As someone old enough to have seen the US invade too many countries, I'm struck by the lack of effort put into justifying this sort of military action these days. There is going to be a lot of debate over whether this specific operation was legal and I have no idea where the courts or history will ultimately land on that decision. But the way they don't even try to convince us this is necessary anymore is a sign that wherever the line is, we let it slip too far.
To briefly quantify some things: US public support at the onset of the Afghanistan invasion polled at 88% [a]; at the onset of the Iraq invasion, 62%, rising to 72% [b]; and Venezuela here and now polls at 30% supporting "U.S. taking military action in Venezuela" [c] (Nov. 19–21 2025).
I suspect that invading and bombing a country for a few hours and then pulling out is not what most people will have in mind when you mention "taking military action". People are much, much more likely to remember the military quagmires in Vietnam or the Middle East, which have absolutely nothing to do with what occurred here.
Taking out Maduro is likely to lead to similar consequences as toppling Saddam, isn’t it? I predict the nation will be very unstable for decades ahead.
The action is smaller scale, but the ethics of it are the same: it’s abhorrent. The justifications are paper-thin ”the people deserve democracy”, while everyone knows the only interest served is that of the US government.
"Taking out Maduro is likely to lead to similar consequences as toppling Saddam, isn’t it? "
I don't think so. The Near East is a simmering cauldron of ancient ethnic and sectarian hatreds. Compared to that, Venezuela is ethnically and religiously almost homogeneous.
There is no equivalent of mad clerics preaching to their flock that they have to exterminate their heretic neighbours and that God will grant them paradise for doing so.
That’s the same talking point the far right uses for why the US shouldn’t get involved in Ukraine because they worry about a destabilized Russia if Putin goes away.
It’s some sort of dictator insurance policy. The idea that they are there because the country will likely just do it again but worse given the chance.
I’d say it’s easily the most common talking point I’ve seen from westerners on Twitter against overly supporting Ukraine and specifically providing them advanced American weaponry to strike within Russia proper, which was the biggest debate/controversy for about two years.
Also not necessarily “remove Putin by force”, it’s create instability in Russia where there’s a power vacuum if they lose badly in Ukraine.
Everyone just takes all of their American foreign policy lessons from Iraq and applies it broadly because Iraq briefly had ISIS and other extremist pop up
It’s also deeply rooted in a lack of respect for the general public in those countries, who they think will keep supporting evil regardless
”Following the war on social media” is a highway to poor psychological health, so I’ve avoided that after the first few weeks of the Russian invasion. In retrospect, I think I’m better off for having missed these far-right talking points.
Edit: Twitter? Why would anyone but the far right still be on Twitter these days?
Not necessarily, but there is the risk that ELN will further consolidate power. Maybe the US dies not want the group's leader, Antonio Garcia, to be the next president of Venezuela.
Public opinion in 2001 and 2003 followed the 9/11 terror attack and was very fresh in peoples mind. A more recent war (2015) would be the attack on Yemen by Barack Obama.
I can however not find any good public opinion for that war.
I don't think Americans perceive much of a difference between attacking Al Qaeda++ in Afghanistan versus in Yemen, certainly not enough to see it as "a different war", and it's not clear that perception is incorrect.
Afghanistan had the context of 9/11. All Americans knew about 9/11, and most cared strongly about it.
I doubt most Americans know anything about Yemen or know anything about any US involvement there, nor do they care.
Military strikes in Yemen aren't seen as the same war. Afghanistan and Iraq were boots on the ground, building up military bases, hearing about the occasional death of US personnel, etc. It's also decades apart.
When it comes to Yemen, the average American is probably entirely unaware of it, and the ones that do know about it are definitely going to place it in the Palestine/Israel context (which has huge mindshare circulation here, All things considered - we usually just ignore things outside of US borders and this is ultra politicized here). Maybe without that element, there would be more truth to what you were saying, but it's definitely in the Israel/Hamas war bucket as of now.
I think Americans are broadly aware that the US has been striking AQ, AQ++, and ISIS affiliates across the Middle East as part of the broader GWOT/OIR for years, and the exact jurisdictions in which it happens are essentially implementation details.
As of a few months ago, when the US began striking Yemen for purpose of defending Israel, it ha become loosely affiliated with that conflict, but the period discussed was Obama era.
We've been bombing Yemen on and off since post 9/11, including a rather large attack with UK support just last year (2025). Are you thinking of the Saudi-led intervention that occurred in 2015 in Yemen as part of the Yemeni civil war? Or maybe when we built a base there in 2011 to facilitate more drones?
I think this is a very good indicator US has been transitioning away from democracy towards something else for quite a while and now it has reached a point where no justification for an illegal war is even required.
After the Iraq war we(US allies that were dragged into this war by a bunch of lies) felt like this was very bad, but it was a blunder of one administration and the trust in the US as a whole was going to be restored.
> After the Iraq war we(US allies that were dragged into this war by a bunch of lies) felt like this was very bad, but it was a blunder of one administration and the trust in the US as a whole was going to be restored.
I don't understand how people can be this naive. It's the only thing the US has ever done for the entirety of it's existence! How did you miss that?
True. Maduro has not been the president since the last elections; he merely usurped the position. You cannot perform such an action without facing some constraints. For him, personally, maybe this was the better outcome.
First, read up on Venezuela's oil. I don't think that's the case. At the very least it's very expensive oil, hard to use and very bad for engines, refineries and for the environment and also oil is over (meaning oil will go into terminal decline probably before 2028 and that will be the end of the oil companies)
Second, when the US did have Venezuela's oil things were going a lot better in Venezuela for the whole population. So would that really be such a bad thing?
Third, Chavez made things so bad in Venezuela it's tough to imagine this making it worse. Oh and then he died and Maduro came ... and made things worse.
> and also oil is over (meaning oil will go into terminal decline probably before 2028 and that will be the end of the oil companies)
Back in the 90s, my dad told me a quote from someone big in oil:
"Oil is too valuable to burn"
(Shah of Iran? Trouble with searching for quotes on the internet, they get misattributed a lot).
Oil as a fuel will, hopefully, be over soon. 2028 is… I think that's too soon, though it would be good if it was. But oil is useful for a lot more than just fuel, and engineered bacteria synthesising more is probably more like a 2030s thing than a 2028 thing.
You don't understand. 2028 is the time peak oil will definitely be behind us, and therefore the oil business will only deteriorate from that point forward. It will quickly mean the end of all oil producers except the very cheapest.
If you're going to go with conspiracy theories, China is desperate for oil and was openly allying with Venezuela, and so was, ironically, petrostate Russia, although that's ending (for now). I bet Putin is looking for contingency plans though. Even though Venezuela is not exactly the easiest to reach for either of them, but beggars can't be choosers. Preventing any progress here might have been worth a lot to both the US and the EU. And, yes, I know how it sounds, but this will be pretty helpful with the Ukraine war. Yes, really.
Of course leftist tankies will be mad the billionaire fake-communist "revolution" that started with Chavez and should have ended 20 years ago is now very likely over. Of course, most Venezuelans (75% according to the opposition) would describe that revolution as a nightmare.
Of course I doubt 75% of Venezuelans wanted the US to resolve it.
I seriously doubt either China or Russia could manage to extract significant quantities of Venezuelan oil at a profit even if the US lifted all sanctions and completely forgot about Venezuela.
The costs of getting production set up at are so high compared to the relatively bleak outlook for the oil market, it's likely that Venezuelan oil isn't a hugely attractive proposition for anyone.
China is desperate, and also the enemy of essentially every source of oil ... "except" Venezuela (disregarding the fact that of course Maduro can't be trusted, and thus isn't really an ally of China. More accurately they're both desperate and might be able to help one another).
Russia is also desperate. And is extracting oil in Venezuela easier than doing it while under Ukrainian bombardment? Good question but we can summarize: extracting oil inside Russia is failing, thanks to Putin's 3-day special military operation ... and they've already had to import fuel twice in the past 6 months, despite how utterly ridiculous that is: the country that out-produced Saudia Arabia when it comes to oil needed to import fuel.
China is moving away from oil at such a pace that any massive development of first the extraction technologies for Venezuela and then the actual infrastructure would probably take too long to be particularly useful.
Venezuela is also simply too far from China to be a reliable source of oil.
Yes because the only reason Chinese government officials would talk with Venezuela is because China wants to spin up large-scale oil production there? Literally no other reason they could possibly be talking, right?
And ... of course the answer here appears to be that I was right. About China, about the US, about most of what I said.
With a MAJOR exception: I expected Trump to think about things for 5 seconds before ordering people killed and kidnapped and ... If he did a good thing, it's pretty clear now that it's accidental.
The question is whether it's the majority of Venezuelans. I have no doubt that there are many who hate Maduro and his regime - for very good reasons - but that's true of many authoritarian countries that nevertheless have the "silent majority" tacitly supporting their regime.
There is the opposition vote result that showed us 75% wanted Maduro out. Of course you can ask, did that include having US forces remove him? On the other hand, you can bet a lot the result would have been even more than 75% if everybody wasn't afraid while voting in secret.
"Rules-based order" just means Washington makes up the rules and gives out the orders. The very phrase hints at its conceit. Why "Rules-based order" instead of "International law" ? Its because International law is something concrete, something you can point to and hold up as a standard. International law means UN, ICC, Geneva conventions, votes and parlimentary procedure. It means accountability and uniform application of said law. "Rules-based order" just gives a slightest hint of legitimacy while Washington and its cronies do whatever they want. "Rules-based order" means that the United States can invoke the Monroe Doctrine in Venezuela, Cuba and all over its "backyard" i.e. South America, but Russia doing the same in Ukraine or China doing it in Taiwan is an affront to civillization.
What changed more recently is the mask has slipped off. They don't even pretend to give a plausible reason anymore because noone will ever buy it so why bother. "All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force." That is what we are witnessing now.
> What changed more recently is the mask has slipped off.
The mask has been off since the ICC came into existence (at the latest). The reason why the U.S. don’t recognize the ICC is because they know they’d be defendants there one second after.
I will admit i was slow to catch on. But watching the whole abominable horror show laid out - Gaza, Ukraine, Epstein, Trump coins, resorts, and ballrooms. Seeing the Nobel prize being given to the woman literally calling for Trump to invade her country and take their oil and cheering as her countrymen get bombed. And then seeing the media and liberal elites spin it as a snub against Trump as she dedicates the prize to him. I am ashamed that i was taken in for so long.
"Rules-based international world order" consists of just two rules:
1. The Western countries (basically meaning USA makes the decision) may attack any country.
2. Other countries may not defend themselves nor attack any country.
Iraq, Iraq (several separate agressions on Iraq, that is not a typo), Afghanistan, Cuba, Serbia, Libya, Sirya, Venezuela... the list goes on, Venezuela is of no particular significance here.
Hungary, Chechoslovakia, Afghanistan, Angola, Ethiopia, Azerbaijan, Lithuania, Moldova, Georgia, Tajikistan, Ichkeria, Ukraine, Syria... The list goes on
If you're genuinely curious dig into the protests 2014, who won the election, who asked her supporters to take to the streets, and what has she been advocating for for a long time before.
It's all about Crimea and the black sea fleet and pipelines. Every time the same conflict, as Orwell put it: We've always been at war with Eurasia.
Edit: Instead of down-voting, tell me where I'm wrong. All of the facts are public information and you won't even have to leave Wikipedia.
I'll bite: speaking for myself, I can't figure out what point you are trying to make
First sentence says to look up 2014 protests and "her" supporters, second sentence says "it's" about the Black Sea and Crimea. Third sentence "we've" always been at war with Eurasia
> First sentence says to look up 2014 protests and "her" supporters, second sentence says "it's" about the Black Sea and Crimea
Yulia Tymoshenko (pro-West), she urged her supporters to take to the streets when the pro-Russian candidate won the election. For a long time she wanted to withdraw from the Russian/Ukrainian deal that the Black Sea Fleet could be in Crimea until 202? (can't remember the exact year right now).
When those protests erupted Russia (unofficially) sent forces to protect their interests, Crimea. The conflict then escalated to the invasion.
> Third sentence "we've" always been at war with Eurasia
We as in the West, are always at war with the east. We want a world order where we are at the top of the food chain and we'll stop any attempt to rise. If we're going to prosper the rest of the world has to remain as cheap labor.
Look into any conflict this and the previous century and you'll see the same pattern. It's always been a game och risk between the East and the West.
One interesting thing to look into is which countries along the Russian border are not Nato members. Correlate this to where there has been pro-Western protests and even coup attempts in the last decade.
The world is run by psychopaths and they have most of their populations living in ignorance of how geopolitics actually work. My most important principle in life is to judge "my side" harder. Russia and China don't have to be our enemies, but a country is easier to run if there's an external threat. And that's why Oceania in Orwells' 1984 is always at war with either Eurasia or Eastasia.
It's a big subject and it's difficult to summarize in a comment, that's why I listed a few questions to look into. I can dump facts and events all I want but the best thing one can do is to look into these conflicts themselves and find the patterns. It's always about who's allied with who, and who's extracting the resources. Gas/oil/minerals/power.
We were fine with Saddam (that we put in power in the first place) trying to exterminate the kurds, but mention leaving the petrodollar, oh no you didn't.
Thank you for the clarification. Given that the current context is comparing Ukraine to Venezuela, and Venezuela's opposition leader is a woman and there were protests in 2014, I had no idea you were talking about Tymoshenko.
According to West, not allowed. However, the West does not exist anymore, and we have two different ideological camps within it. According to USA, it’s bad, but it did not hurt American interests, so a good deal is possible. According to EU, foreign policy of which is hijacked by Baltic right, it is still not allowed, but… Deep currents indicate that as soon as it’s done with formal condemnations, it is desirable that business will resume as usual.
There’s massive propaganda effort painting the picture of imminent invasion, so opinion polls are naturally reflecting that. I doubt that there was ever a reason for Finland to worry about it. It’s just a convenient narrative for politicians, mainly on the right. But I was not saying that it’s only right leaning voters think this way. Just pointed out that we have Kallas as head of EU diplomacy and few other vocal politicians from Baltic right wing parties, and they are fixated on Russian threat, which is necessary for their political survival.
Plenty of European businesses still operate in Russia or have set up their exit for easy return via Dubai legal entities. Also Belgium fiercely resisting confiscation of Russian assets etc.
>Also Belgium fiercely resisting confiscation of Russian assets etc
Isn't this literally them not wanting to be left holding the paper bag?
What businesses are doing, I don't know, I am more aware of what states are doing. What're your thoughts on the expansion of military expenditure? Let Ukraine die, keep ourselves defended?
> Isn't this literally them not wanting to be left holding the paper bag?
It’s telling that they consider this a possibility. If EU wanted it, they could protect Belgium. But anticipation of business as usual means that whoever distances from such decisions better, will do better.
„Let Ukraine die“ decision was made in 2022, when NATO chose not to engage directly and not to switch to war economy, rapidly scaling production of military equipment and supplies. In NATO vs Russia war, Russia had no chances, but it quickly became Ukraine vs Russia war with token Western support, where Ukraine has no chances in the long term. As for increase in military spending, it’s necessary, but whatever is done, is insufficient. It is barely enough for containment of Russia, and EU needs independent operation in Middle East and Africa, pushing out USA from the region (whatever America does there, always ricocheting on Europe, so they should be denied action without approval of allies)
It is not like citizens of Iran decide to attack Israel or like sponsoring terrorist orgs attacking Israel. I am not sure if Russians freely vote in referendum to attack Ukraine. These decisions are made by despots ruling these countries and then their citizens suffer. Either they die in trenches or suffer economic misery. What for? China too can live without Taiwan. Chinese people do not need to have another island belonging to their country. Only despots wants to have statues raised after them, or write their names in history books, because all other things: Power, Money, Sex they already have.
>the invasion had broad popular support at the beginning.
According to whom?
You should understand that public opinion surveys in authoritarian countries are problematic. In autocracies, people might want to hide their opinions and give socially desirable answers that conform to the official government position for fear of facing repression or deviating from the consensus view.
According to my own relatives, friends, and acquaintances in Russia, where I'm from. You don't need to tell me about "hiding opinions". The majority support is regardless of all that, though.
This is a ridiculously small sample to tell me that "the invasion had broad popular support at the beginning". It had a broad support in your own circles and you casually extrapolated it to the whole population.
According to my own relatives, friends, and acquaintances in Russia (where I'm from) – no one supports or ever supported in the beginning the total idiocracy which is happening.
Expectations are higher, competition is stiffer, and the gap between bottom and top end has grown, but by and large (especially in the US), the middle class quality of life has gone up.
Obviously specific regions that failed to transition out of low value-add manufacturing and agriculture have suffered, but the vast majority of Americans live in cities doing or supporting high value work.
It's not even competition anymore. It's a screaming void that deafens everyone, causing them to reach for the nearest "acceptable" thing just to quiet the endless cacophony of human struggling.
Yes this is a big problem but a large part of this is the total elimination of starter homes from the market. I.e. they would be able to afford the types of homes that earlier generations started in, but those homes simply don't exist anymore.
It's kind of a quality of life degradation, but it's a bit more complex than just "an attainable item is no longer attainable." It has never been normal to buy a 2600 sqft, 4 bedroom home at the start of a career.
It's not that starter homes were eliminated or were torn down, it's that construction stopped in cities. The downzonings of prior generations, combined with the limited ability to expand by car travel, finally hit its limit and the urban planning apparatus was in complete capture of people who didn't want the built environment to change.
The reason construction slowed down so much is that developers fear another 2008. We have just barely gotten back onto a historically normal-ish pace of construction: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST
And this talk of "just build build build," while not wrong per se, overlooks the fact that of course prices will come down, which then discourages construction. The system is self-equilibrating. 2008 reset the equilibrium point very low for 15 years, and now the nature of the costs of construction (labor and land) means it is not advantageous for anyone to build starter homes, and it's hardly advantageous to build homes at all.
Restrictive zoning is a problem and would be a very tidy explanation of all the woes of residential in the US, but there really isn't much evidence for it mattering that much in the grand scheme of things.
The single most important factor in home prices is local income levels. This gets baked into both land prices and labor costs, which then makes it very difficult to profitably build much, and completely unprofitable to build entry level homes.
The building industry never really recovered after 2008 because the only surviving companies were extremely cautious. In order to get more builders, there needs to be more places to build, and entry into the industry needs to be easier. It's all permitting, zoning, and discretionary processes stopping housing from being built where it's wanted to be built.
Well I've shared a statistical analysis and raw data series backing my points and directly contradicting yours. On the flip side I guess we have "trust me bro."
To the extent "it's all [any individual cause]", that cause is rising incomes. The second major cause of rising housing prices is cost of inputs (labor, land, material). Zoning definitely plays a role, but again: there's just no evidence that "solving zoning" will actually solve affordability. We should do it anyway because it'll solve all sorts of other problems in our built environment, but there's not good evidence affordability is one of them.
You ar also doing "trust me bro" with a statistical analysis that at most shows that prices rise with wages when supplies are constrained. Which, yes! That's what everyone says! K shaped recoveries happen when there's unequal access to opportunity, and supple constraints in access to the geography of good incomes is exactly the sort of supply constraints. Further, in order to get their weak results they do silly things like transform "supply constraints" into an indicator variable, and on the basis of that single odd regression try to overturn a huge body of literature showing the opposite.
Yet this one strange paper keeps getting cited as if it were God's own truth, the holy grail of economics that changes everything that was known before.
Supply restrictions are not binary, though that's how your paper treats them, and they perform none of the causal analysis that would be needed to extend their analysis to the conclusions you are trying to draw.
Here's a random paper with completely different results that agrees with the rest of the field:
I remember the last time the "we can't change zoning" folks passed around a paper like the NBER paper you shared, and it was one about transit-oriented-development in Chicago, where allowing small upzonings close didn't change pricing much. It was contra to the vast majority of the literature, covered only a small geographic area with fully adequate housing supply, yet for a few years nobody could suggest doing the obvious zoning reforms without people claiming that Chicago proved that upzoning doesn't change pricing.
And again, supply will always be constrained below "affordability" by virtue of there being no profit available at affordable price points given the costs of inputs. So yes, if we imagine a world where supply isn't constrained first by the actual cost structure of construction, then clearly artificial constraints are the sole problem and solving them would solve the problem overall. But that's not the world we live in!
From your random paper:
> Fig. 5 shows the event study results for the change in log hedonic rents. In contrast to the housing supply, we find no statistically significant effect of upzoning on rents.
So it looks like your paper actually agrees with mine.
As I've said over and over: we should overhaul zoning for sure. However there is not good evidence that will solve affordability, and there's basically zero evidence that it is the cause of "all" the problems, as you so boldly claimed.
> I wouldn't call it "some inflation". The living standard of the western middle class has been on the decline for a long, long time.
IMHO the main problem nowadays, especially facing young people, is housing.
Otherwise there is probably never been a greater time to be alive, generally speaking, than right now. If you believe there is, can you outline the year(s) in question and how they were better?
As for inflation, using Bank of Canada numbers (since I'm in CA), $100 of goods/services from 1975-2000 increased by 220% to $320.93, while $100 of goods/services from 2000-2025 increased by 71% to $171.22.
While unpleasant, and higher than that of what many young(er) people have experienced, it is hardly at a crazy level. The lack of people's experience of higher rates is simply more evidence as to how stable things have generally been:
Interestingly, this is not just flaunting international law. It is a blatant violation of federal domestic law in the USA itself: Congress is the only body that can declare war, and they have not done so. The Presidency has no right whatsoever to attack a foreign country without a declaration of war.
While yes, Congress authorized the "War on Terror", there is very obviously no possible justification for applying that to the case of Venezuela.
My point is that —- regardless of appropriateness —- this is about as far from “unprecedented” as can be imagined.
Congress didn’t declare ware on Syria, or Iraq, or Yemen, or Somalia, or any number of other African countries when the US attacked them during the Biden administration.
That’s not what I was saying, but I didn’t argue when smarter men than I said exactly that:
But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain - that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.
- Lysander Spooner
Liberia has/had a nearly identical constitution and look at them. It was just a roadmap for what the US could become if we became even more savage like them. It was never the Constitution that made the USA special, in other hands you got what we're getting now.
You always needed a populace that respected life, liberty, and property above all in order to have a prayer of it working out; that is long gone if it ever existed.
Ah yes, using the Coast Guard's aircraft carrier, stealth fighters, and their famous "Delta Force" commandos. I bet they even got a warrant to kick in Maduro's door and read him his rights!
Just like how Denmark and Greenland stole American land that happens to be where Greenland is. Or Canada.
Seriously though, even the imperial ambitions from the guy feels racist :)
I guess Turkey can stop worrying on thanksgiving days.
I have a lot of conflicting views with both the "left" and the "right" these days, but it seems the so-called "conservatives" are not that conservative in their ambitions, no?
Panama and Granada in the 80s weren't that fundamentally different. And before that US had a very long history of invading or intervening in Latin American countries due to various often dubious reasons.
If anything the last few decades might have been the exception.
> the way they don't even try to convince us this is necessary anymore is a sign that wherever the line is, we let it slip too far
A lot of Americans don't care. They either actually don't care. Or they sort of care, but are too lazy and nihilistic to bother doing anything about it.
Like, this entire exercise is a leveraged wager by the Trump administration that this will not cost them the Senate in any of these states next year [1].
As an American, I think we make this excuse too often. People have opposed and overthrown their governments more effectively under much harsher circumstances.
What data do you have that they don’t care? Waging a war is a pretty massive thing to not care about. I would think that someone would either be positive or negative towards it. Because even if they don’t care about invading countries per se they would presumably care about what their presumed tax money is spent on.
Of course being “nihilistic” is a different matter.
> Or they sort of care, but are too lazy and nihilistic to bother doing anything about it.
Typical.
Doing anything about US foreign interventions is a very tall order in a country where the vast majority are politically disenfranchised (with income and wealth as a proxy). It’s difficult enough for domestic affairs, like getting universal healthcare. Much harder to fight the war machine.
Americans did put up a fight against the interventionism of the Reagan administration. But that didn’t stop the funding of the Contras. “All it did” was force the interventions to become clandestine. (A big contrast to this admin.)
But ordinary Americans do have the largest power in all of the world to fight the war machine of their own country. That ought to be encouraged. But as usual we see the active encouragement of nihilism from comments where A Lot Of X are deemed to be useless for this particular purpose. Ah what’s the point, People Are Saying that everyone around me are useless or politically katatonic. Typical.
It’s funny how the America First, America Only crowd is cheering on this shameless regime change whose ultimate goal isn’t about drugs or democracy, but getting access to oil and minerals to make the Trump family richer.
And that’s so why there is a lack of effort to justify it. The right has been compromised and will support anything the party does - deporting citizens, invading countries, making things unaffordable with tariffs.
I have seen many people on X who have a profile saying America First or America Only or both post messages supporting the boat strikes or “thanking” Hegseth or whatever. Among big influencers - Matt Walsh, Benny Johnson, others have all supported the narrative in one form or the other. For example Johnson pushed the conspiracy theory that Venezuela rigs elections in America. Often they use dishonest language to shill their support for what’s going on - “we don’t want a new war but here’s ten reasons why Venezuela is bad”
> There is going to be a lot of debate over whether this specific operation was legal
There might be a local debate about the legality in the US. But from the outside perspective in terms of international law, there is not much to debate. Unless i missed some UN resolution, the US has no jurisdiction in Venezuela.
This is a consequence of the society concentrating on its internal culture war. International politics became irrelevant to most voters; they don't really have any personal stake in it anymore, or they at least don't feel so. Their kids won't be drafted to war.
>There is going to be a lot of debate over whether this specific operation was legal
Or maybe there wouldn't be any debate and people will move on to the next bombastic thing he does. Populists get away with everything by simply not engaging, people get tired and seek new entertainment and there's no actual checks and balances beyond the decency. When someone has no claim of decency, they are untouchable. No one will ever arrest them, stop them or deny them anything because they can just replace those who do not obey. Maduro, Trump, Putin, Erdogan, Orban and many others are made from the same cloth.
It was one or two elections ago that we entirely dropped the pretense of dignity.
Quite refreshing, actually.
Earlier today I heard the argument that idealism was promoted in the West because it encourages a separation from reality and makes people easier to control.
I consider myself an idealist. I just don't believe that ignorance and delusion are the means by which an ideal can be brought about.
