Sharp analysis on opporunity costs here. The framing of interventionism as a resource allocation problem rather than just a moral one makes this way more actionable for policymakers. Back when I worked in municipal goverment we saw the same dynamic play out locally, where flashy symbolic wins always got prioritized over unglamorous but high-impact infrastructure work. The focus point is dead-on.
There is vast disagreement about morality in human affairs. So hyperventilating about principles makes very little difference to policy makers. The people I know who are most vehement about the evil of the holocaust will turn around and tell me the atomic bombings were perfectly morally justified.
Virtually everyone is fine with killing civilians as long as the *right* civilians are getting killed. Nearly pointless to speak of morality, sacred duty, or natural law in political matters.
No mention of China or Russia in this article feels a weird oversight. Those two foreign adversaries definitely had/have an interest in allying with hostile regimes like Venezuela to cause trouble for the USA. You can oppose interventionism but also not want hostile State actors to have a foothold in South America and an ability to stir up trouble.
What do we mean by foothold? If China or Russia put nuclear missiles in Venezuela that would be one thing. But then again, we maintain a huge nuclear arsenal right off of China's coast.
Having bases in the vague vicinity of another country is not much of an advantage.
What are China and Russia going to do to us militarily?
Your skepticism is warranted but controlling your sphere of influence and depriving your global opposition of access to an oil resource could be argued as prudent policy. Militarily they may not do much directly but indirect warfare is still a real thing, some places are always going to be dominated by stronger powers. Not hard to imagine why China or Russia would want to destabilize South and Latin America.
In the last 130 years, the United States has done more to destabilize Latin America than China and Russia could ever hope to. The list of Progressive Era and onward interventions in these places numbers in the dozens. The results have been… extremely lackluster, to say the least.
Of course we don’t have to repeat the failures of the past BUT that doesn’t mean China wouldn’t want a foothold in South America in the future and that could spell risk.
Until very recently they have not been able to even day dream about such ambitions.
If you’re only looking backwards to avoid mistakes you’ll miss threats on the horizon, some balance is required and the surgical strike executed here seems a lot more sensible than funding the contras.
I think we should look at the problem logically. If China or Russia were able to establish a military base in Latin America it would be more likely to be an achilles heel for them than a strength.
A base thousands of miles away from the mainland with very vulnerable sea routes in between is not an asset. America learned this the hard way with the Philippines in WWII. McArthur's forces collapsed immediately, even with warning from Pearl Harbor.
They just couldn't hold out against Japanese forces with much shorter supply lines. In the end, holding the Philippines did nothing of value for the United States and even helped provoke war! We got nothing from that overseas holding worth having.
Josiah - must fundamentally disagree on several points. Venezuela is NOT a poor country; long before you were born, it was quite rich.
From Grok: Here are the top 5 countries around 1950 according to Maddison’s estimates (in 1990 international Geary-Khamis dollars, a PPP-adjusted measure):
1. United States — By far the leader, with GDP per capita around $9,561 (far ahead due to post-WWII industrial dominance and no major war damage on home soil).
2. Switzerland — A high-income neutral country with strong banking, manufacturing, and precision industries.
3. New Zealand — Benefited from agricultural exports (especially to Britain) and a high standard of living in the postwar era.
4. Venezuela — Oil boom made it exceptionally wealthy for a Latin American country at the time, often ranked in the top 4-5 in various historical compilations.
5. Denmark or Sweden — Nordic countries with strong welfare systems emerging and solid industrial/agricultural bases (exact order varies slightly by source; Denmark around $6,943, Sweden $6,739).
Have other disagreements. Certainly understand your (and George Washington’s) reluctance to get involved in foreign affairs, but you must admit the world is fundamentally different than it was in 1800. There is IMHO no comparison between Trump and the Bush/Obama/Biden view of foreign policy. Plus, I fully support using our military to attack drug dealers. And one last thing: if a country is actually trying to save itself from a communist regime, I would use our blood and treasure to defend it.
Keep up your work, Josiah! We desperately need active thinkers involved in leading our great country. Now if you could get DJT/Hegseth to fire the current CMC I would truly love it!.😬
Easy to be an interventionist on day one with big flashy wins. Gonna be tough to admit you were an interventionist a decade-in if things turn into a costly disaster.
"We" is doing a lot of work in this sentence. If "we" had really just picked up $17.3 trillion in assets, then I and my family should have just received $220,000 in our investment accounts. That didn't happen and isn't going to happen.
In reality that oil is only valuable when it can be extracted. That will take A LOT of work and investment. It will also take decades. Even if private American firms are now able to go in there and profitably extract those resources--which, I admit, will benefit global markets--who will pay for their security? Who will secure their property rights?
Right now, the American taxpayer is on the hook (depending on how Trump plays this) for all of those problems. So we are now going to subsidize the profits of those oil companies in Venezuela. Yet individual taxpayers are not willing shareholders in this project. No one asked me if my tax money should be used to overthrow this Latin American shithole's government. Nor did I get to do an analysis for myself on whether this project will be profitable to me.
And frankly my answer would have been no! Conquering Venezuela isn't a project I'm interested in as an American; I have other problems that are more pressing.
But, look, I get why other people might want to monkey in the third world. If a bunch of oil companies wanted to get together and pay Erik Prince to create an army of mercenaries to go into Venezuela and overthrow Maduro and topple the socialist government so they can extract oil, that would have been fine, based even!
In that scenario, though, I don't think the taxpayer should have been on the hook to bail out the companies and mercenaries if they failed. You're not really a bronze age warrior if Delta Force and the CIA is on the hook to swoop in to save your ass when you fail.
The purpose of the American military is defense of American person and property. Its job is boring.
I will also note that conquest as a way of life comes with real downsides. The cost of seizing wealth by force is subject to diminishing returns--the people you steal from don't like it and will fight back (afghanistan)--and you also have to deal with *other* conquerors getting in the action and trying to steal *your* stuff.
So the conquerors/thieves end up needing to all work together in order to limit conquest (ironically). This was the historical foundation of international law after the 30 years war. The sovereigns of Europe (and their people) didn't like the horrific brutality of the wars they kept fighting and wanted to limit the violence. Vattel, Grotius, Locke, and Hobbes all emerge out of this condition of widespread chaos and brutality.
Exxon said they will have a tactical team in Venezuela in the next 2 weeks; Chevron said they're pumping 240,000 barrels per day and they can double that almost immediately.
No bro you're being super gullible. ExxonMobil is asking for a government backstop in the style of Too-Big-To-Fail 2008 subprime housing crisis. Exxon is asking for a bailout and you're falling for it. Exxon is implicitly asking for 1.) American soldiers guarding their locations and routes for free, 2.) government financial insurance at below market rates, 3.) government subsidies of $5-20 per barrel to increase their profit margins.
Everyone wins under this arrangement. America picked up $17.3 trillion with zero loss of life. The people of Venezuela are liberated, their economy will be healed, and we are going to scale up deportations of Venezuelan illegals in America.
My point is about trade offs. There wasn't any loss of life on this particular raid but future interventions might not be so fortunate. And this will take up a lot of time and effort to fix. I think there are better places for that effort here at home. I'm also not sure this will lead to an improvement in the freedom of the people of Venezuela.
Even if it did, that isn't my concern as an American. America has intervened dozens of times in latin America since 1898 and the results have been very lackluster. For instance, we still own Puerto Rico and that place is just complete dead weight.
You are my friend, a brave and morally principled and intelligent man. I understand your thought process on this which is internally and logically consistent. But I think you're being intellectually rigid and should just keep an open mind.
Sharp analysis on opporunity costs here. The framing of interventionism as a resource allocation problem rather than just a moral one makes this way more actionable for policymakers. Back when I worked in municipal goverment we saw the same dynamic play out locally, where flashy symbolic wins always got prioritized over unglamorous but high-impact infrastructure work. The focus point is dead-on.
There is vast disagreement about morality in human affairs. So hyperventilating about principles makes very little difference to policy makers. The people I know who are most vehement about the evil of the holocaust will turn around and tell me the atomic bombings were perfectly morally justified.
Virtually everyone is fine with killing civilians as long as the *right* civilians are getting killed. Nearly pointless to speak of morality, sacred duty, or natural law in political matters.
No mention of China or Russia in this article feels a weird oversight. Those two foreign adversaries definitely had/have an interest in allying with hostile regimes like Venezuela to cause trouble for the USA. You can oppose interventionism but also not want hostile State actors to have a foothold in South America and an ability to stir up trouble.
What do we mean by foothold? If China or Russia put nuclear missiles in Venezuela that would be one thing. But then again, we maintain a huge nuclear arsenal right off of China's coast.
Having bases in the vague vicinity of another country is not much of an advantage.
What are China and Russia going to do to us militarily?
Your skepticism is warranted but controlling your sphere of influence and depriving your global opposition of access to an oil resource could be argued as prudent policy. Militarily they may not do much directly but indirect warfare is still a real thing, some places are always going to be dominated by stronger powers. Not hard to imagine why China or Russia would want to destabilize South and Latin America.
In the last 130 years, the United States has done more to destabilize Latin America than China and Russia could ever hope to. The list of Progressive Era and onward interventions in these places numbers in the dozens. The results have been… extremely lackluster, to say the least.
We don’t have to live this way.
Of course we don’t have to repeat the failures of the past BUT that doesn’t mean China wouldn’t want a foothold in South America in the future and that could spell risk.
Until very recently they have not been able to even day dream about such ambitions.
If you’re only looking backwards to avoid mistakes you’ll miss threats on the horizon, some balance is required and the surgical strike executed here seems a lot more sensible than funding the contras.
I think we should look at the problem logically. If China or Russia were able to establish a military base in Latin America it would be more likely to be an achilles heel for them than a strength.
A base thousands of miles away from the mainland with very vulnerable sea routes in between is not an asset. America learned this the hard way with the Philippines in WWII. McArthur's forces collapsed immediately, even with warning from Pearl Harbor.
They just couldn't hold out against Japanese forces with much shorter supply lines. In the end, holding the Philippines did nothing of value for the United States and even helped provoke war! We got nothing from that overseas holding worth having.
Josiah - must fundamentally disagree on several points. Venezuela is NOT a poor country; long before you were born, it was quite rich.
From Grok: Here are the top 5 countries around 1950 according to Maddison’s estimates (in 1990 international Geary-Khamis dollars, a PPP-adjusted measure):
1. United States — By far the leader, with GDP per capita around $9,561 (far ahead due to post-WWII industrial dominance and no major war damage on home soil).
2. Switzerland — A high-income neutral country with strong banking, manufacturing, and precision industries.
3. New Zealand — Benefited from agricultural exports (especially to Britain) and a high standard of living in the postwar era.
4. Venezuela — Oil boom made it exceptionally wealthy for a Latin American country at the time, often ranked in the top 4-5 in various historical compilations.
5. Denmark or Sweden — Nordic countries with strong welfare systems emerging and solid industrial/agricultural bases (exact order varies slightly by source; Denmark around $6,943, Sweden $6,739).
Have other disagreements. Certainly understand your (and George Washington’s) reluctance to get involved in foreign affairs, but you must admit the world is fundamentally different than it was in 1800. There is IMHO no comparison between Trump and the Bush/Obama/Biden view of foreign policy. Plus, I fully support using our military to attack drug dealers. And one last thing: if a country is actually trying to save itself from a communist regime, I would use our blood and treasure to defend it.
Keep up your work, Josiah! We desperately need active thinkers involved in leading our great country. Now if you could get DJT/Hegseth to fire the current CMC I would truly love it!.😬
Great analysis and writing as always.
Easy to be an interventionist on day one with big flashy wins. Gonna be tough to admit you were an interventionist a decade-in if things turn into a costly disaster.
We just picked up $17.3 trillion in oil
"We" is doing a lot of work in this sentence. If "we" had really just picked up $17.3 trillion in assets, then I and my family should have just received $220,000 in our investment accounts. That didn't happen and isn't going to happen.
In reality that oil is only valuable when it can be extracted. That will take A LOT of work and investment. It will also take decades. Even if private American firms are now able to go in there and profitably extract those resources--which, I admit, will benefit global markets--who will pay for their security? Who will secure their property rights?
Right now, the American taxpayer is on the hook (depending on how Trump plays this) for all of those problems. So we are now going to subsidize the profits of those oil companies in Venezuela. Yet individual taxpayers are not willing shareholders in this project. No one asked me if my tax money should be used to overthrow this Latin American shithole's government. Nor did I get to do an analysis for myself on whether this project will be profitable to me.
And frankly my answer would have been no! Conquering Venezuela isn't a project I'm interested in as an American; I have other problems that are more pressing.
But, look, I get why other people might want to monkey in the third world. If a bunch of oil companies wanted to get together and pay Erik Prince to create an army of mercenaries to go into Venezuela and overthrow Maduro and topple the socialist government so they can extract oil, that would have been fine, based even!
In that scenario, though, I don't think the taxpayer should have been on the hook to bail out the companies and mercenaries if they failed. You're not really a bronze age warrior if Delta Force and the CIA is on the hook to swoop in to save your ass when you fail.
The purpose of the American military is defense of American person and property. Its job is boring.
I will also note that conquest as a way of life comes with real downsides. The cost of seizing wealth by force is subject to diminishing returns--the people you steal from don't like it and will fight back (afghanistan)--and you also have to deal with *other* conquerors getting in the action and trying to steal *your* stuff.
So the conquerors/thieves end up needing to all work together in order to limit conquest (ironically). This was the historical foundation of international law after the 30 years war. The sovereigns of Europe (and their people) didn't like the horrific brutality of the wars they kept fighting and wanted to limit the violence. Vattel, Grotius, Locke, and Hobbes all emerge out of this condition of widespread chaos and brutality.
strongly disagree
We got 30-50 million barrels of oil valued at $1-4 billion in the first week. But most of the oil will be drilled over the next 100 years.
Exxon said they will have a tactical team in Venezuela in the next 2 weeks; Chevron said they're pumping 240,000 barrels per day and they can double that almost immediately.
Exxon is skeptical of investing in Venezuela because they don't think their property rights will be protected. I understand their reticence! They were expropriated twice. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/trump-says-he-might-keep-exxon-out-venezuela-2026-01-12/
No bro you're being super gullible. ExxonMobil is asking for a government backstop in the style of Too-Big-To-Fail 2008 subprime housing crisis. Exxon is asking for a bailout and you're falling for it. Exxon is implicitly asking for 1.) American soldiers guarding their locations and routes for free, 2.) government financial insurance at below market rates, 3.) government subsidies of $5-20 per barrel to increase their profit margins.
Everyone wins under this arrangement. America picked up $17.3 trillion with zero loss of life. The people of Venezuela are liberated, their economy will be healed, and we are going to scale up deportations of Venezuelan illegals in America.
My point is about trade offs. There wasn't any loss of life on this particular raid but future interventions might not be so fortunate. And this will take up a lot of time and effort to fix. I think there are better places for that effort here at home. I'm also not sure this will lead to an improvement in the freedom of the people of Venezuela.
Even if it did, that isn't my concern as an American. America has intervened dozens of times in latin America since 1898 and the results have been very lackluster. For instance, we still own Puerto Rico and that place is just complete dead weight.
You are my friend, a brave and morally principled and intelligent man. I understand your thought process on this which is internally and logically consistent. But I think you're being intellectually rigid and should just keep an open mind.
Strong disagree with this analysis
"Not worth the squeeze"
•Urgent
•Important
•Principle
•Paradigm
"Focus"
HTTPS://mileswmathis.com/maduro.pdf
Yesterday's news. Today's is Iran. Please try to keep up...
It isn't easy!
Aah, unfortunately, you turned into a Lincoln Project/Trad Inc cuck while I wasn’t looking…