Idk for certain, but it feels like very bad decision on polymarket’s side.
If they start engage in such technicalities, eventually it would mean that typical bet should be several screens long lawyerspeak/legalese, like EULA, otherwise it can be just rejected more or less arbitrary, based on wordplay, and that will scare off potential bettors.
Standard Polymarket legalese for invasions requires the goal of indefinite "control of territory" for this reason.
Raids don't qualify.
This issue already happened with the war in the Middle East when Israel engaged in cross border raids that weren't intended to establish permanent control.
The US didn't kill all Iraqis, so it was just a "limited" military action or "raid" also? The intent was a nation removing the head of another nation to cede control of the nation to the invading nation. If you kill 1 or 100,000, it's still an invasion.
If a nation assassinates a leader, then leave the country to their own devices (which may include a more friendly replacement), I could see the ground on this logic. NEITHER of these events (killing nor elected replacement) has happened. The US has asserted control.
In Iraq the US entered with a force numbering in the hundreds of thousands and occupied the country for years. That's what makes it an invasion, not whether the leader was the target. The US didn't remove Saddam Hussein when they attacked in 1991 and that was still, beyond any doubt, an invasion.
The US has asserted control with words and threats, not with sustained military presence or a successor not approved by the previous Venezuelan administration. The Venezuelan military has full control of its territory, and leadership has passed to the next in line to the Venezuelan presidency who even Trump acknowledges needs to be negotiated with to get the oil he wants, and is busy telling her own domestic audience Maduro is still her president.
It's obviously far closer to assassinating a leader and leaving the country to its own devices than the complete destruction of the Iraqi army as a viable fighting force, installation of an entirely new government and extended military occupation, or even something like Russia's ultimately unsuccessful annexation of Kherson.
There's certainly a fuzzy line there somewhere, but the Maduro raid is clearly on the non-invasion side of it. This operation was much more similar to the Bin Laden raid than to even the smallest operation that could be considered an invasion.
Intent is important here. It’s an invasion if the objective is to establish sustained military control over some portion of the country’s territory.
But if the intention is some other military objective: blow up a military base, kidnap a president, etc, and get out quickly, then I don’t think the word “invasion” applies.
I have no idea who has decided that "invade" means "establish sustained military control".
With certainty that is not the original meaning of the word. In Latin and in classic English, the meaning of the word is just: "enter in a hostile manner", as it can be verified in any dictionary.
As long as foreigners have entered the territory of another country by force, that is an invasion.
It does not matter which was the duration of the invasion or whether the intent of the invasion was to stay there permanently.
An invasion may be followed, or not, by a military occupation, which is "establish sustained military control".
The real answer is that the people that set up the bet decided, and they listed the conditions upfront.
And imagine how silly it would be if 1-5 soldiers came across the border by force and left a few minutes later and that counted as a major world event!
Compared to other dictionaries, this is a very poor explanation of the word.
Nevertheless, even here it says clearly that "invade" refers only to "enter", and neither to "subjugate" or to "occupy".
Other dictionaries explain better the distinction between "invading" and normal "entering", which is in the manner how one enters, i.e. "in a hostile manner" or "by the use of force".
Your dictionary explains the distinction by intent, not by manner, but this is wrong, as at the time of the invasion one cannot know which is the intent, which will become known only in the future.
By this definition one could never recognize an invasion while it happens, even when one sees a foreign army entering and killing everyone on sight.
I agree however, that the Polymarket bet has specified that the object of the bet was an invasion followed by an occupation of the territory, so the conditions of the bet have not been met.
The presence is not in Venezuela. Sure, they can threaten Venezuela's new president, just like they can (and do) threaten other countries that they have not invaded [recently] and having a powerful military not in Venezuela adds a certain credibility to those threats, but that doesn't change the fact its the successor under the Maduro administration's rules, not theirs, and she's able to publicly insist that Maduro still the president! The threats of dire consequences if she doesn't do what they want are precisely because they don't control the country.
It's really not "serious hair splitting" to point out that they haven't "invaded" a country they haven't even attempted to maintain non-covert presence in, particularly not when you've conveniently provided the perfect analogy of a state assassinating a leader and then letting them pick a successor who might be more convenient.
What is the difference between having the militaire have boots in the ground to kill you if you don't comply, and having military in the border next to you to kill you, bomb you or kidnap you if you don't comply?
USA is not meaningfully in control of Venezuela. They have no more control then a week ago.
Venezuela regime did not changed either. The same generals and politicials remain on power, altrough there is bound to be some power struggle between them.
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.
This has already been the case for political and/or social impact events for years in the UK's betting exchanges. The settlement rules for any potentially hairy real-world event have to be explicitly clear and account for all possible outcomes that might affect the resolution.
When there's money on the line, I have years of hard evidence that arm-chair lawyers (ie. betting exchange clients) will do absolutely anything to find potential loopholes in settlement rules and argue that their bets should have paid off.
If they start engage in such technicalities, eventually it would mean that typical bet should be several screens long lawyerspeak/legalese, like EULA, otherwise it can be just rejected more or less arbitrary, based on wordplay, and that will scare off potential bettors.