World

“The Mexican drug-trafficking organizations have an intolerable alliance with the government of Mexico,” announced the White House last month, buried in the official statement on US tariffs on that country’s goods. The declaration has sent shockwaves through Mexico. If true — if the government of our southern neighbor acts in concert with, defends, condones and/or profits from the trafficking cartels that have killed hundreds of thousands of Americans and worked to destroy American sovereignty in recent years — then it is a seismic pronouncement that heralds a new era of confrontation between the two nations.

President Donald Trump posted an AI-picture of a gangster version of himself on Instagram at around 3 p.m. Sunday. Behind the fedora-clad figure, the text “FAFO” — short for “fuck around and find out” — appears alongside a smiling face.  What happened earlier that Sunday, and the machine-made picture that followed, tells us a lot about how Trump 2.0. will deal with the world.  After two planes carrying Colombian illegal aliens departed the United States this weekend, self-proclaimed humanist and former guerrilla fighter Gustavo Petro, Colombia’s president, refused to allow the plane to land. “I deny the entry of American planes carrying Colombian migrants into our territory,” Petro said on X.

New Year’s marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the collective freakout known as Y2K, when overwrought tech aficionados joined forces with Luddites to warn the world of the pending apocalypse of computer infrastructure that could run the global economy but was evidently incapable of resetting to “00” in date codes. Those chiliastic projections obviously did not come to pass, which is why we can spend 2025 reflecting on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the day’s other Chicken Little situation — consternation over the transition that would, some skeptical parties feared, have catastrophic consequences for infrastructure central to the daily functioning of global markets, the final turnover of the Panama Canal.

A new presidential term is set to begin officially in Venezuela on January 10. Despite the electoral commission’s failure to release the results of the July 28 election, Nicolás Maduro’s swearing-in appears inevitable. Opposition leader Edmundo González Urrutia, however, says he’ll be inaugurated as the country’s new leader. Will he return to Caracas? That’s the question Venezuelans keep asking, with González Urrutia having promised exactly that. “I am going to return to Venezuela to take the responsibility that 8 million citizens gave me,” he told Infobae five days ago after meeting with Argentinian president Javier Milei. This week he also met with President Biden, Uruguayan president Lacalle Pou and Panamanian president José Raúl Mulino.

The United States only has one president at a time. Until January 20, that’s Joe Biden. But President-elect Donald Trump and his skeleton foreign policy team are waiting in the wings, plotting policy behind the scenes on issues — Ukraine, Gaza, Iran, Middle East peace — that have stymied the Biden administration for the last year. In fact, Trump is already influencing the respective calculations of allies, partners and adversaries before he even steps foot in the Oval Office. And Biden’s advisors seem perfectly fine with it. Trump fancies himself as a master negotiator, somebody who’s inherently skilled at poking, pressuring and sweet-talking the opposite side of the table until he gets what he wants.

I represented the United States at the sixth Youth and Democracy in the Americas Summit at the Organization of American States, or OAS, last month. Most Latin Americans know this organization well, though most here in the US don’t. It is the premier regional political forum, the region’s European Union, a sort of mini-UN. When tyrants steal elections and jail journalists, the OAS becomes the center of the spectacle.  It has a reputation for defending liberty. But when it comes to China, matters get murky. So much so that the organization is willing to censor American voices that tell the truth about China’s regional ambitions. The appointment of Florida senator Marco Rubio as secretary of state may augur a new era of US focus on its hemispheric neighbors.

By the summer of 2024, Kyivans could joke that there was no way the Russian army could take their city now — they’d never get through the downtown traffic. The simple normality of urban congestion, crawling through grand boulevards in the shadows of buildings that, with fresh coats of paint, would suggest a Wes Anderson vision of Mitteleuropa, could lull a visitor into thinking he could be in any capital on the old Orient Express route. So, too, would the world-class Fenix restaurant, run by a celebrity chef and festooned with Chihuly-inspired decor. It was between the salmon tartare eclair and the rabbit ravioli that I heard for the first time, face-to-face, what it’s like to be persecuted for worshipping God in the wrong way.

On the back of President Trump’s victory November 5, the end of the election season will open an interesting eleven-week window. President Biden will assume lame-duck status and be freed from any concern that a more aggressive posture toward Russia might hurt Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. Biden might also be considering the implication of handing over Ukraine policy to an individual who has repeatedly signaled his pro-Putin views. Both of these factors argue for Biden breaking from his self-imposed restrictions and supporting Ukraine striking targets in Russian territory during this lame-duck period. Imagine a moderately successful Ukraine attack now, after the November 5 election, on a moderately relevant target, such as a railroad terminal fifty miles inside of Russia.

Claudia Sheinbaum was sworn in as Mexico’s new president in Mexico City’s San Lázaro Legislative Palace this Tuesday. In her inauguration, she underscored the historic significance of electing the first woman president, while promising to adhere closely to her predecessor’s political agenda.  Wearing her presidential sash, she began her speech by thanking foreign dignitaries, but she saved the most thanks to former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), whose coattails she rode into the National Palace.

Viral footage showing armed Venezuelan gang members taking over an apartment complex in a Denver suburb has shocked thousands, especially after Mayor Mike Coffman of Aurora, Colorado joined Fox News’s Sandra Smith on Thursday to explain how failed border policies are affecting his city — which is around 700 miles away from the US-Mexico border. In the interview, Coffman confirmed that at least two apartment buildings in Aurora were taken by what some suspect are members of the notorious Tren de Aragua gang.  All of this is not quite surprising for those who are familiar with Venezuela. “Invasiones” (invasions, as Venezuelans call it) have been a recurrent phenomenon throughout the oil-rich South American country in the last twenty years.

The massive prisoner swap which led to Russia’s release of prisoners Evan Gershkovich, Paul Whelan and Vladimir Kara-Murza, among many others, is the greatest gift their families and loved ones could ever hope for — in several cases, it is a lifesaving development. But it also serves as an indication of just how much the practice has become a weapon of the world’s great powers. For my family, the news is deeply personal. Vladimir, a longtime dissident imprisoned for the crime of speaking out against the war in Ukraine in remarks to the state legislature of Arizona, was a pallbearer along with me for my father-in-law, John McCain. My wife joined with his, Evgenia, to speak to a bicameral congressional committee earlier this year to advocate for his release.

Nicolás Maduro’s rival Edmundo González and opposition leader María Corina Machado told reporters at around 6:30 p.m. Monday that with more than 70 percent of votes counted, González is more than doubling Maduro’s votes. During the press conference, both candidates emphasized peaceful protests, especially as thousands began taking to the streets the day before, when the country’s electoral council declared that Maduro had won with 51 percent of the vote. They called on voters to gather at 11 a.m. Tuesday. “I speak to you with the calmness of the truth,” González said to his cheering supporters from outside his campaign’s headquarters in Caracas. “We have in our hands the tally sheets that demonstrate our categorical and mathematically irreversible victory.