Summarizer

If you were not already entirely reliant on American tech before, this ought to convince you to put jump in with both feet. What could possibly go wrong?

There is not really any reason to conclude that "american tech" was responsible for this attack. If anything, given all the sanctions Venezuela was under and how friendly they are with china, i would be surprised if they were using american tech in their infrastructure. [Of course i agree with the broader point of dont become dependent on the technology of your geopolitical enemies]

It’s for sure another alarm signal for the EU to further reduce dependencies on our newest geopolitical enemy… the United States of America.

It's pick-your-poison, really. Technology is notoriously expensive to develop and manufacture. One must either have native capacity (and thus, the wealth) to do so, or must get it from someone else. Other Western/US-aligned countries might have the ability to do so, albeit at geopolitical and economic cost, because the only thing you're likely to gain from kicking the US out of your tech stack and infrastructure is a tech stack and infrastructure free of the US. Meanwhile American companies will be developing new features and ways of doing things that add economic value. So at best, a wash economically. Maybe the geopolitical implications are enticing enough. Places like Venezuela? Nah. They'll be trading the ability of Americans to jack with their tech infrastructure for the ability of the PRC, Non-US Western nations, or Russia to jack with their tech stack. The geopolitics of technology are a lot like a $#1+ sandwich: the more bread you have, the less of someone else's $#1+ you have to eat.

Sure, but there must always be a fear that the military and public would not want to die in a nuclear inferno to defend national sovereignty. And may tolerate a coupe instead. Which then reduces the madness and the deterrent effect. The extra step the Dprk have taken is to try and build bunkers so that the regime could survive the destruction of the country. A step further into madness that goes beyond what western countries have been willing to accept.

It wasn't the a civilised option. Japan would have lost and surrendered with or without nukes. The USA nuked two cities just to demonstrate their nuclear capabilities to the Soviets.

> The estimated range of US military deaths from an invasion of Japan (Operation Downfall) was 250,000 to 1,000,000, and another 5 to 10 million Japanese. I've read convincing arguments (sorry, I cannot find them now) that this reasoning is mostly bogus. One, the decision of dropping the bombs wasn't coordinated with planners of Operation Downfall, so casualties weren't a consideration. As such, it cannot be "civilized" (because the intent to be civilized just wasn't there). Two, those casualty numbers rest on arbitrary assumptions about what the Japanese would or wouldn't do that don't hold up to real scrutiny, and ignore a host of options other than "full scale invasion" or "nuke". Three, you cannot discount the flex towards the USSR, an argument many Japanese to this day maintain was a major reason. Which wasn't a civilized reason either.

> And may tolerate a coupe instead The US is vulnerable to that scenario as well, even though the military’s willingness to comply with literally textbook illegal orders is not encouraging.

The nukes are a bargaining chip (disarmament). Basically, if your country has the human and tech capital to develop a nuke, you probably should because it's free money. I don't believe that NK's nukes deter the US from doing anything. Would NK nuke Guam and risk getting carpet-bombed with nukes for endless days and nights until even the ants are dead? Artillery on Seoul doesn't matter. The US would just ask SK to evacuate it. The US doesn't do anything about the DPRK because it's not economically relevant (i.e. it doesn't have the world's largest oil reserves etc). In an ironic way, their economy being closed-off and mostly unintegrated with the Western world maintains the peace.

Guess the US's mistake was not decapitating NK earlier then. Too late for NK, not too late for other regimes.

Well, really any leader who dissatisfies the president of the US, really

NK is protected by China, a very credible force.

Maduro may have been aligned with them, but that is a completely different thing than being protected by them. The DPRK is actually protected by the PRC, in the sense that the PRC is willing to and historically did deploy millions of soldiers to push back Americans from North Korean territory.

The reason Mao helped Pyongyang still applies: namely, it would make China less secure to have on its border a regime allied to a great power other than China.

They already have a border with Pakistan and got exactly zero problems from it (if anything, China is the one to stir up shit on that border). You seem to be repeating Putin-style propaganda points. Stalin and Mao were never threatened by the West really, that was part of the Marx-mandated global commie land grab.

Saying "The West is no threat to anyone" at the same time you're advocating for an invasion and abduction of a country's leader is certainly a position to hold. Not a very internally consistent or convincing one, though. And I suppose Vietnam never happened in your constructed reality.

That is a bold assertion to make considering China literally did retaliate against the US in North Korea once already, to the tune of war. Kidnapping heads of states is an act of war. Venezuela can't defend itself, but China certainly will do whatever is necessary to secure its vassal if the alternative is NK collapsing and having US military bases on its border. You also rule out the possibility of an invasion of Seoul, as though it would be "unfair" -- when you're advocating for and actively in the process of tearing whatever remains of the concept of international law to shreds, what makes you think PRC would be inclined to play nice?

Other than by launching nukes (and getting 10x on themselves) China has no capability to attack the US. I don't think attacking SK is unlikely because it's "unfair", but rather because there's no incentive to do so. The concept of "if you attack Cuba we'll attack Europe" is an old playbook for the commies, and I think was always a bluff.

> Us has these nifty things called aircraft carriers, which were used to capture Maduro as well. It wasn't just carriers in Maduro's case. The operation was carried from multiple places, including out of Caribbean countries aligned with the US. The US was literally signing deals with those countries months in advance. Who would those countries be in an hypothetical NK strike? Because those countries would suffer retaliation.

This is only partially true. China's primary concern is resource extraction from Venezuela, which is why Trump immediately clarified that they'd make sure China still got their oil deliveries. Russia is stretched way too thin right now to do anything meaningful about it. Venezuela was basically being run by Cuba. Maduro was really only a figurehead. The military and government was functionally run by imported Cubans which is why a coup wasn't possible.

> Your computer is designed and built in China therefore your computer belongs to Chinese and China. Right? The previous owner was the USSR, who ceased to exist, and who Ukraine was a part of. > Maybe you should see how good the Ukraine was at keeping their naval assets after they used the totally legal methods to obtain them. Maybe then you would have a clue on how good they could had maintained them. Are you talking about the ships that weren't originally that Russia mostly scuttled on their way out of Sevastopal, in addition to stuff like a 70% completed nuclear powered carrier that even Russia couldn't maintain the sister to, and didn't fit in any naval doctrine that made sense for Ukraine?

> The previous owner was the USSR Not quite. > and who Ukraine was a part of Oh, so there were some wedding contract what stated what in case the parties.. part - there would be the transfer and division of assets? When why Belorussia didn't received their part of the navy? Kazakhstan? Georgia? Baltics, because they surely "were parts of USSR"? > Are you talking about the ships that weren't originally That weren't originally what ? I know you degraded to just throwing words with your blanket knowledge but again you can find out the fate of the ships the Ukraine used totally legit means to obtain from Russian Federation with a quite short trip to Wikipedia.

> Not quite. Actually, exactly. We're specifically talking about the arsenal of the 43rd Rocket Army of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces. A force not reorganized until much later to be under the Russian Federation, and the relevant 1990 Budapest Memorandum occurred before the 1991 creation of the CIS. Rather than a vague "not quite", would you care to elaborate? > Oh, so there were some wedding contract what stated what in case the parties.. part - there would be the transfer and division of assets? When why Belorussia didn't received their part of the navy? Kazakhstan? Georgia? Baltics, because they surely "were parts of USSR"? I think a divorce settlement is actually a pretty good model actually. Those other states rankly didn't have the means to keep them, but should have been otherwise compensated for that loss. However, as I described above, Ukraine literally designed and built large portions of these systems as was capable of keeping them. > That weren't originally what? I know you degraded to just throwing words with your blanket knowledge but again you can find out the fate of the ships the Ukraine used totally legit means to obtain from Russian Federation with a quite short trip to Wikipedia. I'm dyslexic and accidentally a word while editing. Are you incapable of telling what was meant by context, or where you just looking for a reason not to address the point made?

To be the devil's advocate, I don't think Russia foresaw a situation that had Ukraine looking to join NATO right after NATO had been used offensively for the first time ever to put its thumb on the scale of a civil war that didn't involve NATO countries.

If Putin didn't want NATO getting involved if he started a war there's one special trick he could have played! He could have not started a war ... The only reason Ukraine joining NATO is a problem is if Putin/Russia (or someone else) wants to attack them. I know there's a real risk of peaceful trade, mutual alliance, humanity, and democracy from breaking out in such circumstances but somehow I think the risk might be worth it for the billions of us who aren't completely fucked up megalomaniacs.

> The only reason Ukraine joining NATO is a problem is if Putin/Russia (or someone else) wants to attack them. I mean, that's objectively not true since Libya, who attacked no one, but had a NATO bombing campaign to assist their civil war. NATO is no longer a purely defensive pact.

Sure, but I think these discussions are more enlightening when we model superpowers as rational actors within their ideological system rather than just whatever propaganda is locally convenient.

Not much of a change, TBF.

No no no, some random American diplomat told a random Soviet diplomat during the East Germany negotiations that NATO wouldn't extend east at all. No, it wasn't put on paper anywhere. No, it wasn't mentioned (much) when the countries of eastern Europe all chomped at the bit to join NATO in the 90s. No, it completely makes the Budapest Memorandum bunk. No, the people of Ukraine absolutely do not have the agency to want to pivot towards the EU and become wealthy and stable like the former Warsaw Pact countries did. It must have been the CIA, so Budapest is bunk again! (and other lies the war apologists tell themselves)

> All those people that lived under Soviet Russia occupation, they were better off dead in nuclear fire than living under said occupation? As someone from a country that used to be under russia n boot - the fireball is preferable.

Sure, but that practically looks like Russia telling NATO what it's going to do, then most of NATO sitting at DEFCON 1 and being ready to respond the instant any Russian missiles look like they're not going towards Ukraine. NATO has no reason to inject themselves into a nuclear exchange more than diplomatically, and has the ability to respond well after they know where Russian missiles are going to land.

> that practically looks like Russia telling NATO what it's going to do Which is indistinguishable from a Russian first strike. Russia glassing Ukraine is about as rational as it launching a first strike. So serious people would have to weigh–based on incomplete information–whether Putin is still in charge and if tens of millions of lives might be saved if we neutralise their silos first. Outside nuclear holocaust, Russia, on launching a strategic nuclear strike on Ukraine, would have crossed a red line Beijing, New Delhi and Tehran each value. (The last because Russia's justification for glassing Ukraine is easily copy-pasted by Israel.)

> It's really not. Once they've launched, it's pretty clear where they're going What are you basing this on? Even back when warheads were strictly ballistic we couldn't do that. Russia's arsenal, today, contains maneuverable warheads. Flip it around: if we committed to a first strike on Russia and China, is there a world in which we wouldn't say it's to glass North Korea? > All NATO needs is enough time to respond This is not how strategic nuclear exchanges are ever modeled. Because it's now how strategic war plans are ever written. Use it or lose it. Silo-based missiles are sitting ducks. By the time nukes are landing in Ukraine they could be landing across a good chunk of Europe and Turkey. > If you look, their nuclear policy is to respond overwhelmingly to a nuclear strike I'm not saying India will nuke Russia. I'm saying India and China would both exact a price from Russia for normalising nuclear war in the modern context. This has been repeatedly messaged by both in respect of the Ukraine invasion.

>The false premise rests on: it's better for everyone to die than live under Russian occupation. That would overwhelmingly be chosen false by the population in question that is being invaded. Well, Russian occupation usually means your town slowly undergoes mass extermination and genocide.... so yes? nuclear fireball is potentially preferred

> remaining leadership of Venezuela does not in fact want to die for Maduro Now do this same exercise for Taiwan.

Terrible take in the 2nd premise of your argument. Is Venezuela a sovereign nation or a colony? Can similar logic be applied against Russia or even the US?

> Is Venezuela a sovereign nation or a colony? Reality is not that black and white. We may no longer have formal colonies, buy the world is still carved up by spheres of influence by the superpowers. Displease them and you'll find out how limited your sovereignty really is.

Of course it can, and it is. Such logic is behind the argument in favor of arresting Putin. Many have argued that should happen if he were to step on their nations' soil. The reason no one thinks seriously about going into Russia and enforcing open arrest warrants is that they fear the consequences, though maybe in light of Russia's revealed impotence that fear is unjustified.

The sovereignty of Venezuela is not the right argument here, because practical sovereignty is not absolute and there are just war grounds for Maduro's capture. The man was an awful tyrant. However , just because there are just war grounds for Maduro's capture per se doesn't mean the operation was justified by just war principles. It wasn't. It takes more than just the fact that the ruler is tyrannical to justify an operation like this. Operations like this can risk civil war and all sorts of horrible fallout that also need to be considered. There must be a realistic plan following the removal of the tyrannical leader. As always, justice must be upheld always. And of course there are the procedural and legal aspects that Trump totally ignored.

I agree with you for the most part. The subtext to all of this is Maduro's close relationships with China and Russia of course.

Let’s be honest, that was a crazy operation. I wonder whether they really secured all chances of success, or just winged it with chances of not depositing the leader, and him being able to summon his diplomatic relations into 50 countries declaring war to the USA. While on their way out, if the USA could set everything back to IPv6, that would be nice.

The outcome is less-crazy if one views it as assisting a palace-coup, partnering with a bunch of Venezuelan government and military insiders already seeking to depose Maduro, able to subtly clear the path and provide intel.

P.S.: In that scenario, it's quite possible for both groups of conspirators to benefit from denying it and saber-rattling: * The (remaining) Venezuelan government gets to point to Big Evil America to unify (or crack-down-upon) an unhappy public, and they avoid being personally tarred as unpatriotic. * Trump et al. get to "wag the dog" as distraction from crimes and mismanagement back home.

> him being able to summon his diplomatic relations into 50 countries declaring war to the USA. As if. Dictators only do things that benefit themselves, and deciding to attack the US is suicide and/or world ending.

Took a long time to catch up with Bin Laden after he attacked the US.

Let’s be realistic. Not easy to find one man in a haystack. Guerrilla warfare has always been insanely overpowered as a defense tactic anyways, as are terrorist attacks. The US can realistically only be challenged militarily by Europe or Asia, assuming a unified continent, and the US is on the offensive. If it’s defensive, the US might put up a good fight against the rest of the planet .

No one would lift a finger for him. Russia just watched. The Chinese too. They may be allies in words but in the end each dictator just care about themselves. Just like how Trump wouldn’t help any ally unless he got something out of it.

Of course they didn't. While I can't imagine Russia is exactly happy that it lost an ally in the Western Hemisphere, this kind of action is very much aligned with Putin's multi-polar worldview where the great powers leave each other to play empire in their respective spheres of influence. It helps justify things like invading Ukraine. I can imagine some in the Chinese military are over the moon right now, taking notes on how to force regime change in Taiwan.

> While on their way out, if the USA could set everything back to IPv6, that would be nice. You actually think the US would leave things better than they found them?

Only when it's oil infrastructure.

They never ‘leave’ that.

The unquestioning logistical and intelligence support from the US military is truly formidable, and probably expensive.

the rest of the world is weirdly too passive, there's a smell of shock

understandably, it's more about the acceleration in aggressiveness from Trump clan and the precedent of crossing the usual international red lines

In EU, so far I believe only the PM of Spain had the backbone to speak properly with anything that could be considered "strongly worded", proving that it's possible. The others have been variants of "Celebrating liberation of the Venezuelan people from the illegitimate dictator, a new dawn for democracy! (oh and everyone (not naming names) please behave and try to be mindful of international law and human rights from now on)" Not a single word about the dead, for one. While the NYTimes headline names France as critical, here's Macron (still only posting) on Twitter: https://xcancel.com/EmmanuelMacron/status/200752538697719404... Meanwhile POTUS is over there talking literally and openly about how US are "going to run things" and motivating it with taking the oil and how they don't really care about democracy one way or other.

That just sounds like more 'strongly worded letters' which never go anywhere and they never do anything about. It's over for the EU. They rested on their laurels for too long and cowardice rotted them from the inside. I don't think Denmark will put even a smidge of resistance up. Trump is going to bark some orders, boots are going to hit the ground and it's fait accompli .

Any sort of pushback at all would be an improvement. Even now, the EU Commission is trying to 'defuse' the Greenland situation by trying to invoke NATO's fifth article, as if that's worth anything without the will of the USA behind it. You know, instead of like actually drawing out plans for a military alliance, economic retribution (remember all those sanctions against Big Tech which fell apart the moment Trump made even the slightest comment against them?) or… just about anything. Laws are worth even less than the paper they're written on, and no amount of naïve idealism (and calling it that is me being generous!) will change that. NATO membership is worthless other than as an aesthetic signifier.

What happens when you start making nukes and the US doesn't want you to? Ssetting aside the whole non-proliferation thing, or expense (see NK), etc. Let's get serious, please.

Sanctions come to my mind.

Why set aside expense? You do it anyway by whatever means necessary, like the DRPK. And if you’re a “western democracy” (also known as capitalist dictatorship) and you’re part of the ruling class, you still have the incentive to protect your assets, things you exploit in your country, land, natural resources, etc, that the US won’t be sharing or that they want to decrease supply when they take over through puppets or multinationals, and you can always force the public to pay for such a project, like all the times western peoples had to bail out or spend their taxes to benefit private corporations, but now it would look like it’s to protect sovereignty, which is a bonus of course, it would be to protect the local ruling class’s interests, but anyway. It’s clear the Americans will stop at nothing to acquire whatever it is they want, including indirectly violent means like ordering their financial institutions and tech giants to destroy whoever is on the way. The monster was always there since the Cold War and just now it dropped any pretenses.