> Again, Hitler didn't blitzkrieg GB because communism.
Of course not, he never planned to attack the Brits. They declared war on Germany after Germany attacked Poland. To be fair, they told him that's what they would do if he attacked Poland.
One point of attacking Poland even though they were anti-communist and inviting Russia to join in, is to disguise the true aim from Russia which was to invade the Soviet Union and destroy the Communist International. And they certainly eventually did invade.
Japan would have joined in, but invading Russia from their side was very unfavorable.
> Marxism is fundamentally a workers movement. The CCP is a lot of things, but a workers movement isn't one of them.
Technically they did kill the land owners and hand the land over to the workers. Then they murdered countless intellectuals and elites to make sure that workers had no competition in being on top. Then they enslaved the workers, tortured them, stole their production and took back their land. Even today they largely keep their wages suppressed.
You could argue that core Marxist principles are taking a back seat to national strategy, but the CCP higher ups are definite believers of Marx even if it might be easier to describe their system as some kind of neo-mercantilism. To them the reality is the same as it was under the Soviet Union. They cannot achieve their goal of communism in a world where capitalism also exists.
It's strange though how theoretically communism should be inundated with empathy, but in practice it barely cares about people and treats their lives as a commodity. It would be hilarious how stupidly bad their logic is in thinking that a brutal philosophy would be allowed to expand and control the Earth, if it wasn't so sad. They like to think of themselves as the clever deceptive geniuses who know better and are truly logical, erasing religion and going all in on science, yet they do the most insane illogical things that guarantee the most basic kinds of failure.
Failing to establish the fundamentals of a state to give most workers a decent living is bad enough, but to do that in exchange for a failed attempt to control the world is even worse. Failure has limited consequences too, because they can simply lie about how things are so the normal pressures that should exist for them to do a better job aren't as potent.
> The Taiwan Strait is notoriously treacherous. Taiwan has few beachheads, tons of tall mountains, dense urban environments, and flat, open farm land. It would be a nightmare of casualties and would destroy Taiwan's economy for at least a generation. China doesn't want to suffer any of that.
That doesn't change what I said. They still don't need all of that. China is also of the Russian mindset when it comes to human life. They don't mind throwing a bunch of their people at a problem to go die, so casualties is not a big issue if it came to that. China has also shown itself very capable of taking negative results in order to reject something else. So if there is something they want enough, they can likely suffer for it.
> Other countries had sanctioned Maduro and members of his regime, but only the Trump admin charged him with crimes.
I mean, technically these countries don't formally publish charges for someone in an uncooperative foreign country, because the UN typically doesn't like going into a country to capture someone. That means they rely on the person coming to them or being extradited, but both of those require the person coming to their country so you can arrest them or avoiding them fleeing before an extradition. So you have sealed warrants that nobody knows about until the moment the person enters your country and they get arrested. The ICC was investigating Maduro and Venezuela, but their investigations have often been delayed and if they did have a sealed warrant for Maduro, nobody knows.
The way the US accelerated the timeline is that the ICC does not handle terrorism cases. By identifying that Maduro was assisting cartels that are on the formally designated Foreign Terrorist Organization list and that he was promoting the distribution of drugs into the US for _political_ reasons and these drugs have caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, there is a kind of justification. For example, how we attacked terrorists in some countries without permission from a country is by claiming they are Unwilling or Unable to sort it out themselves or assist.
Another important distinction is that, if Maduro had been rightly elected he might have had more protection as a head of state, but instead since he stole the election and this was internationally recognized, he didn't have the same kinds of protections.
Some people argue that less fentanyl comes out of Venezuela than other countries, but they ignore the fact that cocaine alone has killed hundreds of thousands of people in the US so it is its own issue.
Obviously there is some gymnastics going on, but we would not have done this if it wasn't important.
> Here's a quote from Trump: “Now I love Venezuela. You know, I love it. We’re doing great in Venezuela. We’re taking a lot of oil from Venezuela, and we’re getting along great with them. Billions and billions of barrels of oil is coming out of Venezuela. … It’s the old-fashioned way, right? It’s the old-fashioned way. To the victor belong the spoils, right?”
That's mostly Trump trolling. Venezuela is still a sovereign state as per the UN, but we're managing their transition period since they don't have a legitimate government. The US used to have an oil deal with Venezuela that was pretty standard and quite the international norm. Communists then lied to the people and told them we were stealing their oil. They got elected and nationalized the oil, so oil companies left and stopped investing. In the 1990s and 2000s, Venezuela tried to return to the old deal to attract oil companies back, but nobody wanted to come back due to the risk they they would just nationalize their investments again. We're not simply taking their oil as "spoils", we're paying for it and the deal is structured to reduce the perceived risk that investors face when they invest in Venezuela. The deal is worse than what Venezuela used to have, but that's expected when you betray the trust of companies and investors which now means there's a risk premium included.
> This is pure conspiracy theory. Whatever algorithm you're in has broken your brain.
Algorithm? It's called Reuters. It's called AP News.
> Mostly agree, but this was uniquely Trump and wildly unlawful. You can't just invade other countries and abduct their leaders. You also can't just blow up random noncombatants in the ocean.
Venezuela was responsible for countless thousands of American deaths and has engaged in wildly unlawful things, disregarding international law blatantly. Maduro was not the leader of Venezuela, so we didn't abduct the leader. We are definitely blowing up drug boats, though and have taken out almost 70 of them now. In the middle east, we've launched strikes on lots of unarmed people that we designated as terrorists and these are just people working for the cartels that have been designated as terrorists. They don't have to be carrying a gun. These groups have killed over 1 million Americans over the past 20 years, which is more than any terrorist attack. I think a lot of people simply don't understand the scale of the problem we're facing in terms of grayzone warfare. The US is uniquely targeted, because we've been the only country standing in the way of countries like China or Russia having their way.