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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

> 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.

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.

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)

>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.

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