Al Jazeera has been super loud and vocal about how US aggressions towards Venezuela is all about oil. It makes sense since Venezuela’s future oil exports in case the current regime falls will hugely impact the price of oil which funds Qatar which funds Al Jazeera.
When US initiates aggressive unilateral military action on other sovereign countries, US bad yes, of course.
Old-school UN-led "police action" as in Korea is one thing, at least there's a somewhat universal institution making judgements on which countries need to be "saved" under a consistent legal framework, but that's such a slippery slope too.
The US does not have the authority to make such decisions and definitely does not have a good track record of them. It's just vigilantism at a large scale, at best. Even when being charitable about intent, the US did do some things in legitimate good faith, at least partially, the results are always catastrophic. There's been no instance of actually positive outcomes for the local population, it has always destroyed the country for decades to come and set the stage for significantly worse regimes.
No, that's not at all what I said, read it back please.
My point is that history has shown that such action is extremely counterproductive if you actually care about doing good for people under such regimes, particularly when the decision is made impulsively by a single country with a biased perspective and no consistent system or criteria to make sure it's a smart thing to do.
Anyone that supports such action is using inconsistent moralistic arguments to justify blatant power grabs. It may be well intentioned, but you are just making yourself feel good by fighting the bad guys, while doing even more harm to innocent people and making it all worse in the long-run. Very American indeed.
And frankly, right now, the US is not exactly in a position to be a judge of what is moral in the first place.
US foreign policy goals are self serving like every other country. And it has supported lesser of two evils many times (like a non communist dictatorship vs a communist one).
I don’t think the Iraq war was to establish democracy, it was to get rid of a dictator hostile to the US at a time when after 9/11, the US decided to it would not tolerate further aggressions. But a byproduct of that policy has been the establishment of a democracy and historically the US considered that democracies as natural allies and therefore the more the better.
In practice, just the act supporting the lesser of the two evils has brought so much more evil.
If you want to do good, fine, but make sure you are smart about it and actually achieve that aim. The US has shown that its not good at this, regardless of intentions, they should just refrain from action until they get their shit together.
No just the first part, China ain't doing no ground invasion for oil, minerals and power half around the world. Iraq and whole surrounding region became a hellhole due and only due to US failed invasion, gave the world ISIS and screwed entire region badly for decades to come. Afghanistan became (again) a hellhole due to failed US invasion too, 0 positive long term things achieved, just death all around.
US military-industrial complex (aka the republicans in power but not only) will try and force any way US will spend trillions on military equipment again and again, thats glaringly obvious to literally whole world and not something new or secretly done behind many curtains.
If US would actually want to have an image (and not just self-image) of somebody standing up to tyranny and genocide and protecting the weak and just, they would support Ukraine and not backstab it frequently as they do. Thats a fine litmus paper for this in current times, don't need anything else. The fact that enemy there is a mortal enemy of US itself and all principles US holds (held?) dear like freedom, democracy, capitalism or right to self-determination is just the proverbial cherry on the top of the cake. No amount of words can bullshit around this simple fact.
Also in the process US is losing its by far biggest and strongest ally in whole world on all existential, moral and societal levels - Europe. An army of expert spies and hackers wouldn't be able to achieve in decades what current potus achieved in less than a year.
Ok. Then the question is "If the US really goes full isolationsist and packs it home, who takes the power vaccum?"
> China ain't doing no ground invasion for oil
I didn't say that "China handling it" is about invading anything. I also didn't say anything that the US is justified in invading Venezuela. I am just wondering that if those saying "the US shouldn't do anything" understand that someone will do something, even if this something is stupid, counterproductive or plain evil.
Like grabbing conscription age men on the streets, put them in a van while they are screeming "I want to live" and send them to the front line after two weeks of "training"?
Apparently, yes, that's what the US does if you look at the Ukraine.
Sounds like you are pleading for an international intervention in the US as Trump tramples all over the constitution, indulges in blatant corruption and sends troops onto the streets :-)
Fortunately most countries think it's a US internal matter for the US people to sort out.
The problem with your argument is there are dictators all over the world the US ignores. If anti-dictator is enough, why the tepid response for Ukraine? What about the various African nations? What about Haiti and the violence there?
The difference is oil, and Trump's also very petty and Maduro has told him to pound sand.
> Oil is unconvincing since it took years before production recovered, so that clearly wasn’t the priority.
Haliburton, Exxon, Chevron, etc... made a ton of money rebuilding the infrastructure and continue to make money on the oil reserves.
It's an interesting perspective, and looking back at history I'm inclined to believing that. A question about those refineries for heavy crude oil: isn't that possible to adapt the oil plants to lighter oil? Or would that mean rebuilding the whole facility?
You end up with useless processors, and you are working against the market. Converting increases the demand for light and decreases the demand for heavy, which will at least directionally improve the supply cost advantage of the heavy.
It's not that easy/clear. Venezuelan oil is really poor quality, needs lots of refining, and is thus only profitable only when the price per barrel is on the higher end.
So Qatar (which mostly exports natural gas anyways), Saudi Arabia, etc. can just dump oil at a cheaper price to make it unprofitable to extract and refine Venezuelan oil.
US decision makers salivating over war/oil/whatever def don't take that into account, but it really doesn't matter either.
This doesn't mean that they are wrong. We should not have another was for the petrodollar. We have enough suffering in this planet. We should not only not create more, but actively try to reduce it.
The data you linked doesn't show that. If I were on my computer, I would download crude oil prices/US shale oil extraction data and look for correlations.
My intuition seeing this is that the lack of openness of Venezuelian economy made it impossible to recover from the crude oil price drop circa 2014, because of a lack of access to capital and new tech (and probably corruption). Also, if you want to nationalizes, you better have a plan like Norway had, and Venezuela didn't. If your goal is only profit, better let a private company take care of it, that's the thing they're good for.
From what I understand the root cause is racism and classism.
Venezuela was in a deep economic crisis for a very long time before Chavez was elected. The then ruling elite were pretty happy living in a bubble, extracting oil, selling to the west, embezzling the proceeds and ignoring most of the population.
The reason I say, the root cause is racism and classism, is because they totally underestimated the power of the people to overthrow their corrupt regime.
You clearly don't know anything about the history of the country. It was never about classism or racism, venezuelans are racially diverse with lots of mix between the original indigenous inhabitants, colonial europeans, african slaves and then the second wave of european immigrants after the WWII.
> The reason I say, the root cause is racism and classism, is because they totally underestimated the power of the people to overthrow their corrupt regime.
There was no 'regime', there was a democracy with corruption problems but that was still functional. Nor it was 'overthrown', a populist was elected due to disenchantment and the populist dismantle the state institutions and turn it into an oligarchy ran by his circle.
> There was no 'regime', there was a democracy with corruption problems
OK.
> but that was still functional
Clearly not, because Chavez was elected despite having attempted a coup d'etat previously.
Clearly not, because the coup d'etat against Chavez failed because the population was overwhelming supporting him.
> populist dismantle the state institutions and turn it into an oligarchy ran by his circle
Which was necessary because previously it was an oligarchy ran by an opposing circle, which lost favor with the people.
> It was never about classism or racism
It's classism, partly fueled by racism, which causes the ruling elite in Latin America to have such disdain for the rest of the population, that they believe they can take control of the country and govern it as if they were some kind of aristocracy, and completely ignore those beneath them, because they aren't of the right class, are not white enough, and don't have enough wealth, to be taken into consideration.
Ignoring the perfect example of selection bias you have there, people have no idea just how much the “immigration” and “refugee” thing is a function of conquering their home countries for the empire and installing them as the governors and apparatchiks of the vassalage.
It’s one of the reasons why the ruling class of the empire loves immigration, it means those people can be used to conquer their home country. That applies to Ethiopians as much as Chinese and Indians, they are tools. It’s more complicated than that, but that’s the gist; immigrants and refugees are tools, just like how slaves are/were tools to the ruling class for other purposes. Today the ruling class puts their tools through education and gives them resources and opportunities and even funds them to make them heads of “NGOs” above and beyond their own people; so that those immigrants can become agents of the empire’s ruling class, to expand the empire into their home countries.
It’s quite an ingenious and diabolical manipulation, but that’s why the ruling class of the empire rules you.
Btw, I know this for a fact. I’ve been in the conversations about these kinds of matters. You didn’t think we support immigration out of the goodness of our heart, did you? It’s so easy to manipulate the peasants, especially when they personally have things to gain.
every day i talk to many Venezuelans who are currently living there and also living here working low level jobs… they all say they want him gone. they seem to think that it will solve their problems with running water, poverty and so on. i always silently think that it wont
Trump has been begging for a peace prize, got his FIFA pretend-prize, and immediately threatens war on a country over pretense after illegally killing their citizens over dubious claims. They've been pressuring Ukraine into handing over valuable resources, and now they're going for a country over Oil. Okay, enjoy your peace prize Mr. Global FIFA Peace Man.
It is shocking how openly US planning a war of aggression against Venezuela and the whole civilized world is just fine with it. EU could grow a pair and show the US that this type of behaviour is not accepted. Sanction the fuck out of the US regime, boot off Swift, kick American companies out of the EU market, barren American citizens from travelling to EU. EU can prevent this war, while it is not too late.
While I like the sentiment, we have to be somewhat pragmatic. The sanctions on Russia have had a deep impact on the EU economy, mainly the energy crisis and other connected systemic consequences. Germany and much of central and eastern EU became highly dependent on Russian natural gas over the last 20 years, and higher energy prices in general have been quite harmful to the already precarious industrial and agricultural sectors (high-tech farming as in NL, while quite profitable, is very energy intensive and sensitive to tightening margins).
Most of EU (and UK) is on (or near) recession right now, except for some southern EU countries which are doing surprisingly well, although relative to a long period of hardship after the 2008 crisis. It's not an acute recession, but there's no clear way out of this stagnation on the horizon, and the people are really starting to feel the squeeze.
Of course, the root cause of this is much deeper, the Russia situation was just the spark. EU industry has been complacent for decades, believing that while less competitive on costs and scale we still had the technological edge, which ironically led to severe underinvestment in R&D. And giving up on nuclear is backfiring badly too.
I do think the (shrinking) majority still believes that the (limited) actions against Russia were worthwhile, since they are not threatening sovereignty in general, they are threatening EU's territorial integrity at our doorstep. It is unacceptable, and while it is a heavy price, not retaliating would have much more catastrophic consequences.
But cutting off trade with US over Venezuela? Forget about it, EU's dependency on US is orders of magnitude higher than it was with Russia, it would be absolutely deadly to the EU economy.
Not with this kind of attitude for sure. EU can at least send a strong signal by doing concrete actions. Sanctions against American corporations and individuals, travel restrictions, SWIFT ban. These will make Trump think twice before waging acts of unprovoked aggression.
Trump and the US has never shown to care about this. The current US gov seems fixated on attacking the EU and trying to break it up. If they want to go to war, EU won't be able to stop them. Perhaps if they gift Trump a plane, though.
The EU has consistently been anti-Chavez and anti-Maduro, probably because the corrupt Venezuelan elites who escaped with their stolen millions after Chavez was elected, have been whispering in their ears ever since.
War is bad .. yes very, of course, but look closer at life in Venezuela, it’s really gotten bad for people there.. millions left, just saying: regime change if it works might .. be good?
No. Currently it's still better than in Syria and Libya before their regime change. If a insurrectionist force existed, you would have a point, but even then it doesn't work when too much foreign meddling happens, just look at Libya. But Syria is probably the best example: foreign power meddling made everything worse for years. Foreign power switch target because of October 7th, let free reign to insurgent group, the regime change took what, 8 weeks? And it seems way more stable than expected.
The EU is fine with it, because there are no principles in geo-politics. All their hue and cry about Ukraine is also because of their own security, not any virtue. Laughably it was the EU that went along with US plans to deorbit Ukraine from Russia's influence.
The only way for Venezuela to survive is to play dirty and be cunning/resourceful just like their Ukrainian counterparts fighting for their life.
You make it sound like it's a bad thing, being the subject of weekly nuclear threats and invasion threats like the EU is is a valid reason on its own to support Ukraine.
I also wonder why the EU should invest a significant amount of political, economical and hard military power to protect a failing dictatorship?
Make no mistake, the EU is not "fine" with the war in the sense that they will express diplomatic criticism of the US when Trump finally starts his idiotic (and narcissistic, and corrupt, but I already said "Trump") war. They are "fine" with it in the sense that they won't self-implode their collective political careers and perhaps the EU itself by sanctioning the US and destroying the economy of the entire EU for fucking Maduro. Doing that would be idiocy.
The export charts appear to have been taken from OEC[0]. They appear to be CC0 from the source but they've applied CC BY-NC-SA and put their own logo on it. A bit odd.
Al Jazeera has been super loud and vocal about how US aggressions towards Venezuela is all about oil. It makes sense since Venezuela’s future oil exports in case the current regime falls will hugely impact the price of oil which funds Qatar which funds Al Jazeera.
The similarities with Iraq are insane
https://youtu.be/C5QGzYFjVaU?si=09nRUo_ddUd5H3D7
The Daily Show segment on comparing them.
let's get a time stamp:
https://youtu.be/C5QGzYFjVaU?si=lr30ZcfhKQgGCe1t&t=597
[flagged]
When US initiates aggressive unilateral military action on other sovereign countries, US bad yes, of course.
Old-school UN-led "police action" as in Korea is one thing, at least there's a somewhat universal institution making judgements on which countries need to be "saved" under a consistent legal framework, but that's such a slippery slope too.
The US does not have the authority to make such decisions and definitely does not have a good track record of them. It's just vigilantism at a large scale, at best. Even when being charitable about intent, the US did do some things in legitimate good faith, at least partially, the results are always catastrophic. There's been no instance of actually positive outcomes for the local population, it has always destroyed the country for decades to come and set the stage for significantly worse regimes.
So you support brutal dictatorships because that’s the “legal” thing to do? This is neither a legal or moral decision.
No, that's not at all what I said, read it back please.
My point is that history has shown that such action is extremely counterproductive if you actually care about doing good for people under such regimes, particularly when the decision is made impulsively by a single country with a biased perspective and no consistent system or criteria to make sure it's a smart thing to do.
Anyone that supports such action is using inconsistent moralistic arguments to justify blatant power grabs. It may be well intentioned, but you are just making yourself feel good by fighting the bad guys, while doing even more harm to innocent people and making it all worse in the long-run. Very American indeed.
And frankly, right now, the US is not exactly in a position to be a judge of what is moral in the first place.
I think the problem with your take is your assumption that the US topples regimes because of dictatorship or to support "democracy".
US foreign policy goals are self serving like every other country. And it has supported lesser of two evils many times (like a non communist dictatorship vs a communist one).
I don’t think the Iraq war was to establish democracy, it was to get rid of a dictator hostile to the US at a time when after 9/11, the US decided to it would not tolerate further aggressions. But a byproduct of that policy has been the establishment of a democracy and historically the US considered that democracies as natural allies and therefore the more the better.
In practice, just the act supporting the lesser of the two evils has brought so much more evil.
If you want to do good, fine, but make sure you are smart about it and actually achieve that aim. The US has shown that its not good at this, regardless of intentions, they should just refrain from action until they get their shit together.
He did just get the FIFA Peace Price that was created out of thin air this year :)
Yes FIFA as in the football/soccer league.
> When US supports dictators, US bad. When US topples dictators, US bad…
there is a third option.
"Don't do anything, let China handle it" ?
No just the first part, China ain't doing no ground invasion for oil, minerals and power half around the world. Iraq and whole surrounding region became a hellhole due and only due to US failed invasion, gave the world ISIS and screwed entire region badly for decades to come. Afghanistan became (again) a hellhole due to failed US invasion too, 0 positive long term things achieved, just death all around.
US military-industrial complex (aka the republicans in power but not only) will try and force any way US will spend trillions on military equipment again and again, thats glaringly obvious to literally whole world and not something new or secretly done behind many curtains.
If US would actually want to have an image (and not just self-image) of somebody standing up to tyranny and genocide and protecting the weak and just, they would support Ukraine and not backstab it frequently as they do. Thats a fine litmus paper for this in current times, don't need anything else. The fact that enemy there is a mortal enemy of US itself and all principles US holds (held?) dear like freedom, democracy, capitalism or right to self-determination is just the proverbial cherry on the top of the cake. No amount of words can bullshit around this simple fact.
Also in the process US is losing its by far biggest and strongest ally in whole world on all existential, moral and societal levels - Europe. An army of expert spies and hackers wouldn't be able to achieve in decades what current potus achieved in less than a year.
> No just the first part,
Ok. Then the question is "If the US really goes full isolationsist and packs it home, who takes the power vaccum?"
> China ain't doing no ground invasion for oil
I didn't say that "China handling it" is about invading anything. I also didn't say anything that the US is justified in invading Venezuela. I am just wondering that if those saying "the US shouldn't do anything" understand that someone will do something, even if this something is stupid, counterproductive or plain evil.
Let dictators do whatever the fuck they want?
Strange how this humanitarian concern only comes up when they have oil, or are somehow geopolitically relevant.
(You may also want to look into the US' track record for installing dictators throughout the Americas. It's not great.)
> Strange how this humanitarian concern only comes up when they have oil, or are somehow geopolitically relevant.
And you've inferred this from my comment how exactly?
>Let dictators do whatever the fuck they want?
Like grabbing conscription age men on the streets, put them in a van while they are screeming "I want to live" and send them to the front line after two weeks of "training"?
Apparently, yes, that's what the US does if you look at the Ukraine.
> created: 11 months ago
> 90% comments are about Ukraine and US
:^)))
Well as long as they're just fucking around within their borders, yeah?
Or maybe the US should start with instituting regime change in its allies in the Persian Gulf?
Sounds like you are pleading for an international intervention in the US as Trump tramples all over the constitution, indulges in blatant corruption and sends troops onto the streets :-)
Fortunately most countries think it's a US internal matter for the US people to sort out.
The problem with your argument is there are dictators all over the world the US ignores. If anti-dictator is enough, why the tepid response for Ukraine? What about the various African nations? What about Haiti and the violence there?
The difference is oil, and Trump's also very petty and Maduro has told him to pound sand.
> Oil is unconvincing since it took years before production recovered, so that clearly wasn’t the priority.
Haliburton, Exxon, Chevron, etc... made a ton of money rebuilding the infrastructure and continue to make money on the oil reserves.
>I don’t care that much which pretext is used to topple him.
The US also destroyed the country in the process and caused more deaths than Saddam.
Good video on the oil: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Pgwny1BiCYk
It's an interesting perspective, and looking back at history I'm inclined to believing that. A question about those refineries for heavy crude oil: isn't that possible to adapt the oil plants to lighter oil? Or would that mean rebuilding the whole facility?
You end up with useless processors, and you are working against the market. Converting increases the demand for light and decreases the demand for heavy, which will at least directionally improve the supply cost advantage of the heavy.
It's not that easy/clear. Venezuelan oil is really poor quality, needs lots of refining, and is thus only profitable only when the price per barrel is on the higher end.
So Qatar (which mostly exports natural gas anyways), Saudi Arabia, etc. can just dump oil at a cheaper price to make it unprofitable to extract and refine Venezuelan oil.
US decision makers salivating over war/oil/whatever def don't take that into account, but it really doesn't matter either.
This doesn't mean that they are wrong. We should not have another was for the petrodollar. We have enough suffering in this planet. We should not only not create more, but actively try to reduce it.
It could also reduce US dependence on Qatar, reducing the value of all the bribes they paid to Trump so far and requiring them to bribe him more.
Interesting how Venezuela has more oil than Saudi Arabia but is not able to capitalize on it due to systemic issues
Venezuelan crude is heavier and has more sulfur than Saudi oil which makes it harder to process. (Still easier than Canadian oil sand though)
Venezuela was processing it just fine before Chavez showed up, nationalized the industry, put his cronies in charge and let it all fall to pieces.
https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/venezuela/crude-oil-ex...
The data you linked doesn't show that. If I were on my computer, I would download crude oil prices/US shale oil extraction data and look for correlations.
My intuition seeing this is that the lack of openness of Venezuelian economy made it impossible to recover from the crude oil price drop circa 2014, because of a lack of access to capital and new tech (and probably corruption). Also, if you want to nationalizes, you better have a plan like Norway had, and Venezuela didn't. If your goal is only profit, better let a private company take care of it, that's the thing they're good for.
From what I understand the root cause is racism and classism.
Venezuela was in a deep economic crisis for a very long time before Chavez was elected. The then ruling elite were pretty happy living in a bubble, extracting oil, selling to the west, embezzling the proceeds and ignoring most of the population.
The reason I say, the root cause is racism and classism, is because they totally underestimated the power of the people to overthrow their corrupt regime.
You clearly don't know anything about the history of the country. It was never about classism or racism, venezuelans are racially diverse with lots of mix between the original indigenous inhabitants, colonial europeans, african slaves and then the second wave of european immigrants after the WWII.
> The reason I say, the root cause is racism and classism, is because they totally underestimated the power of the people to overthrow their corrupt regime.
There was no 'regime', there was a democracy with corruption problems but that was still functional. Nor it was 'overthrown', a populist was elected due to disenchantment and the populist dismantle the state institutions and turn it into an oligarchy ran by his circle.
> There was no 'regime', there was a democracy with corruption problems
OK.
> but that was still functional
Clearly not, because Chavez was elected despite having attempted a coup d'etat previously. Clearly not, because the coup d'etat against Chavez failed because the population was overwhelming supporting him.
> populist dismantle the state institutions and turn it into an oligarchy ran by his circle
Which was necessary because previously it was an oligarchy ran by an opposing circle, which lost favor with the people.
> It was never about classism or racism
It's classism, partly fueled by racism, which causes the ruling elite in Latin America to have such disdain for the rest of the population, that they believe they can take control of the country and govern it as if they were some kind of aristocracy, and completely ignore those beneath them, because they aren't of the right class, are not white enough, and don't have enough wealth, to be taken into consideration.
> systemic issues
Like sanctions?
Systemic issues is a nice euphemism
What do Venezuelans think about the US aggression? Both in numbers and what are some common opinions?
I only know expats and they can't wait to see Maduro gone.
Ignoring the perfect example of selection bias you have there, people have no idea just how much the “immigration” and “refugee” thing is a function of conquering their home countries for the empire and installing them as the governors and apparatchiks of the vassalage.
It’s one of the reasons why the ruling class of the empire loves immigration, it means those people can be used to conquer their home country. That applies to Ethiopians as much as Chinese and Indians, they are tools. It’s more complicated than that, but that’s the gist; immigrants and refugees are tools, just like how slaves are/were tools to the ruling class for other purposes. Today the ruling class puts their tools through education and gives them resources and opportunities and even funds them to make them heads of “NGOs” above and beyond their own people; so that those immigrants can become agents of the empire’s ruling class, to expand the empire into their home countries.
It’s quite an ingenious and diabolical manipulation, but that’s why the ruling class of the empire rules you.
Btw, I know this for a fact. I’ve been in the conversations about these kinds of matters. You didn’t think we support immigration out of the goodness of our heart, did you? It’s so easy to manipulate the peasants, especially when they personally have things to gain.
All wealthy?
every day i talk to many Venezuelans who are currently living there and also living here working low level jobs… they all say they want him gone. they seem to think that it will solve their problems with running water, poverty and so on. i always silently think that it wont
Trump has been begging for a peace prize, got his FIFA pretend-prize, and immediately threatens war on a country over pretense after illegally killing their citizens over dubious claims. They've been pressuring Ukraine into handing over valuable resources, and now they're going for a country over Oil. Okay, enjoy your peace prize Mr. Global FIFA Peace Man.
It is shocking how openly US planning a war of aggression against Venezuela and the whole civilized world is just fine with it. EU could grow a pair and show the US that this type of behaviour is not accepted. Sanction the fuck out of the US regime, boot off Swift, kick American companies out of the EU market, barren American citizens from travelling to EU. EU can prevent this war, while it is not too late.
While I like the sentiment, we have to be somewhat pragmatic. The sanctions on Russia have had a deep impact on the EU economy, mainly the energy crisis and other connected systemic consequences. Germany and much of central and eastern EU became highly dependent on Russian natural gas over the last 20 years, and higher energy prices in general have been quite harmful to the already precarious industrial and agricultural sectors (high-tech farming as in NL, while quite profitable, is very energy intensive and sensitive to tightening margins).
Most of EU (and UK) is on (or near) recession right now, except for some southern EU countries which are doing surprisingly well, although relative to a long period of hardship after the 2008 crisis. It's not an acute recession, but there's no clear way out of this stagnation on the horizon, and the people are really starting to feel the squeeze.
Of course, the root cause of this is much deeper, the Russia situation was just the spark. EU industry has been complacent for decades, believing that while less competitive on costs and scale we still had the technological edge, which ironically led to severe underinvestment in R&D. And giving up on nuclear is backfiring badly too.
I do think the (shrinking) majority still believes that the (limited) actions against Russia were worthwhile, since they are not threatening sovereignty in general, they are threatening EU's territorial integrity at our doorstep. It is unacceptable, and while it is a heavy price, not retaliating would have much more catastrophic consequences.
But cutting off trade with US over Venezuela? Forget about it, EU's dependency on US is orders of magnitude higher than it was with Russia, it would be absolutely deadly to the EU economy.
EU can't prevent this war.
Not with this kind of attitude for sure. EU can at least send a strong signal by doing concrete actions. Sanctions against American corporations and individuals, travel restrictions, SWIFT ban. These will make Trump think twice before waging acts of unprovoked aggression.
EU has to focus on its hostile neighbour to the east. I can see you are no fan of the EU but be realistic
Sanctions against someone they need to contain Russia?
Trump and the US has never shown to care about this. The current US gov seems fixated on attacking the EU and trying to break it up. If they want to go to war, EU won't be able to stop them. Perhaps if they gift Trump a plane, though.
No, but it can freeze the assets of its perpetrators.
Last time I've checked it was Pax Americana, not Pax Europeana.
> Checks registration date and comments
Ah, right, another Russian bot.
The EU has consistently been anti-Chavez and anti-Maduro, probably because the corrupt Venezuelan elites who escaped with their stolen millions after Chavez was elected, have been whispering in their ears ever since.
It will be interesting to see how quickly people & media will suddenly go "Well, actually Venezuela is a problem" or similarly spineless turnaround.
War is bad .. yes very, of course, but look closer at life in Venezuela, it’s really gotten bad for people there.. millions left, just saying: regime change if it works might .. be good?
No. Currently it's still better than in Syria and Libya before their regime change. If a insurrectionist force existed, you would have a point, but even then it doesn't work when too much foreign meddling happens, just look at Libya. But Syria is probably the best example: foreign power meddling made everything worse for years. Foreign power switch target because of October 7th, let free reign to insurgent group, the regime change took what, 8 weeks? And it seems way more stable than expected.
EU is a puppet state of the US empire.
The EU is fine with it, because there are no principles in geo-politics. All their hue and cry about Ukraine is also because of their own security, not any virtue. Laughably it was the EU that went along with US plans to deorbit Ukraine from Russia's influence.
The only way for Venezuela to survive is to play dirty and be cunning/resourceful just like their Ukrainian counterparts fighting for their life.
> The only way for Venezuela to survive is to play dirty and be cunning/resourceful just like their Ukrainian counterparts fighting for their life.
You are trying very hard to make the situations sound similar, but they are not.
Ukraine is a democracy, Venezuela is not.
The scope of the attacks are entirely different. Still doesn't justify what Trump is doing, of course.
You make it sound like it's a bad thing, being the subject of weekly nuclear threats and invasion threats like the EU is is a valid reason on its own to support Ukraine.
I also wonder why the EU should invest a significant amount of political, economical and hard military power to protect a failing dictatorship?
Make no mistake, the EU is not "fine" with the war in the sense that they will express diplomatic criticism of the US when Trump finally starts his idiotic (and narcissistic, and corrupt, but I already said "Trump") war. They are "fine" with it in the sense that they won't self-implode their collective political careers and perhaps the EU itself by sanctioning the US and destroying the economy of the entire EU for fucking Maduro. Doing that would be idiocy.
The export charts appear to have been taken from OEC[0]. They appear to be CC0 from the source but they've applied CC BY-NC-SA and put their own logo on it. A bit odd.
[0] https://oec.world/en/profile/country/ven
all these world power grabs are manufactured stories with the back end being -- gimme your stuff. something something playbook something something.