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Comment by xg15 | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I was mostly surprised about the brazenness of it all. So the plan is to take over the government, take over the oil industry, sell the oil and in infinite grace give the Venezuelans some part of it back (minus of course the "compensation" for the years in which US companies were kept out of the country)

And all that as official doctrine, not even some secret strategy paper or covert ops campaign.

Edit: I had to chuckle at his "reviewing" of the Monroe doctrine as DONroe doctrine. There is "on the nose" and there is "punching someone in the face"...

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> minus of course the "compensation" for the years in which US companies were kept out of the country

I don’t want to sound like I’m running coverage for the Americans, but wasn’t a lot of that infrastructure built by foreign multinationals and then expropriated by Chávez in 2007?

If it was done in a legal process then it should be litigated in that country.

> built by foreign multinationals and then expropriated by Chávez in 2007?

If you follow this reasoning - after what happened today - you will get Iran 2.0: Venezuelan boogaloo

I have zero optimism that after this - ordinary Venezuelans will have better outcomes in 10 years time.

Current USA government is some weird klepto-oligrachy. Hates brown people. It’s not doing it out of benevolence to Venezuelans. Venezuelans will get either colonialist resource extraction treatment or some power vacuum will bring just another despot.

Venezuela is the new Africa [or India [or Philipins]]

Ask the Guyanese next door if they think they are getting a good deal from oil exploitation: https://ieefa.org/articles/guyana-paying-oil-costs-20-years-...

What is Guyana’s GDP without western oil technology? https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/Guyana/GDP_per_capita_const...

We have already seen this plot in Iraq!

> Hates brown people

You're reading tealeaves to support your own hate-fueled nonsense belief. Correlation doesn't equal causation and all that.

It blows my mind anyone can hold this opinion after 10+ years of Trump very publicly spewing racist garbage. Let's just review a few recent examples:

- Claimed Haitian immigrants were eating neighbors' pets

- Currently claiming Somalian immigrants have setup vast networks of fraudulent daycares

- While he's worked diligently to stop immigration from, what he calls, "shithole countries" like Somalia, Haiti, and Afghanistan, he's advocated for increased immigration from "nice" or "beautiful" countries like Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. He also specially carved out a special South African Afrikaner refugee status for white South Africans.

- Habitually calls predominantly non-white opponents "low-iq individuals".

- Repeatedly called SARS-CoV-2 the Chinese virus, "kung-flu", etc.

- Told four congresswomen of color (3 of whom were born in the U.S.) to "go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came". A bipartisan resolution was passed in The House condemning these comments as racist.

- And we can go back a long time ago, and remember the Central Park Five, where he relentlessly attacked five innocent black and latino children, calling for the death penalty for them. Even after DNA evidence proved their innocence, Trump never apologized or acknowledged wrongdoing.

Each of these you could try to individually explain away as a misunderstanding or whatever. But there's an abundantly clear pattern of racism, not just with Trump, but much of his administration.

Your comment triggers so many thoughts, but the first one is I'm so friggin' naive, which is embarrassing. In my fantasy world corporations make investment decisions based on risk. They invest in a country like Venezuela and part of the due diligence is evaluating whether things may go sideways, like in any investment, and what plan b is if they do. And if plan b is getting the government to backstop you with money, guns and/or regulations then that would not be a viable strategy.

But, at every level in the US, that plan b is viable. And it's used over and over and over again, from small local businesses with local politicians to the US Federal Government and military for the likes of the oil industry.

At what point do you just accept the truth: that you (me!) are the dumb one because you hold onto this fantasy of how you think things ought to be as opposed to how they are?

Why is plan (b) bad? From my perspective it is certainly how things ought to be. If my property is nationalized in another country by force, I am fully in favor of my country swinging its dick around to get it back.

And what is to say that plan (b) isn't taken into account when doing the risk assessment in plan (a)?

In your world everybody will be at war with each other. The way to deal with the risk of foreign nationalization of your assets is to price it in or to forego the opportunity. Expecting your country to go to war for your private interests is ridiculous. You can go to court if you want and if you lose you'll have to take your lumps.

1898 is a while ago (the Banana wars).

> Expecting your country to go to war for your private interests is ridiculous.

At the risk of coming across as flippant: Why? I don’t think the math has worked out on most peer conflicts during the past hundred years. The cost of the operation has likely already exceeded the value of whatever infrastructure was left in Venezuela to be reclaimed. But why should we expect courts and bailiffs to enforce the law domestically and not expect soldiers to enforce it internationally?

Maybe because war is terrible and no one wants it? Especially if it means protecting private companies’ revenues.

There is always a cost/benefit done for these decisions, it is never as simple as "war as terrible so we just shouldn't do war."

The benefits definitely do not accrue to you, though. There is no direct or indirect benefit to you supporting the invasion of another country where you can now bomb locals with impunity.

No, people won't be at war with each other because the cost and the likelihood of war will play a role in the decision on whether to enter war or not.

In this case, the administration (correctly!) assessed that there was virtually no cost or risk (albeit, a very high profit.)

Damn man, no risk?

It must be lovely to exist in a world where you think you can punch someone in the face and nothing will ever happen to you if they don’t respond immediately.

Good thing the window of opportunity for retaliation is now firmly closed and we’ll never see anyone come back years later for revenge.

Unrelatedly, has anyone seen the twin towers lately? I visited NYC for the first time in 30 years and I couldn’t find them anywhere.

Indeed, and that was just a loosely knit organization of US haters that figured if they can't do anything in a direct confrontation maybe an indirect one would work.

One of these days someone is going to set off a nuke in a capital somewhere and we're all going to wonder where that came from...

Incidentally, I believe Bin Laden is in part responsible for Trump's election.

"Incidentally, I believe Bin Laden is in part responsible for Trump's election."

I assume you don't mean he does that from his secret base on the dark side of the moon, but rather 9/11 -> patriot act - war on terror -> ..?

That and the wider division between humans with different amounts of melanin.

Who is going to come back for revenge? Maduro was vehemently hated.

You may have not seen the update, but as per the king we will be running Venezuela.

This isn’t over and out adventures like this tend to create adversaries that bite us in the ass later, even when a competent admin is the one with their hands on the wheel

The US has sent nun rapers all across Latin America, puppet leaders, outright military takeovers, and everything in-between. The people we make enemies with haven't forgiven us for all those things, and I can't imagine there is much remaining unaccounted overlap between people that disagreed with all the other stuff, and those who were ok with the other stuff but not this.

This is one of those weird moments where I have a hard time wondering what new people we can even piss off that somehow weren't already against us from prior LA incursions.

Ordinary citizens were bombed in Caracas. There are videos of such bombings. Please do consider that the loss of the lives of ordinary people is a risk.

I am obviously speaking from the perspective of a superpower or a nation, not my own perspective. To a superpower, the lives of 40 people is indeed "virtually no cost" for the benefit of $17T worth of oil reserves and a favorable regime change.

What if military intervention was an explicit part of the investment agreement in the first place? I’m not saying it was, but would it affect your judgement?

what do you think nationalise means? it wasn't taken without compensation.

My understanding is that courts ruled that some (though not all) of the 2007 expropriations were made without proper compensation.

It's fair because privatization of public good is generally not made with proper compensation either.

Compensation is complicated.

As far as I recall, in Guatemala, United Fruit had undervalued the worth of their land to reduce their taxes. So when they were compensated for the nationalization of their land based on their own valuation, they said that they were under compensated. United Fruit complains helped trigger the US intervention.

Of course it's taken into account. Feel like you didn't read what I wrote.

Question back to you: who decides when the government gets involved in getting your property back? You cool with it if they don't do anything to get your property back because of the size of your property; the cost to make it happen; you're not friends with the right person; etc.? Or better yet they don't get yours back but they get your competitor's/neighbor's back? Seems like the thing that happens in these situations is that someone maybe gets their property back and then the dick swings to piss on the people who didn't.

Like I said, fantasyland over here.

> swinging its dick around

I'm sorry, I can't resist extending your metaphor:

The problem comes when "swinging your dick around" you accidentally get the other country pregnant. Then you have to co-parent the resulting child government, and they are always moody, rebellious, and ungrateful.

As soon as they're standing they run all over the house, painting the walls, breaking things, and costing you gobs of money. You can't ever go out, because the moment your attention wanders even a little they throw a party and invite their hooligan friends over; and wrapping up the party and throwing out their friends is another expensive debacle.

Not to mention the endless shady boyfriends/ girlfriends that parade through the place. They're "just experimenting" they claim: fascism, communism, and dictatorship are just phases they're going through as they explore who they really are.

Eventually they get resentful and want to live on their own. To accomplish this they kick you out of the house, and you end up leaving your car and many other possessions behind, and many times they trash the place as you leave.

If you're lucky, you both mature and you can develop an adult relationship in time. If you're not, they end up beating up their cousins and you have to break up the fights and pay for the broken furniture.

In short: don't swing your dick around, and if you must, be sure to use protection. I'm not sure what that equates to in this metaphor, but it's obvious the U.S. flunked sex-ed.

> If my property is nationalized in another country by force, I am fully in favor of my country swinging its dick around to get it back.

In this case your property is actually not your property though. Assuming property == oil, then it belongs in Venezuela - you seized control of it but it’s not really yours.

Imagine you start a business in another country where the law says your business assets will be seized if you don't file tax form 123(a) before August. That is to say, non-filers don't have any business property rights. And you don't file the form.

Do you:

(Plan A) Realize you fucked up

(Plan B) Send in the military to kidnap the president and take over the country, retroactively claim the law wasn't the law, undo its effects (but only for you) and then change the law so that property rights work exactly the same way they work in your country.

Now you see why people are saying plan B is bad, and would cause everyone to be at war all the time.

And Venezuela was well aware of plan b when accepting the investment.

That’s the story in every oil producing third world country. Without western countries, and these days China, they would just have oil in the ground because they lack the technology and capital to explore for it and extract it. They want the colonizers to come just long enough to install the oil spigots then leave.

They just do not want colonizers to steal their country and interfere in their internal decisions. Unfortunately, this is the story with every First World colonizer: they do not agree with that.

They want to have their cake and eat it too. Here, the Venezuelan government invited western oil companies to develop its oil fields. Then they broke the deal and stole the infrastructure the western countries had built.

That’s very different from actual colonization, where countries showed up and expropriated resources the natives were already developing.

So strange that only the US has the expertise to do prospection and build oil rigs and no one else...

These countries are also mad at Britain and the Netherlands. In a few decades they’ll be mad at the Chinese too.

If these countries had been smarter they would have negotiated better deals and solicited competition from international companies to get the best terms. But that’s their own fault.

Oil companies were apparently compensated, but also allegedly not enough. Companies were awarded further compensation in international arbitration, but Venezuela has avoided fully paying up.

If that's all accurate there are numbers out there for what they owe, and it shouldn't be whatever the POTUS decides.

I admittedly don’t know much about the industry, but didn’t most other countries not elect to expropriate the infrastructure? My understanding was that a lot of the problems the Venezuelans are having now arose from alienating themselves from the international supply chains and expertise necessary to maintain the equipment used to extract and refine petroleum.

What happens to the infrastructure built or businesses run or labor contributed by “illegal” immigrants who are now deported? Does the USA somehow reverse it and make it disappear?

Such a line of reasoning used to justify this kind of extrajudicial and warlike activity is somewhat similar to France’s nonsensical demand for long term reparations from Haiti for colonial infrastructure.

> What happens to the infrastructure built or businesses run or labor contributed by “illegal” immigrants who are now deported?

I believe “built” here refers to the financiers. Like when someone says “I’m building a house” they mean they’re paying to have a house built, unless they’re actually in the construction business, etc.

As someone living in a country where all of our oil wealth is being extracted by American corporations - America has a very special talent for "convincing" government officials to sign away their citizen's oil wealth. Not repairing that theft by nationalizing the oil seems more criminal than allowing the corporations to continue

At least you are paid fair share of taxes instead of being sent to gulag for questioning your dictator.

> "And all that as official doctrine"

The Donroe Doctrine.

https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3mbjv2l5otf25

I think a lot of people don't understand the difference between geopolitical control and economic control.

Being explicit, I'm saying that having access to a resource doesn't mean you get to sell it to whoever you like.

Nobody from Latin America is surprised, the US has been a bully state since the cold war.

American interventionism in Latin America goes back hundreds of years

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filibuster_(military)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Wars

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roosevelt_Corollary

There has never not been a bully in anarchic systems.

The official doctrine yesterday was they were killing Americans with drug trafficking. That didn't even get mentioned today.

> the plan is

There is no plan. Again.

Machado is standing by. But she’s a woman so Trump has ruled her out.

He's just said she's not being considered.

Correct. I spoke unclearly. I meant that we have a good option, our Endara to Noriega, but instead Trump is hard pivoting to the Baghdad model.

Which makes total sense, the military has been Chavismo's strongest asset for as long as it's been a thing

That won't change just because Maduro isn't there, whomever does take control, will need external protection, or the US acting as an unspoken enforcer (Unspoken because "No boots on the ground right now" but "prepared for a second wave")

I suspect there is also consideration of strategy here. The regime's lack of democratic approval is actually a benefit. A client state that has democratic approval has much more leeway to go against its master. A client regime that is unpopular with its population has no other base of support than the powerful country that put it there. This maximizes leverage.

> Which makes total sense

Which implies it's may not be the actual reason. The reason might be as trifling as being salty over Machado getting the Nobel peace prize, and not Trump.

The military clearly moved (or strategically chose to indicate they wouldn't move) for a paranoid, military-aligned dictator to be captured by a small force with only naval backup exactly when everybody most expected the US to move. Unless there's a faction there that actually likes Machado she may even be lower on the next-leader list than "Maduro pays his captors off with the contents of his offshore accounts, meaningful promises of oil money and empty statements about cracking down on narcotics trade". I assume he has ways of finding out who his loyalists are and who they aren't too...

You mean the lady that basically called for this invasion, praised Trump and MAGA, promised she would let western companies extract whatever they want in exchange for personal power? Yeah, surely this will end well for Venezuelans.

She could had gotten everything she wanted if she only understood that blowing smoke up Trump's ass isn't good enough anymore. He demands bribes as well.

If $1-6 million buys a pardon, how much buys a country?

It’s reasonable for her to say such things in order to get support of the nation most capable of removing Maduro and allowing her to rule. It doesn’t make her a bad person or speak negatively on how effective a ruler she will be.

> the lady that basically called for this invasion

Like Jefferson lobbied France to help us out with Britain.

I missed the part where Jefferson promised Louis the XVIth exclusive access to the colonies' wealth, and then France abducted the King.

Better analogy would be Pinochet's coup. Nationalists calling for the US to coup their own country and place them in charge in exchange for acting like docile puppets to US interests. This is exactly what is happening there, Trump said so a few hours ago.

I was completely unaware that Maduro was a foreign colonial power like Britain.

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