The only way for Venezuela to survive is to play dirty and be cunning/resourceful just like their Ukrainian counterparts fighting for their life.
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.
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.
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.
> Checks registration date and comments
Ah, right, another Russian bot.
https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/venezuela/crude-oil-ex...
Like sanctions?
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.
> 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.
mohsen1•1h ago
faidit•1h ago
e40•1h ago
https://youtu.be/C5QGzYFjVaU?si=09nRUo_ddUd5H3D7
The Daily Show segment on comparing them.
cm2187•56m ago
To me the similarity with Iraq is that it is run by a ruthless dictator that destroys the country. I don’t care that much which pretext is used to topple him. The reason why the Iraq war was a bad idea isn’t that the pretext used turned out to be bullshit, it is that Saddam’s brutal regime was keeping a lead on ethnic tensions, that ended up killing over a 100k people. Though it isn’t clear it wouldn’t have happened ultimately when Saddam would have died of natural death.
Oil is unconvincing since it took years before production recovered, so that clearly wasn’t the priority.
But I see no such risk in Venezuela. Not that it is likely to become a wealthy Switzerland, the voters elected Chavez after all. But a poor democracy is better than a poor dictatorship.
Not sure how Trump will still claim he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize if he starts an unprovoked war (and also rewards the dictator having started an unprovoked war in Ukraine) though.
gpderetta•50m ago
there is a third option.
rglullis•47m ago
kakacik•25m ago
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.
wiseowise•36m ago
fakedang•23m ago
Or maybe the US should start with instituting regime change in its allies in the Persian Gulf?
drysine•16m ago
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.
vkou•3m ago
(You may also want to look into the US' track record for installing dictators throughout the Americas. It's not great.)
DrScientist•2m ago
Fortunately most countries think it's a US internal matter for the US people to sort out.
sirfz•41m ago
oersted•34m ago
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, US has done 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.
drysine•14m ago
The US also destroyed the country in the process and caused more deaths than Saddam.
matwood•5m ago
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.
kristopolous•27m ago
https://youtu.be/C5QGzYFjVaU?si=lr30ZcfhKQgGCe1t&t=597
sofixa•56m ago
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.
apples_oranges•53m ago
4gotunameagain•12m ago