So around a week ago the phenomenally unpopular Nicolas Maduro basically stood in front of a map that said 2/3rds of Guyana is part of Venezuela and gave a speech; it's not super clear whether this will lead to war precipitously or a thousand other possibilities but it is an interesting event. Maduro wants to shore up his absymal popularity and maybe attempt to fix the disastrous Venezuelan economy so what better way to do that than to invade your neighbor that has 1/35th your population and 1/40th to 1/100th the size of your military. The territory in question is extremely sparsely populated; it's kind of the inverse of Gaza, in Gaza you have 2+ million people in 141 Square Miles and in Essequibo you have roughly 125,000 People in 61,600 Square Miles; so 2 people per Square Mile basically. It is one of the densest Forests/Jungles on Earth and there's basically no one there so if theoretically Maduro was to occupy the coastline he would face little or no resistance presently.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................There's a wide variety of Oil interest in the location (especially Offshore) and the GDP per capita of Guyana entirely (~850,000 people) has tripled since 2020 and is now almost 8x the Venezuelan GDP Per Capita under Maduro, to put it bluntly I don't think Venezuela is even remotely capable of holding any of the Naval Territory in question which seems to be the main corporate interest but they can definitely hold a portion of the land territory if they want to; is there anything gained from doing that other than more sanctions and a 1% chance of Desert Storm 2.0 (Jungle Storm edition) is more debatable but if it's strictly a popularity or Military loyalty measure instead of an economic one (because Maduro is astonishingly inept in that department) then it could work.................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................This next bit is just a musing secondary aspect of this and other recent posts; essentially the Demographics of the world have lined up to incentivize war before inevitable fertility decline but another point is that in 40-80 years or whatever the main fuel of existing war materiel will be much more scarce; so if you want to fight a war the time is now before everything is electronic drones that aren't very good at taking territory (but could be quite adept at holding it); in this scenario if you succeed in taking Taiwan and the Phillippines by 2070 or what have you and then fossil fuels are starting to run out it's possible you wind up in a similar world state to 1991 where there are very few disruptions for around a century until offensive drones and/or EMPs/EWS's are figured out; so if your country is in a strong position going into the scarcity period and the demographic decline phase then in theory it will prosper more in that environment; possibly even leading to an uncontested rise or unipolarity (unlikely admittedly but we are projecting to the far flung future at this point).
