Hello, I am from overseas. Can someone please explain to me why would they do that? What is the goal, what is the plan, what is the intent? Thanks for any comments, I am utterly confused.
Venezuela has oil. Wants to sell them in Chinese Yuan, because America bad.
America ensures the world's waters stay safe for commerce as long as all countries continue to do business in dollars.
When they don't, America is forced to remind them.
China in the meantime continues to diversify away from oil and doesn't mind taking risks that could cut supply. Venezuela's leadership has, for reasons well understood, fewer options.
America's number one export, as is every global empire's number one export is its currency. It's a gift and a curse.
Saddam's days were numbered when he began selling oil in Euros.
Gaddafi's days were numbered when he tried to sell oil in "gold dinars".
> I do think that stopping trade in USD is the biggest reason
This hasn't been a thing since the 1970s. Oil is priced and settled in multiple currencies today, including out of New York and London. America is a net oil exporter. And global oil trading volumes are insignificant compared with other dollar uses.
There are a lot of stupid reasons we're going to war with Venezuela. None of them have to do with dollar hegemony.
> Thats not true. ~85%+ of global oil trade is in USD
What part isn't true? I never said most oil isn't traded in dollars. Just that it's priced and traded in currencies other than dollars on commodities desks in the United States.
In 2019, over 60% of all global trade was dollar denominated [1]. (58% today.) That's $27tn of dollar-denominated export invoices. Globally, oil exports are $1.3tn [2].
The petrodollar hypothesis held in the 1970s. It was becoming irrelevant with the 1980s' trade liberalisation. By 2019 [3] it had become totally irrelevant, both as a rational motivation and as a non-conspiratorial geopolitical talking point.
It was spelled out in the recently published National Security Strategy [1]:
> We want to ensure that the Western Hemisphere remains reasonably stable and well-governed enough to prevent and discourage mass migration to the United States; we want a Hemisphere whose governments cooperate with us against narco-terrorists, cartels, and other transnational criminal organizations; we want a Hemisphere that remains free of hostile foreign incursion or ownership of key assets, and that supports critical supply chains; and we want to ensure our continued access to key strategic locations. In other words, we will assert and enforce a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine.
While seizing oil supplies and using them to corruptly reward cronies of Trump’s is probably part of it, a bigger part of it is just to have a war, both to provide a legal and propaganda cover for domestic repression (a war with Venezuela —due to a completely fictitious invasion by Venezuela—is already part of the pretext for that since Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act on that basis in March) and to provide an electoral rally-around-the-flag effect.
I have also seen people believe that those boats have drugs, it's wild. I mean if they had drugs we would gather proof and hold trials instead of just murder, murder, murder.
I'm not going to assume they are drugs, I'm not that weird. I'm confident our military could figure it out and share the evidence, though. They should be competent enough.
Thanks. I just saw at BBC that it was "for a very good reason". I just thought that I'm missing some context. I guess all that's left to say is to wish you a great day.
I suspect they want to gain access to Venezuelan oil reserves to make energy cheaper, reduce prices, and win elections. Or grift off it for personal wealth. Or both.
Any US actions wrt Venezuela almost certainly have the backing of what the US (probably rightfully) considers to be the legitimate government of Venezuela.
> Domestic laws of a country do not constitute valid justification for seizing another country's vessels under international law
The great powers (China, Russia and America) have each, at this point, explicitly rejected this principle. More broadly, internationa law does contain broad exemptions for piracy.
UNCLOS provides that “all states have universal jurisdiction on the high seas to seize pirate ships and aircraft, or a ship or aircraft taken by piracy and under the control of pirates, and arrest the persons and seize the property on board” [1].
> if we're using that as a justification, are we admitting the US has turned pirate then?
No, because the seizure was not “committed for private ends by the crew or the passengers of a private ship or a private aircraft” [2]. Under UNCLOS states can’t be pirates.
(Again, this is academic. China has been blowing off UNCLOS judgements in the South China Sea for years.)
In theory they gave the flag state a perfectly valid casus belli, but the flag state isn't in a position to take on the US navy. It would be funny if the flag states or the owners tried to seize US owned property in some involved jurisdiction as compensation.
Sanctioned by who? The president who thinks his tech companies shouldn't be subject to European laws when they operate in Europe believes completely separate countries have to abide by his rules when doing business?
Hello, I am from overseas. Can someone please explain to me why would they do that? What is the goal, what is the plan, what is the intent? Thanks for any comments, I am utterly confused.
>In his 2019 memoir, The Threat, former Deputy Director of the FBI, Andrew McCabe, quotes Trump as saying of Venezuela "That’s the country we should be going to war with, they have all that oil and they’re right on our back door.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_United_States_invasio...
OCR is regularly the easiest way to copy web page text on an iPhone by taking a screenshot first, and copying text from the photo. iPhone browser text selection is often broken.
Then again, a friend sent a screenshot of a contact and I asked AI to convert that to a vCard I could import (impressively saved time and was less error-prone).
Hello, security here - I'd highly recommend setting a captcha for registrations. Unless the true intent of the site is to capture any and all hackers that are searching for new plausibly deniable channel for their attacks.
I'd add rate-limits. They need to be tested, but once working, it tremendously helps managing the site load, especially with regards to malicious scarpers/crawlers.
I remember annoying one of our professors at the university. Whenever he was discussing a problem and found me falling asleep, he called my name. I woke up, said Chinese remainder theorem and with like 90% success rate it solved the problem handily. Yes, it was an Algebra class. We were still surprised how well it worked.
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