need Venezuelan oil and it’s probably not worth the risk of destabilizing the country just for oil. Cutting off China and Cuba from Venezuelan oil may have more value, but, China can get oil from elsewhere.
“here’s the most important thing about free trade that Trump fails to grasp: It is voluntary and consensual.
Rolling into Greenland with guns blazing—or making enough threats that Denmark eventually hands the island over to avoid that possibility—is the exact opposite of that. Trump’s centralized, nationalistic view of the world has no room for individuals or their consent. What do the people of Greenland want? What do the people of Denmark want? Heck, most Americans are not very keen on the idea of their government seizing Greenland. It’s not quite accurate to say that no one wants this—some very powerful people unfortunately do—but this would be something that the U.S. government would be doing against the will of most of the individuals involved in the transaction. That should matter—a lot.
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it is encouraging to see that the Trump administration is putting together an offer that will reportedly be presented directly to the semiautonomous government of Greenland. The Economist reports that the deal includes giving Greenland the same status as the Marshall Islands and some other small Pacific islands.
The people of Greenland have the right to vote on their own future. If Trump’s deal is accepted, then Denmark (and others) should stand aside. But it certainly seems like that deal would have had a better chance of being accepted without all the bellicosity that has gone along with it.
Again, one of the glorious things about free trade is that no one points a gun (or the whole U.S. military’s terrifying arsenal) at you to make a deal happen. Individuals buy and sell things when and how it makes sense for them to do it. Yes, it is impossible to apply that logic to every aspect of international geopolitics, but presidents ought to nudge the world toward more trade and less war whenever possible. Trump is doing the opposite.”
It’s not clear how long Venezuela will remain stable. There is a careful political balance to maintain stability. It’s also not clear how long the powers in Venezuela will put up with the US domineering over them. The US can destroy shit, but the Venezuelans can release chaos within Venezuela. Gangs in Venezuela are very powerful. The Venezuelan military doesn’t fully control the country.
Oil companies don’t want to invest in a country that requires huge investment and may not be stable, so their investment will likely need to be subsidized by the taxpayer.
The US is in its weakest position compared to China. The US’s global trade war makes it less able to threaten China with a coalition of countries working together to counter it economically, and the US’s trade war with China revealed America’s severe weaknesses, which is why the US keeps backing down when the bilateral trade war reaches extremes. China was starting to understand and respond to a more coalitional strategy when that got blown up with a change of president.
The uncertainty of Trump’s tariffs have hurt small businesses and people who buy from them. If people can’t be sure how much something will cost, sometimes they just hold off on that economic activity.
The Chinese Communist Party refuses to buy other countries’ agricultural goods when those countries do things China doesn’t like. You offend the emperor, your farmers pay the price.
“The 1992 UNFCCC serves as the international structure for efforts by 198 countries to slow the rate of rising climate pollution. It has universal participation. The U.S. was the first industrialized nation to join the treaty following its ratification under former President George H.W. Bush — and it will be the only nation ever to leave it.
The move marks an intensifying effort by Trump to topple climate efforts compared to his first term, when he decided against quitting the treaty.
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Since taking office for a second time a year ago, the Trump administration has tried to undermine U.S. and international climate efforts by shuttering offices throughout the federal government and threatening to unleash tariffs on countries that support carbon taxes on shipping emissions.
He has overseen a wide-ranging campaign to erase regulations governing climate pollution at power plants and in cars, and his administration recruited high-profile climate contrarians to write a report that promoted misinformation about the tenets of climate science.
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The U.S. Senate ratified the U.N. framework 34 years ago, making it a rare environmental pact that was supported unanimously. That could complicate any future president’s efforts to rejoin the treaty.
Some legal experts say the Senate’s consent does not operate in perpetuity after the U.S. leaves a treaty. Others argue that if a president can unilaterally leave a treaty, a future president could rejoin it without a new vote.”