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Merged Peace President invades Venezuela,/U.S. Forces Capture Maduro

Jack by the hedge said:
You're suspiciously quick to submit that invoice for services rendered. Is Venezuela suddenly free now? Was Maduro some kind of evil wizard whose enchantment is now forever broken, or is it possibly a little more complicated than that?
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Moreno has captured my account and will answer:

No, it is very easy!
The US deserves every little penny it can get, period.
For decades the US was taken advantage of by Europe and many many other countries. And the US was destroyed by Biden and Hillary and Clinton and Hussein B.O. and Norway and Greenland and everyone. God gave us President Trump, so that he can save us from ultimate destruction. Only Trump can do that. He knows best. He will do what is best.
 
Andy_Ross said:
Q: Has the Venezuelan government fully committed to turning over its oil to the USA indefinitely?

LEAVITT: This was a deal, a deal made by the president and his team with the Venezuelan interim authorities
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Well, duh! The question was what is the deal? Why is it a secret? Do the "free" people of Venezuela get to know what deal you just imposed on them?
 
Axxman300 said:
The thing that used to make the United States a super-power was not our military force, but our restraint.
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That was never the case. American power has always been in the exercise, not the restraint. Starting with the ruthless pogroms of natives, to build a continent-spanning empire. The Confederacy was defeated not by Northern restraint, but by unrelenting Northern violence.

When Churchill held out hope that Europe would be saved by "the arsenal of democracy", he didn't mean that maybe America would trickle out some support here and there. He meant that America would open the floodgates of its military-industrial complex, and overwhelm the Third Reich with the output of a war machine never before seen in human history.

It was American restraint in avoiding a direct conflict, that lulled Japan into thinking America would cower back into its own hemisphere after one good punch on the nose. It was the brutal exercise of American power that drove Japan back to its home islands, and established the US as the naval power in the Pacific.

Axxman300 said:
That eroded after Vietnam, and we tried to stay on the high road through 2001. We didn't defeat communism with nuclear weapons and Delta Force, we crushed it with Levi's, McDonalds, and KFC. The world wasn't afraid of us, they respected us (for the most part) because we were cool. Now were just a-holes.
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This is also wrong. Have you ever seen this video?

It's a time-lapse of every nuclear weapons test in history. The US tested more weapons than the rest of the world combined. There's a period of a couple years where the explosions just don't stop. It wasn't blue jeans and hamburgers that defeated the Soviet Union, it was the inability of their economy to keep up with the American war machine. Sure, Russians may have coveted Western fashions, but a generation after the fall of the Soviet Union, it's obvious that Russians never adopted Western values.

There has never been a time in history where American power - or any nation's power - manifested in the restraint, not the exercise of that power. Whether military, or economic. "Restraint" is the sour-grapes narratives of other powers, who hope to shame America into backing off and giving them room to exercise more power of their own.

American restraint is what allowed Maduro to take over Venezuela. American restraint is what keeps Ukraine hanging by a thread, rather than climbing a ladder to decisive victory.

Restraint has its place. Power must be exercised judiciously. But to say that American power is based in restraint is completely counter to history.
 
Beelzebuddy said:
Isn't Russia under strict oil sanctions? Aren't we supposed to be seizing those? I thought the issue was the reason for it - not for any sanction, but because the orange pedophile didn't get to wet his beak first.
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typically they issue financial sanctions which is removal from the dollar backed banking system. anyone trading with a sanctioned nation could potentially also be sanctioned in the same way, which is a big deal so most nations voluntarily stop trading with sanctioned nations. but nations already off the dollar system kind of freely trade with one another.

might be more to the story there but i would think seizing tankers is beyond the intent of the sanctions. it’s pretty dangerous to say nations aren’t allowed to trade at all
 
theprestige said:
That was never the case. American power has always been in the exercise, not the restraint. Starting with the ruthless pogroms of natives, to build a continent-spanning empire. The Confederacy was defeated not by Northern restraint, but by unrelenting Northern violence.

When Churchill held out hope that Europe would be saved by "the arsenal of democracy", he didn't mean that maybe America would trickle out some support here and there. He meant that America would open the floodgates of its military-industrial complex, and overwhelm the Third Reich with the output of a war machine never before seen in human history.

It was American restraint in avoiding a direct conflict, that lulled Japan into thinking America would cower back into its own hemisphere after one good punch on the nose. It was the brutal exercise of American power that drove Japan back to its home islands, and established the US as the naval power in the Pacific.


This is also wrong. Have you ever seen this video?

It's a time-lapse of every nuclear weapons test in history. The US tested more weapons than the rest of the world combined. There's a period of a couple years where the explosions just don't stop. It wasn't blue jeans and hamburgers that defeated the Soviet Union, it was the inability of their economy to keep up with the American war machine. Sure, Russians may have coveted Western fashions, but a generation after the fall of the Soviet Union, it's obvious that Russians never adopted Western values.

There has never been a time in history where American power - or any nation's power - manifested in the restraint, not the exercise of that power. Whether military, or economic. "Restraint" is the sour-grapes narratives of other powers, who hope to shame America into backing off and giving them room to exercise more power of their own.

American restraint is what allowed Maduro to take over Venezuela. American restraint is what keeps Ukraine hanging by a thread, rather than climbing a ladder to decisive victory.

Restraint has its place. Power must be exercised judiciously. But to say that American power is based in restraint is completely counter to history.
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Developing a massive war machine and not using it is definitionally restraint. So yes, it was restraint that won the Cold War and lead to the U.S. becoming the world's sole superpower.

You are also woefully underestimating the influence of the soft power the U.S. has used to become a global hegemon, which is what Axxman300 was referring to, and was correct to do so. We become the power we are not through the exercise of military and economic force but by becoming the world's dominant culture. We didn't force America on the rest of the world, we sold it to them.

And the Trump administration is burning all that down with ignorance and imperialism.
 
theprestige said:
That was never the case. American power has always been in the exercise, not the restraint. Starting with the ruthless pogroms of natives, to build a continent-spanning empire.
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Our expansion west, and our use of military force was ad hoc from 1787 through Wounded Knee in 1890. We didn't get organized until after the Civil War. It was always ugly, even the raids Andrew Jackson led against the Creek are up there with worst of the worst, but we evolved our tactics and policies to go even darker in the 1870s. But it needs to be pointed out that we often fought along side indigenous tribes who'd been at war with many of those other tribes, which speaks to a deeper truth about North and Central America - this has always been a place of war. It's literally in our blood. As someone pointed out, we just took the British playbook, and added new chapters to use local tribes against each other to meet our goals.

This was all done with an army that numbered around 30,000, and local tribes of about the same strength. But we were not a super power in the 19th century, but by the 1830s we were starting to have super power problems. The French had washed their hands of this continent, but the British were still to the north, and Mexico was flexing to the south, and Russians were out here on the west coast. We had already jumped into the Barbary War, and after the War 1812 we got salty. We went to war with Mexico, went all the way to Mexico City forcing their surrender. But we didn't keep Mexico, we signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and went home keeping California, and their territories north of the Rio Grande (which we paid $15 million, and we really didn't need to do that).

I do have to ask, why do the Spanish, British, French, Mexico, Sioux, Cheyenne, Kiowa, Apache, and Comanches get a pass whenever American expansion is discussed? We didn't invent the game, we just played it.

theprestige said:
The US tested more weapons than the rest of the world combined. There's a period of a couple years where the explosions just don't stop.
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And?

Have we used these weapons in any of our wars since August, 1945? Why is that, do you think?

And back then is was only the US, Soviet Union, Great Briton, France, and eventually China, and most countries don't want these things. Sure, we tested the crap out of our nuclear devices, why wouldn't we? It was, and is the responsible thing to do because the military understood, even back then, that at some point the American people would elect morons into power, and they needed to provide accurate data about the effects, and long term outcome of using nuclear weapons. The smartest minds in the word worked on our nuclear weapons knowing they might end up in the hands of a guy like Trump, and he hasn't seriously threatened anyone with nukes (yet). We also tested them to understand what we could face if and when they fell on our country. Scary weapons require scary things be done to ensure nothing scary happens, and that's the paradox of being a nuclear power.

We could have nuked Hanoi, Nixon openly proposed this a few times in NSC meetings. After 9-11, we could have brought one of our Ohio Class subs to launch depth, and erased Afghanistan. We didn't.

theprestige said:
It wasn't blue jeans and hamburgers that defeated the Soviet Union, it was the inability of their economy to keep up with the American war machine.
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We never had a war machine.

Our defense posture was based as a response to Soviet and Chinese aggression. We would have been happy to not be the world's policeman.

After WWII, Eisenhower's foreign policy after Korea was to threaten hostile nations nations with nuclear force. When JFK came in he expanded our conventional forces to give the US what was called a flexible response. So instead of threatening a nuke strike, we could send an aircraft carrier, Marines, and the Army. Obviously flexible response sometimes gave us a military option we should have skipped.
theprestige said:
Sure, Russians may have coveted Western fashions, but a generation after the fall of the Soviet Union, it's obvious that Russians never adopted Western values.
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That's because Russians have always been their worst enemy. We never needed nukes to destroy Russia, just patients while they destroy themselves.

theprestige said:
There has never been a time in history where American power - or any nation's power - manifested in the restraint, not the exercise of that power. Whether military, or economic. "Restraint" is the sour-grapes narratives of other powers, who hope to shame America into backing off and giving them room to exercise more power of their own.
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You need to make up your mind. You began your post by dredging up our Indian Wars where we just killed as many as we could, and now you postulate that not killing as many people as we can is weakness. We learned from our 19th century atrocities, and they loom over much of our military decision making today. The Soviets would just level Afghan villages, through tribal leaders under tank treads, kill live stock, and poison wells. While we killed some non-combatants in Afghanistan it was never intentional, and there were plenty of targets we were forced to pass on because of proximity to civilians. Russia doesn't make this effort, nor does China.

The Anbar Awakening in 1987 turned things around for us in Iraq because of our restraint. Since the end of the Vietnam War US Special Forces ODA teams have inoculated more kids and cattle, dug drainage ditches, built schools, and stood up city councils all over the world. Sure, they've been shooting bad guys in the GWOT, but their overall record shows they helped far more people than they've killed.

That is restraint, and it should be something we're proud of, and we used to be.

theprestige said:
American restraint is what allowed Maduro to take over Venezuela.
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Our bad.

theprestige said:
American restraint is what keeps Ukraine hanging by a thread, rather than climbing a ladder to decisive victory.
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Honestly, if we knew just how much the Russians suck at war we would have been more hands on. But I guess I need to point out that the Russians have those pesky nuclear weapons you complained about, and they tend to make strategy a little prickly. I'd love to joke about how their missiles might not work as advertised in a dependable manner, and even the Russians aren't completely certain all of their warheads will detonate (one of their missiles failed in a test this past December, lol), but they have a lot of missiles, and it's always been about quantity over quality with them.

I have to ask you, which American cities are you willing to trade for Ukraine?

Or maybe we can cool our jets and make nice when we can, instead of taking other countries' lunch money, and stuffing them in a locker.
 
Andy_Ross said:
CNBC: Is there a narrative in Venezuela that you are stealing their oil?

CHRIS WRIGHT: That's untrue. We're just controlling the flow of revenues from their oil

https://twitter.com/x/status/2008980260180906209
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On the one hand, these mystery tankers have been a thing for a while that we should have been more vocal about. On the other hand I have to wonder how long before the US Navy starts sounding like actor Robert Newton on the radio.
 
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