“Last Friday, Canada and China struck a preliminary trade deal that would open the Canadian market to Chinese electric vehicles and lower Chinese retaliatory tariffs on key Canadian agricultural exports. … The deal will undoubtedly revive accusations of malign Chinese influence and Canadian perfidy from U.S. right-wingers and China hawks. But a year into Trump’s second term, moving closer to Beijing makes perfect sense for Ottawa, as well as the European Union. … Put bluntly, a relatively rational autocracy with limited, stable foreign-policy goals located an ocean away may seem preferable to a country run by an erratic autocrat next door. In this respect, the ongoing Greenland crisis has given Canada’s leaders brutal clarity about the United States as it is, not as it was or as they want it to be.” (01/20/26)
“Socialism pretends to be all warm and cuddly, but Sen. Bernie Sanders is showing how heartless it can be. He’s been the sole lawmaker blocking legislation to speed up cures for kids with cancer and nudge drug makers to develop new pediatric therapies. And on Tuesday, he joined nurses who’ve abandoned their hospitalized patients to strike for fat pay hikes. For cold-blooded socialists like Bernie, ideology clearly trumps compassion. Start with the bill he’s blocking: the Mikaela Naylon Give Kids a Chance Act, recently renamed for a 16-year-old who died of cancer last year while lobbying for the measure. Sanders (I-VT) says he himself backs the bill, except it doesn’t push other health care measures he wants, such as funding for community health centers — so he’s holding the cancer kids hostage.” (01/20/25)
“Superimposing a coherent narrative where none likely exists in order to explain the policies of President Donald J. Trump is an deeply unenviable task, not least because of the famously mercurial nature of the President. In order to make sense of his policies toward Russia and Ukraine it helps to begin with the obvious: President Trump has set for himself the goal of winning a Nobel Peace Prize by the end of his term, as such, he will do almost anything to achieve it. It is the way in which he has gone about doing this that many find so confounding. Depending on your point of view, Trump’s approach has been either highly innovative or highly erratic.” (01/20/26)
“Today marks the one-year anniversary of Donald Trump’s return to the presidency. We thought it would be the perfect occasion to look back at some of the low-lights of Year 1 of Trump 2.0 and imagine the diagnosis that the self-proclaimed cool heads would have ascribed to us Trump worrywarts if we had predicted even a fraction of what His Orange Eminence and Wannabe Nobel Peace Laureate went on to do. Actually, we know their diagnosis because they were not shy about telling us.” (01/20/26)
“From Greenland to Ukraine to Venezuela, President Donald Trump has relied on a dizzying diversity of definitions for peace over the past year. They range from ‘peace through strength’ (using tariffs or troops) to temporary and shaky ceasefires. He has brokered deals that offer security if the United States gains natural resources or that assume economic integration between rivals can alone ensure tranquility. He overarchingly sees his role as a ‘president of peace’ (an allusion to ‘prince of peace’) and as deserving of winning a Nobel Peace Prize or, at least, an actual winner’s gold medal given to him this month as a gift of gratitude. Lately, however, he’s warned that he does not feel ‘obliged to think purely of Peace.'” (01/20/25)
“Should we expect a four-year pitched battle? I see one brewing between the new communist mayor of New York City and those judges who respect law and the U.S. Constitution.” (01/20/26)
“‘The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must’ is a quote that has come down through the ages from the Greek historian Thucydides’[s] History of the Peloponnesian War, written in 416 BC. It has come to encapsulate the ‘might makes right’ philosophy in international relations and is embraced by some in the realist school of foreign policy. Such realists are mostly right about how the world still works, but have a PR problem in today’s milieu of woke platitudes in international relations. Despite the fact that the balance of power and spheres of influence still shape the worldview of the vast majority of global leaders, some of these strong countries usually dress up the reasons for their military interventions in terms of democratization, humanitarian ends, or their national security.” (01/20/26)
“As usual, today’s president, coming late to a long-standing problem, but presuming his original discovery of it, has made himself the issue. His acquisitiveness regarding Greenland has nothing to do with national security, and everything to do, as everything always does, with his fragile ego. He is pouting, and threatening aggression, because he has not received the Nobel Peace Prize. The Danes can perhaps take comfort from the fact that the president is contemplating military operations against another northern place. As this is being written, the Army is reportedly readying a potential deployment to Minnesota to quell disturbances stemming from ham-handed activities by the ludicrously — and lethally — militarized U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. During all this, the president has announced he will order that no other football game can be televised during the annual Army-Navy game.” (01/20/26)
“Around the United States, the rebellions against President Donald Trump’s militarized Immigration and Customs Enforcement invasions (bolstered by other agencies including the National Guard and, at least in one case, actual Marines) continue. National headlines have mostly skipped over Memphis, perhaps because it’s a smaller city in the South, far from the headquarters of national media. On the ground in Memphis, local policy organizer Amber Sherman explained, the fear (and resistance) are similar to what we see in bigger cities. It’s not so much the National Guard, she said, but around the city, there are some 1,500 federal agents from the so-called Memphis Safe Task Force working alongside existing police and using traffic stops (reportedly more than 35,000 in two months) as a way to get their hands on people. This is the very issue (pretextual stops) that Memphis activists organized against so effectively after police killed artist and skateboarder Tyre Nichols two years ago.” (01/21/25)
