Imagine if Hitler was removed before... Instead, foreign powers favored appeasement and trade; conservative elites thought they could control him, Nazi propaganda and terror consolidated power, and Germans were disillusioned with democracy after WW1.
> are you seriously saying Maduro had Hitler-like potential to ignite global war if we didn't stop him?
No, and in fact the comparison to Hitler felt out of place. I'm simply saying that it isn't as black and white that one should NEVER remove a head of state.
What I will concede is that catch 22 of not knowing how the future will play out, so how COULD you confidently and with wide agreement intervene BEFORE someone commits atrocities.
I'm still not convinced removing Hitler before his invasion of Poland would have been a good idea, it seems possible someone like Himmler would be just as capable of picking up Mein Kampf as an ideological framework to continue imperialism and kick off genocide. "Look what the Jews and communists did when we tried to stand up to them, they killed the leader of our movement," etc etc.
Once the genocide started though I do thing all considerations, including national stability and continuity, are lower priority than ending the genocide as fast as possible.
Like Hitler, Trump has (or rather, had, based on recent performance) the power of oratory. Himmler did not and I wonder if he would have been able to whip up the kind of fervor that Hitler did.
That's what made Trump so dangerous, it is insane that such terrible people have such a charismatic appeal. To me they are horrible men, to others they seem to come across as some kind of savior.
Basically, "leave it to the population to sort out themselves, even if they've lost the democratic means to do so," up until a government has gone so insane it's massacring its people, or other people.
So we should have done a much bigger intervention in Syria, much earlier? We should intervene in Sudan right now? We should finally intervene in Russia where they slaughter their own children and Ukrainians in a genocidal war of aggression? We should finally intervene in Palestine and destroy Hamas (and in Iran and destroy their Mullah-sponsors) who've committed a genocide on October 7th, killing thousands of Israelis and ten thousands of Palestinians?
From a purely moral standpoint, my answer would be "yes, absolutely." Unfortunately, most of these interventions are not practically possible. Taking out a dictator in US's backyard is so much easier (and easier to do bloodlessly) than any of these examples.
