Seeing the world through an extractivist lens frees the US from concerns with democracy, stability and rule of law, even if it does little to free those who have long suffered under the regime now partnered with Trump. My piece in @newstatesman1913.bsky.social

The US has long prioritized stability over ideology. This serves Trump’s extractivist agenda, but is not unique to him. If anything it’s a throwback to the days of United Fruit Co. style imperialism.

Can’t believe we just accept this as normal now

If Trump is concerned about narco-dictators, why did he just pardon one, Honduras' Juan Orlando Hernandez, convicted in the US of conspiring to "stuff the drugs right up the noses of the gringos"...? I asked this on ABC News:

Rubio’s “primary interest is in Cuba, not in Venezuela,” I tell @nbcnews.com. His interest in Venezuela is instrumental for the goal of taking out what he sees as Cuba’s chief patron, and thus the Vz opposition, and securing democracy, are expendable concerns.

It's wild to think that the US killed all those people in the boat strikes, and spent millions in a military campaign, just to end up with essentially the same outcome as the "chavismo lite" deal that Delcy & Jorge offered the US through Qatar last year.

Taking out Maduro while leaving Delcy, Diosdado and Vladimir in charge makes little sense unless you accept that Trump really believed Rubio's line that Maduro is personally in charge of a vast drug trafficking organization, and by extension everything else bad in the Vz govt.

Lessons from political science: Leadership change is not the same as regime change, and regime change is not the same as democratization. Most often, leadership change leads to another leader within the regime, and regime change is from one type of authoritarianism to another.

“No vemos ningún intento, ni siquiera un tema de debate, el desmantelamiento de la Fuerza Armada Nacional Bolivariana. Esto sería una tarea mucho más difícil para Estados Unidos. Realmente parece que Trump solo quería atrapar a una persona, Maduro,” le digo a @eldiario.es

Maduro should have squirreled some money away to give to Trump’s golf buddies like JOH

If this is true, the closest comparison for the Venezuela operation isn't Iraq but Panama. In both cases, the invasion was portrayed as a police action to capture a head of state to stand trial in the US for drug trafficking...

If this is true, there are still many scenarios for who takes over next, not all of which are democratic 1. Others within the PSUV, like the Rodriguez siblings 2. The military itself 3. The opposition, ie Edmundo Gonzalez though he’s in Spain and would need military backing

The reported targets also include oil refineries, Venezuela’s legislative palace, and Chavez’s mausoleum, none of which are military facilities

If “viewers like you” are all knowing and already have the most correct analysis of world events, why do they need to watch the news?

Remember how during the metrosexual era, lazy straight men would use “don’t want to look gay” as an excuse to not work out or dress well or groom ourselves? Now we can do the same but our excuse can be “don’t want to look like a nazi”

I was trying to imagine what common interests these two could have to be laughing about and the only thing I could come up with is Assad

Both journalism and academia are professions that involve a lot of writing, but most academic writing for journals is formulaic to the point that it leaves little room for creativity. I used to be an arts critic and miss when I got to write stuff like this.

David’s been making this point for a while: Trump wants to provoke Venezuela into war not because he cares about regime change per se, but because he wants to use the Alien Enemies Act to facilitate mass deportations, including of Venezuelans, and the courts say it can’t be invoked outside of war.

Brazilian and US politics have many parallels - evangelicalism, Jan. 6 / Jan. 8, “deep state” / “o sistema” - but one striking difference is unlike the Democrats, Brazil’s PT has retained and even grown its rural voter base.

Merry Christmas! Thinking of all those who have fled persecution and violence, as well as those unable to.

If blockades, embargoes and sanctions were effective tools for regime change, there wouldn’t be such a long list of regimes that have weathered them…indeed, so many that they now make up a huge chunk of the global economy that coordinates specifically to evade US sanctions

It seems MTG and Laura Loomer have put aside their differences for a common cause

I teach at a Minority-Serving Institution. The reason it’s an MSI is because it’s a non-elite public university and affordable to all thanks to federal grants. The DOJ seems to think it’s because MSIs deny spots to white students. We have a 93% admission rate! We don’t deny anyone!

For Trump's blockade of Venezuela to lead to regime change, it would require the Venezuelan military to bet it will get a better deal under the opposition. It's like the South Park underpants gnome bit, I tell BBC. Step 1: ship seizures, Step 2: ???, Step 3: democracy!

I just uploaded @jasonparis.bsky.social 's recording of the segment CBS News pulled from "60 Minutes" to YouTube:

Over at @cipolicy.bsky.social, I published two stories on CECOT/El Salvador. In May, @mpaarlberg.bsky.social made the case that CECOT's primary function is a way for the corrupt Trump admin and the corrupt Bukele admin to scratch each other's backs, disappearing political problems out of courts.

It seems Weiss is performing the exact function she was hired to do, run interference on behalf of the Trump administration

The strategy behind Trump’s 🇻🇪 blockade is to provoke splits in the Maduro regime by denying the military its oil rents. But this only works if the generals expect an opposition govt will restore their rents and keep them in charge of the economy, which goes against MCM’s stated vision of governance.

And let’s be precise: universities have decreased TT positions while increasing PhD student enrollment and relying on grad student and adjunct labor, creating more people who feel screwed over when they graduate and can’t get a decent academic job From 2020 www.insidehighered.com/advice/2021/...

The perverse logic of campism is that those who defend tyrants like Maduro inevitably end up having to justify the killings of journalists, trade unionists, and communists. Presumably all of whom were somehow agents of imperialism.

Ctrl-F "democracy" "human rights" not found

Interestingly Chile has the largest gap of anywhere between actual security and perceptions of security. www.elmostrador.cl/noticias/opi...

The distinguishing pattern of Chile’s politics since 2010 has been voters voting against the incumbent party in every election despite the economy, political stability, rule of law, and social cohesion being pretty strong the whole time.

In Chile, where non-citizen residents can vote, right wing candidate Kast is heavily favored to win today’s election with a combination of voters who blame an alleged crime wave on Venezuelan migrants, and Venezuelan migrants he’s pledged to deport, who support him because he’s anti-communist.

Trump’s dumping of Bolsonaro speaks to his overriding political impulse: he can smell a loser

Not to be conspiratorial but “Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine” sounds like something a Russian analyst with superficial knowledge of US history would come up with. No serious US Latin Americanist would cite the Monroe Doctrine as a relevant blueprint for foreign policy today.

Russia’s and China’s abandonment of Venezuela makes sense in the same context as the Trump security strategy’s abandonment of the EU. Putin’s spheres of influence framing seems to have convinced Trump that dominion over Latin America is a fair trade for Europe, Africa, ME and Asia.

Even Chile’s current left wing government can’t deport Venezuelan migrants because they don’t have relations with the Maduro government

What a headline:

I wonder how much of this is a Gaza effect

I have been warning about the similarities of Trump 2.0 and the Dominican policy towards migrants and people of migrant descent since January. I am glad more people are paying attention theconversation.com/the-dominica...

Worth reading. I’m seeing a lot of backlash to this on X from (tenured) academics bragging about how cushy the job is, and there are certainly perks! But for additional context, here’s a current job ad from LSE for a tenure track job paying £68,087 to live in London jobs.lse.ac.uk/Vacancies/W/...

Important new research with empirical evidence that decapitation as an anti-crime (eg cartel or gang) strategy doesn’t work in terms of diminishing violence

Reminder that the Maduro government detains and kills opposition politicians; in the case of Díaz, for something as small as criticizing a regional government’s response to an electricity crisis.

As @katz.theracket.news wrote, the Dominican Republic did this a decade ago, leaving 130,000 Dominicans of Haitian descent stateless and subject to family separation and trafficking

Trump’s weird fixation on the Panama Canal is further evidence that his political formation comes from some traumatic experience in the NYC disco scene that got his brain stuck in 1979 www.nytimes.com/2020/01/11/o...

“Trump told reporters this week that “the people of Honduras” had asked him to pardon Hernández” By “people of Honduras” he meant Matt Gaetz, Roger Stone, and members of the Mar-a-Lago club.

Two years into the extermination campign against Gaza, and 32 years after the Oslo Accords, it's crucial to understand that the failures of Oslo were baked in from the start. Any durable peace demands future efforts be far more democratic, argues @danaelkurd.bsky.social at @cipolicy.bsky.social

Note USIP is not a federal agency, it was created by Congress as an independent body. Trump doesn’t have the authority to either rename it or fire its board and staff, which he did anyway