God Is Poor - War Against Venezuela

War Against Venezuela: Immoral, Foolish, and, To Put It Politely, Not Terribly Clever

By quarantining Venezuelan oil shipments, the United States may be committing an act of war. As a complex systems scientist, I’d love to discuss morality as strategy and why strong nations benefit from promoting nonviolent conflict resolution, but war against Venezuela can, and must, be rejected on even more straightforward grounds.

First, if we fight Venezuela, the People’s Republic of China probably gets Taiwan, with its irreplaceable advanced microchip manufacturing capacity, or we may all get nuclear war. The United States would need to be in peak military condition to fight a conventional war against mainland China, which has invested heavily in its armed forces. War against Venezuela would reduce our readiness to fight elsewhere, preventing our conventional armed forces from credibly deterring mainland Chinese ambition.

The readiness of our reserve forces is already being degraded by assignment to domestic patrol duties. National Guard personnel have put their lives on hold and submitted to stressful conditions. These deployments must also be taking an unusually high toll on morale, as some deployed soldiers must be among those who regard the deployments as wrong.

Now consider the fact that some U.S. sailors and air personnel must question the morality of executing helpless boat operators in the Caribbean Sea, whether or not the targets were criminals. Antiship missiles and bombs aren’t tools of law enforcement. Our nation’s servicemembers have consciences we are wrong to tax.

Speaking of antiship missiles, Venezuela has some of those. We’re dangling the only operational vessel in our latest class of aircraft carrier in front of that antiship arsenal and anything else Venezuela might obtain. We’ll see how much United States influence around the world evaporates if the USS Gerald R. Ford gets knocked out of any fight, demonstrating what many can only suspect at this point, that United States forces are highly vulnerable under the current conditions of warfare. Besides, chess players will recall why they don’t bring out their queen at the first opportunity.

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Image: Complexity arises from a small number of simple elements iterated many times and from the relationships among the iterations. By focusing on only a few of the iterations or ignoring the relationships, rapid progress can be made, as in reductionist science, but only at the cost of missing the big picture, which complex systems science considers. Looking at the whole global picture clearly shows the grave and potentially calamitous self-injury the United States does by attempting to provoke war with Venezuela. (Photo was taken by the author on June 5, 2025, in the New York State Capitol.)

A less sophisticated complex systems scientist might entertain the hypothesis that the people of the United States are a bunch of idiots for allowing our current government to sabotage our nation’s interests. After all, we could shut down the United States at any time if enough of us refused to do our jobs. In fact, the number of striking workers in certain fields required to cripple the economy is surprisingly small.

However, unlike many complex systems scientists, I’m also a trained teacher. I learned from my educational psychology professor that intelligence is a construct, a subjective model of complex phenomena. I know he was an excellent teacher, because I still can’t forgive him for having changed my mind so many times.

It takes great intelligence of a certain kind to suppress one’s natural moral instincts right now. I’m asking my fellow people of the United States to stop being so clever and start doing what we know to be right, which happens to be strategically wise, too.

I should acknowledge that for some readers in the United States, encouraging or permitting war against Venezuela might be good strategy. They, their friends, or their employers might have vast sums of money invested in arms manufacturing firms. They might be agents of the Chinese, Russian, or North Korean government. They might be some kind of Noam Chomsky disciples who think that the United States has been a murderous bully since at least the 1950s and should be taken down several pegs. They might oppose unipolarity, the domination of Earth by any single nation, on the grounds that domination is inherently bad.

I, personally, am a member of the latter two groups. Nevertheless, we, too, must oppose war against Venezuela, on moral grounds. That’s another essay.

War against Venezuela is neither smart, nor wise, nor just. Do something now.

James Lyons Walsh dropped out of high school, out of the top graduate program in condensed matter physics in the United States, and out of science after completing a doctorate, with a dissertation in fundamental physics, at the University at Albany, State University of New York. He has completed the Complex Systems Summer School of the Santa Fe Institute and holds a CAS in adolescence education from The College of Saint Rose. Since 2020, he has published, posted, and circulated essays and letters to promote human survival against the multiple, mutually reinforcing threats against it, including overconsumption of resources, hatred of the poor, hatred of wildlife, and modern warfare. He blogs at proudfatherofnone.org, godispoor.org, momshair.org, and fpmalbany.org.