General British politics discussion thread

Maduro should be transferred to the custody of the UN which will determine if and where he has charges to answer for.

This is not a competence of the UN and you full well know it is an utterly pointless idea. The UK already considers Maduro a criminal so I don't know why they would do this anyway.

The response has been relatively muted all across Europe as it would be quite an about face to call for the removal of Maduro and then call for sanctions because someone removed him…

I am aware it is obviously far more complicated than that, the motivations of the US are far from altruistic and the actions portend a potentially far more troublesome future. I think they are correct to focus on putting the pressure on the US now to put some kind of plan in place - ideally one that involves the political opposition. I don't think blowing up the relationship on the back of getting a murderous dictator who has been catastrophically bad for the country back into power is a good idea.

If the UN had any power or competence or was structurally capable of doing anything useful, Maduro would not have been in power. It has been functionally dead as a useful international organisation for decades at this point (and was never a useful organisation for keeping any of the UNSC5 in check in the first place).

Talk of emboldening authoritarian figures is silly, they are all doing this stuff anyway. It provides some meaningless rhetorical cover, little else. I don't condone what the US did, and it is clearly for nakedly materialistic reasons. However, deposing Maduro is, in and of itself, not a bad thing. If the UK can exert any pressure at all to give space to the legitimately elected opposition that is a far better use of their diplomacy than sabre rattling about globally catastrophic sanctions wars with the US.

The US never got a UN Resolution for their actions in Iraq. The UN is toothless precisely because it is incapable of any enforcement action. The last time it did anything close was the Korean war. You are yearning for something that never existed.

I don't know what response you expect. The response if he does similar in Greenland will be orders of magnitude higher, but no one is (rightly) going to eviscerate the global economy to go to bat for a dictator they consider illegitimate anyway.

I don't know what response you expect in the real world where the UK and Europe are not going to decimate the global economy (which is what sanctions on the US would do) over the removal of a illegitimate dictator that they didn't recognise and wanted gone in the first place. Thankfully no government and no potential government is that utterly stupid.

None of this is even remotely unprecedented. The US has done this before and there is no and has been no impediment to it constantly happening globally by countries with sufficient might. You need to ground your expectations in some semblance of reality to avoid your constant disappointments. The UK is not now, and has not been for about 100 years, in a position to do what you are suggesting. Unless you think this cause is worth mass privation and ultimately death across the continent.