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#31

Off the Record / Re: What does a TRUMP presiden...

Last post by viper37 - December 11, 2025, 06:27:59 PM

I don't have any insight into whether a quick invasion of a Latin American country is part of the current US administration's roadmap. It would be on brand, I suppose.

I mean, I do think Trump is a moral coward who is unwilling to make the kind decisions and take responsibility for the consequences that starting a war requires from a leader. He's a bully, not a fighter. But he might be talked into it, especially as senility sets in.

For sake of argument, let's say the current US administration decides it does want one of its traditional Latin American regime change wars - how will it play in the US? Will Trump be able to rally patriotic fervour?

Trump won't invade Venezuela, he has had a couple of consistent political positions since the 1980s:

1. Hatred of international trade, as a real estate investor he has never understood it and intrinsically thinks trade is just a way for America to lose money
2. Obsession with the concept that alliances are a form of being taken advantage of by the other country
3. Dislike of deploying the U.S. military overseas

Trump enjoys the uses of the military which mirror how he engages with the world--performative, off the cuff, Tweet format thinking and acting. This will look like drone / bombing strikes and possibly up to and including small special forces raids and naval incursions into Venezuelan waters. It will never look like the massive build up and invasion of Iraq in 2003.

If this sort of harassment fails to destabilize Maduro's regime to the point of him fleeing or losing support of the military, Trump will just pretend all of this never happened and move on to something else.

So it'll look like Caligula invading Britain?

#32

Off the Record / Re: What does a TRUMP presiden...

Last post by Tamas - December 11, 2025, 05:08:37 PM

I fear the European leaders are convincing themselves that all they need to do is survive 4 years to have a Democrat in the White House again, resetting time to like 2014. Ain't gonna happen.

Show strength to Trump he might get wet enough between his legs like with Putin to start showing respect.

#33

Off the Record / Re: The EU thread

Last post by Zoupa - December 11, 2025, 04:52:41 PM

Have to agree with Minsky here. They're shipping donkeys to the front and are using tampons to stuff bullet wounds. There's no need to overanalyse and work ourselves up. The only reason they've had a modicum of success is because life has little value to russians and they just throw more meat at the problem.

#34

Off the Record / Re: The EU thread

Last post by The Minsky Moment - December 11, 2025, 04:43:03 PM

Yes of course, probably got mixed up with an old Hearts of Iron game.

#35

Off the Record / Re: The EU thread

Last post by Duque de Bragança - December 11, 2025, 04:37:12 PM

You obviously meant Italy's invasion of Greece, not Yugoslavia, to nitpick, in true Languish style. 
Not arguing with the rest.

#36

Off the Record / Re: The EU thread

Last post by The Minsky Moment - December 11, 2025, 04:36:26 PM

Now where Russia does have some real levers is outside the realm of direct hard power. They are a shitposting superpower. They really have mastered the art of post-modern propaganda in the age of social media. They've refined the old Soviet art of exploiting western plutocratic influence over politics and manipulation of greed. They are at the heart of international criminal networks: money laundering, arms dealing, cyber crime, trafficking of every kind.  Those are real capabilities and what Putin has used to keep Russia punching well above weight.

#37

Off the Record / Re: The EU thread

Last post by The Minsky Moment - December 11, 2025, 04:29:01 PM

Similarly I bang on about this because I think it's important (and actually reflects the state of European infrastructure), the former US Army in Europe commander has said that there is not enough "transport capacity, or infrastructure that enables the rapid movement of NATO forces across Europe." Germany - which is the linchpin in the middle, has the capacity to move "one and a half armoured brigades simultaneously at one time, that's it."

Let's dig down about what this means.   OK let's assume they can't presently "enabl[e] the rapid movement of NATO forces across Europe" in accordance with US standards.  But if NECESSARY, they could improvise. The Krauts could move a lot more than 1.5 brigades at a time if they really wanted to.  They have a fantastic highway system and lots of flat land. Would it look great?  Perhaps not.  Would the military end result be optimal.  Perhaps not.  But they could do it.

Russia is no better; they tried to cram down a bunch of armor from Belarus down Kiev and despite years of planning and months of pre-positioning ended up with the century's worst traffic jam and a military fiasco of world historical proportions.  You can call that agency.  You can also say the Yuros have agency because they choose to avoid such obvious disasters.

The Russians like to compare their invasion to Ukraine to the "Great Patriotic War" but the better WW2 era analogue is Italy's invasion of Yugoslavia. In comparative world power terms, Russia c.2022 is about the same level as Italy c. 1940.  Both sought to boost themselves up by invading what appeared to be a vulnerable neighbor and found themselves in a quagmire.  Putin has no Wehrmacht to bail him out.

Mussolini impressed a lot of people at the time with bellicose talk and a military that looked impressive on paper, but like Russia now, Italy couldn't sustain the burden of even medium scale war without leaning on a stronger power.  It looked like Fascist Italy was exercising its agency, but like with Russia, it was a mirage.  It could exercise a power to choose but the cost of that exercise was accepting dependency on greater powers.

So with Syria I think we should avoid reading backward from what was an improbable collapse of the regime - the month before Assad fell the EU was discussing an Italian proposal to actually recognise Assad again because they'd clearly won. Russia was able to intervene decisively for a period.

It's the Middle East; all alliance system based on Arab regimes are built on sand. It's just a matter of when.  The bigger question is what was the overall strategy?  Getting an air base in?  Chasing the dream of a naval base in Med?  Manipulating refugee flows was an improvised response to a situation and one where what mattered was Russian control over its remaining Euro satellites, not some proconsular presence in the ME.  There's always going to be refugees from somewhere at sometime or another.

On the oil isn't that largely because of the oil price cap?

That's the mechanism but if Russia had the requisite clout or influence it could evade it by negotiating subsidized imports back from China.  They don't.

I think my argument is that isn't enough. What matters is the ability to leverage those capacities into agency: the ability to decide to do something and then do it. I think Europe, collectively and at individual state level (for different reasons), is less than the sum of its parts. It's unable to turn its advantages and resources into effective levers of power.

That's true but by choice.  There is agency, just not agency at the level of national executives.  It's the agency of populations that prefer the comforting illusion of national sovereignty over external effectiveness.

#38

Off the Record / Re: What does a TRUMP presiden...

Last post by grumbler - December 11, 2025, 04:17:50 PM

Ander Puck Nielsen just released a vid on the Trump administration's new National Security Policy.

Lots and lots of incredible shit here. Basically, the Trump administration doesn't give a shit about Russia or China, but instead believes that the most essential and immediate task for the US in foreign policy is to overthrow any European government that isn't already MAGA-adjacent.

Anyone in Europe that didn't already understand that MAGA is their deadly enemy has no more excuses. While it is true that the document looks like it was written by a Russian Middle School student to engorge Trump's penis, but it's the official policy of the US now.  NATO is dead.

#39

Off the Record / Re: What does a TRUMP presiden...

Last post by The Minsky Moment - December 11, 2025, 03:56:30 PM

The analysis is fine but it does require assuming that the US can maintain complete control over events and that Trump maintains complete control over his people.

#40

Off the Record / Re: What does a TRUMP presiden...

Last post by Baron von Schtinkenbutt - December 11, 2025, 03:38:30 PM

Per a recent article on the tanker seizure, "[t]he president has repeatedly expressed reservations about an operation to remove Mr. Maduro from power, aides say, in part because of a fear that the operation could fail".  So yeah, all he gives a shit about is optics.  Honestly, par for the course for a real estate developer, in my experience.

On a related note, based on that article it sounds like that seized tanker was shady as fuck.  It may have been intended to fuck with Maduro, but it doesn't sound like it was completely unjustified.