These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us: that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.
Driving the news: "MAGA loves it. MAGA loves what I'm doing. MAGA loves everything I do," Trump told NBC News in an interview in which he denied that the U.S. is "at war" with Venezuela. "MAGA is me. MAGA loves everything I do, and I love everything I do, too." What they're saying: Conversations with MAGA operatives and media figures reveal varying degrees of comfort with regime change, a concept that became politically toxic after the Iraq War.
MAGA is primarily a personality cult, the objectives of which evolve to suit Trump's capricious moods. Yet his pivot to new wars of conquest is not some shocking reversal. The "Donroe Doctrine," as he calls his assertion of regional supremacy-a Trumpian extension of the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine, which established the United States' claim over the Americas in order to keep Europeans out-is in fact consistent with his deepest beliefs. In some ways, it represents the ultimate expression of the world order he hopes to engineer.
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.
OPINION - Wars are increasingly fought by unconventional means. A recent example is Ukrainian insertion of unmanned aerial systems (UAS) to attack Russian airfields, launched from civilian outfitted trucks. The Israeli pager attacks are another example of leveraging unconventional means to achieve an outsized effect. Both examples demonstrate that unconventional methods can not only disrupt enemy forces and destroy key objectives, but also achieve tremendous psychological effects and by saturating the airspace, limit an adversaries ability to mount offensive operations.
