Crisis in Venezuela

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China had extended over $50 billion in loans over the past decade. The National Assembly had already declared that many of these debts were undertaken without its approval as required by Venezuela's Constitution, and therefore are illegitimate.

If Maduro's regime collapses soon, there will be thinking in Beijing that this was another attack by the U.S. against their interests, never mind of course that these debts were totally unpayable.

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There is no such thing as a "right to self-determination" for dictatorships. A non-democratic regime has the exact same amount of legitimacy in ruling over people as a foreign country (ie, zero).

So I guess Adolf was correct in invading Poland (ruled by a slightly less nasty ethno-nationalist dictatorship) in 1939? What about Mussolini's invasion of Greece? Japan's invasion of China?

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The Afghanistan invasion was a complete waste of U.S. and NATO effort and lives. If the purpose was strictly to kill Bin Laden and destroy Al-Qaeda, then the U.S. could have done so without risking a single life.

They could have simply offered to deposit $1 billion in the Swiss bank account of the Pakistani military general who delivers Bin Laden's corpse to the U.S. embassy in Islamabad. Smaller bounties would be offered to other Al-Qaeda leaders.

It would have cost just $10 billion to avenge 9/11, without costing a single U.S. life or jeopardizing NATO's legitimacy, or burdening the west with an intractable problem.