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September 1, 2005
Self-Destructive Behavior From Hugo Chavez
(But what's new about that, you may well ask.)
Brian Dunn notes some provocative behavior by Venezuela's tin-pot Leftist dictator: provoking the Dutch over their Caribbean islands close to Venezuela. Perhaps Chavez thinks that the Dutch are too weak to respond if he does decide to invade, as Argentina thought (wrongly) about the British.
In actual fact, he right: the Dutch have no expeditionary capability. But they do have a different asset: the Dutch are in fact a part of NATO, and those islands are not just nominal, but actual, Dutch territory, to the extent that the Dutch citizens of islands like Aruba have full representation in the Dutch parliament. One of the interesting parts of the NATO treaty is that an attack on one NATO member is, under Article V, an attack on all NATO members. The US is also a NATO member, with significant expeditionary military capability stationed within a few days of Venezuela. The US also has some grudges of its own against Chavez, who is one of the most destabilizing and anti-democratic leaders in the world, interfering throughout Central and South America with his buddy, Fidel Castro.
If I were Chavez, I'd think very, very carefully before picking on the Dutch.
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