Douglas Macgregor: Trump never has a strategy

Douglas Macgregor thinks Trump has no strategy in kidnapping Maduro and never has a strategy. Maduro was kidnapped to distract attention from the Epstein papers, rather as Serbia was bombed for 72 days to distract Americans from Monica Lewinsky. 

He interestingly said the Monroe doctrine, which Trump has reinterpreted to mean the USA can do what it likes in the Western hemisphere, presumably including Greenland, was a line from a speech by James Monroe that was forgotten until Warren Harding revived the idea, after the USA withdrew from Europe. 

Venezuelan oil is low standard, hard to refine and will not make a difference to world prices quickly. The country's mineral resources are mostly in the interior and will be hard to extract and transport for years.

The Daily Telegraph this morning: 

“There is no blueprint, no plan for what comes next,” said one source. “And anybody who tells you that it’s anything other than day by day is really not being forthright with you.”

....“The duration of the transition, its benchmarks, and its ultimate outcome all remain resoundingly unclear,” said Laurel Rapp, director of the US and North America programme at Chatham House, in a recent commentary. “Trump and Rubio’s imprecise language about who currently runs Venezuela hints at limited succession planning, if any.”

....“It is not a criticism. It is his style,” said the first source familiar with the president’s Venezuela thinking. “Pull the trigger and then figure out how it works.

In this case, he added, Mr Trump and his team were particularly incensed by the way Mr Maduro had responded to US demands by dancing in public.

"At some point here, he did feel that sometimes he was being mocked,” he said, confirming previous reports by the New York Times.