How about when Carter made peace between Egypt and Israel? Carter also gave the canal back to Panama and normalized ties with China.
Carter may not have won the FIFA Peace Prize. But he did win the Nobel one. My father respected Carter more than almost any other living person, and I trust his judgement.
No, they didn’t, and if your media tells you that’s what’s happening, it’s either misinformed or propaganda (or both).
Our political left already thinks we’re the bad guys. Our political right is posting pictures of eagles on Facebook. Nobody feels any different than they did yesterday.
Why? It really isn’t anything new. The only new thing is the admission it is for oil, which we usually pretend it isn’t.
Those of us who are opposed to it probably didn’t vote for Trump and surely have no foreign policy influence, which is the same as when Bush invaded Iraq. Same old song and dance.
This isn’t out of line with past performance. We have spent decades toppling regimes. Basically since WW2.
Hows this any different than what we did to Noriega? Saddam? Qaddafi?
That’s my original point, to anyone who is paying attention it’s already been priced in. The method was novel perhaps, but nothing else about it was anything different. I’m not that old and I’ve already seen it happen several times.
If somebody punches you in the face from Monday through Friday, then they punch you in the face on Saturday you probably don’t feel any different about them on Sunday.
I certainly can’t say I expected the exact method of capture, but I had no doubt all of those carriers were moving to the Caribbean for some reason other than show. I figured we would just blow some stuff up and topple the regime that way.
I would guess not at all for any of them. Drugs clearly aren’t that much of the reason involved here. If you were listing the countries that export the most drugs to us, Venezuela wouldn’t even be top five. I am not sure I would be opposed to us taking out cartel leaders in Mexico, but there are certainly a lot of downsides to it that have held us back. I don’t think Gloria Shienbaum is on our enemies list.
What they have that we care about is a third of the world’s oil reserves. They are friendly with our biggest geopolitical rival, China. This is not to endorse what we did at all, but it’s pretty clear that there is a future coming where oil gets scarce, and the last thing we want is China to have a better supply of it than us.
I don’t think this was probably the right way to solve the problem, but it is a problem that needed to be solved, and even though I don’t like it, I have to admit there is a lot of upside.
Going by the historical record the chances of a mess are larger than the chances of a net positive. One thing is for sure: the US reputation abroad just sunk a little lower and it really did not need that.
Certainly possible. There are plenty of examples where these sorts of interventions worked for the country we intervened in though. Even in Latin America, which I’ve travelled extensively. I’ve talked to them about it.
A year ago today I was in Grenada looking at a statue of Reagan. The Grenadians love America (and the older ones love to tell you about it) for our intervention in the 80’s which I was not old enough to remember. They did not want to become another Cuba and we saved them from it.
South Korea. Japan. Germany. There were some solid wins in our nation building along with the losses.
I think the shock is more of a shift from the lawful evil spectrum, where the US either did things covertly or had a much better narrative prepared, to chaotic evil. Apparently Congress had no clue here, and Trump simply called them "leakers".
To be more blunt, we knew America was a pompous asshole, but it always pretended to be orderly. This is the US putting in a toupe and plucking its mustache. The act isn't surprising, the shift in attitude is.
While I agree with the sentiment, Maduro’s fate, for the time being, seems much better than Gaddafi’s. And while increased chaos in the region is not unlikely, I don’t foresee open air slave markets in SA at least
Libya wasn’t for oil, intervention was approved by the full UN Security Council, it was motivated by stopping crimes against civilians committed by the regime, and the intervention ended immediately after the regime fell, instead of “running things” and taking the oil like Trump is doing.
Lybia is a tribal country that has always been divided between its eastern and western part. Gaddafi married a bride from the opposing tribe to seal an alliance and bring stability to the country.
The "revolution" was done by the Tripoli (western) tribe, against the Cyrenaica (eastern) one - it was more a civil war starting than a popular uprising.
Gaddafi could have indeed crushed them, bring back order to the country, avoiding the current long lasting chaos, civil war, open slavery, migrant waves and so on.
It's hard to evaluate situations with a westerner mind, in countries that are structured around very different cultural norms, and with deep ethnic divisions. "Democracy" is not the silver bullet it those cases, and maybe we should acknowledge that.
That's the false history of the felon Nicolas Sarkozy, who is going to prison for the crimes he did in Libya for his personal enrichment [0].
The reason France and its crook leader invaded Libya was, according to public reports[1], because they had negotiated back-room deals with anti-Qaddafi rebels for oil. 35% of Libya's oil production in exchange for French support. Literally a war for oil.
Qaddafi's atrocities were real, but they were never the motivation of the French-lead bombing of Libya. That was a false rationalization made up to manufacture public consent. Manufacture consent for a failed intervention, that left Libya worse off than it had ever been.
> "was approved by the full UN Security Council"
Whose members actually knew about the corrupt oil deal[2], and chose to go along with the fraud, lying to their own people.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/sep/01/libya-oil ("The new Tripoli government has denied the existence of a reported secret deal by which French companies would control more than a third of Libya's oil production in return for Paris's support for the revolution")
Gaddafi was trying to establish a gold-backed "arab" currency system and wanted to sell his oil using it. This was a threat to the US dollar so Obama was very happy to see Sarkozy knock at his door asking to go get the oil themselves lol
Nobody is even close on software. I’m honestly shocked more software people here don’t appreciate Tesla more for their software efforts. If you’d prefer the traditional automaker route of contracting out software to cheap labor in third world countries then ok, but you’re working against yourself
Because traditional car companies aren’t interested in buying software that they can’t get built by cheap contractors. Tesla actually hires high end engineers to build software, and that’s not cheap.
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