Tobold's Blog

Wednesday, January 28, 2026

Abroad and Fromage

I am making good progress on my pile of loot from the Spiel Essen, and we played 2 more games from that pile: Abroad and Fromage.

Abroad offered some light fun, but the current BGG weight of 2.7 is an overestimation, the game is a lot less complex and strategic than that. While there is a huge stack of different cards, these cards don't combine into any engine. But as the cards usually give more victory points than other aspects of the game, what cards you draw and in which round you draw them makes a huge difference. So there is very little planning ahead, you just make the best out of the cards you are dealt every round. To me that felt a bit too random, but then I came last in both games I played, so maybe that is just my excuse.

The quality of the components of Abroad is a mixed bag: The cards with the photos of the various tourist spots in Europe are nice and good cardstock. They carry the travel theme very well. The main board is functional, but not pretty. And the player boards look and feel as if the game was still a prototype.

Fromage was a surprise, as it demonstrated the power of parallelization. Normally, a game of this medium complexity takes easily 2 hours, when one player plays after another, and everybody is waiting for their turn. In Fromage, the round game board is divided into quarters, and turns. With each player playing simultaneously in parallel on their own quarter, not needing to check what the others are doing, the whole game is over in 45 minutes, with very little waiting involved. Other games that take less than an hour are considerably less deep.

The component quality of Fromage is very good. After playing it once, I spent $10 on an upgrade with a neoprene mat and a plastic part that makes the board turn easier. It isn't strictly necessary, but helpful. Fromage comes with two cheese wedge shaped plastic trays that hold the resources, and the neoprene map fits between those diagonally in the box, so somebody obviously had thought things through. I didn't buy the luxury resource upgrade, as I found the cardboard resources practical enough.

Labels: Board Games

- posted by Tobold @ 9:22 PM Permanent Link (0) comments

Tuesday, January 27, 2026

Protests and political violence

Sometimes I regret that I stuck with outdated medium of blogging, and never made the move to creating video content on YouTube. Right now, I could make a great video overlaying footage of the events of the killing of Ashli Babbit with politicians and officials making comments about the killing of Alex Pretti, and vice versa. The reality of things is that one man's freedom fighter is another man's domestic terrorist, and what politicians say about a person's action depend mostly on which "side" that person is on, more than on what that person actually did.

The second amendment of the US constitution says that "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." That is in obvious contradiction of the state's monopoly on the legal use of force. At what point exactly does a crowd of armed civilians become a well regulated militia? Several of the January 6th protesters were charged with carrying firearms, so right wing politicians suggesting right now that protesters don't have the right to carry arms sounds very hypocritical.

Not that I believe that the protesters in Minnesota have a lot of moral superiority here. What they are protesting against is after all a legal law enforcement operation. A flawed law enforcement operation, certainly. But if one day the French police would decide to go to the Banlieu of Paris to arrest everybody there with an outstanding warrant, the scenes on the street would resemble very much what we are seeing in Minneapolis.

The underlying problem is a decade long lack of political courage from both sides. An estimated 14 million people, or 4% of the population of the US, is illegal immigrants, with many of them living in America for many years, even decades. I consider both possible views as politically valid: Either illegal immigrants should be pardoned and turned into legal citizens by some pathway, or they should be deported. Instead, politicians went with I call the cannabis approach: Keeping a widespread reality illegal on paper, but deciding not to let law enforcement take care of it.

A number of studies have shown that once you correct for socio-economic factors like poverty, immigrants are no more likely to be criminals than natives. There are millions of immigrants in the US whose only crime is to have entered the country illegally. The incarceration rate of the US is at around 0.6%, and that is one of the highest in the world. No state can have 4% of its population living outside the law. You end up in situations where people are "technically" illegal, but still pay taxes, and have driving licences. That is pretty stupid.

What needs to happen, and what is happening in many other countries, is that there is some sort of administrative procedure, even if it takes years, by which it is decided whether somebody can stay in the country, or whether he has to leave. The US has made it difficult on itself by sleeping on that, and accumulating the problem. Even if the administrative procedure would just cost $1,000, multiplied by 14 million that ends up being 14 billion dollars. And for $1,000 you probably only get a not very thorough check, where some decisions are arguably wrong, one way or another. But make the check more thorough, and it will cost even more, and take even longer. Germany currently has 175,000 administrative procedure deciding on asylum seekers, and it already takes a full year for each; the exact cost is unknown, but the "on paper" cost per procedure is €5,000. Now multiply that problem by two orders of magnitude, and you can see the size of the accumulated problem the US faces.

It would probably be a lot faster and cheaper to work with a general pardon and accelerated citizenship procedures for all illegal immigrants, but that option is politically difficult. America's politicians are doing their utmost to avoid American realizing that the US has a class problem, and so immigrants are a convenient scapegoat for low wages. Not to mention that illegal workers are potentially cheaper than legal ones, and can be denied various rights.

There is a lot of hypocrisy here on both sides. The left favors making illegal immigrants legal, while the right favors deporting them, but neither side has done very much about it in the past decades. So now we are at a point where a right-wing government enforcing existing law, admittedly heavy-handed, is seen by left-wing protesters as fascist. And even this heavy-handed approach in 2025 led only to about 400k deportations, which is potentially not even enough to keep the number of illegal immigrants in the US from growing. The solution proposed by the left, defunding ICE instead of solving the legal limbo problem of the illegal immigrants, isn't much better than the approach of the Trump administration. You can't have a rule of law based on non-enforcement of existing laws; laws that don't work or are considered unjust need to be changed, not ignored.

- posted by Tobold @ 11:31 AM Permanent Link (15) comments

Wednesday, January 21, 2026

Open world survival crafting base building

I got bored of Sengoku Dynasty relatively quickly. I liked the first 20 or so hours of the game, but when the task turned towards building multiple villages in different regions, while I was gathering and crafting less and less, my interest waned. So I looked at the tags that Steam described Sengoky Dynasty with: Open world, survival, crafting, base building, and looked what other games are out there that might be better suited to my personal preferences.

Now there are dozens of this kind of games, but a closer look revealed what the tags didn't tell: That there are a number of games which combine crafting and base building with some sort of automation, and there are other games which have no automation, and it is you who has to do all the gathering and crafting. To keep them apart, one has to look for clues: Games that have villagers, or other creatures living with you (e.g. Palworld), or factories (e.g. Satisfactory) are more likely to be of the automation kind of base building crafting games. Games in which you are all alone, or where the only other people in your base are other players in multiplayer games, are usually of the non-automation variety. Right now, I am looking for the latter.

So I was looking at the huge number of games that have come out over the last years, and looked at other criteria: Which games were hyped at release and then forgotten, abandoned by both players and developers? Which games kept their players and received continued development? By looking at that, one game stood out: Enshrouded, which was released two years ago, has received various patches, updates, and content additions, and has kept a good number of players over the years. While still technically in early access, the full release is planned for 2026, and the last mayor content update in October 2025 was well received.

Looking at the gameplay, Enshrouded has no automation. Instead it has a much bigger exploration and roleplaying part than Sengoku Dynasty has. It has real-time combat, which I don't love, but has very detailed difficulty settings, where you can set the monsters to hit harder or less hard, so I should be able to find a difficulty that isn't too frustrating for me. The game is only $30, and I checked that it isn't available on Game Pass. So I bought Enshrouded and am currently installing it. Hopefully, this is the open world, survival, crafting, base building game I have been looking for.

- posted by Tobold @ 2:41 PM Permanent Link (7) comments

Monday, January 19, 2026

Waking Europe

From an American perspective, especially when combined with a lack of historical knowledge, it is easy to consider Europe as some sort of has-been power. Europe is clearly playing second fiddle in the NATO alliance, and doesn't throw its weight around internationally like the US does. Once you study European history a bit more, and especially post-war history, a more nuanced picture becomes clear: European weakness is by choice, and part of a post-war deal with America. Europe has tried imperialism, colonialism, and nationalism, and they all actually didn't work out that well for them. America offered a deal, in which it offered security in exchange for Europe neither joining the communists, nor trying to become an independent superpower. Europe, disillusioned by two world wars, accepted the deal. The post-war decolonization made Europe even happier to leave the job as world police to the US.

Voluntary weakness isn't the same as structural weakness. Change the conditions, remove security guarantees, add security challenges from both Russia and America, and with sufficient prodding, Europe will wake up. It will take some time, decades, and at first Europe will concentrate on being able to defend itself without help, rather than being able to project power to other continents. But Europe has nuclear missiles, and enough population, money, industry, and science to grow its military significantly. Europe is weak out of a belief that military strength isn't terribly useful anymore; shattering that belief will probably have unintended consequences. European powers were global superpowers for centuries, and that was with them fighting each other constantly. External threats could accelerate European unification / collaboration and remilitarization to a point where it would easily surpass Russia, and rival the US and China as a global superpower. Europe is weak because its military spending as percentage of GDP is small; raise that to 1938 levels, and Europe is suddenly bristling with guns.

The Trump administration despises Europe, and hates international treaties. To me that suggests they don't understand what a treaty like NATO actually was made for, and how much it actually favors the US who dictated those treaties. Turning Europe from their most loyal ally into their rival isn't going to make America great again. If anything, it diminishes American capacity to project power globally.

- posted by Tobold @ 1:38 PM Permanent Link (12) comments

Saturday, January 17, 2026

First thoughts on Arydia

After finishing the campaign of Tidal Blades 2, my campaign game group voted to play Arydia. I had made a shortlist of 4 games I proposed to play next; all players had found two games on that list that they were interested in, and Arydia was on everybody's list. So this weekend I am preparing the game, and we'll start playing next weekend. In theory, Arydia can be played with minimal preparation, as there is a Quick Start Guide that leads a group through the start of the campaign, while explaining every rule for every step. In practice I prefer to read the full rules, and think about how to organize the game.

Arydia has been relatively well received by the community of BGG, with over 2k ratings and an average of 9.0 out of 10. But while looking at reviews on YouTube, I was left with the impression that it was less well received by some of the people who review board games for a living. The main points of contention by some critics were that the game was fiddly and boring. So in my preparation, I was looking why those critics thought that way, and if there is anything that can be done in preparation to mitigate those problems.

The "boring" point in my opinion is actually a question of genre. Arydia is a game in the low fantasy genre. Our group won't be saving the world this time, as we did in Agemonia or Tidal Blades 2. Instead we are exiles, tasked to help regular people in a region, and collecting squills, a sort of scout badges for good deeds. Some of the stories are rather generic fantasy tropes, like hunting rats in a cellar. We will see how my group likes the stories, but I can see how somebody who is new to roleplaying games in general might have a better time here than a veteran, which would explain why the users rate the game higher than the critics. What interests me about Arydia is that the story allows for a less linear narrative, with a more open world feel, and NPCs and locations that can change in function of your actions. There are no changes caused by the progress of time, and the time limit for the main quest is 88 days, which is very generous, so some people complained about a lack of urgency. To some extent that is the price one has to pay for a more open world structure, because if you need to take an optimal path through a game in order to make it in time, that path becomes increasingly linear.

What I also noticed in the videos of the critics is that they either completely ignored, or mocked the roleplaying system of Arydia. Meanwhile the people who praised the game often expressed that roleplaying was fun. In Arydia, there are 165 NPC cards. The idea is that the player to the left of the active player is the "guide", who plays the NPC. The NPC card gives a description of the NPC, some mannerisms, and a text. Some words in that text are written in bold, and if the player interacting with the NPC asks about these words, the NPC gives a response with more information. Of course some people play this solo and have no other choice, but even some of the people who played in multiplayer just revealed the NPC and directly pointed out the possible keywords, with zero roleplaying. I think it is obvious that if you play a "roleplaying game in a box" and skip all roleplaying aspects, you are missing something. So I'll encourage my group to play this as intended, although different people might put more or less effort into roleplaying those NPCs, or make the keywords more or less obvious. It is clear that the system isn't a full roleplaying system, and can't deal with players asking questions about things other than the keywords. But I don't think that is reason enough to completely dismiss it, especially since talking to NPCs to gather bits of story is making up a major part of the exploration gameplay.

The fact that many of the YouTube critics played the game solo might also explain the "fiddly" complaint. I have heard similar complaints about all games that use boxes full of index cards to create and populate a world, e.g. 7th Continent or Vantage. I happen to be a person who doesn't mind dealing with index cards. But more importantly, if you play a campaign game with multiple players, you can massively decrease the feeling of too much administrative work by distributing the tasks. I think with 4 players, one of us will handle the index cards in the 3 boxes, one of us with handle the 4 boxes of map tiles, one will handle the boxes of figurines and other tokens, and the fourth one will be tasked with taking notes about the bits of information we receive. That should significantly speed up the game, and feel a lot less fiddly than a solo player doing it all.

- posted by Tobold @ 12:23 PM Permanent Link (0) comments

Thursday, January 15, 2026

Emberheart

I played another board game from my Spiel Essen 2025 haul this week, Emberheart. It is a medium weight worker placement game with a bidding component, that increases player interactivity. Thematically you are collecting dragons and heroes, to defend the island of Emberheart against dragon poachers. Practically you have 5 rounds in which you place stacks of workers to bid for various cards, trying to achieve the highest amount of victory points through the best combination of cards.

The worker placement mechanics of Emberheart are interesting. You don't just place a worker, you place a marker plus a stack of workers. Most locations on the board have 3 cards, and 5 spaces you could place your party on, numbered 1 to 5, and in general you need to put as many workers there as that number is. Players take turns to place their stacks, and after up to 5 turns the round ends. Then the player who occupies the highest spot on each location gets first choice among the 3 cards there, followed by the others in decreasing order. If there are more than 3 stacks placed, the 4th and 5th player get no card, but a consolation prize. The workers you can put in each stack are either grey grunts, which at the end of the round would go back into the general supply, or colored specialists, which at the end of the round would return to the player. But the grunts can be placed in any location, while the specialists can only be placed in the locations of their color. One resource in the game is gear, which can be used to change a grunt into a specialist, or vice versa, or a specialist into a specialist of a different color.

The different locations have cards with different functions: There are hero cards that, when combined with dragons, give special abilities and end game points. There are tavern cards that reward you with a mix of grunts and specialists. There are two different types of dragon cards, poached and free. Preserve cards also combine with dragons and give your dragon companion additional abilities. Garrison cards also give dragon companion abilities and end game points, if you fulfill their placement conditions. There are 6 locations in the game, with 5 spaces each, but as there are a maximum of 4 players with a maximum of 5 stacks each, not all locations will be full at the end of a round. Thus you need to think carefully where you want to place your stacks. If you always go for the 5 space, you will have first choice guaranteed, but run out of workers quickly. If you always place grunts, you won't have workers left next round, but if you transform them into specialists that limits where you can place them. Sometimes you can get a card with a lowly 1 bid, as not enough other players were interested.

I played two games of Emberheart this week, both with 4 players, two different groups. Each game took between 2 and 2.5 hours, including setup and rules explanation, so this is perfect for my usual board game nights, which have a 3.5 hours hard limit. Emberheart is the type of game that is great for pickup groups, as it doesn't take too long to explain. I am less sure that it would be great to be played repeatedly with the same people, as all cards except the hero cards are limited to exactly the number you go through in one game, so you will always see the same cards, just in different order. Only the hero cards have about twice the number needed, so there is more variability and replayability there.

Emberheart is also great value for money. The regular retail price is $39 or €35, and for that money you get a good amount of game components in good quality. Comparable games can easily cost $20 more these days. From the games I bought at Essen and tested up to now, Emberheart is the game I had the most fun with, and one of the cheapest.

Labels: Board Games

- posted by Tobold @ 10:03 AM Permanent Link (0) comments

Tuesday, January 13, 2026

Rune Dice

I came across a nice game via some influencer, and would like to pass on the recommendation. The game is called Rune Dice, it will come out this year, but on Steam there is a free demo you can already play. It is a game about the physics of throwing dice onto a dice tray, you aren't actually *rolling* dice. Instead you are throwing a die with a 1 on it, trying to cause a collision with another 1 die on the table. That will produce a 2, which will then automatically jump towards the closest other 2 on the table. If it can reach that, that causes another merging of the dice, the value goes up to 3, and it jumps towards the next 3, and so on. Although the dice are cubes, this isn't even limited to reaching 6. And you can cause multiple chain reactions at the same time, if you cause a collision of already existing dice.

All merged dice are moved to the left, and when all the collisions are done, the merged dice are processed. Regular dice just produce damage onto the monsters at the top of the screen that are moving towards your hero. But there are special dice with special effects, with everything from healing to setting enemies on fire. After a few throws, the table is reset and new dice appear on it, so you don't run out of targets to throw at. Combat ends if either you are dead, or all the monsters are. Then you move towards the next fight, until you reach the boss fight at the end of the map. Besides fights, there are spaces with bonuses or shops, where you can buy additional dice, runes, and relics.

Rune Dice is a roguelite game, but the demo doesn't have those lasting effects between runs yet. You can also only play two different character classes, with more to come in the release version. However, the demo doesn't prevent you from playing a complete run, and you can do that repeatedly. It might be a tad too generous there, because you could very well play this for hours, and then not feel the need to buy the game when it comes out, unless you want this roguelite progression. In any case, this is certainly fun for a while, and free, so I can only recommend it.

- posted by Tobold @ 9:16 AM Permanent Link (0) comments

Monday, January 12, 2026

Plastic foam safety warning

In view of recent events, I would like to give some home improvement safety advice, based on me having worked in plastic material science. On January 1st, 40 people died in a bar in Crans-Montana, Switzerland, and 116 others suffered burn injuries. The investigation quickly found out that the fire started when sparklers were held too close to the ceiling, which was covered with noise absorbing plastic foam. It later turned out that the owner of the bar had bought that noise absorbing foam in a home improvement store and installed it himself, and there had been no safety inspections for years.

Basic plastic foam of the cheapest variety is incredibly flammable. But you can also buy only slightly more expensive versions with increasing amounts of additives that prevent the foam from catching fire or hinder the fire from expanding quickly. If the owner of the bar had just paid a little bit more for his noise absorbing foam and taken a flame-retardant one, the fire would have been much slower, and a lot more people would have been saved.

So if you are thinking of doing any home improvement for heat or noise insulation that involves plastic foam, please buy a flame-retardant version, even if it is slightly more expensive.

- posted by Tobold @ 9:43 AM Permanent Link (6) comments

Sunday, January 11, 2026

Betting on semantics

Gambling used to be heavily restricted in the USA, with casinos legal only in Nevada and Indian reservations. But then a Supreme Court decision in 2018 allowed states to legalize sports betting. And then so called "prediction markets" appeared online, allowing people to bet on just about anything. They do that by claiming to be financial instruments, futures markets, instead of betting sites. But there are some obvious problems there, and some of those became public when the US captured Maduro.

The first problem is one of insider knowledge. In other financial markets, you can't trade on insider knowledge. With prediction markets offering greater anonymity, that is much harder to enforce. While the capture of Maduro came to a surprise for most of the world, obviously a number of people were involved in preparing it. So when an anonymous person created a new prediction market trading account just days before the capture, only to bet $30k on Maduro being captured before January 31st, and promptly made over $400k profit, it seems likely that this person made money on insider information.

But there were other bets on Venezuela on Polymarket, one of the biggest prediction markets. For example one that let you bet on whether the USA would invade Venezuela by January 31st. And that is now causing even bigger trouble. The people who bet on that argue that if US soldiers bomb Caracas, land there with helicopters, capture and extract the head of state, and then say the US will run Venezuela, the USA has obviously invaded Venezuela. But Polymarket says that bet was only about "US military operations intended to establish control", while the US action in Venezuela according to Marco Rubio was only a law enforcement action.

Now it is one thing to quibble over semantics for political purposes. You could see the political bias of various media from what words they used about the capture of Maduro, with left leaning media using "kidnapped", while right leaning media using words like "extradition". Fortunately the bet on that used the neutral term "captured", and nobody disputes that Maduro was captured. The bet on the "invasion" is less fortunately worded. What exactly is an invasion? The US is still threatening Venezuela in classic 19th century gunboat diplomacy, but the US soldiers that captured Maduro left, and the US is not occupying the country. Some people would call that an invasion, others not.

And that is obviously a problem of prediction markets compared to sports betting. Much of the purpose of various sports organizations is to establish and enforce extremely clear rules on who exactly has won a competition. People in a sports bar watching a soccer match will argue about things like whether an action by a player was a foul, or whether an offside occured. But umpires on the field rule that immediately, and the game always ends with a clear result, even if some fans don't consider it fair. You don't get people in sports betting argue about who actually won the game. But if a prediction market allows you to bet on anything, the reality might be a lot less clear, and semantics suddenly matter. Is an invasion only a ground invasion with an occupation?

As prediction markets are relatively new, rules have not really been established yet. There is a strong argument to be made that this sort of gambling is harmful, and should be illegal. But even if it is decided that it is legal, there need to be rules on who is the umpire that establishes whether an event happened by the terms of the bet or didn't.

- posted by Tobold @ 9:10 AM Permanent Link (4) comments

Saturday, January 10, 2026

Sengoku Dynasty

In April 2024, I played some Medieval Dynasty and liked it. At the time, Sengoku Dynasty had already released, but was still in early access. And of course I didn't want to play two very similar games one after another. Meanwhile, Sengoku Dynasty has had a full release, an update to version 1.1, with version 1.2 already announced. So this is what I am playing now. Compared to Medieval Dynasty, Sengoku Dynasty has more quality of life features like fast travel. And I do like the Japanese theme.

Sengoku Dynasty belongs in the survival crafting genre of games, like Valheim, or Palworld. It does have automation like Palworld, but of course you have villagers to do the work instead of Pokemons. From humble beginnings as a refugee stranded on a coast, you quickly get to building your first village, and can currently end up having up to 4 villages.

What I typically don't like so much about survival crafting games is the combat part, where for example raiders attack your village. Fortunately you can turn that off in Sengoku Dynasty. You need to kill some bandits as a condition to liberate some areas, but you can trivialize that by giving yourself infinite health. So the combat never gets into the way of the part I like, gathering resources and building villages. I am basically playing it more as a cozy game.

Having said that, I played Medieval Dynasty for 30 hours, Palworld for 50 hours, and will probably play Sengoku Dynasty for 30 or so hours and then stop. These games all have some sort of progression system or tech tree, and once you can build the best buildings, there isn't much reason to continue. There is also the aspect that running around in a new open world collecting resources is fun, but only for so long. Survival crafting games are also comparatively cheap, you can usually get them for around $30 or less. And if you just plan to visit for a while and leave anyway, you can get many of them for even cheaper on Game Pass, as it doesn't matter to you that you don't get to keep the game.

- posted by Tobold @ 10:17 AM Permanent Link (0) comments

Monday, January 05, 2026

Silencing my computer

I bought my current PC a bit over 2 years ago. Although it came with a basic water cooling system (Xilence LiQuRizer LQ360PRO ARGB), it never was a particularly silent computer. But as I hadn't built the PC myself, and it was my first PC with water cooling, it didn't occur to me that something was wrong. Until recently the computer started to make more and more noise, to the point where it became obvious that this wasn't working as intended.

I buy my PCs in big tower cases with easy to open doors. That way even I can do minor maintenance operations, like changing a graphics card. So I looked into the computer while it was running, and quickly identified the problem: The three fans on the heat exchanger of the water cooling unit were making the noise. And when I looked at my CPU temperature, it was below 30°C, which even I know is unusually frosty. And little by little I figured out what the problem was: The fans on the water cooling heat exchanger had been running at 100% capacity for two years. Which A) is unnecessary, B) makes the fans louder, and C) causes a lot of wear on those fans.

So first step, I replaced the Xilence fans, which I suspect aren't particularly high quality, with new fans from Corsair, bought as a set of 3 for just $20. That eliminated the part of the noise that was caused by the old fans now scraping against their frame. While changing the fans wasn't very easy, I just about managed, and at the same time could clean the heat exchanger and ventilation of my PC from two years of accumulated dust. The main problem was that the old fans each were separately connected with long cables, while the new fans had short cables and needed to be daisy chained.

Now the computer was back up and running, and the CPU was even cooler, as low as 26°C when just running Windows and Chrome. Then I looked into software for controlling the fans. With the MSI Center software for my motherboard I had a lot of problems. So in the end I decided to set things up directly in the BIOS. While I couldn't find the controls for the LED lighting of the fans, that wasn't really that important. What I did find was how to set a curve how fast the fans should be running as a function of the CPU temperature. That worked like a charm: My computer is now very silent, and still has a CPU temperature of just over 30°C. When I run a game like Baldur's Gate 3, the fans audibly speed up a bit, although still less than the noise they made at 100%, and CPU and GPU temperatures stay below 60°C.

- posted by Tobold @ 9:21 AM Permanent Link (3) comments

Sunday, January 04, 2026

The purpose of international law

Yesterday, the USA attacked Venezuela and captured sitting president Nicolás Maduro. You might have seen this or that pundit on international law on TV explaining how this is against the law of nations. What most people don't realize is what exactly international law is, because it works very different than national law. International law exists by consent. Breaking international law carries very little risk that you will be successfully sued somewhere, and if yes you can usually just ignore the consequences. Breaking international law carries a much higher risk that the previous consent is considered null and void, and that others now consider an action that was previously prohibited to be a valid action.

As could be seen just a few days earlier, last Monday, when Russia claimed that Ukraine had launched a drone attack on Putin's residence, there is a longstanding international agreement that you don't go after a country's leader before you haven't beaten that country in war. Think Saddam Hussein. The reason why international leaders agreed on such a rule is obvious: It is to their own personal benefit. The rule also benefits large countries more than it benefits small countries, because large countries can take over another country by war.

A country like Venezuela has zero possibility to launch a successful invasion of the United States. While it wouldn't be easy for them to attack US political leaders, at the very least that option would be a lot easier than an invasion. We have seen over the last years several examples of assassinations or attempts on US politicians, which showed that even protecting a speaker against a high powered rifle at 500 feet distance is difficult. Protecting a person against a drone attack is a lot more difficult. It isn't to the United States' advantage to have declared open season on foreign leaders.

And that is before considering a part of international law that actually can't be broken, because it is just a rule how other people will see your actions: Colin Powell's Pottery Barn rule. The USA will be held responsible for whatever happens for the foreseeable future in Venezuela, and chances are that a lot of what will happen will be pretty bad. And voters will hold Trump responsible. The history of regime change is not a happy one.

- posted by Tobold @ 7:33 AM Permanent Link (9) comments

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