US politics

US politics

TikTok was technically banned in the U.S. as of January 19th, 2025, as part of the Senate-approved " Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act." But upon his inauguration as President on January 20th, President Trump issued an Executive Order to withhold enforcement of the bill, in order to give his team an opportunity to potentially re-negotiate the details.

"While many are reporting Venezuela's oil infrastructure was unharmed by U.S. military actions, it has been decaying for many many years and will take time to rebuild," said Patrick De Haan, who is the lead petroleum analyst at gasoline price tracker GasBuddy.

Denmark's prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, has urged US President Donald Trump to stop threatening to take over Greenland, after the latter reiterated his wish to do so following Washington's abduction of the leader of Venezuela. It makes absolutely no sense to talk about the US needing to take over Greenland. The US has no right to annex any of the three countries in the Danish Kingdom, Frederiksen said in a statement on Sunday.

The United States intervention in Venezuela to abduct President Nicolas Maduro is not law enforcement extended beyond its borders. It is international vandalism, plain and unadorned. Power has displaced law, preference has replaced principle and force has been presented as virtue. This is not the defence of the international order. It is its quiet execution. When a state kidnaps the law to justify kidnapping a leader, it does not uphold order. It advertises contempt for it.

In the early hours of January 3, the US military launched a coordinated bombardment of key targets in Caracas, while a special Delta Force team-no doubt acting on CIA-gathered intelligence-located and seized Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, who were holed up in a fortified compound. They were helicoptered to the USS Iwo Jima battleship deployed in the Caribbean and then flown to New York, where Maduro and his wife face a brand-new indictment for engaging in a "narco-terrorism conspiracy," conveniently issued January 3, 2026.

This is no place for the U.S. to be doing this. That's a sovereign country, and Trump is acting like a war criminal.

The South American country is not Ukraine, nor, for that matter, is it Afghanistan, Iraq, or Libya. But by ordering military strikes to seize dictator Nicolas Maduro, Trump has thrown a country of around 28 million people into uncertainty and tossed aside the most obvious, hard-won lesson of decades of US foreign policy failures: regime-change wars are easy to start and hard to win, much less to turn into anything resembling genuine success.