Good move. Venezuela shipping oil to Cuba violates NO international law and America is committing an act of terrorism with their "blockade" (an act of war according to the UN). America can never win a war with Venezuela, seeing their humiliating defeats in Afghanistan, Iraq and Vietnam against much smaller and less developed nations. Godspeed to all Venezuelans resisting the ongoing American aggression.
For the time being, the US did not declare any blockade. It is simply seizing vessels that are part of the "shadow fleet". The particular oil tanker that was seized recently was flying under a Guyanese flag. Guyana, by the way, is Venezuela's neighbor, and about a year ago Maduro was thinking of invading it. Guess what, Guyana said they have no idea why that tanker is flying their flag, so technically speaking the ship was flying a false flag, therefore under the UN Convention of the Law of the Seas (UNCLOS) the vessel could be boarded, inspected and seized.
Bullshit. If a ship is legally registered with any sovereign country, including Liberia, then it is entitled to fly that country's flag. Nothing false about it.
However the M/V Skipper was not registered in Guyana. It was flying a false flag and so any country was free to seize it.
You'll have to ask the M/T Skipper's master about why he was flying a false Guyanese flag. I understand that he has been detained so that may come out during the investigation. The vessel had never been registered in Venezuela so there would have been no reason to fly that flag.
I can speculate as to motives for flying a false flag but so what? Any vessel flying a false flag is subject to seizure and isn't entitled to legal protection.
They’re not random, they’re called “flags of convenience” since the ship is subject to the laws of the country where it is registered, including labor laws and safety standards. Panama and Liberia are common flags for merchant ships because they make it cheap to register, exempt the ship from some taxes, and hire foreign labor.
The rules for ships are a bit different for rules for cars.
There's a number of countries (some of them land-locked) that sell flags of convenience, but in that particular case, it's possible that didn't happen.
Hard to comprehend the stunning levels of cope required to still view what happened in Iraq as some kind of decisive victory for anyone except Blackwater and Halliburton.
It's widely accepted that the US lost in Vietnam due not to military defeat, but from the clever Tet Offensive - where they successfully influenced US politics via US journalism, to cause them to simply cease fighting.
Whether they should have bothered in the first place though, given how corrupt and dysfunctional the regime in the south was, is an open moral question.
> It's widely accepted that the US lost in Vietnam due not to military defeat, but from the clever Tet Offensive - where they successfully influenced US politics via US journalism, to cause them to simply cease fighting.
Yes, that's called "losing a war," and no serious strategist pretends that politics is not one of the key theaters (if not the key theater) of conflict.
> It's widely accepted that the US lost in Vietnam due not to military defeat, but from the clever Tet Offensive - where they successfully influenced US politics via US journalism, to cause them to simply cease fighting.
Yes, that's literally how essentially every war ends; some combination of factors causes one side to stop fighting rather than continuing the pay the price in blood and treasure that fighting demands.
There's probably a few somewhere that end because the losing side doesn't give up but fights to the last person, but that's very much not the norm.
There are plenty of examples from history where the winners simply wiped out the losers. In ancient times the usual practice was to kill all the men, take the women and children as slaves, and destroy all the cultural artifacts. Probably thousands of societies or cultures worldwide were utterly erased in that way, maybe leaving only some shards of pottery. We are perhaps a little more civilized about such things now, and show restraint for political or moral purposes rather than setting out to commit genocide.
What do you mean by poor track record? I can infer you are talking about the Vietnam War, and that is why I am curious. From a military point of view, the US did not lose a single battle of any significance during the entirety of a Vietnam War.
How does a country lose a war without losing any major battles? On the homefront first.
It's because Venezuela has lots of oil and gold, and the money (and blood) won't be "wasted" for the small sliver of people who benefit from stealing it.
> America can never win a war with Venezuela, seeing their humiliating defeats in Afghanistan, Iraq and Vietnam against much smaller and less developed nations.
I don't disagree, but it cost at least 400,000 civilian lives in Vietnam war. It's hard for me to say "good move."
One there could be a bit easier than Afghanistan etc. in that they have an alternative leader to bring in who seems to have won the last election. I don't think Maduro is very popular so much of the army could turn.
If your assumed goal is regime change from autocratic to democratic, they lost. If it was for stability in the middle east, the lost. If it was for oil and pressure on OPEC, I'd say they lost, but I would hear and understand an opposite argument (and change my mind).
They did not lose. They failed to achieve certain long term strategic objectives. Their military still mopped the floor with all of their enemies, inflicting millions of casualties before finally retreating for whatever reason, and they're only getting better at it by constantly maximizing the casualties per dead US soldier ratio.
It's not going to go well for Venezuela if the US attacks it, no matter the result of the war.
I have to say I appreciate Maduro calling the U.S. empire's bluff at every turn. Whether it's the corrupt Nobel Peace Prize, trying to bribe his pilot to betray him, or now this, it's all just making it clear to anyone with eyes remotely open to see that U.S. foreign policy operates on shameless pretense and dishonesty.
I mean technically US doesn't have to go to war in land, if they sink the navy(which would be accomplished in minutes) then all Venezuelan oil is trapped in country and they go bankrupt.
Could the buyers just send their own ships to retrieve oil from Venezuela? Say, China sends a oil tanker, I imagine it would be trickier for US Navy to just sink or steal it.
Once the US has air superiority, they don’t need their aircraft carriers anywhere close to Venezuela territory. The submarine fleet alone can enforce a blockade.
Point is, a blockade in and of itself is an act of war, and will get the corresponding response. You cannot hope to just starve them out. You can go full ham if you'd like, but that will also get a corresponding response. If you just want "a bit" of war, then you need to leave them an out.
All moot now, as anyone could have predicted, but it was fun to think about.
Playing devil's advocate here, wouldn't Venezuela be massively better off from its "complete collapse of civilization" state and matching ruling class if it simply called up the US and said "hey, want to govern us?"
That the US cannot win a war is silly. The US could erase every population center within a few minutes. The core issue with US military policy is nobody can agree on what the goals are or what the appropriate level of force should be, and this is further confounded by an extremely large industry that benefits from no compete contracts and production practices that are optimized for low intensity conflict that lasts for decades. It’s sort of an elaborate jobs program, a lot like the TSA.
> That the US cannot win a war is silly. The US could erase every population center within a few minutes.
Although the U.S. ruling class often likes to pretend it can operate with no regard for its domestic perceptions of legitimacy, the stunning amounts they expend on relentless psychological operations suggest otherwise. Killing millions in an aggressive nuclear strike would do nothing but reveal to many people (who are desperately trying to pretend otherwise) that they are controlled by a klatch of relentless psychopaths.
