No. of Recommendations: 9
And no offense here, al, but I think you've become accustomed to being glazed by all the liberal posters on this board to the extent that you're merely adopting a contrarian stance with respect to anything Trump does or how anyone chooses to explain it.
Not really. This isn't just a "Trump did it, so nuh uh" posture. I genuinely find it hard to see how removing Maduro and no one else is likely to have the types of impacts you seem to think will flow from this. Venezuela remains a socialist military dictatorship that represses its population, lacks any semblance of the rule of law or property rights or a true legal system, and is ruled by a government that uses antipathy towards the United States as a way of pretending to legitimacy. Those factors are what drive it to be allied with China and Russia instead of the United States - and none of them have changed.
It's simpler to just treat my response as if it were a "nuh, uh" answer - but it's not. That's just a way of avoiding a substantive response to the fact that none of the macro factors affecting how Venezuela is going to behave in the future have changed.
I'll just note that your quote Trump has always had a much higher tolerance for authoritarian rulers than most other Western democratic leaders, as well as an inclination to prefer to cut deals neatly expresses the notion we don't mind that Generalissimo X is a scumbag so long as Generalissimo X is OUR scumbag, a core component of Realpolitik.
That's how Trump perceives the world. And guess what? It's the right answer. One of the most fatal flaws that progressivism has is its need to project its own cultural interpretations and lenses onto others leading to expectations on how others will behave.
And that's certainly one way to view the world - but it's a worldview that's inconsistent with your above statements that the opposition has been energized and that the international community is now pressuring for elections actually mattering at all.
Plus, my point - again - is that there's no reason to think that the scumbags running Venezuela are now our scumbags. They're not. They don't depend on us for their control of the country, they're not ideologically or politically aligned with us, we didn't install them or elevate them into power....and now they have a pretty clear indication that while we're willing to do a "surgical precision" operation against their government, we are not willing to replace them. We're not going to deny them the money they need to spread their graft around. We're not going to bring in the opposition leader-in-exile to replace them. We're not going to send in troops - or even civilian leaders - to set foot in the country. We don't have a plan on how the country will function if the military dictatorship was replaced.
So, they will continue to respond to the incentives they face, pursue their own interests, and act in a manner that preserves their power, in much the same way they did before the abduction.
This is not "Orange Man, Bad." I have not been discussing anything about the legalities or even wisdom of what he's done. It's entirely about the consequences of what he's done. If you conduct a limited operation, you'll have limited impacts - and that's what we've done. The limited operation was still significant, and the impacts may still be significant - as I've mentioned several times, I think this is likely to hugely affect the stability of Cuba, and will shift our posture on deporting immigrants back to Venezuela. But it's not going to do much to China, or change very much about what happens in the day-to-day on the ground in Venezuela, to any great extent.
