The U.S. military captured Venezuela’s dictator, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores, on Saturday; a lot of people who hate Donald Trump are complaining about the president’s decision to “arrest” the foreign head of state.
Sure, it’s an act of war.
Authorized by Congress? Not really, but that’s hardly unusual.
There is that 2020 indictment, unsealed by the U.S. Department of Justice during Trump’s first term, accusing Maduro and senior Venezuelan officials of conspiring with Colombian guerrilla groups (like the FARC) to traffic massive quantities of cocaine into the United States. This was updated in a superseding indictment unsealed over the weekend, which added Maduro’s wife, son, and others as defendants.
Specifically, the charges are:
- Narco-terrorism conspiracy.
- Conspiracy to import cocaine.
- Possession of machine guns and destructive devices.
- Conspiracy to possess machine guns and destructive devices.
Considering that Venezuela is a sovereign state and can have whatever drug policies or gun laws it wants, all this might seem a tad … ridiculous.
Most people, however, will likely be moved by two very different lines of thinking:
- Maduro was an evil tyrant
,and it’s good that his murderous regime has been (sorta) toppled; and - The operation was skillfully done, demonstrating U.S. military strength.
Is the effort coherent and compatible with other international military stances of the United States? Debatable.
How does it affect, say, the U.S. position on Taiwan? Will this encourage or discourage the People’s [sic] Republic [sic] of China?
One could argue both ways. As a successful demonstration of military might, it will likely dissuade the Chinazis. But if it turns world opinion against the U.S., the opposite will likely prove true.
Still, isn’t it hard to side with a dictator? I mean Maduro.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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10 replies on “The Dictator’s Arrest”
The US is not appropriately the police agency of the Western Hemisphere nor of the world more generally.
The failure of the Trump Administration simply now to recognize the actually winners of the last Venezuelan election, and its instead calling for new elections, bodes very ill. Apparently the US is once again going to muck-about with nation-building, something that could be done in the case of Japan by co-opting the Emperor, but not possible without some comparable social lever.
Concerning the Chinese state, I note that the Venezuelan state relied upon Chinese defense technologies, and part of the motivation of the invasion may have been to demonstrate to the PRC and to its clients that these technologies were not as effective as might have been thought.
I remain baffled about the small boats that the US was attacking. They plainly were neither fishing boats nor transporting drugs to America. I do not understand why the Maduro Regime didn’t simply keep them ashore until the US wearied of the costs of suppression.
I totally agree that we should not police the world. Nation building should be avoided forever after. And yet the world keeps expecting us to ‘do something’ about these sovereign nations led by dictators. Our navy is expected to safeguard navigation around the world to facilitate trade. One thing Paul forgot to mention was that Joe Biden offered a $25 million reward for information leading to Maduro’s arrest. Did anyone object to putting the leader of a sovereign state on a most wanted list?
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” — HL Mencken
And the hobgoblins can are mutually reinforcing. Got questions about Venezuela? “CHINA! OOOGA BOOGA BOOGA!”
Paul, pleeze. Embarking on yet another thoughtless effort at regime change is NOT siding with a dictator. What’s happened to your libertarian roots.…?
Let’s do the same with Russia and China! Ih, we only do that with countries that can’t fight back. Trump is nothing more than a bully. He should be impeached and removed from office! Won’t happen because republicans are gutless!
Pam, even when your ultimate conclusions are in the same neighborhood of those of reasonable people, your arguments tend to madness.
If you rush-out to save your cat, Stinkipoo, from a chihuahua but stay indoors when the attacker is a wolf, that makes you prudent, rather than a bully or gutless.
And the police are not bullies when they use guns and tasers, rather than batons, against muggers using bats.
War — even hypothetically just war — is not about some game-board notion of fairness. And bullies are not people who easily defeat opponents, but people who use violence and threats where they have no place.
A tad ridiculous? You mean like Biden creating a drug distribution super highway with wide open borders? Or maybe it’s a tad ridiculous to not understand that this is a continuation of the war on drugs. Was it a tad ridiculous to know that there is a precedent set by the arrest, trial and imprisonment of drug dealer Panama’s drug dealer Manuel Noriega and today Panama a thriving, democratic nation. A tad ridiculous that Venezuela, with Maduro’s coordination, has been serving as the major distribution hub for major drug producers Peru, Bolivia, Honduras and Colombia, which is still the largest supplier and exporter of cocaine in the world.
Is it a tad ridiculous that the war on drugs was enacted by congress under the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 and Nixon’s war on drugs. Congress accepted President Nixon’s plan in 1973, allowing for the creation of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) through Reorganization Plan No. 2, which consolidated federal drug enforcement under a single agency to combat growing drug issues. Congress has approved the DEA budget ever since.
Narco-terrorism is about more than selling or importing drugs. The drug trade helps to finance terrorist groups and it may be financing governments. It has been reported that the Iranian-backed Hezbollah operates in Venezuela and Maduro’s government is working with these terrorists. China is also bent on our demise and Maduro was meeting with a Chinese operative just before this attack. Do we ignore these actions until they reach our shores or do we take preventive action to guard American sovereignty? There are no easy answers.
There’s no such thing as doing business with a dictatorship, also MAGA doesn’t distinguish just a certain part of America
So, who do we *kidnap* next? Carney? Sheinbaum? Putin? Xi?