Note the US administration contends that he wasn't the legitimate head of state. [1] [2]
[1] https://www.newsnationnow.com/politics/marco-rubio-nicolas-m...
[2] I'm (obviously) being sloppy regarding head of state vs. head of government.
There are general rules against war crimes and they still happen day after day, under flimsy excuses. Bombed a hospital or a wedding party? There was a suspected terrorist there. White phosphorus over civilians? It was just for the smoke screen. Overthrew a government overseas? Freedom for those poor people.
China on the other hand doesn’t get visibly involved in almost any remote conflict and they’re obviously a (if not the) superpower.
China has everything that Russia lacks and more.
China was another example of superpower “style”. Not the Russian or US “let’s invade this country” or “let’s kidnap that leader”.
For example if your country is subject to a terror bombing campaign, it's very tempting to assassinate the one leader who had the power/respect/authority to order the attacks to start but often they're also the only leader who can order the attacks to stop
In the 1970s/1980s presumably the UK could have had IRA leaders Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness assassinated. But it sure turned out to be useful, in the late 1990s peace process, that the IRA had identifiable, living leaders who could engage in negotiation, sign an agreement, and get the bomb makers to stop making bombs.
I think these affairs ought to be handled through international bodies. The UN seems to have no mechanism for it.
The UN deliberately has no mechanism for this because it's a talking shop intended to help avoid war by providing a talking venue. That's the whole idea, they're not the world police, there is no such thing. They're a forum.
I'm absolutely not defending any given dictator but history shows that every attempt to remove a dictator "for the greater good" is usually 1) selfishly motivated and 2) backfires horribly.
No, and in fact the comparison to Hitler felt out of place. I'm simply saying that it isn't as black and white that one should NEVER remove a head of state.
What I will concede is that catch 22 of not knowing how the future will play out, so how COULD you confidently and with wide agreement intervene BEFORE someone commits atrocities.
Once the genocide started though I do thing all considerations, including national stability and continuity, are lower priority than ending the genocide as fast as possible.
That's what made Trump so dangerous, it is insane that such terrible people have such a charismatic appeal. To me they are horrible men, to others they seem to come across as some kind of savior.
> every attempt to remove a dictator "for the greater good" is usually 1) selfishly motivated and 2) backfires horribly.
Basically, "leave it to the population to sort out themselves, even if they've lost the democratic means to do so," up until a government has gone so insane it's massacring its people, or other people.
To phrase it more completely, regime change and general destabilization of Latin American countries has definitely led to the immigration crisis in the United States now. Lack of stable governments and economies has absolutely exacerbated the production and transportation of drugs into the United States. Hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans have been killed or disappeared by US-empowered gangs or governments.
Now that said, I don't know what the world would look like had their right to self-determination been preserved. Nobody knows. But as a general rule, countries whose power structures were not toyed with by colonial powers do better than countries whose power structures were toyed with.
It's why the UN has an obsession with a tiny democracy in the middle east and ignores the multitude of brutal dictatorships which oppress and kill far more people around it and across the globe.
Since ideas don't execute themselves, who would you pick to enforce this prohibition, never mind even getting 100%(?) alignment from countries what the conditions are for "kidnap", "assassination", and "de facto head of state"?
Opinion, public or not, cannot enforce anything.
Don't get me wrong, I live in Taiwan so it's not something I want to have happen, but the PRC seems focused on localizing its economy as much as possible, so it may be that if that time comes, it doesn't matter if other countries boycott it. Didn't seem to matter that much to Russia in the Ukraine situation, or at least, it didn't stop them.
If they would actually do that, they would loose their threat model to keep the EU in check.
But enforcement is not even my point. I'm referring to a moral principle.
Lesson 1 of W.Spaniel course on international relationship is that "international order" is the longest running form of anarchy.
Pray you stay on the good side of the Emperor closest to your home.
It's a good thing the current emperor is old - at least we have patience and trusting biology as an option. Successions are often messy, and I don't see Emperor Trump as the kind to cautiously pick his heir.
The entire post-WWII system with the UN and international law was an attempt to change this.
That is why the 5 most powerful countries were permanently put on the security council with complete veto powers.
It was in his documentary series War, but I don't remember which episode.
Democracy, free trade, free speech and freedom of religion had "won" over the soviet union. International treaties were reducing stockpiles of nuclear and chemical weapons. The WTO had just started resolving trade disputes through negotiation rather than trade wars. International peacekeeping forces were preventing ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Kosovo, even though there wasn't anything like oil motivating the peacekeeping forces. Planners of the genocides in Yugoslavia and Rwanda were being prosecuted by an international war crimes tribunal.
Then-UK-Prime-Minister Tony Blair believed in this stuff pretty earnestly - in fact he wanted to get a UN resolution authorising the Iraq invasion so badly he was happy to submit fabricated WMD evidence to get it.
Of course, even at the height of the "rules-based international order" there were always some stark inconsistencies - especially in the middle east, for example.
> Pray you stay on the good side of the Emperor closest to your home.
I think we painfully agree, here :/
Trump contends that Biden wasn't the legitimate President because the 2020 election was rigged.
If Trump ends up contending the 2026 mid-terms are not legitimate is that valid too? Are they able to act on those contentions to… do stuff?
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth_Amendment_to_the_Un...
[2]https://www.npr.org/2025/12/31/g-s1-104190/capitol-riot-trum...
Was he tried and convicted? As far as I know the powers that be instead decided for some reason to attack him on other charges (sexual misconduct, corruption, etc.)
This was appealed to the US Supreme Court, who didn't rule that this wasn't true, they ruled that the 14th amendment needs to be applied by Congress for reasons of consistency across states... which sidestepped the entire issue and was a dereliction of duty in my opinion, in the sense that they are the highest court and could have ruled on the issue of insurrection, or at least required some kind of jury proceeding at that time. They basically didn't do their one job.
Then Jack Smith later amassed a case about it, with grand jury approval. He ran out of time to try and convict Trump before he was elected, basically published a summary report of his case. Recently he testified before a congressional committee about it and asserted he was extremely confident Trump would have been convicted. He testified that he never consulted with Biden about the case, and asked that the rest of his materials from his investigation be publicly released.
Legally speaking there is a strong argument that Trump engaged in insurrection; he's just been shielded from the consequences by political maneuvers and poor timing.
Put differently, one state supreme court decided he so obviously engaged in it that it didn't require a trial. Another federal attorney presented his evidence to a grand jury and they decided he was likely to succeed if it went to trial.
My personal belief is historians will look at the evidence presented and conclude that US Congress made catastrophic mistakes by not impeaching Trump the first time (for obstruction of justice first, and insurrection second), and that SCOTUS made an equally catastrophic mistake (or corrupt decision) by not ruling on insurrection as the highest federal court, either on its own or with a grand jury trial.
For starters, TSMC has opened facilities in Az, but these are still owned and operated from Taiwan and rely significantly on Taiwanese capability for substantial inputs to the development process in both knowledge and operational capacity.
The new wafer capacity is not a replacement for Taiwan based infrastructure, but rather an extension of those operations.
And to be blunt: If amerika were to immediately about-face on 1975's "back-to-basics" math movement and resume math theory based primary education in order to develop the foundational comprehension necessary for the materials science at|in the design level workforce, it would still be at least one generation before homegrown capacity was 'on-par' with the current Taiwanese (and Dutch) resources.
TLDR; not a concern from a rational leadership condition.
However, pretending that one TSMC plant in Az is sufficient reason to TACO and post on social media in saggy golf pants == very much a potential outcome; regardless of the absolute immediate cost in lives and material capability, and the unavoidable long term consequences both within the US and around the world caused by said capricious behaviour.
From a US strategic perspective, there are a lot of other things made in Taiwan other than just semiconductors. They make a lot of machine tools, for example, and tend to have better quality than what we can get imported from China directly. The castings are likely made in China mainland but then finished in Taiwan. You can get nearly identical machines from either source but the Taiwan-made version is generally superior.
You get "preemptive self defense" that urgently requires "buffer zones" on foreign territory, which then mysteriously become your own territory and have to be defended with even more buffer zones.
Some Terror Regime of Literal Nazis is doing Unspeakable Atrocities to its own population which practically forces you to invade the country purely out of empathy and the goodness of your heart. Nevermind that the population has never asked for the invasion and will in fact be worse off through the war than before - and that this other state who is your ally is doing the exact same things, but then it's suddenly "realpolitik" and just the way the world works.
Someone has broken the law of his own country. "Internal affairs" or grounds for invasion? Depends if he is your ally or enemy.
Pardon the cynicism, but my growing impression is that war justifications only serve as discussion fodder for domestic audiences and have very little to do with the actual war.
Two things intersect here:
"War is the continuation of politics by other means" - Carl von Clausewitz
"Politics is the entertainment division of the military-industrial complex" - Frank Zappa
There's a third quote that kinda sums it all up neatly: "War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it." — George Orwell
The media in the US, being a wholesale production of the oligarchy now, has been brazenly honest about the fact that this is purely a large-scale looting of Venezuela.
Just speculating, but I wonder if there is another purpose as well: To hand the military a story it can tell itself to assure they are still the "good guys" - i.e. ensuring "troop morale".
If you have thousands and thousands of servicemembers, not all of them might submit to drill or be motivated by money or career advancements or other personal goals - some people might ask questions about the bigger picture, about why they are doing an operation, etc. I imagine for situations like this, it's useful for an officer to have some ready-made answers available that they can use to counter those questions, even if the answers really don't make a lot of sense.
For all the personnel who executed the Maduro operation, the "we're just helping law enforcement to arrest a criminal" story was probably the practical reality for the last months, no matter how ridiculous it is in the larger context.
I feel like at this stage the US administration could contend that the moon is in fact made of cheese and news agencies would respond by running news stories about the implications of this on future possible lunar missions.
Trump is a sex offender. He's also a convicted criminal. He is also completely devoid of ethics or morality.
But because of the car crash that is American politics, you have to address all of this through the theatre of the set of documents associated with the world's most infamous paedophile (who also appears to be his best mate).
It's exhausting.
Ultimately, there's a war between the haves and the have-nots and one side clearly has more resources.
It's demoralising.
The impact of that is on display in this very thread. Random unproven accusations, conspiracy theories and repetition of “facts” that have been disproven long ago.
If your goal is to educate yourself about the US leadership, or really any subject, you’re not going to do it by what you see on social media.
Are there more reliable sources of information that you can point to?
Every person who has been out in the world had to deal with a Trump like person in the workplace or wherever .
And people don't like it, as a matter of fact they despise it, he's only kept afloat by those who fail to connect the abusive bullying behavior of DJT with their own personal experience with a similar character and those who enjoy bullying or are paitiently waiting in line to do some bullying.
Let me put it this way - if you wanted to know a subject well, as in truly understand it, for example the current protests in Iran.
Do you think you’d walk away with a good understanding from what the mainstream media says? From social media?
I think it clear to most people the media does a horrible job.
Now consider if they do such a horrible job on those topics, do you think they suddenly do a good job on US politics?