#us-global-influence

#us-global-influence

In 1970, during a visit to President Nixon, King Charles was awkwardly paired with Nixon's daughter, Tricia, highlighting the primitive optics of royal diplomacy at the time.

The conversation reveals that the ongoing conflict raises critical questions about the motivations behind US foreign policy, particularly regarding Israel's role in shaping military strategies.

For a nation whose founding symbols were carefully engineered around the balance of peace and war, that omission is hard to read as accidental. Dropping the olive branch from the dime isn't just a design choice: it's a cultural signal.

Forecasters now predict that the coming El Niño—a warming of the Pacific Ocean that deeply affects global weather patterns—is likely to be as severe as the one in 2023-2024, which triggered severe flooding and prolonged heatwaves around the world.

The Iranian choke hold on the Strait of Hormuz evidently had a lot to do with it. By cutting off roughly one-fifth of the world's oil supply over the past five weeks, Iran's blockade of that narrow waterway caused an energy crisis and fears of a global recession that the White House could not abide for long.

I happened to be in Canada a week ago-in the cold and snowy mountains of Quebec-when President Donald Trump sent the text to the Norwegian Prime Minister, Jonas Gahr Store, in which he explained that, because he hadn't gotten a Nobel Peace Prize, he no longer felt "an obligation to think purely of Peace" with regard to Greenland. Canadians I spoke to seemed saddened by this latest outburst.

Three of the four things that gave Trump a foothold, in my opinion, were failures in this century (the fourth is the legacy of slavery and the organized political violence that replaced it). The other three, though, are the War on Terror, the financial crisis, and social media. (COVID was the final catalyst, I think; having moved during the height of COVID, I can't express how much worse the US dealt with it than much of the EU.)

The Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, inspired a wave of enthusiastic nodding among the cosmopolitan crowd gathered in Davos last month when he took to the podium and proclaimed that the world order underwritten by the United States, which prevailed in the west throughout the postwar era, was over. The organizing principle that emerged from the ashes of the second world war, that interdependence would promote world peace by knitting nations' interests together in a drive for common security and prosperity, no longer works.