Reply With QuoteIsn't that the plan?Originally Posted by Anti-Bunny
Isn't that the plan?
Wow, that's a nexus of crazy right there.
Oh lord. This is going to end up in a proxy war.
For crazy people.
Side note: Baduel, the former defense minister, has been arrested on 'corruption' charges for speaking out against Chávez.
Good thing he's in his final t... doh.
Meh, Ahmadinejad is a right-wing nutjob who will be out of office this year. In terms of nuance, politics, and popularity he's the Bush of the Middle East, and he only got elected because The Powers That Be in Iran felt that Khatami's moderate policies showed weakness and led to two adjacent countries being invaded by America. That's not why we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, but nobody seriously doubts that we would have invaded Iran if Iraq had gone better (with maybe a quick blitzrieg into Syria as a palette cleanser).
Chavez on the other hand is a more permanent problem, although that doesn't mean we need to invoke American interventionist policy in Venezuela. I'm not one of those OMG LIBERAL WESTERN DEMOCRACY IS ALWAYS THE BEST GOVERNMENT FOR EVERYONE!! idealogues, but increasingly it looks like he's not going to step down. Ever. That's bad for Venezuela. The job of US foreign policy should be to make sure that Chavez's reign doesn't become bad for South America, and the Western Hemisphere as a whole.
You are talking like Chavez will become the next Hitler or something. The US foreign policy should be to stay the fuck out of South America, where such policy has caused more problems that solutions in the past.The job of US foreign policy should be to make sure that Chavez's reign doesn't become bad for South America, and the Western Hemisphere as a whole.
Last edited by Cubit; 04-05-2009 at 05:44 AM.
According to... Baduel himself. Thanks for the objective analysis.
The job of US foreign policy in Latin America in the future should be to remove itself as much as possible as a key factor in promoting a dangerous cycle of instability and repression based around class and international inequality. That begins with drug legalization and proceeds through all of the different tiers of trade agreements adjusted to the level of development of the country.
More than likely, it will just be a softer (for a while) form of exactly what you describe, which is the kind of poisonous self interested approach that got us Chavezes in the first place. If Chavez were an idiot running his country into the ground and cooperating with US interests no one would see a problem with his reign. I know you don't advocate direct intervention, but the many levels on the spectrum of intervention that the US has tried in the past are often just as problematic. In the absence of a coherent plan to address (and make up for) the US role in South America historically, doing nothing would be preferable to taking a strong stance.
I know all about the massive and constant moral and strategic failures of US policy in Central and South America. I’m not a rah-rah American imperialist, like you mentioned I don’t favor intervention. I also don’t think we should put him in a box or try to isolate him, or get into a situation where we keep trying to intimidate or threaten by drawing lines in the sand that are easily jumped over (basically our policies towards Iran and North Korea). I’ve always thought we should just ignore him and keep trading with Venezuela normally, and I remain pretty convinced that the US had some involvement in the attempted coup a few years back. Finally, I don’t think Chavez is the new Hitler (please shoot me if I ever start using language like that), but all that said, I’m getting the increasing feeling that Chavez is going to burn his house down. He’s an ass, and as near as I can tell grossly incompetent. Of course America shouldn’t be trying to dictate how Venezuela should be run (we’re regularly run by grossly incompetent asses), but at the same time they’re our neighbor, and rhetoric and sniping aside, also one of our most important trading partners in that region. So yeah, maybe I’m recommending something much further to the carrot side of the intervention spectrum in the region, but I don’t see that as necessarily the same thing as trying to bully and dictate terms.
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