Over the past two months, the United States has engaged in an alarming buildup of military capabilities in the Caribbean.
These capabilities vastly exceed the demands of even the most ambitious counter-narcotics program.
A report from the Miami Herald (quickly disavowed by the Trump administration) suggested that plans were in place for an extensive military campaign against Venezuela that would target military installations and suspected narcotics transit points on the way to a potential regime change campaign.
Nevertheless, official Trump administration statements have been frustratingly vague regarding the desired outcomes of policy towards Caracas. Are we at risk of drifting into war with Venezuela?
Also, Venezuela is going to hit US air assets hard, this will be a PR failure all around if Trump tries it as well as stupid and pointlessly cruel.
I hope so but I wouldn’t bet on it. How exactly do you think Venezuela can pull this?
Trump stopped attacking Yemen because they threw enough stuff back that it made the US military look bad. Venezuela is way better armed than Yemen.
The US population expects invincibility, and that doesn’t exist on the real world.
TBH the most loses from Yemen were airplanes thrown into the sea from the air carriers.
The most expensive loses were from mistakes caused by the constant need to react to their attacks, and the most numerous loses were caused by throwing things at their attacks.
And that was enough to make the military look irredeemably incompetent inside the US. Imagine what will happen when they fight an adversary that may actually hit something once or twice. Under a different president, or if they had any non-criminal reason to go into war, the reaction would probably be different, but that’s not the case.
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I am not saying Venezuela will win, I am saying it has invested enough in air defense that the likelihood of the US being able to launch an air campaign without embarassing losses is lower than it appears at least in terms of how the media covers it, and the political consequences of a blundered strike that loses US lives and equipment in a high profile way would be devastating to an already very unliked republican party. Trump and his administration really can’t risk looking any more dumb or incompetent than he does now, a limit is being reached though it is hard to believe one exists, it does.
If Trump and his cronies launches strikes, he will bungle the US militaries’ advantage, this administration is too dysfunctional to do otherwise.
You sure though? I’d expect it at similar or lower level as Iran was. I might be wrong, though, certainly hope so. Funnily enough, they have also 2 or 3 F-16s.
I think the amount of money in the US military industrial complex that has gone into obsessing over how best to bomb Iran is probably incomprehensible. Venezeula too a degree, but not anywhere as much. There was no way Iran could entirely deny US airpower, but so what?
This isn’t just a question of strike capable technology vs. counters it is about landscapes and who knows them best and has invested in their idiosyncracies, and I don’t get the feeling Venezuelans have been wasting all this time thinking the US wouldn’t try some shit like this.
Were the Iran strikes successful? What did they do but confirm to the world the irrationality of US foreign intervention under this administration?
If the US wants to project actual power into Venezuela it will have to get its hands dirty and that is where the wheels will immediately fall off.