PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP has sought to justify his policy of summarily executing suspected drug smugglers by arguing that the United States is engaged in an “armed conflict” with criminal organizations that supply prohibited intoxicants. Yet the Trump administration also insists that U.S. forces are not engaging in “hostilities” when they blow up boats believed to be carrying illegal drugs. Those positions are hard to reconcile with each other, but they are consistent with Trump’s disregard for legal limits on his use of the military to prosecute a literalized war on drugs. His administration has tied itself in knots to portray murder as self-defense while avoiding congressional constraints. As of early December 2025, Trump had ordered 21 attacks on suspected drug boats in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, killing a…

How big is Venezuela’s oil industry? About a quarter of the size it used to be. Venezuela has the world’s biggest proven reserves of oil, estimated at more than 300 billion barrels, or around 17% of the global total. The oil lies onshore and the vast majority is in the central Orinoco belt – south of the Orinoco River – in a well-mapped 50,000 sq km zone that’s probably the biggest single hydrocarbon deposit on Earth. But in recent decades, Venezuela’s once-surging stream of oil has dwindled to a trickle. Production peaked in the 1960s and 1970s, when US and British oil companies dominated, producing 3.5 million barrels a day, or around 7% of global output at the time. Following nationalisation (in January 1976) production fell, but then rose again…

A Venezuela-style operation on the continent is unlikely, but South Africa is still concerned about United States international behaviour. However, a caution is raised regarding Africa’s historical susceptibility to Washington-backed regime-change tactics. “I don’t foresee that the US can execute a Venezuelan military style against South Africa,” according to political analyst and international relations expert Dr Gideon Chitanga. In a risky operation that has infuriated people worldwide, US military forces apprehended President Nicolás Maduro and his wife over the weekend and transported them to the US to face criminal charges. Gideon cited Libya as a warning example and stated that the US has frequently used non-military means to weaken governments it does not support, such as economic pressure, political discrediting, and destabilisation. South Africa’s democratic legitimacy, he said, remains its…

“They don’t need probable cause…. What they need to detain someone and question them is reasonable suspicion.” —Tom Homan, U. S. “border czar” “The homegrowns are next.” —45/47 WHAT IN THE WORLD COULD I, A U. S.-BORN, long-law-abiding citizen, have had to be fearful about, some might say. But there I was, returning from a book festival in Jamaica, winding through immigration, running through the list of possi - ble scenarios: agents ushering me into a stark room and forcing me to unlock my devices to verify allegiance to an authoritarian; badgering me to kingdom come about my critiques of a regime; detaining me without charges or flying me to a foreign gulag infamous for vanishing humans. Those fears tempered a modicum when I saw that my immigration offcer was…

“Whatever Washington’s plans for the future of Venezuelan governance,” the “show of US force in Latin America” (see page 26) looks like “the first manifestation of a more assertive American foreign policy”, designed to restore American pre-eminence in the western hemisphere, says Pablo Uchoa in The Conversation. America’s National Security Strategy, published in November last year, clearly stated the administration’s intention to “reassert and enforce” the Monroe Doctrine, the strategy articulated by president James Monroe in 1823 that any European interference in the western hemisphere should be opposed. At the time of publication, Donald Trump referenced a “Trump Corollary”; today he talks of the “Donroe Doctrine”. Trump and his “top allies” have already suggested that the Venezuelan operation could be the “start of efforts to remake the region”, warning Cuba…

Donald Trump had been waiting Four years to get back in the Oval Office, and he arrived with a long to-do list. “They came out of the gate like Man o’ War,” says Joseph Grogan, who served as director of Trump’s domestic policy council during the first term. “They set a blistering pace of administrative actions across all major agencies.” On his first day alone, he pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate-change agreement, froze all foreign aid, suspended refugee admissions, and granted clemency to more than 1,500 people charged in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot that tried to overturn his 2020 election loss. And he was just getting started. Within a month, he’d fired 17 inspectors general, allowed immigration agents to arrest people inside courthouses, taunted Denmark…

It’s astonishing how quickly the flames of protest have spread across Iran, said Ara (Barcelona). On Sunday 28 December, a couple of small protests in central Tehran, one outside the Alaeddin mobile phone centre and another by the Sabzeh Meidan currency exchange, led shopkeepers in the grand bazaar to close their doors in solidarity, and in a matter of days the unrest had spread like wildfire across the country. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the powerful military force that underpins the regime and controls somewhere between 20% to 40% of Iran’s economy, has reacted with severity, using bullets, water cannon and tear gas against the demonstrators; at least 35 people have been killed and some 1,200 protesters arrested. The spark for all this was yet another sharp fall in…

What happened President Trump launched sweeping immigration restrictions this week, saying he would “permanently pause migration from all Third World countries” in the wake of the shooting of two West Virginia National Guard members by an Afghan refugee. The suspect, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, 29, was charged with killing Spc. Sarah Beckstrom, 20, and critically wounding Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, 24, as they patrolled Washington, D.C., the day before Thanksgiving. Lakanwal, formerly a member of a CIA-trained counterterrorism unit, ambushed the troops, reportedly shouting “Allahu Akbar” before opening fire. He was shot while reloading and taken into custody, and he pleaded not guilty from his hospital bed. The Department of Homeland Security announced an immediate pause of all immigration applications of Afghan nationals “pending further review of security and vetting protocols.” Trump…

THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION believes you don’t have the right to record Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers in public. This stance is both factually wrong and an attempt to chill free speech by conflating it with violence. At a July 2025 press conference in Tampa, Florida, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem said, “Violence is anything that threatens them and their safety, so it is doxing them, it’s videotaping them where they’re at when they’re out on operations, encouraging other people to come and to throw things, rocks, bottles.” In September 2025, DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin called “videotaping ICE law enforcement and posting photos and videos of them online” a form of doxing. She added, “We will prosecute those who illegally harass ICE agents…

Honduras just got a “brutal reminder of how fragile sovereignty can be” in the shadow of a superpower, said El Libertador (Honduras) in an editorial. On the eve of our presidential election this week, the “abuser Donald Trump” declared his support for Nasry Asfura, a right-winger in the model of Trump himself whose slogan is “Daddy, at your service.” That was sad news for another conservative, sportscaster Salvador Nasralla. He had spent years sucking up to Trump, only to be thrown aside like a “discarded banana.” The unpredictable U.S. president suddenly began denouncing Nasralla as a “borderline communist” and threatened to cut off all U.S. aid to Honduras if Asfura didn’t win. It’s too soon to tell whether the intervention was successful: With ballots still trickling in—some of them carried…

When it comes to international conflict, U.S. President Donald Trump learns everything the hard way. On issue after issue—North Korea, Venezuela, Russia-Ukraine, Gaza, and more—Trump begins by bucking conventional wisdom and insisting that a bold new approach will yield breakthroughs. Implied, and often said outright, is that past officials who worked on the matter were feeble, inept, and craven. Trump insists that his determination and powers of persuasion will force seismic change, cowing enemies, bridging schisms, and achieving diplomatic masterstrokes. Yet time and again, after gambles and gambits, Trump comes to the same conclusion: While he might not admit it, his approach reverts to something much closer to what policy wonks and advisors urged on him at the outset. Trump’s overconfidence and distrust of expertise drive time-consuming, costly, and sometimes…

What happened An emboldened President Trump threatened this week to take over Greenland, saying that the U.S. “absolutely” needs the semiautonomous Danish territory for national security purposes—prompting Denmark to warn that such an annexation would destroy NATO. Trump said Denmark lacked the ability to defend the vast, resource-rich island from Russian and Chinese activity in the Arctic. “You know what Denmark did recently to boost up security in Greenland?” he said. “They added one more dogsled.” Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said her government was taking Trump’s threat seriously. If the U.S. were to attack a NATO ally, “everything would come to an end,” she said. “The international community as we know it, democratic rules of the game, NATO, the world’s strongest defensive alliance—all of that would collapse.” Secretary of…

A day after toppling Maduro, Donald Trump started to drop hints that he had settled on his next target. Greenland, he said, “is covered with Russian and Chinese ships”, and the US needs it “from the standpoint of national security”. His message was amplified by his deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, who said that no one would fight the US military over Greenland. The real world, he added, is “governed by strength …. by power”. By Tuesday, the White House was openly stating that it retained the option to use force to seize the semi-autonomous Danish territory, which is six times the size of Germany. Trump isn’t wrong about Greenland’s strategic importance, said The Washington Post. Controlling the territory would give the US a vital foot hold in the…

The deposed Venezuelan president Nic olás Maduro pleaded not guilty to drugs, weapons and narco-terrorism charges on Monday, two days after his capture by US special forces in an operation ordered by Donald Trump that sent shock waves around the world. The brevity and formality of the arraignment hearing in federal court in Manhattan – barely 30 minutes during which Maduro was asked to confirm his name and that he understood the four charges – belied the far-reaching consequences of the US action. As Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, addressed the court in Lower Manhattan, the UN security council held an emergency meeting just a few kilometres to the north, where a dozen countries condemned the US “crime of aggression” and secretary general António Guterres suggested the operation constituted…

DRAMATIC SCENES HAVE come to define the second Donald Trump administration’s immigration policy: federal troops patrolling the streets of American cities, agents snatching international students on video, hundreds of Venezuelan migrants disappeared to a brutal Salvadoran prison. Behind those scenes, Trump is reshaping the country’s immigration bureaucracy. In just its first 100 days, the second Trump administration had “taken 181 immigration-specific executive actions,” found the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute (MPI), “a sixfold increase over the fewer than 30 actions during the same period in Trump’s first term.” Visa processing and bureaucratic rulemaking don’t grab as much attention as harsh, highly visible enforcement actions, but they’re making it harder for immigrants to work, learn, and live in the United States. De-Documenting Immigrants IN OCTOBER, THE Trump administration ended the automatic extension…

The immediate political void left in Venezuela by Nicolás Maduro’s abrupt removal from power has been filled by the former vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, who was sworn in as interim president on January 5. But the situation is far from stable. Rodríguez represents just one of multiple and competing interests within a Venezuela elite composed of a precarious civil-military alliance officially committed to a leftist populist ideology called Chavismo. Delcy and her brother Jorge Rodríguez, the long-time right-hand man of Maduro, are the leading faces of the civilian factions. Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello and Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López represent its military interests. Even this rough civilian-military split represents just the institutional dimensions of power in Venezuela. There are also numerous armed groups and organisations with distinct interests that will…

Venezuela’s Vice President, Delcy Rodríguez, has taken over as acting leader in the wake of a US raid that deposed President Nicolás Maduro at the weekend. Rodríguez, 56, is a veteran politician, lawyer and diplomat who had served as Maduro’s vice president since 2018. She has deep family ties to leftist politics in Venezuela, although she was generally viewed as more pragmatic than other members of Maduro’s government. Venezuela’s Supreme Court ordered Rodríguez late on Saturday to assume the presidency in Maduro’s absence, a position she would hold on an interim basis. On Sunday, Defence Minister Vladimir Padrino López also recognised her as acting president. Previously, US President Trump suggested that Rodríguez was willing to work with the US, which he said would “run” Venezuela. But on Sunday, he threatened…

President Trump “used to offer only vague answers” when asked to explain the U.S. military campaign against Venezuela, said The Economist in an editorial. He’d cite the need to stop drugs, or to reclaim oil assets. “Rarely, if ever, did he mention regime change.” But after last week’s “stunning predawn raid” that captured President Nicolás Maduro, Trump laid out “an extraordinary view of the use of American power,” saying he would impose “American dominance” over the entire “Western Hemisphere.” Under this muscular revival of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, now the “Donroe Doctrine,” all countries from Canada to Argentina will yield to Washington. Venezuela will sell oil on terms set by the U.S. Cuba’s leftist regime will be replaced. Troops could be deployed against the cartels “running Mexico,” Trump said, while…

It took US forces less than two-and-a-half hours to snatch President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, in the small hours of last Saturday morning, said Dan Sabbagh in The Guardian. But this “extraordinary display of imperial power” – involving 150 US aircraft, including bombers and fighter jets – was the product of months of planning. According to Gen Dan “Raizin” Caine, chair of the US joint chiefs of staff, US intelligence agencies had been working since August to establish Maduro’s “pattern of life”. Using spy drones, and information from one or more agents within the Venezuelan government, they’d discovered “where he lived, where he travelled, what he ate, what he wore, what were his pets”. As the US steadily built up its military presence in the Caribbean from…

It took the US two hours and 28 minutes to snatch President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, last Saturday morning – an extraordinary display of imperial power that plunges 30 million Venezuelans into a profound uncertainty. But it was also months in the planning. Critical to Operation Absolute Resolve was the work of the CIA and other US intelligence agencies. From as early as August, their goal was to establish Maduro’s “pattern of life”, or as Gen Dan Caine, the chair of the US joint chiefs of staff, described it, to “understand how he moved, where he lived, where he travelled, what he ate”. As the US built up its military presence in the Caribbean from September, Maduro tightened his personal security to evade capture. He used six…