What does "kinetic" mean now? According to Merriam Webster:
Ever watch a top spin? Or see one pool ball collide with another and send it across the felt? When you do, you’re witnessing kinetic energy—the energy of something in motion. Kinetics is a branch of science that deals with the effects of forces upon the motions of material bodies, and something described as kinetic has to do with the motion of material bodies and the forces associated with them. Both words were adopted in the 19th century from the Greek word kinetikos (meaning "of motion") for use in the field of physics, but the adjective kinetic proved too apt for broader application, and by the 1930s it was being used to describe people and things full of literal and figurative energy as well.
But recently, every time we blow up a fishing boat, it's a "kinetic action". And then yesterday:
Hours later, Mr. Lee said that Mr. Rubio had called him to tell him that “the kinetic action we saw tonight was deployed to protect and defend those executing the arrest warrant.” He added: “This action likely falls within the president’s inherent authority under Article II of the Constitution to protect U.S. personnel from an actual or imminent attack.”
So perhaps now "kinetic" does not mean "of or relating to the motion of material bodies and the forces and energy associated therewith." It's evidently become just a nice way of describing the action of "blowing shit up".
"Legal Issues Raised by Trump’s Seizure of Maduro, Explained"
Related: "The country is on a better track; theres a plan in place. Have patience, give it a year or so.." OK... That's delusional. There is no plan in place. The regime is still the same regime it was under Maduro, without Maduro. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=177142214
The United States has ousted the leader of a regime that wasn’t to its liking. So now what?
January 5, 2026
IMAGE WASHINGTON, DC - JANUARY 04: U.S. President Donald Trump walks... (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
When Americans awoke on Saturday to learn the United States had invaded Venezuela and kidnapped its president, they likely expected their nation’s elected officials to offer an explanation about why we had done this.
After months of military buildup and activity in the Caribbean, it wasn’t a surprise that the U.S. had finally decided to embark on a crusade to bring down Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. What was stupefying was that America’s latest regime-change operation was apparently designed to leave the regime intact.
Helpfully, President Donald Trump duly appeared with his top Cabinet officials on Saturday to clarify everything. Among the range of casus belli he offered were the drug war (“those drugs mostly come from a place called Venezuela”); immigration (“they sent everybody bad into the United States”); terrorism (“a ceaseless campaign of violence, terror, and subversion”); even the altruistic promotion of American ideals (“we want peace, liberty, and justice for the great people of Venezuela”).
Oh … and oil. “As everyone knows the oil business in Venezuela has been a bust, a total bust for a long period of time. They were pumping almost nothing by comparison to what they could have been pumping,” Trump said, vowing that U.S. businesses would go to Venezuela and “start making money for the country.”
Well, pick your poison as to which of these you believe to be the real reason for the military intervention — or make up another. There are several that seem equally as plausible as anything offered: a need to counter Chinese influence in the Americas; a strategy to undermine Cuba; a balm to Trump’s ego in the face of Nicolás Maduro’s dancing defiance… Maybe just an uncontrollable urge to demonstrate unadulterated badassery, ’Murica-style, after decades of frustration and failure in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It’s in light of those failures that the most surprising thing to come out of Saturday’s press conference was the outright declaration that America was taking over in Caracas.
“We’re going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition,” Trump said, later adding: “We’re not afraid of boots on the ground if we have to have them.”
Many onlookers could not have been more stunned if a ’roid-raging Uncle Sam had kicked in the door and poleaxed them between the eyes with the Stars and Stripes. Here was an American president openly ordering regime change and admitting to installing a puppet — and it wasn’t even being couched in diplomatic words or shrouded in high ideals. It was in the open. America is taking over Venezuela. Why? To make money from its oil. How? Well, through Delta Force and then… a shrug and a wave of the hand vaguely in the direction of the State Department.
“[Secretary of State] Marco [Rubio]’s working on that directly,” Trump said, noting that Venezuela’s deputy president — a regime loyalist — appeared to have taken over after Maduro disappeared into the night sky with several new American acquaintances. “He just had a conversation with her, and she’s essentially willing to do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again.”
It was unfortunate that mere hours later, the woman in question — Venezuela’s Interim President Delcy Rodríguez — denied in a televised speech that she would cooperate with the gringos. “There is only one president in Venezuela, and his name is Nicolás Maduro.”
Many anti-regime Venezuelans were initially thrilled that Maduro had been ousted, but were far gloomier about the fact that Rodríguez was now in charge — and that Washington’s decapitation strike seems not to have taken the head off the snake, but removed a single head from a hydra. Maduro is gone, his regime is still in power.
“This is the first time that I find myself wondering if I am on the opposite side of U.S. policy,” one Venezuela opposition activist tells Rolling Stone. “The U.S. now backs the regime, instead of opposing it,” the activist says.
They were certain that the situation was in flux, however, saying they believed the Trump administration would deal with “whoever is easiest to manipulate, corrupt, and make deals with.”
“What is the strategy? Who do they want to actually be in charge?” asks a former American special operations soldier with expertise in South America, who formerly worked in the region.
He says that mistrust inside Maduro’s regime will now begin to peak, with top officials convinced that at least one of their compatriots is secretly working with the Americans to take charge of the country. With Maduro gone, a shakeup is inevitable and could lead to internal conflict — possibly even civil war.
“We’re in for a roller-coaster ride of pretenders to the throne. But anyone who gets in with Washington’s blessing will lack legitimacy,” the special operations soldier observes, saying he believes the one thing that could really unite Venezuelans is opposition to U.S. control. “After destabilizing the country, what does Washington want?”
What, indeed.
One couldn’t have scripted a scenario more perfectly tailored to showcase American military might than the raid to abduct Maduro. All of the elite elements of the U.S. military and national security apparatus were brought to bear. It was an eloquent testament to the trillions of dollars America has spent on advanced weaponry, coupled with decades of hands-on experience conducting special operations.
That Washington has tools of military power that outclass any competitor is unquestionable. The problem is that tactical victories do not guarantee strategic success. The idea that a country can simply swoop out of the blue and change another government to its liking through force of arms without complication is an illusion — see America in Iraq or Afghanistan, or Russia in Chechnya or Ukraine.
Many commentators and critics are focused on the wider implications of the raid on Venezuela, its legality, or the idea that it will usher in a new era of realpolitik as described by Thucydides, where the “the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”
What, such commentators ask, is to stop Russia or China from doing the same, in Ukraine or in Taiwan?
You needn’t be a cynic to think the answer to that question has less to do with the norms of international law than it does with pure military capability. Indeed, Russia tried several times to capture President Volodymyr Zelensky in the early days of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February and March 2022. It failed, at great cost to its special forces units.
Trump’s foray into Venezuela was unquestionably a military success. Its wider implications remain to be seen. But it is another step toward an unrestrained imperial presidency, actively working to dismantle a global system America itself created, as it sows chaos at home and abroad.
Paper shields alone have never kept the powerful from preying upon weaker neighbors, and most world leaders cast aside legality and morality when it suits their interests to do so. Trump is not the first. The international order America has long championed is a system of double standards, hypocritically applied or cast aside to suit Washington’s whims.
That it was a system that benefited the United States is rejected by MAGA true believers. They argue that, as most nations follow their self-interest, the era of America First is at least a more honest system of international relations.
You can also call this system the law of the jungle.
But of course, none of the animals in the jungle have nukes.
The Brazen Illegality of Trump’s Venezuela Operation
"Legal Issues Raised by Trump’s Seizure of Maduro, Explained "Trump’s blockade of sanctioned Venezuelan oil raises new questions about legality""
A scholar of international law on the implications of the U.S. arrest of President Nicolás Maduro.
By Isaac Chotiner January 3, 2026
On Saturday morning, President Donald Trump announced that the United States military, working with American law-enforcement officials, had carried out a strike in Venezuela, capturing the country’s President, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores. Maduro was indicted in a federal court in New York for his role in what the Administration claims is a narco-terrorism conspiracy. At a press conference later on Saturday, Trump said, “We are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition.” He also said that he was not concerned about “boots on the ground,” referring to an American military presence.
I spoke by phone on Saturday morning with Oona Hathaway, a professor at Yale Law School and the director of its Center for Global Legal Challenges. She is also the president-elect of the American Society of International Law. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed whether Maduro can legally be tried in American courts, the long history of U.S. meddling in Latin America, and what makes Trump’s decision so uniquely dangerous.
What is the legal basis, such as it is, for this action?
Unfortunately, I don’t think there is a legal basis for what we’re seeing in Venezuela. There are certainly legal arguments that the Administration is going to make, but all the arguments that I’ve heard so far don’t hold water. None of them really justify what the President seems to have ordered to take place in Venezuela.
What are the arguments that you’ve heard from either people in the Administration or from their supporters?
We’re still in the early hours, but the arguments that have been made in the run-up to this full-scale effort have largely focussed on self-defense against drug traffickers, who they claim are being supported or maybe even directed by Maduro and his administration. The problem is that that really doesn’t work under international law. There is a right of self-defense under the United Nations charter, which allows states to use force in self-defense against an armed attack. But it’s never been used for something like drug trafficking. And so all of these boat strikes that have been taking place over the past couple of months, which have been justified as self-defense, don’t fall within anything that anyone would recognize as self-defense under international law. Self-defense generally requires that there’s actually an armed attack. And it seems like they’re making a similar argument here to justify the capture of Maduro and the use of force on land in Venezuela.
What do you think of the argument that lots of people in America die from drug overdoses and so this is a form of self-defense?
Look, when the U.N. charter was written, eighty years ago, it included a critical prohibition on the use of force by states. States are not allowed to decide on their own that they want to use force against other states. It was meant to reinforce this relatively new idea at the time that states couldn’t just go to war whenever they wanted to. In the old world, the pre-U.N. charter world, it would have been fine to use force if you felt like drug trafficking was hurting you, and you could come up with legal justification that that was the case. But the whole point of the U.N. charter was basically to say, “We’re not going to go to war for those reasons anymore.”
The charter included a very narrow exception, which was an exception for the use of self-defense. The idea there was that surely we shouldn’t have to wait for the Security Council to authorize a use of force in order to defend ourselves if we’re attacked. But that was meant to be a narrow exception.
If drug trafficking is a reasonable justification, then a whole range of possible arguments can be made that basically mean that self-defense is no longer a real exception. It’s the new rule. Why couldn’t you make the same argument about communicable diseases? There’s bird flu coming from a country, and therefore we have a legal justification for the use of military force. Once we start going down that road, the idea that there’s any limit evaporates. I mean, yes, drugs are horrific. Do they cause loss of life in the United States? Absolutely. There’s no doubt about that. It’s a terrible scourge, but the idea that because drugs are coming from a country it justifies an invasion and a change of administration in that country basically gets rid of any kind of limits on the use of force.
What other arguments have you heard from the Administration?
One of the claims is that Maduro is not, in fact, the leader of Venezuela. This is something that they’ve been saying for a while now—that he’s not the legitimate leader of the country, that they don’t recognize him as the head of state. And that might justify his seizure and indictment, although using military force to do that would not be justified. I don’t know how they get from there to an argument that they can use military force in Venezuela.
What do you mean, exactly, about his “seizure and indictment”? Venezuela had an election. It was not a free election. He declared himself President, and he’s broadly recognized as the President of Venezuela, but, again, he was not freely elected by the people of Venezuela. That could justify his indictment in an American court?
I should back up. As part of this military operation, at least one of the key goals seems to have been the capture of Maduro and his wife, who have been indicted for criminal charges in the Southern District of New York. The only way they can do that is if they’re claiming that he’s not a head of state, because heads of state get immunity and heads of state are not subject to criminal prosecution in the domestic courts of other states. That’s just a basic rule of international law. The United States has long recognized it.
So you were not saying that the fact that he stole an election per se means you can grab him and try him in an American court but, rather, that if he were not a head of state, that would at least allow for trying him in an American court, which normally would not be the case?
Right. So if he’s not actually a head of state, then head-of-state immunity doesn’t apply. And it’s connected to this broader question of the use of military force in that it may be that they would make a claim—although I haven’t yet seen this—that because he’s not the legitimate head of state that somehow they have a legal authority to use force to grab him. But, again, the two don’t connect. So the problem is that merely saying that he’s not head of state doesn’t then justify the use of military force in Venezuela.
Five years ago, Maduro was federally indicted in a Manhattan court on charges of narco-terrorism and cocaine trafficking.
Yes. The 2020 indictment argued that he and several other Venezuelan officials had participated in a violent narco-terrorism conspiracy with various non-state-actor groups, including the FARC, which is a Colombian group, and that that had been connected to drug trafficking in the United States. [A new indictment, unsealed on Saturday, reiterated the previous charges and added Maduro’s wife and son to the list of defendants.]
So if Maduro goes to trial in an American court, is this going to be a contested legal issue about whether he can even be tried based on whether he is the head of state of Venezuela? Is that something that American courts are going to have to weigh in on?
Yes, it is something that the American courts are going to have to weigh in on. It definitely is the case that his lawyers will make the argument that he’s a sitting head of state at the time that he was seized and that he remains the sitting head of state and therefore, under international law and under U.S. law, he should be given immunity, which means that he’s not subject to the jurisdiction of U.S. courts and can’t be criminally charged. This has come up once before with the criminal indictment of Manuel Noriega, the former leader of Panama, when the U.S. invaded Panama in 1989 and seized Noriega and then brought him back to the United States and indicted him for drug smuggling and money laundering.
Back then, Noriega argued that he enjoyed head-of-state immunity, and the executive branch argued that he didn’t because the United States had not recognized him as a legitimate leader of Panama. That gives us a hint as to what is likely to happen in this case. My guess is that the United States will argue that it’s never recognized Maduro as a legitimate leader of Venezuela and therefore he doesn’t receive immunity. And the courts are going to be in the position of having to decide whether they defer to the executive branch’s determination that he’s not head of state or whether they make an independent assessment of his legitimacy as a leader of Venezuela.
How did the Noriega case play out?
In the Noriega case, the courts deferred to the executive branch. They said they were going to accept that the executive branch said that he’s not a constitutional head of state, and therefore he can, in fact, be prosecuted.
Seems quite possible they will do so again now.
It seems likely they’re going to do the same thing. I mean, this is a weaker argument on the part of the executive branch.
Why weaker?
Maduro did clearly seize power after losing the election. But, nonetheless, he’s been acting as the head of state for quite a while, and he’s been recognized by a number of other countries as a legitimate head of state. He’s been exercising the powers of head of state. He’s been directing the military. He’s been running the country. Noriega had served as an unelected military dictator alongside various Panamanian Presidents. So he had a weaker claim to be head of state. But, to be clear, none of that justified the use of force.
So, according to international law, if you are acting like the head of state and have the powers of the head of state, you are the head of state?
There’s some uncertainty, but generally speaking, under international law, if you exercise effective control, you are basically running the country.
The idea that Trump can basically decide who is the head of state of a given country is absurd and terrifying to me. At another level, there does seem to be something absurd and even terrifying about the idea that someone who is not elected can become the leader of a country and then will be recognized as the leader of that country and receive the immunities afforded to heads of state. How do you think about that?
It’s an area of law that is unsettled and can create real problems. The dangerous thing here is the idea that a President can just decide that a leader is not legitimate and then invade the country and presumably put someone in power who is favored by the Administration. If that were the case, that’s the end of international law, that’s the end of the U.N. charter, that’s the end of any kind of legal limits on the use of force. And if the President can do that, what’s to stop a Russian leader from doing it, or a Chinese leader from doing it, or anyone with the power to do so? We’ve been supporting Ukraine, and its war against Russia, and Putin has been making very much the same argument about Zelensky.
You’re right to point out, however, absolutely, that there’s something that seems also wrong from a democratic perspective about the idea that whoever manages to control a country somehow gets to be in charge of it, even if they’re not legitimate, even if they haven’t won the election. This has been a real source of tension in international law. Who gets to decide who is a legitimate leader? Who gets to make the decision that they should use military force to address that problem?
Let me just quickly go back to Noriega, because this does seem very similar to what George H. W. Bush did in Panama. In that case, a bad guy was running a country, the country’s not in great shape, there was a long and sordid history between the country and the U.S., and the U.S. decided to overthrow the person and arrest him. Do you think this is a good analogy for what we’re seeing now? Were there major differences?
Yeah, it’s similar. There were a number of arguments made by the Bush people that were similar. There were some differences back then, and there was also a claim that the Panama Canal treaties gave a legal justification for the invasion, but otherwise the arguments are very similar. It’s important to note that the U.N. General Assembly condemned that invasion as a flagrant violation of international law, and I think that was a correct assessment. It was clearly illegal, and we’re doing something clearly illegal again here in Venezuela. So, yes, it does seem like we’re following a fairly similar playbook.
When I e-mailed you suggesting that we do an interview, you responded and mentioned the Monroe Doctrine. Was there anything else you wanted to say about that?
What’s troubling here is that it seems that President Trump may be making good on his promise and his national-security strategy that he issued last month to revive the Monroe Doctrine. The Monroe Doctrine was basically a justification by the United States to exercise force in Latin America. And that was renounced by President Franklin Roosevelt as part of a shift away from the idea that states could use force whenever they wanted to. It was an endorsement of the idea that we’re outlawing war as a way of solving our problems. But Trump’s claim that he’s creating a Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine suggests that this is not just a one-off. The Panama invasion was at least a one-off.
In his press conference, Trump said that the United States would “run the country.” And he made it clear that he was not “afraid” to put boots on the ground—for years, if necessary. That’s nothing like the operation to seize Noriega from Panama, which was short-lived. And it’s nothing like anything Trump has done before today. His previous illegal uses of force were all over shortly after they began. The scale of the operation that will be required is massive, and it means putting U.S. soldiers at long-term risk.
He also claimed that we would take the oil in Venezuela. He even suggested that some of the oil would be taken to pay the United States back for oil “stolen” from us—presumably a reference to nationalization of the oil companies in the nineteen-seventies. That is looting, plain and simple, and clearly unlawful. It also makes clear that this is not about what’s best for the Venezuelan people. It’s all about the oil.
Yes, Trump also just said on Fox News that this was a message to Mexico and that his Administration may have to follow up by doing something in Mexico. I don’t think he meant removing Mexico’s President, Claudia Sheinbaum, but still.
Yeah, that’s the danger. And, just to be clear, this is catastrophic as a shift away from a world in which we deal with our problems peacefully toward a world in which we deal with our problems using military force.
I’m not sure that the United States for any extended period of time has ever dealt with its problems in Latin America peacefully.
But it has not invaded countries and got rid of their leaders as a way of dealing with problems like drug trafficking. This is a different level.
It did support numerous coups.
Yeah, absolutely. Look, the U.S. has not got a perfect record. There’s no doubt about that, and it has betrayed its values many times, but this is of a different order. This is just a blatant throwing-the-whole-thing-out and making a claim to be able to use force whenever it wants.
Trump does some things that are really uniquely bad and other things that are in line with the behavior of past American Presidents, but that feel more disturbing because of how he goes about them. It’s interesting to think about how this fits in one of those two boxes.
It is telling that, in that Fox interview, he was very dismissive of any suggestion that Congress should somehow have been involved in this. And, of course, it’s important to remember that it’s not just international law that’s an issue here; it’s also U.S. domestic law and particularly constitutional law that requires the President to go to Congress to seek authorization before using force against another country. [At the press conference, Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, said that this was “not the kind of mission you can do congressional notification on,” characterizing it as “largely a law-enforcement” operation.] And part of what’s troubling here is not just that the President has used force in clear violation of domestic law and international law but that it’s clear he couldn’t care less about the fact that he’s breaking these rules. We’re talking not just about the U.N. charter but about the U.S. Constitution.
And that just suggests there may be no limits, that he’s just going to do what he thinks is warranted based on his own kind of reasoning, as opposed to any kind of constraints or legal limits or having to seek advice or consent from the international community or the U.S. Congress. That, I think, is what’s so scary about this. ♦
Trump Takes America’s ‘Imperial Presidency’ to a New Level ------ "Donald Trump’s ‘chilling effect’ on free speech and dissent is threatening US democracy "MAGA death threats drive Trump agenda - Violent Threats Against Members of Congress Spiked as Senate Considered Trump’s Nominees" [...] Nearly 250 years after American colonists threw off their king, this is arguably the closest the country has come during a time of general peace to the centralized authority of a monarch. Mr. Trump takes it upon himself to reinterpret a constitutional amendment .. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/05/us/politics/supreme-court-trump-birthright-citizenship.html .. and to eviscerate agencies and departments .. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/11/upshot/congress-doge-cuts-mystery.html .. created by Congress. He dictates to private institutions how to run their affairs. He sends troops into American streets and wages an unauthorized war against nonmilitary boats in the Caribbean. He openly uses law enforcement for what his own chief of staff calls “score settling” against his enemies, he dispenses pardons to favored allies and he equates criticism to sedition punishable by death. [...] Strong and Weak The presidency is a living organism, shaped by the person inhabiting it, whether it be self-styled men of action like Andrew Jackson and Theodore Roosevelt, father figures like Dwight D. Eisenhower, legislative wizards like Lyndon B. Johnson or captivating communicators like Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama. More than the sum of the clauses of the Constitution’s Article II, it is an evolving construct, one that has adapted to the ever-changing challenges of a complex and fast-moving world. P - Mr. Trump wears it like a cloak. Power is the leitmotif of his second term. For the record, he disclaims royal aspirations. “I’m not a king,” he said after millions of Americans took to the streets in “No Kings” demonstrations in October. But at the same time, he embraces the comparison, at least in part to troll his critics but also, it seems, because he enjoys the notion. { = He and his staff have posted images of him in monarchical regalia, including an A.I.-generated illustration of him wearing a crown and flying a fighter jet labeled “KING TRUMP” that dumps excrement on protesters. He delighted when the South Koreans gave him a replica of an ancient golden crown. “LONG LIVE THE KING!” he wrote about himself on social media. [...] “Even Nixon was a guy who got that there were limits that he had to tread carefully around even as he was trying to push them,” Mr. Schlesinger added. “Whereas Trump, he’s not interested in limits. And whether it’s through a conscious strategy or just unconscious cunning, by being so open about it, it normalizes it to some extent.” Learning Curve That may stem from Mr. Trump’s distinctive ability to overcome obstacles and scandals that would hobble any other politician. He was impeached twice, indicted four times, convicted of 34 felonies, found liable for sexual abuse and found liable for business fraud while his firm was convicted of criminal tax evasion. Yet he won a stunning, against-the-odds comeback election victory. The Supreme Court even granted him and his successors broad immunity that it had never bestowed on any previous president. P - And so Mr. Trump evidently sees little reason to restrain himself. He has pursued an everything-everywhere-all-at-once strategy of pushing policies, even knowing that some of them may be rejected — a gamble that paid off, from his vantage point. As it turned out, not only has Congress acquiesced to vast intrusions on its traditional spheres of authority, most notably spending, but even the courts have been more of a speed bump than a stop sign. P - That owes a lot to the team Mr. Trump has built around him, one that cheers him on rather than holds him back. [...] If Democrats win the midterm elections next year, they will surely use their newfound power to push back further against Mr. Trump. Some, like Mr. Flake, predict that even some Republicans will begin to speak out after filing deadlines for possible primary challengers have passed. And legal analysts expect the Supreme Court to clip Mr. Trump’s wings on tariffs, and possibly on birthright citizenship. P - Russell Riley, a presidential historian at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, acknowledged the nation’s long history of expanding presidential authority. But, he added, “we have an equally robust history of cramming the presidency back into its constitutional box once war or economic crisis has passed.” P - That history “strongly suggests that what we are seeing today will not, in fact, endure.” Is that a guarantee? “I’m not smart enough to know the answer to that.” https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=177090140
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