On one of my three trips to Venezuela in the 1980s, my father and I traveled by car, with a couple of his associates in the bean industry, from Caracas to the city of Barquisimeto. The highways were in good shape, a reflection of Venezuela’s oil boom. My father did most of the speaking, about what I don’t recall. The trip was several hours; Google Maps currently gives it as a drive of close to, perhaps exceeding, five hours, longer than I’d have guessed but possibly indicating those highways nowadays aren’t so good. Moreover, this route is small compared to Venezuela overall. I’ve mentioned previously that war with Venezuela’s a terrible idea, but that long-ago ride hints at what a quagmire it’d be.
Back then, my inclination, in prospective conflicts between the US and foreign powers, was to see dangers in inaction, weakness, “appeasement.” I didn’t imagine aggressive, criminal acts by an American administration, such as blowing alleged drug-traffickers out of the water in disregard of US and international law. I traveled by boat in the Caribbean frequently in the 1980s and remember one time on the 46-foot fishing vessel of the family I visited when a US Coast Guard cutter, visible far away, crackled onto the radio with questions about who we were, what we were transporting. This was routine patrolling. They evidently saw no reason for closer inspection or interception, and our tour continued.
I recently watched The Diplomat, which has run three seasons on Netflix with a fourth in the works. I found the series engrossing, but had trouble swallowing a central premise, of an American president participating in an action extraordinarily dangerous to US alliances and national interests with a flimsy rationale. Then a leading character, seasoned in diplomacy, told the president, apparently sincerely, they would’ve done the same thing. So stupid! And yet not necessarily worse than the Trump administration’s criminality in the Caribbean and possible war against Venezuela, or lurching attempts to pressure Ukraine into submission to Russia. Yet Secretary of State Marco Rubio, at a Cabinet meeting praising his boss as the only person able to bring peace to Russia/Ukraine, as President Trump seemed to doze off next to him, was a scene the scriptwriters of The Diplomat might’ve rejected as implausible.
Rational decision-making is elusive, both because problems are complex and because people aren’t rational. Our views of the world are shaped by idiosyncratic personal experiences. One might train an AI on massive data, but it won’t replicate the ideas an individual derives from their own life. This can be beneficial. Perhaps I’ve some insight into Venezuela or the Caribbean from long-ago travels. I’ve written about math, epitome of an abstract subject, but one factor in my take on it was a comment by a math teacher in high school. He said “first, second, third,” and asked the students what came next. When the answer given was “fourth,” he said the answer was “Lexington,” the avenue.
There’s a distinction between “complicated” problems and “complex” ones. Complicated problems have many parts that are individually straightforward to resolve, even if the overall effort is time-consuming. Complex problems resist reduction into manageable parts, because of some tension or uncertainty as to how the parts interrelate, or how to define the problem, or whether there even is a problem and, if so, whose problem it is. My teacher’s ruse made a point that the stated problem wasn’t adequately defined.
Sometimes I become convinced of something just from listening to the arguments of people who disagree with it. In math, a more rigorous version of this is called “proof by contradiction.” You prove, for example, that the square root of two isn’t a rational number (expressible as a ratio of whole numbers) by starting with an assumption that it is rational, which means there are whole numbers a and b such that a/b is the simplest form of a fraction that equals the square root of two, but this requires those numbers can’t both be even, yet it turns out they are, and thus the square root of two must be irrational.
In politics, analogously, some arguments stand as evidence against themselves. The administration’s case on Venezuela, narcotrafficking and the Caribbean attacks is rife with contradiction: that lethal action is needed because this is war, while approval from Congress isn’t needed because it isn’t war; that suspected narcotraffickers are such a menace they should be killed on sight, and Venezuela’s government must be held accountable for criminals that may operate from its territory, but “If somebody sells drugs in that country, that doesn’t mean you arrest the president and put him in jail for the rest of his life,” and so the ex-president of Honduras, convicted of narcotrafficking, gets a pardon.