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Comment by pythonic_hell | Hacker News Reader

Nothing good can come from this. Illegal drug production exploded after the 2nd gulf war and invasion of Afghanistan.

This is going to be a repeat of this if the Americans decides to invade Venezuela.

Foreign wars are used to launder money not stop drugs, Opium production in Afghanistan increased during US occupation, if the actual goal was to stop drug production it would be more effective to put the Taliban in charge of Venezuela.

I see this conflict as the impotent rage of a dying empire.

The invasion of Panama to overthrow a CIA backed dictatorship was needlessly over the top because of concerns that the US had lost its mojo after Vietnam and was seen as a chance to test out a bunch of Reagan's new weapons.

Opium production in Afghanistan more closely tracked the cost of solar to pump water up the hill to grow poppies than any us influence

Seems that the Taliban rule reduced Opium production by 95% but the cost of solar didn't go up 20x? At best the US did nothing to stop it. I would include displacing the Taliban as a direct result of US influence.

You are right, i wonder where i got my earlier info from…

> was seen as a chance to test out a bunch of Reagan's new weapons.

The F-117, the wonder-weapon of Panama, was funded by the Carter Administration.

As was the B-2.

I was thinking more new to combat not new to Reagan, although if Carter buys it and Reagan uses it wouldn't that still be new to Reagan.

I don't think either was used until George HW Bush.

They were funded by multiple administrations and Congresses for decades.

They don't want to stop drugs. They just want to be the ones to pocket the profit

No idea why you are getting downvoted; this is true.

Quite a few Americans who haven't properly realized that we have in fact become the baddies we used to tell tales about defeating 89 years prior.

Real shame it didn't take that long after those soldiers of WW2 died out to forget all the lessons taught.

Who's "we"? Most of us didn't vote for this administration.

Royal "we". "i" didn't vote for this, but "we" did. Or at the very least, a third of us did and another third of us didn't think it mattered enough to vote one way or the other.

It's not this administration alone, or even this decade alone. We've had many decades of sociopathic wars and CIA operations. And while I'm sure they think they're just being Machivalien and achieving some greater good for America, more often than not they are completely myopic, completely backfire, and screw over US interests on a global level. And in exchange we get to go tens of trillions of dollars into debt and lose all soft power on a global level.

If there is some parallel dimension where after WW2 we went something much closer to isolationism, perhaps with some baseline effort to balance against the USSR, the US and the world alike would be a vastly better place today. And most notably this whole issue continues on to this very day. Our foreign policy is completely self defeating.

It's not about the drugs. It's the oil they're after.

Don't forget the proof that the Epstein Files are a hoax! We know it's in Venezuela … must be around here somewhere …

This upcoming war has absolutely nothing to do with drugs whatsoever, just like the 2003 invasion of Iraq had absolutely nothing to do with WMDs whatsoever.

I rather appreciate that they're not even bothering to try to make some big lie of it. The drug stuff is the most half-hearted messaging I have ever seen. Rare is going to be the person who truly believes we're invading a country, which has the largest oil reserves on the planet, to stop drug smuggling.

I think it's difficult for people to understand the war machine when the messaging is effective. When we make it reasonably clear what's happening, you have a more informed electorate. And I think that's a very good thing.

>Rare is going to be the person who truly believes we're invading a country, which has the largest oil reserves on the planet, to stop drug smuggling.

Theyre all over this thread - both those who think it is genuine and some who think it is real.

>Nothing good can come from this.

Military industrial complex gets bored quickly.

> Illegal drug production exploded after the 2nd gulf war and invasion of Afghanistan.

Glowies need money too.

> Military industrial complex gets bored quickly.

Eisenhower coined that term. During the Korean War, defence spending was 12% of GDP; in the 1970s during the Cold War, it was 8%. It is currently about 3.5% of GDP:

* https://old.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/1o919po/why_i...

It's not a small amount, being the largest discretionary line programs in the federal budget, but it's no where near what it once was.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget#/...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget

And it should be noted that keeping that industry (and manufacturing in general) alive is important:

> Democratic countries’ economies are mainly set up as free market economies with redistribution, because this is what maximizes living standards in peacetime. In a free market economy, if a foreign country wants to sell you cheap cars, you let them do it, and you allocate your own productive resources to something more profitable instead. If China is willing to sell you brand-new electric vehicles for $10,000, why should you turn them down? Just make B2B SaaS and advertising platforms and chat apps, sell them for a high profit margin, and drive a Chinese car.

> Except then a war comes, and suddenly you find that B2B SaaS and advertising platforms and chat apps aren’t very useful for defending your freedoms. Oops! The right time to worry about manufacturing would have been years before the war, except you weren’t able to anticipate and prepare for the future. Manufacturing doesn’t just support war — in a very real way, it’s a war in and of itself.

* https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/manufacturing-is-a-war-now

Percent of budget doesn't really mean much of anything. We currently spend something like $1.2 trillion on interest payments alone thanks to burying ourselves in debt. And on the note of burying ourselves in debt, we also tend to spend on a large deficit each year which artificially increases the budget. These sort of things already make percent of budget fundamentally misleading.

Here [1] is a graph of US military spending, inflation adjusted. It's going up, up, and away.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...

So USA is exporting the product it still holds a competitive advantage to? It may not have the edge in electric vehicles, or renewables, or manufacturing, etc., but its military is still the biggest.

> Military industrial complex

That really seems just wrong. The established interests here haven't been pushing for a Venezuela action at all. They want to sell arms (via western assistance) to Ukraine, which is much more lucrative and clearly something the Trump adminstration has stymied at all opportunities.

If you have to push for a Capitalist String Pulling Conspiracy angle here (which I don't buy either) it makes much more sense to view this as an oil industry play. American-driven regime change in Venezuela opens up its state-owned petroleum industry to American petrochemical interests.

But no, 99% of of this is simple pique and bullying. Maduro is a loudmouth antiamerican and weak, Trump is a bully. This is just what bullies do. Pushing around antisocial nerds in the schoolyard is how bullies demonstrate authority to their base.

In line with your comment, I wish people that believed in the military industrial complex theory would look at the defense market cap more often and realize that, even in their own reality, their theory doesn’t make sense.

If money controlled politics to that degree, Trump already wouldn’t be in office right now because every large corporation would be fuming at his stock market nonsense with tariffs. Apple alone has a larger market cap than every public US defense contractor combined and wars tend to not do good things for the rest of the market.

The MIC influence doesn't come from money, but power. As our soft power has been dying for decades and is verging on non-existent, the main way that the US exerts influence worldwide is by threatening to attack you, threatening to give weapons to somebody else who will attack you, or by threatening to no longer give you weapons imperiling your ability to attack people. And this is all 100% fueled by the military industrial complex. Without the military industrial complex US influence on a global level would rapidly plummet. And this influence also plays a major, if indirect, role in economic matters by helping to, amongst other things, maintain the USD.

When the entire government is dependent upon you for such a critical role, it's basically inescapable for them to end up with an amount of influence that can't be overstated. This is precisely what Eisenhower tried to warn us of. Well one among a few things, all of which he ended up being completely, and unfortunately, correct on. [1]

[1] - https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/president-dwigh... (scroll down a bit for transcript)

The value of war to industry doesn't stop at companies that are labeled as 'defense market.'

They are buying pencils, IT, software, gasoline, electrician services, plumbing services, non-defense contractors, education, health care, insurance, providing (via their actions on the other side of the coin) opportunities for fundraising and action for anti-war NGO and aid organizations, funneling money into industries in poor communities (via earnings of enlisted soldiers), and it goes on.

> If money controlled politics to that degree

FWIW the easier evidence here is that if money controlled politics to that degree the tech industry would be our explicit overlords. The defense industry is a bunch of mid-size Fortune 500's with no particular economic might to note. I don't think there's a single one with more than $100B of revenue. Any of the top five tech companies could buy the whole lot with a few stocks swaps and no one would notice.

>Trump already wouldn’t be in office right now because every large corporation would be fuming at his stock market nonsense with tariffs.

1. Stocks are soaring right now. A few small shocks that recover in a week won't make corporate turn on Trump.

2. Line go up isn't the only thing corporations care about. Trump slash corporate taxes and is pretty much letting any merger go through. It's prime time right now to focus less on maximizing revenue and instead consolidste power.

The best part is that they are somehow having their cake and eating it. There's really been little downside if you're a billionaire corp in 2025.

Capitalist interests and imperialist interests in the US are distinct and often at odds with one another. Usually the former defers to the latter though.

For example, the capitalist interests didn't want to strand their assets in Russia and eat huge losses in 2022 but most of them still did it without much protest.

Half of the imperialists in the deep state seem to have realized that piling money and resources into the war in Ukraine didn't achieve the goal of advancing their power and influence so they're looking elsewhere (China, Venezuela, Panama... Greenland even). The other half wants to escalate the war.

Trump isn't actually very coherent on this issue, probably because he's getting pulled in two directions (e.g. rubio/lindsay graham is pulling him one way, witkoff the other) - hence why he keeps (for example) threatening Tomahawks sometimes and pulling back other times.

The one thing US imperialists can all agree on is that every Latin American country led by an opponent of the US needs to be overthrown. I think they've done this somewhere between 15 and 30 times in the last century.

It’s not about drugs, it’s about oil.

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