bc, I’m glad your reasoning has more to do with conditions in Venezuela than with your trust in the current administration.
I'm hoping bc will tell us what her reasoning is (or will be) about the menacing of Greenland (or its takeover), given her extraordinary comments about the US occupation in WW2, bearing in mind for example that Greenland has been Danish longer than the United States has existed. Not to mention that 85% of the Greenland population (which is 56,000) have rejected the suggestion that they should be part of the USA. And an opinion about the comments by Steven Miller about this issue would also be welcome.
It’s becoming clear through statements by Rubio and Miller, that the goal is hemispheric dominance by the US for the sake of dominance.
I've been saying since about February that the actions of the administration make some sort of weird sense if you assume the goal is Donald, First of His Name, Emperor of the Americas. There are lots of parallels to historical empires. Vassal states are to produce raw materials and consume manufactured goods. Citizens of the vassal states don't easily acquire citizenship in the dominant country.
Perhaps not all of the Americas, though. Like the historical Monroe Doctrine, Trump's version is very heavily Atlantic- and Caribbean-centric. There is an interesting test case: a shiny new deep-water port built by China opened in Chancay, Peru late in 2024. Bolivia has already signed a deal to increase their lithium production and ship it to China through that port. Estimates are that very soon there will be a million shipping containers per year of consumer goods shipped directly to South America through Chancay. There also appear to be lots of EVs going there as well in big roll-on/roll-off ships.
Somehow I’m in the spam bucket after a comment with no links or anything else I can imagine would flag it.
Freed it. Spam filters are the magic sauce in commercial blogging software. Good ones make sites usable. The companies don't reveal how it works, so there's no reliable way to warn people about what not to do. That's actually understandable: if the spam-detection algorithms were revealed, the spammers would be working even harder to find ways to defeat them.
It's becoming clear through statements by Rubio and Miller, that the goal is hemispheric dominance by the US for the sake of dominance. Of course, there's no commitment to freedom or elected government--they oppose that here and they sure don't support it elsewhere. Trump, in rare bursts of honesty, has stated his motive: he sees money for himself. He has been planning for a while now to broker a deal with oil companies to give them access to Venezuela's oil and he will want a percentage for himself beyond the money already paid to his election campaign.
"And Miller’s observations about what makes the world go around is how we get world wars. The man is a cancer on the nation."
I some sense Miller is right. The real questions is - how do you use the power you have? What kind of world do you want to live in? How do you maintain power and have some measure of influence over what happens around the world?
Miller's problem is that he sees the realities of strength, force, and power to mean that might makes right. You simply take what you want because you can without really thinking through what the long-term repercussions of your actions are.
GftNC's Atlantic link includes some discussion of this - how the world order post-WWII has led to wealth, prosperity, peace, and freedom to degrees never seen in human history. That's not to say it's all been perfect - far from it. But it's been better overall than ever before.
If you want to be the bully that everyone wants to kill, even if they're afraid to say so until they think they have a decent chance, and you want to live in a world that is a mix of chaos and repression, depending on where you are, I guess you can buy into Miller's worldview. But you might change your mind when you're eventually dragged through the streets and ripped to pieces.
Maduro was not the legitimate winner of the recent election in Venezuela. So a POTUS who exactly five years ago attempted a violent autogolpe to remain in power is going to remove him.
Maduro allegedly is involved in trafficing narcotics. So a POTUS who quite recently pardoned another corrupt leader who was in jail for the crime of trafficing narcotics is going to remove him.
This was an exercise in naked power. Folks around Trump have their own various reasons for championing it. Trump's own reasons are obscure, but could be as simple as his enjoyment of exercises in naked power. Most likely he thinks there is some upside for him, personally, most likely because one of his minions told him so. Good luck to him with that.
I am beyond confident that none of them - not one - is motivated by a desire for a free and peaceful Venezuela. Venezuela is just another example of, to quote Ledeen, a crappy little country that we can throw against the wall.
And Miller's observations about what makes the world go around is how we get world wars. The man is a cancer on the nation.
Opening up oil is a good idea if the government is going to lose drug revenue and get the economy going again. If the plan includes pressure for a free and fair election in the immediate to near future, and it actually happens, and there is a peaceful transition of power, that would obviously be amazing.
It would be amazing if any US administration could pull it off.** But the massive incompetents we actually have? Even assuming the massive counterfactual that it would even occur to them to try, there's zero probability that the attempt would be anything but an epic failure.
** We did manage something like this with Germany and Japan in the mid-20th century. But we had also just utterly, overwhelmingly, defeated them in war. We had huge armies in place to conrol the places. And we had a few people in positions of authority (e.g. Marshall) with both the desire and the wit to make it happen. None of which conditions apply.
“We live in a world in which, you can talk about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time,” he continued.
Does this mean I could beat the living sh*t out of Stephen Miller and it would be okay with him?
lj: I don't know that I see everything as an extension of what has come before, but I do see similarities. This is a lot like Noriega, but with much bigger risks and incentives. I hope the end result is a lot like Panama.
What acts of terrorism has he committed? The charges are he conspired to financially support terrorist organizations, namely FARC, FARC-EP, Segunda Marquetalia, ELN, TdA, the Sinaloa Cartel and CDN.
Why to a lesser extent? Only because of my sense that the Venezuelan people are largely unified in wanting something different, Venezuela has an educated population, they had a successful economy not all that far in the past and the risks are less from outside groups than they were in Libya for example.
It looks (so far) that the plan is to keep the regime sans Maduro in place, at least temporarily, to keep stability, using pressure to keep the regime/Rodriguez in line. There are rumors of a secret agreement with Rodriguez. There are questions whether she could deliver if there is. Opening up oil is a good idea if the government is going to lose drug revenue and get the economy going again. If the plan includes pressure for a free and fair election in the immediate to near future, and it actually happens, and there is a peaceful transition of power, that would obviously be amazing. I have no way of assessing whether an approach like this will work. It is a completely different look than boots on the ground, putting Machado or Gonzalez in power by force. It might be brilliant. It could be incredibly stupid. I have a hard time keeping a Chavista in power, but the problems with the alternative are obvious. Let's hope we end up with a free Venezuela with a duly elected leader in six months or so.
How can one be even-handed about this? It's clearly illegal according to international law, the charges are ridiculous and hypocritical and the self-interested motivation is crystal clear.
I guess that Venezuela is seen as different from Iraq because Venezuelans (papist Latino weaklings) are not expected to put up as much or as successful a resistance as the sand n-words in the Middle East. The US looks at a long tradition of controlling South American countries via right-wing authoritarian proxies who use death squads.
Btw, legally the UK has first rights to buy Greenland. After the US in the past tried to purchase Greenland several times with implied threats that a refusal to sell could lead to a hostile takeover, Denmark turned to the UK for help and there is a legal agreement that, if Greenland would be sold, the UK has right of first refusal. Of course, at the time the UK was as or even more powerful than the US. Not that His Orangeness knows or cares.
No doubt, this will be enthusiastically repeated when the US invades Greenland and thereby officially ends the postwar consensus and NATO:
“We live in a world, in the real world, ... that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” he said. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”
Stephen Miller Asserts U.S. Has Right to Take Greenland
Whenever the US intervenes abroad at least half of its population will unquestioningly believe, parrot or justify the most ridiculous propaganda disseminated by the government and the rule of law will be ignored completely, contorted or aggressively ridiculed.
WRT "narcoterrorism" - hoo boy, how fraught and tactical a word.
The FBI defines international terrorism as "Violent, criminal acts committed by individuals and/or groups who are inspired by, or associated with, designated foreign terrorist organizations or nations." From that definition, all that is required is for the federal government to declare a group or a nation as "terrorist." They are a bit more helpful on the subject of domestic terrorism: "Violent, criminal acts committed by individuals and/or groups to further ideological goals stemming from domestic influences, such as those of a political, religious, social, racial, or environmental nature." Neither of these definitions, however, really do much to differentiate terrorism from other political crimes, especially hate crimes.
From my readings on the subject, I think that the crucial element of terrorism is that terrorism is a narrative crime. The media identity of the party doing the terrorizing must be announced to the public, or at the very least the reason for the violent spectacle must be made known to the public in some way, and that violence must have an ideological goal. I'd argue that the tool of the violence itself is not the weapon of the terrorist, but rather that the media is the weapon and that the media narrative is the intended injury.
From this viewpoint the Mexican cartels would qualify as narcoterrorists, but only in as much as they engage in kidnap, torture, and grisly executions as a means to subjugate the Mexican populace and intimidate, subvert, or control the legitimate government. Killing US citizens with the product that they sell is not an act of terror, it's just an illegal business enterprise. The drug cartels don't have any ideological goals they are trying to achieve through the deaths of their customers. They'd probably prefer to keep those customers alive in order to continue selling the drugs to them.
Maduro was a tyrant who violated the human rights of Venezuelans: https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/americas/south-america/venezuela/report-venezuela/ He engaged in political intimidation and authorized arbitrary detentions and unfair trials for his political opponents. He wielded the Bolivaran National Guard against his political opponents in much the same way that the KKK engaged in terrorism against blacks after the Civil War.
But "narcoterrorism" against the US? That's propaganda. The illegal drug trade is just typical organized crime, and not the sort of thing that justifies military intervention in my non-lawyerly view of things.
“Maduro is a narcoterrorist and was illegally importing cocaine”
What acts of terrorism has he committed?
The users of the term "narcoterrorism" argue that anyone who traffics narcotics is, ipso facto, a terrorist. Regardless of where the narcotics are from or where they are going to. (Except US manufacturers, e.g. the Sackler family, of course.)
On editing... To add slightly to @wj's comment, you generally have to be logged in to WordPress and have sufficient privileges to edit comments. I have enough privileges to be really dangerous, so if I want to edit, I log in, do the edit, then log out immediately.
Are the G-I-UK gap sonar facilities to keep Russian submarines from reaching the North Atlantic undetected still a thing? I assume so, since some of NATO's strategy still involves holding open the sea lanes between Europe and the (supposedly) vast manufacturing capacity of the US.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “2026, as f**ked up as 2025”
There's also this.
https://thehardtimes.net/breaking/ice-accidentally-sends-maduro-back-to-venezuela/
Michael, my comment is still missing, which is weird. It's not that big a deal if it never shows up. Thanks for trying?
"
bc, I’m glad your reasoning has more to do with conditions in Venezuela than with your trust in the current administration.
I'm hoping bc will tell us what her reasoning is (or will be) about the menacing of Greenland (or its takeover), given her extraordinary comments about the US occupation in WW2, bearing in mind for example that Greenland has been Danish longer than the United States has existed. Not to mention that 85% of the Greenland population (which is 56,000) have rejected the suggestion that they should be part of the USA. And an opinion about the comments by Steven Miller about this issue would also be welcome.
"
Fake headline from social media:
Maduro says he’s in the country illegally, asks ICE to deport him.
Kinda appalling that, if he did, it might even work. (Although being deported to South Sudan would be only a small improvement for him.)
"
It’s becoming clear through statements by Rubio and Miller, that the goal is hemispheric dominance by the US for the sake of dominance.
I've been saying since about February that the actions of the administration make some sort of weird sense if you assume the goal is Donald, First of His Name, Emperor of the Americas. There are lots of parallels to historical empires. Vassal states are to produce raw materials and consume manufactured goods. Citizens of the vassal states don't easily acquire citizenship in the dominant country.
Perhaps not all of the Americas, though. Like the historical Monroe Doctrine, Trump's version is very heavily Atlantic- and Caribbean-centric. There is an interesting test case: a shiny new deep-water port built by China opened in Chancay, Peru late in 2024. Bolivia has already signed a deal to increase their lithium production and ship it to China through that port. Estimates are that very soon there will be a million shipping containers per year of consumer goods shipped directly to South America through Chancay. There also appear to be lots of EVs going there as well in big roll-on/roll-off ships.
"
Somehow I’m in the spam bucket after a comment with no links or anything else I can imagine would flag it.
Freed it. Spam filters are the magic sauce in commercial blogging software. Good ones make sites usable. The companies don't reveal how it works, so there's no reliable way to warn people about what not to do. That's actually understandable: if the spam-detection algorithms were revealed, the spammers would be working even harder to find ways to defeat them.
"
It's becoming clear through statements by Rubio and Miller, that the goal is hemispheric dominance by the US for the sake of dominance. Of course, there's no commitment to freedom or elected government--they oppose that here and they sure don't support it elsewhere. Trump, in rare bursts of honesty, has stated his motive: he sees money for himself. He has been planning for a while now to broker a deal with oil companies to give them access to Venezuela's oil and he will want a percentage for himself beyond the money already paid to his election campaign.
"
Somehow I'm in the spam bucket after a comment with no links or anything else I can imagine would flag it.
"
"And Miller’s observations about what makes the world go around is how we get world wars. The man is a cancer on the nation."
I some sense Miller is right. The real questions is - how do you use the power you have? What kind of world do you want to live in? How do you maintain power and have some measure of influence over what happens around the world?
Miller's problem is that he sees the realities of strength, force, and power to mean that might makes right. You simply take what you want because you can without really thinking through what the long-term repercussions of your actions are.
GftNC's Atlantic link includes some discussion of this - how the world order post-WWII has led to wealth, prosperity, peace, and freedom to degrees never seen in human history. That's not to say it's all been perfect - far from it. But it's been better overall than ever before.
If you want to be the bully that everyone wants to kill, even if they're afraid to say so until they think they have a decent chance, and you want to live in a world that is a mix of chaos and repression, depending on where you are, I guess you can buy into Miller's worldview. But you might change your mind when you're eventually dragged through the streets and ripped to pieces.
"
"How can one be even-handed about this?"
Thank you.
Maduro was not the legitimate winner of the recent election in Venezuela. So a POTUS who exactly five years ago attempted a violent autogolpe to remain in power is going to remove him.
Maduro allegedly is involved in trafficing narcotics. So a POTUS who quite recently pardoned another corrupt leader who was in jail for the crime of trafficing narcotics is going to remove him.
This was an exercise in naked power. Folks around Trump have their own various reasons for championing it. Trump's own reasons are obscure, but could be as simple as his enjoyment of exercises in naked power. Most likely he thinks there is some upside for him, personally, most likely because one of his minions told him so. Good luck to him with that.
I am beyond confident that none of them - not one - is motivated by a desire for a free and peaceful Venezuela. Venezuela is just another example of, to quote Ledeen, a crappy little country that we can throw against the wall.
And Miller's observations about what makes the world go around is how we get world wars. The man is a cancer on the nation.
"
It would be amazing if any US administration could pull it off.** But the massive incompetents we actually have? Even assuming the massive counterfactual that it would even occur to them to try, there's zero probability that the attempt would be anything but an epic failure.
** We did manage something like this with Germany and Japan in the mid-20th century. But we had also just utterly, overwhelmingly, defeated them in war. We had huge armies in place to conrol the places. And we had a few people in positions of authority (e.g. Marshall) with both the desire and the wit to make it happen. None of which conditions apply.
"
Because it is so much more difficult to hide resistance groups in heavy jungle than it is in the desert. Riiiiight....
"
bc, I'm glad your reasoning has more to do with conditions in Venezuela than with your trust in the current administration.
"
“We live in a world in which, you can talk about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time,” he continued.
Does this mean I could beat the living sh*t out of Stephen Miller and it would be okay with him?
"
lj: I don't know that I see everything as an extension of what has come before, but I do see similarities. This is a lot like Noriega, but with much bigger risks and incentives. I hope the end result is a lot like Panama.
What acts of terrorism has he committed? The charges are he conspired to financially support terrorist organizations, namely FARC, FARC-EP, Segunda Marquetalia, ELN, TdA, the Sinaloa Cartel and CDN.
Why to a lesser extent? Only because of my sense that the Venezuelan people are largely unified in wanting something different, Venezuela has an educated population, they had a successful economy not all that far in the past and the risks are less from outside groups than they were in Libya for example.
It looks (so far) that the plan is to keep the regime sans Maduro in place, at least temporarily, to keep stability, using pressure to keep the regime/Rodriguez in line. There are rumors of a secret agreement with Rodriguez. There are questions whether she could deliver if there is. Opening up oil is a good idea if the government is going to lose drug revenue and get the economy going again. If the plan includes pressure for a free and fair election in the immediate to near future, and it actually happens, and there is a peaceful transition of power, that would obviously be amazing. I have no way of assessing whether an approach like this will work. It is a completely different look than boots on the ground, putting Machado or Gonzalez in power by force. It might be brilliant. It could be incredibly stupid. I have a hard time keeping a Chavista in power, but the problems with the alternative are obvious. Let's hope we end up with a free Venezuela with a duly elected leader in six months or so.
"
How can one be even-handed about this? It's clearly illegal according to international law, the charges are ridiculous and hypocritical and the self-interested motivation is crystal clear.
This is just normalization.
"
This is an even-handed review of recent events.
Everything You Need to Know About Nicolás Maduro's Capture
"
I guess that Venezuela is seen as different from Iraq because Venezuelans (papist Latino weaklings) are not expected to put up as much or as successful a resistance as the sand n-words in the Middle East. The US look
sat a long tradition of controlling South American countries via right-wing authoritarian proxies who use death squads."
Btw, legally the UK has first rights to buy Greenland. After the US in the past tried to purchase Greenland several times with implied threats that a refusal to sell could lead to a hostile takeover, Denmark turned to the UK for help and there is a legal agreement that, if Greenland would be sold, the UK has right of first refusal. Of course, at the time the UK was as or even more powerful than the US. Not that His Orangeness knows or cares.
"
No doubt, this will be enthusiastically repeated when the US invades Greenland and thereby officially ends the postwar consensus and NATO:
“We live in a world, in the real world, ... that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” he said. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”
Stephen Miller Asserts U.S. Has Right to Take Greenland
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/05/us/politics/stephen-miller-greenland-venezuela.html?unlocked_article_code=1.CVA.rKYs.cbVC6hJAGyHB&smid=url-share
"
Whenever the US intervenes abroad at least half of its population will unquestioningly believe, parrot or justify the most ridiculous propaganda disseminated by the government and the rule of law will be ignored completely, contorted or aggressively ridiculed.
This is a law of nature.
"
WRT "narcoterrorism" - hoo boy, how fraught and tactical a word.
The FBI defines international terrorism as "Violent, criminal acts committed by individuals and/or groups who are inspired by, or associated with, designated foreign terrorist organizations or nations." From that definition, all that is required is for the federal government to declare a group or a nation as "terrorist." They are a bit more helpful on the subject of domestic terrorism: "Violent, criminal acts committed by individuals and/or groups to further ideological goals stemming from domestic influences, such as those of a political, religious, social, racial, or environmental nature." Neither of these definitions, however, really do much to differentiate terrorism from other political crimes, especially hate crimes.
From my readings on the subject, I think that the crucial element of terrorism is that terrorism is a narrative crime. The media identity of the party doing the terrorizing must be announced to the public, or at the very least the reason for the violent spectacle must be made known to the public in some way, and that violence must have an ideological goal. I'd argue that the tool of the violence itself is not the weapon of the terrorist, but rather that the media is the weapon and that the media narrative is the intended injury.
From this viewpoint the Mexican cartels would qualify as narcoterrorists, but only in as much as they engage in kidnap, torture, and grisly executions as a means to subjugate the Mexican populace and intimidate, subvert, or control the legitimate government. Killing US citizens with the product that they sell is not an act of terror, it's just an illegal business enterprise. The drug cartels don't have any ideological goals they are trying to achieve through the deaths of their customers. They'd probably prefer to keep those customers alive in order to continue selling the drugs to them.
Maduro was a tyrant who violated the human rights of Venezuelans: https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/americas/south-america/venezuela/report-venezuela/ He engaged in political intimidation and authorized arbitrary detentions and unfair trials for his political opponents. He wielded the Bolivaran National Guard against his political opponents in much the same way that the KKK engaged in terrorism against blacks after the Civil War.
But "narcoterrorism" against the US? That's propaganda. The illegal drug trade is just typical organized crime, and not the sort of thing that justifies military intervention in my non-lawyerly view of things.
"
The users of the term "narcoterrorism" argue that anyone who traffics narcotics is, ipso facto, a terrorist. Regardless of where the narcotics are from or where they are going to. (Except US manufacturers, e.g. the Sackler family, of course.)
"
On editing... To add slightly to @wj's comment, you generally have to be logged in to WordPress and have sufficient privileges to edit comments. I have enough privileges to be really dangerous, so if I want to edit, I log in, do the edit, then log out immediately.
"
"Maduro is a narcoterrorist and was illegally importing cocaine"
What acts of terrorism has he committed?
"Panama, Grenada and Libya show this to not be so norm-crushing as some might think"
Precedent does not equal norm. Also, FWIW those are also not the greatest moments in our history.
"The US has wanted Greenland for a long time."
It's not our fucking island. Full stop.
"
Certainly Greenland still has strategic value.
Are the G-I-UK gap sonar facilities to keep Russian submarines from reaching the North Atlantic undetected still a thing? I assume so, since some of NATO's strategy still involves holding open the sea lanes between Europe and the (supposedly) vast manufacturing capacity of the US.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.