Further to our earlier discussion about Fiona Hill's testimony, this is from a new piece by Anne Applebaum in the Atlantic yesterday headlined "Trump's 'American Dominance' May Leave us with Nothing". Gift link to the whole article follows.
Back in 2019, Fiona Hill, a National Security Council official in the first Trump administration, testified to a House committee that Russians pushing the creation of spheres of influence had been offering to somehow “swap” Venezuela, their closest ally in Latin America, for Ukraine. Since then, the notion that international relations should promote great-power dominance, not universal values or networks of allies, has spread from Moscow to Washington. The administration’s new National Security Strategy outlines a plan to dominate the Americas, enigmatically describing U.S. policy in the Western Hemisphere as “Enlist and Expand,” and downplaying threats from China and Russia. Trump has also issued threats to Denmark, Panama, and Canada, all allies whose sovereignty we now challenge.
Oh my God, you think nothing this administration does can still shock you, and then you see this in today's NYT:
On the fifth anniversary of the pro-Trump mob attack on the Capitol, the Trump administration created a new page on the official White House website that represented the president’s most brazen bid yet to rewrite the history of the Jan. 6 riot with false claims aimed at absolving him of responsibility. The site blames Capitol Police officers, who defended lawmakers that day, for starting the assault; Democrats, who were the rioters’ main targets, for failing to prevent it; and former Vice President Mike Pence, who rejected falsehoods about the 2020 election, for allowing the results to be certified.
Controlling Venezuela is aimed at making money - he hopes to be paid to bestow oil rights. Kidnapping Maduro is to encourage foreign presidents to toady to him and to bribe him.
Greenland is a greatness project - he wants his legacy to include expanding the territory of the United States
In reality, Venezuela doesn't traffic significant amounts of illegal drugs to the USA - look at the map. The US doesn't need to own Greenland to meet its security needs: Denmark has always co-operated with the US. But facts about his purported justifications are irrelevant to him, because those justifications are not his real reasons.
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.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “2026, as f**ked up as 2025”
Now I can see it, but it still has “awaiting approval” or whatever the exact wording is.
I didn't notice that unspamming it left it waiting for approval, rather than just releasing it completely.
"
Further to our earlier discussion about Fiona Hill's testimony, this is from a new piece by Anne Applebaum in the Atlantic yesterday headlined "Trump's 'American Dominance' May Leave us with Nothing". Gift link to the whole article follows.
Back in 2019, Fiona Hill, a National Security Council official in the first Trump administration, testified to a House committee that Russians pushing the creation of spheres of influence had been offering to somehow “swap” Venezuela, their closest ally in Latin America, for Ukraine. Since then, the notion that international relations should promote great-power dominance, not universal values or networks of allies, has spread from Moscow to Washington. The administration’s new National Security Strategy outlines a plan to dominate the Americas, enigmatically describing U.S. policy in the Western Hemisphere as “Enlist and Expand,” and downplaying threats from China and Russia. Trump has also issued threats to Denmark, Panama, and Canada, all allies whose sovereignty we now challenge.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/01/trumps-american-dominance-may-leave-us-with-nothing/685503/?gift=cx0iluuWx4Cg7JjlT8ugCchlIvK22pg7_84-w9eIkzs&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
"
The memes are on the Maduro...
The EU is upset because the water bottle Maduro is holding doesn't have an attached cap.
"
Oh my God, you think nothing this administration does can still shock you, and then you see this in today's NYT:
On the fifth anniversary of the pro-Trump mob attack on the Capitol, the Trump administration created a new page on the official White House website that represented the president’s most brazen bid yet to rewrite the history of the Jan. 6 riot with false claims aimed at absolving him of responsibility.
The site blames Capitol Police officers, who defended lawmakers that day, for starting the assault; Democrats, who were the rioters’ main targets, for failing to prevent it; and former Vice President Mike Pence, who rejected falsehoods about the 2020 election, for allowing the results to be certified.
"
Trump wants four things:
Controlling Venezuela is aimed at making money - he hopes to be paid to bestow oil rights. Kidnapping Maduro is to encourage foreign presidents to toady to him and to bribe him.
Greenland is a greatness project - he wants his legacy to include expanding the territory of the United States
In reality, Venezuela doesn't traffic significant amounts of illegal drugs to the USA - look at the map. The US doesn't need to own Greenland to meet its security needs: Denmark has always co-operated with the US. But facts about his purported justifications are irrelevant to him, because those justifications are not his real reasons.
"
The memes are on the Maduro-asks-to-be-self-deported schtick:
"
And an opinion about the comments by Steven Miller about this issue would also be welcome.
J. K. Rowling hasn't yet admitted that Miller is the template for her Lord Voldemort character.
"
Now I can see it, but it still has "awaiting approval" or whatever the exact wording is.
"
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.*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.