If the acting president wants, supposedly yes. Emperor Bush II made it thusly, upon going into Iraq for the second time, this time based on lies (and resultingly, starting up ISIS).

(Note: president Bush I had gone into Iraq based on a valid UN resolution due to Iraqi agression.)

The text of the Act has been codified as subchapter II of chapter 81 of title 22, United States Code. The act gives the president power to use “all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release of any U.S. or allied personnel being detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request of the International Criminal Court”.[3]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members'_Protection_Act

If they had something to fight for, I think they would.

In reality, they have Maduro (who has suppressed a popular uprising against himself, and likely didn’t win the last elections) and 20% of inflation per month.

If the US does attack, predictably, only hardcore fans of Maduro will oppose. But the force that Trump has sent is not capable of occupying Venezuela, only striking it and incapacitating the government.

But an attack is an attack - if Trump does order an attack, I have free real estate to sell him… in the Hague, because international agression is prohibited.

Personal suspicion: maybe in Alaska, one man told another: “you can get Ukraine” - “and you can get Venezuela”. One of the men may think he’ll get Caracas in 3 days and will be met with flowers. The other guy may hope that Caracas looks like Kyiv, which he’s been “getting” already for 3 years. But I doubt if Caracas looks like that.

Regardless of what will happen, the story about narco-terrorism is hot air. Smuggling is not war. Smugglers can and should be arrested, not bombed with drones. If this becomes a cause for war, then war will be based on fiction and lies.

The background: Ukraine didn’t have 30 years to refine its cruise missiles and long range strike drones - they built them in 3 years.

There are many ways to make a missile navigate.

• it may follow terrain features (hard, you need to thoroughly map a country using a fleet of satellites)
• it may take readings from a satnav system (this can be jammed)
• it may scan for mobile phone towers and match their ID codes to a map

Once a missile has the direction of 2…3 towers confirmed, it knows where it is - and where to go. Crashing into the final target uses machine vision, but getting there does not.

As a result, Russia tries to counter them by shutting down mobile networks. Not sure if it works. Going by the news, doesn’t seem to work very well.

As for how to avoid exfiltration of mobile network data - hopeless. People have so much spyware and crap on their phones that you don’t need to put an agent on ground to get a list of towers. You just buy out a smartphone app from a shady supplier and develop it into a rootkit, or sell rooted phones on the cheap in the target country.

China is basically going the Marx route to communism.

Kindly, you need to educate yourself about the Chinese economy. If you insist on being an ultra-fan, then know your fandom. For a gentle start, look up the Gini coefficient for various countries from Wikipedia.

Gini coefficient of income inequality

…or just look for blue regions on the map. That’s where a socialist, communist or anarchist (genrally, a leftist) might approve of things economically speaking. One should note with curiosity that some of the blue regions are very poor GDP-wise, but some are very rich too.

China isn’t blue. In terms of inequality, China is in the same class as the US and Russia. It’s better than South American or South African economies, but far worse than the European average. Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Australia, Ukraine, almost any decently developed country beats China in equality, some of them with hands down. Nordic countries also.

Source of map

Poison has been a weapon for ages, so I fully agree.

The flip side of the coin: apparently, Poland has leverage on the US because the US doesn’t independently produce sufficient quantities of TNT.

I hope Poland considers using this leverage “to help the Trump administration make smarter decisions”.