Obviously the rules based order was always humbug.
It's obvious now to the weakest intellect.
Andrew Napolitano's excellent Judging Freedom is the place I go to for insight into US foreign policy and retired Colonel Daniel Macgregor is as always interesting about the US kidnapping of President Maduro.
Note that Colonel Macgregor and Judge Napolitano were both big supporters of Donald Trump.
No liberals they. Though they are fierce critics of Israel.
Emanuel Macron supports Trump's action in Venezuela while Marine Le Pen condemns it, saying that supporting it would be "to accept our own enslavement tomorrow".
Sir K Starmer and Frau v d Leyen, fierce believers in international law when Russia is breaking it, say nothing.
The head of the Russian general staff's intelligence directorate yesterday handed over to the Americans the controlling mechanism of the Ukrainian drone that hit one of Putin's houses, contradicting the Ukrainian denial that such an attack took place and a CIA briefing that there was probably no such attack.
The head of the Russian general staff's intelligence directorate yesterday handed over to the Americans the controlling mechanism of the Ukrainian drone that hit one of Putin's houses, contradicting the Ukrainian denial that such an attack took place and a CIA briefing that there was probably no such attack.
Scott Ritter, who's happy to admit that he's a supporter of Putin and of Hamas, says the drone attack was a CIA operation intended to show Putin that the Americans can kill him.
He is confident that Trump will attack Iran and annex Greenland and calls him a dictator.
I start to think today that historian Timothy Snyder might not be so crazy as I had thought in his warnings that Trump wants to establish a dictatorship.
Luckily it cannot happen at home, despite the President creating tariffs by his fiat, ignoring Congress's authority over taxes. The US constitution still has checks and balances even though Congress is supine and bought.
The USA is still a free country in a way that no country in Europe is free because it has free speech, despite Donald Trump's attempts to limit criticism of Israel in universities, and because Americans value freedom and distrust the government. With Europeans it's the other way around..
But abroad the checks and balances in the US Constitution don't work and the Administration does as it pleases.
It did for decades.
But this administration is even more lawless than others. It seems as lawless as Israel's.
I feel the US government's anti-woke measures are a distraction. The Venezuelan big adventure looks like one too.
From what I am not sure.
The Epstein scandal?
I suppose.
Let's hope this ends without bloodshed, unlike the American invasion of Panama, and things get better for the people of Venezuela.
Noriega's going probably did Panama no great long term harm apart from the hundreds killed. Vladimir Putin expected his attack on Ukraine to go equally well.
Former British diplomat David Blair in the Sunday Telegraph two hours ago::
ReplyDeleteBut Venezuela has two legitimate successors. An opposition leader, Edmundo González, won the presidential election in July 2024, leading Maduro to announce a fake result and hound his opponent into exile in Spain.
Another opposition leader, María Corina Machado, was banned from running in that election. She won the Nobel Peace Prize last year and was, until recently, believed to be in hiding somewhere in Venezuela.
Either Mr González or Ms Machado would be rightful inheritors of power. Yet judging by his words on Saturday, Mr Trump is not remotely interested in this outcome. He made no mention of Mr González.
As for Ms Machado, the President was dismissive, saying it would be “very tough for her to be the leader: she doesn’t have the support or the respect inside the country”.
Mr Trump described Ms Machado as a “nice person but she doesn’t have the respect”. Just hours earlier, this Nobel Laureate had released a statement backing Mr Trump’s operation and saying that Venezuela’s hour of freedom had arrived.
The President then seemed to return the favour by tossing Ms Machado aside. Incredible though it sounds, America seems to prefer Maduro’s loyal deputy as the next president of Venezuela.
None of which makes any sense – unless what we are witnessing has all been carefully planned and agreed in advance. Has America cut a deal with Venezuela’s regime whereby Maduro is dispatched and the ruling elite are allowed to carry on, provided they give Washington a slice of their country’s oil wealth?
Have we witnessed not regime change but rather an American-enforced reshuffling of the ranks in Caracas, carried out with the cooperation of some of the powerful? For now, that is the only conclusion that makes sense.
ReplyDeleteFrom 'Europe is lurching towards tyranny', Douglas Carswell, Daily Telegraph,10 July 2025
America, we are repeatedly warned, teeters on the edge of tyranny under Donald Trump. Commentators point to the 47th president’s populist rhetoric, plans to purge the civil service, reliance on executive orders, and supposed defiance of judicial authority as existential threats to the American Republic.
Scholars like Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, authors of How Democracies Die and Tyranny of the Minority, argue that US democracy is sliding into authoritarianism. Academic David Driesen recently told The Guardian that Trump is attempting to turn the US into a dictatorship.
The Left would like us to believe that Trump’s attacks on “fake news”, and his particular disdain for the progressive media, signal the unravelling of free speech. The truth is that the American system is functioning well and as the Founders intended.
Federal judges have challenged Trump at every turn, issuing countless rulings to block executive actions on immigration, federal funding, and workforce reductions. Hundreds of lawsuits have been filed, subjecting his policies to unprecedented scrutiny. Only recently has the Supreme Court, after careful deliberation, limited the use of universal injunctions. Far from presiding over a dictatorship, it’s unlikely that any other US president has faced such a relentless judicial onslaught.
Yes, Trump is using the executive powers of the presidency to push through change, but the separation of powers is also proving remarkably effective. Trump may have secured his “Big, Beautiful Bill” through Congress, delivering extended tax cuts, increased defence spending, and immigration reforms. But these victories came at a cost: compromises on Social Security and healthcare funding. This is not tyranny – it’s the messy process of American democracy at work.
It is particularly galling to hear hysterical warnings about Trump’s threat to democracy from Europeans. Many of them like to believe that their societies are uniquely civilised, champions of universal values in a world lurching towards authoritarianism. Have they not noticed what is happening within their own borders?
Almost 40 years ago, when the Berlin Wall came down, it was a victory for the free world. America and western Europe – the West – had prevailed against the Soviet system. What is “the West” today?
It increasingly looks as if the freedoms that Europeans enjoyed since the end of the Second World War were really an aberration, a consequence of the victory of Anglo-American arms in 1945. Europe has begun to revert to a much more authoritarian tradition.
Over the past decade, restrictive laws have tightened their grip on free expression. Germany’s NetzDG has turned social media companies into an internet police force, adding to an existing culture of intolerance towards free speech. One journalist recently received a seven-month suspended sentence for a satirical meme. In France, platforms must remove “hate speech” within 24 hours or face severe fines.
The European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA) leans on online platforms to remove “disinformation” – a term so vague it risks abuse. Claims about Covid-19’s origins, once dismissed as misinformation, are now widely accepted. Yet the DSA empowers regulators to police speech with little real accountability.
Having started to proscribe dissident opinions online, Europe may soon begin to take action against dissenting political parties. In Germany, there have been calls to ban the opposition party, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), making perverse use of a law designed to defend democracy.
But it is in Britain – which produced the original Bill of Rights – where the clampdown of free speech has perhaps been most alarming. The British police arrested an estimated 12,183 people in 2023 under laws that, among other things, target “grossly offensive” messages. That is about 33 arrests each day in the land of Magna Carta.