@ngrossman81 • 15.4k followers
International Relations prof U. Illinois. Senior Editor Arc Digital. Author “Drones and Terrorism.”
Politics, national security, occasional nerdery.
The last time the U.S. initiated a regime change war was 2003 against Saddam Hussein in Iraq. American forces played a role in ousting Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, but a civil conflict was already underway, and European NATO members were the main impetus for intervention. With Maduro in Venezuela, as with Hussein in Iraq, American forces destabilized a problematic but relatively stable situation, even though the country had not attacked the U.S., nor harbored terrorists who did.
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The US economy added just 50,000 jobs in December, and the numbers for October and November have been revised down.
To put that in perspective, the average monthly job growth in 2023-24 — the worst economy ever, human beings had never seen such suffering — was 192,000.
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"Forcibly taking another country’s natural resources is blatantly illegal under international law, and the U.S. military providing the security to do it would cost more than any oil profits Trump-friendly companies can extract."
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"Trump announced that the U.S. will 'run the country,' except there’s no apparent plan to do that. American military operations in and around Venezuela have been airstrikes and now a special operations raid. There’s no U.S. or allied ground force to even try to assume control."
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On every stated and possible US goal, forcibly removing Maduro will likely make things worse.
Create more space for drug traffickers. Prompt more migration. Even stealing oil makes no sense. And the US isn't even trying for democratization or helping Venezuelans.
My latest, in @unpopulistmag:
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No one who treated "wear a mask when you enter this store" and "you repeatedly violated terms of service and your account will be suspended" as horrific tyranny actually believe in deference to authority.
No one who cheered, or at least excused, January 6 believes cops can kill you if you don't do whatever they say.
Not one.
It's Schmittian friend-enemy politics all the way down. "We" should be able to do whatever we feel like without consequence. "They" should be harassed, repressed, killed.
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Something like Renee Good's murder "was always going to come," writes @aselrod.
"It is the logical result of Trumpism and MAGA extremism, both in theory and in practice. ICE’s application of lethal violence is the natural product of an administration animated by violence as a core feature of its politics."
Sadly true. And this wholly unjustified state killing won't be the last.
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1984 is over-cited, but nothing fits the government and its supporters blatantly lying about ICE’s murder of Renee Good when video from multiple angles show she posed no threat than “the Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
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It isn't fair or good that much of the public sees some victims of state violence as more sympathetic than others. But they do.
Renee Good really did not deserve to die. Nor did other ICE victims. But ICE killing her may be an inflection point, prompting more people to recognize what's happening.
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"Secret police" is often misunderstood to mean a force that operates covertly, with all their operations secret.
But a secret police force's actions are often public. The secret part is hiding their identities, because they're breaking laws to hurt politically disfavored people, and fear reprisals.
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Minnesota law enforcement have video from multiple angles of an unjustified deadly shooting in Minneapolis. Therefore, they should arrest and prosecute the shooter for murder. The fact that the killer is a federal agent should not alter that basic logic. If anything, it makes an indictment even more important.
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From helping the US defend itself against al Qaeda to defending Greenland from potential US attack.
Trump flipped Denmark from close US friend to, not exactly foe, at least not yet, but something more like wary neutral party. And possibly other Europeans too.
Is that supposed to be an achievement?
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I think a philosophy professor should be allowed to assign and teach about Plato, and that it's wrong for government to forbid them from doing so.
Sorry to get so partisan, but that's how I feel.
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Dr. Bill Cassidy, the senior senator from Louisiana, is disturbed that RFK Jr. is doing the harmful anti-science, anti-medicine actions as HHS Secretary he advocated for years before Cassidy was the deciding vote to confirm him as HHS Secretary.
In response, Cassidy will not use his powers as a U.S. senator to try to remove RFK Jr., he will post about it.
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Congrats to the “anti-imperialists” who helped usher in an imperialist U.S. government.
Maybe supporting (or at least anti-anti-ing) politicians who cheered Russian imperialism, and trying to blame Russian aggression on people opposing Russian aggression, wasn’t a good way to oppose imperialism.
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Combined, ICE and Border Patrol have maybe 50,000 active officers. Despite low standards and increased funding, they’ve struggled to recruit more. By comparison, the Nazi SS had about 250,000 members in 1939.
The fact that I’m making serious comparisons to Nazi Germany highlights how bad things have gotten. And it also shows how much worse they could be. It’s important to keep both of those in mind at once, not growing complacent, nor excessively despairing.
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Bluster isn’t strength.
Tariffs make the US weaker, not stronger.
Bullying is a kind of strength, but not the sort others want to follow, leaving a country weaker in a competitive world.
Allies are a lot more valuable than exploiting neighbors.
On Greenland, Venezuela, and more.
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Jan. 6 was widely condemned at the time, recognized by nearly everyone as a violent attack on America.
It was apparent Trump caused it by lying about the election to attempt a coup, which the Jan. 6 investigation evidence confirmed.
Within a year, lying from Trump, GOP politicians, and right-wing media flipped most Republicans’ opinion to neutral/positive, rendering it another muddy partisan dispute.
Five years later, we live in the country the attackers and coup plotters hoped to create.
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“As frustrating as this may be for people who follow politics and take it seriously, millions of Americans voted for Donald Trump believing that he wouldn’t do the things he kept saying he’d do. That wasn’t a majority of his supporters, but still a significant, election-swinging subset. Now that they’ve seen it in practice—now that they’ve touched the stove—they don’t like it.”
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"In normal liberal democracy terms, the United States is in bad shape. But in consolidated authoritarianism terms, we’re doing pretty well."
I wrote about the weirdness of walking around the monuments in Washington DC, three ways the Trump regime stumbled this year, and why I'm cautiously optimistic heading into 2026.
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US strategy with Venezuela appears incoherent. Making things worse, different members of the Trump administration clearly have different things in mind. To the extent Rubio, Hegseth, and Trump have put any strategic thought into Venezuela, it's with different goals and different understandings of what matters in the situation. So the whole is even less coherent.
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As president, Joe Biden ended the “forever war” in Afghanistan, reduced the drone program to near zero, and did not launch any regime change operations.
Americans didn’t like that or didn’t care, and voted to bring those things back.
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Maduro is bad, his government has been bad, that’s not the point. There are multiple bad state leaders in the world.
The point is whether removal by force makes things better.
Whatever the goal—drugs? migration? conditions in Venezuela?—destabilization could make things worse.
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We’re doing “Mission Accomplished” again, declaring that forced removal of a foreign leader means it’s over?
Except with Venezuela, assuming regime change will work on its own, without an occupation/stabilization force or plan for a new government?
Or any international coalition?
The problem in the Iraq war was not that the US tried to put the country back together.
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Big protests going in Iran, and the state is trying to put them down with force, already killing 3.
I don't know where this is going, and the Iranian government has survived big protests before. But whatever happens, it's admirably brave when people take on violently repressive regimes.
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