The U.S. has committed aggression against a sovereign country, has militarily invaded it, and has kidnapped their leader and his wife. Those facts are not in dispute. In practical terms, the U.S. enjoys impunity from this sort of illegality. Maduro is a piece of shit. He was also the head of government of a sovereign state, resident within that state. There’s no legal path for what the U.S. has just unilaterally done. However, it’s a fait accomplit. The bar is now lowered for other countries to do this to their regional neighbours.
The legal prosecution of Maduro in U.S. courts has obvious potential to go hilariously awry. I’ll nerd out on that when the time comes.
Trump has said he is “making the decisions on what’s next for Venezuela’s leadership”. That is also wholly illegitimate. He nor the U.S. government have zero place picking the leadership for a country capable of its own democratic choices. Who leads Venezuela must be left to the Venezuelans.
We will have to watch and see whether this kidnapping also becomes armed robbery. The question of Venezuela’s oil industry, the removal of sanctions, the permitting of development and export, all remain to be seen. Over today, as Venezuelans start stepping out of their homes, we’ll get a sense of what U.S. presence remains in the ground and what political and economic institutions they may assert military control over.
Other nations need to take U.S. threats to sovereignty much more seriously. There was zero legal legitimacy to the U.S. killing any Venezuelans last night, or going forward.
We can safely assume from the scale of the strikes and the videos of Chinooks openly flying over Caracas that the Venezuelan air defence was quickly and decisively defanged. Their Air Force, such as it is, was not in play. If there’s remaining U.S. ground presence, we will soon see if Venezuela made any preparations and has any will for insurgency.
I’ll wait for some informed analysis of what this means for oil markets; probably it’ll take a while to see what happens there, because we won’t know the new rules or players for a while. But nothing good for Canada. Whether or not the separatists realize it, 160th SOAR effectively did some gun runs on the economic viability of an independent Alberta last night.
Quite the start to the day.
