Geopolitics & international affairs
The bomb went off in Cúcuta six days before Abelardo de la Espriella takes office. Call it the first answer to an ultimatum that has not been issued yet. The president-elect has not been sworn in and has not ordered the bombing campaigns, the mega-prisons or the month-long surrender ultimatum he promised Colombia’s guerrillas and […]
The fund was supposed to be dead. Trump said so himself. Then the Senate balked at confirming Todd Blanche as attorney general, and the dead fund got up and walked. Blanche is Trump’s former personal lawyer and deputy attorney general. He has run the Justice Department since April, when Trump fired Pam Bondi, and the […]
A Russian cruise missile crossed into NATO airspace and crashed in eastern Poland on Wednesday night. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk convened an emergency meeting on Thursday morning. NATO jets scrambled to intercept the projectile, believed to be a Kh-101 fired during Russia’s overnight mass strike on Ukraine, but it came down in an uninhabited […]
The deal’s own word is “lock step.” Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza moves with the decommissioning of Hamas’s guns, and the decommissioning moves with the withdrawal. Trump, who announced the agreement, said withdrawal must move in lock step with decommissioning. The phrase sounds like coordination and works like a veto: each side can stop the whole […]
On Thursday, Japan and South Korea went into the currency market together, and Tokyo spent more in a single day than it ever has. On Friday, the United States joined them, and it paid in euros. The euro detail has produced a weekend of speculation. It deserves one paragraph, and then it should be dropped. […]
Eighteen months into the second Trump administration, the United States still has no Senate-confirmed ambassadors to the Pacific Islands. There are sixteen Pacific island nations and territories in the region, not counting Australia and New Zealand, and none of them has a US ambassador. The first Trump administration treated the Pacific Islands as a new […]
Two things happened to American technology in Europe this month. Washington shouted about one and has not objected to the other. It has them backwards. The loud one first. On July 23 the European Commission fined Google 890 million euros under the Digital Markets Act: 460 million for favoring its own services in search results, […]
The next phase of the Iran war may be fought over electricity. Axios reported on Friday that President Trump is seriously considering strikes on energy targets inside Iran within days, though a US official said no final orders have been given. The Wall Street Journal reported that preparations for a renewed campaign are underway, with […]
Ukrainian drones hit 38 energy facilities in occupied Crimea and the occupied parts of the Donbas in the first week of July alone, according to the commander of Ukraine’s unmanned systems forces, and the strikes triggered a blackout that the occupation authorities acknowledged across all cities and districts of the peninsula, including Simferopol. The campaign […]
The Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway that carries about a fifth of the world’s oil, is close to closed. On Friday, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said they struck two oil tankers trying to pass through under US military escort, and four more ships turned back rather than risk the run. The claim comes from Tehran […]
