What threat was maduro, Chavez, Cuba etc to America and Israel?
Gaddafi tried normalising relationships with both USA and Israel and see where that got him once he gave up WMD's.
I have promised
@Persian Gulf not to derail the thread anymore. So, after this, let's discuss the rest of it in the chill thread.
But seriously, which one of those countries are normal?
Cuba is a single-party authoritarian state running on communism when it's no longer a thing. It's suffering from political oppression, economic stagnation, incredible brain drain, energy cuts, etc. It hosts nuclear weapons aimed at mainland US. It is obviously a security threat to the US. Does this sound familiar?
Chavez increased state control over Venezuela's oil, but he remained in power until his death. Maduro was never as popular or charismatic as Chavez and was in power through consolidating political control and moving towards a one-party system. Again, similar to what Khamenei and the IRGC have been doing since the Green movement. He wasn't an immediate threat to the United States, but he cut the US profits from their oil industry and then did nothing to build a strong country to defend it. Does that sound familiar?
Young Ghaddafi was a true revolutionary figure and he didn't deserve his fate in my opinion. But as he got older, he continued to run his mouth for too long while signing humiliating agreements one after another and he did rule as a dictator over Libya. He was a comedic figure rather than a serious political leader. Any person that appears with dolled-up Slavic escorts on national TV is a joke.
In fact, that seems to be the common pattern for countries that befriend Russia and move to their camp. The difference between becoming a US lackey, like the late Shah, and a Soviet/Russia lackey, like the Ayatollah regime under the KGB-trained agent Khamenei, is that US lackeys at least get some level of progress and economic prosperity with a facade of democracy and normalcy. Russian lackeys get nothing but poverty, loudmouth leaders that want to rebel against the current world order, weird ideologies, and consolidation of power through corruption and tyranny.
The problem with these states is that they do not consider their population as anything other than inferior peasants who are entitled to no opinion or otherwise they will be labeled as traitors. There's not a shred of democracy in any of them. They're all corrupt and when foreign powers start to exert pressure on them, they sign the most humiliating agreements and trade their national security with a few more years in power (like the JCPOA). And they all will eventually have the same fate.
