If the requirement was for the goal of indefinite control of territory, this declaration doesn’t match the requirement even if such declarations do count: he said the US will be running Venezuela during this transition (or “for now” in the particular version you quoted - of course his exact words do vary from moment to moment), not indefinitely.
> If the requirement was for the goal of indefinite control of territory, this declaration doesn’t match the requirement
Yes, it does. “For now” has no definite endpoint and thus states that the mission targets indefinite control of territory. (“Until <clear objective endpoint>” is not, on the surface, indefinite, though if the endpoint is a fixed point in time but one of conditions that may or may not ever be met, it might still be indefinite if the criteria is temporal definition, but “for now” is indefinite by any standard.)
It does not target permanent control, but permanent is distinct from indefinite.
I’ve definitely seen media reports using language similar to what I said outside of my parenthetical, which I don’t view as indefinite.
I also don’t find “for now” to be clearly indefinite, but I agree it depends on which of multiple definitions of “indefinite” you use, and it does fit some definitions. (Similarly, “permanent” also has multiple definitions, some of which overlap with some meanings of “indefinite”.)
Depends, but some things it could mean include clear intent to end the situation within the foreseeable future, taking it outside some but not all definitions of indefinite.
Well the difference is you're a random commentator and the other is the sitting US President. One person's words matter more than the others, at least globally, I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure it out.
I don't care if the almighty comes down, waves their tentacle and says "let there be light" - if it's still dark after their pronouncement, then anyone who bet a light would appear should lose the bet.
Trump's declaration that he is taking over Venezuela fits pretty comfortably within this category.
In your terms, a light did appear. You're right that the light is not directly connected to the utterance. But since the argument above that there was no invasion is premised on a lack of intent to invade rather than on the invasion not having happened, the utterance disproves that.
The language says "if the United States commences a military offensive intended to establish control over any portion of Venezuela".
Emphasis on "intended to". Speech does count as intention, even if you haven't successfully achieved whatever you say you're doing. If the President says the US intends to control Venezuela, then the Polymarket statement is true.
The military has to intend to control territory in the occupation sense. That means controlling the land, not the government. "Venezuela" refers to the land not the state.
All the Israel markets have clearly established this interpretation. Israel has done many raids intended to influence foreign governments, but not to control territory, and those markets didn't count as invasion.
There are other markets if you wanted to speculate on regime change or any kind of military action, but "invade" has a specific meaning.
This happens every single market and it's free money for people that understand the rules.
I don't use Polymarket so if this is the established precedent then that's fine, but I will maintain that it's a crazy interpretation of the word. One country's military violently ___ing another country and taking prisoners with the explicit goal of controlling that country is clearly an invasion. I'm struggling to think of another verb that could work in that sentence.
Edit: I guess "raiding" as you say, but that's a tactic used during a war, and apparently we aren't at war. If Israel had announced after a raid that their intent was to control the target country, then I would say their raid was actually an invasion.
From watching Polymarket, every war ends up being in some weird grey area that screws up the market. It's really hard to write unambiguous rules when there's money on the line.
My favourite invasion market was the Syria one, where Israel took the peak of a mountain on the border of the Golan Heights and the rest of Syria, and there was a huge dispute over whether the peak itself counted as Syria proper.
It does in situations where the speech is itself an action. E.g., "I declare the meeting open", or "The race starts when I say 'Go'... Take your marks, Set, Go!", etc.
"I'm running now" doesn't make you jog if you're sitting down, but it certainly kicks off a campaign if you were considering elected office.
JL Austin called these sort of statements "performative utterances" and there's a lot of linguistic debate about them. Nevertheless, "I declare war", uttered by someone with the power to do so, is pretty unambiguously an example of one.
(A relevant point is that people were still betting on Trump winning the 2020 election even after the results were out in part because it was possible that Polymarket would side with his opinion, but it's probably for the best they didn't...)
There were literally boots on the ground. They left, because that's what happens when an invasion ends. It doesn't mean the invasion retroactively never happened.
