America

Earlier this week in Los Angeles – home to the largest Iranian community in the United States – thousands gathered in solidarity with protests unfolding in their homeland. Amid the sea of national flags and chants against the Islamic Republic, some demonstrators carried Lion and Sun banners and invoked a return to the pre-1979 monarchy, signalling a strand of sentiment that looks back to Iran’s last Shah. The rally took a darker turn when a truck drove into the crowd, underscoring the depth of division within the diaspora debate over Iran’s future. For some Iranians, particularly in the diaspora, the monarchy represents a lost period of national pride and state

After three hours of parsing American case law, for once I share Donald Trump’s exasperation. See, many a naif, including yours truly three hours ago, would have thought the Democrats’ ‘sanctuary cities’ unconstitutional. A sanctuary city instructs its local police force to cease all co-operation with federal immigration agents. The constitution’s supremacy clause dictates that federal law overrules local law, just as rock crushes scissors in the hand game. For sub-jurisdictions to offer refuge from big meanie federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (the aptly cold-hearted sounding ICE) should not, legally, be possible. It’s possible. The work-around is the 10th Amendment’s ‘anti-commandeering doctrine’, which prevents the feds from directly telling local

Donald Trump is playing hemispheric monopoly. Depending on what day of the week it is, the President’s focus alternates between Venezuela, Canada, the Panama canal – and for the last twelve months or so, Greenland. Given what Trump and his team have said over the past week, their acquisition plans for the island are well advanced. But why exactly does he want Greenland? The world’s largest island is an integral part of the Kingdom of Denmark and is about three times larger than Texas. While the term du jour is geopolitics, perhaps the most plausible reason for why Trump is gunning for Greenland is ego-politics. We have a president eager

Donald Trump’s dramatic intervention in Venezuela has achieved much more than to bring a brutal, corrupt dictator and drug trafficker to justice in an American court of law, something which no amount of human rights declarations, international law or indictments in the international criminal court were able to achieve. It took President Trump deciding it was in America’s interests to helicopter Nicolas Maduro to face justice, and this is the awful truth that Europe’s political leaders are coming to terms with: Trump has the means and the will and they don’t. Europe’s growing geopolitical impotence in the world is becoming the issue now, and histrionics about Greenland is confirming this

What do you think: is it manifest destiny that the United States acquire or at least exercise control over Greenland? That’s pretty much how America got Texas, California, New Mexico, Hawaii, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam and American Samoa. Then there was the Louisiana purchase. In 1803, Thomas Jefferson doubled the size of the United States, paying France $15 million or a bit less than three cents per acre for a landmass that is about 26 per cent of the contiguous United States. And let’s not forget about Alaska. A few facts about Greenland. It is big: 836,000 square miles. It is home to about 50,000 people, mostly Inuits. Historically, it has

On this occasion no one can accuse Donald Trump of hyperbole. The American president praised the Delta Force team that seized Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro as ‘incredible’. The operation to capture Maduro – codenamed ‘Absolute Resolve’ – was months in the planning, and Trump watched it unfold in real time. ‘They broke into places that were not really able to be broken into,’ he said. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’ According to the New York Times, the operation began last August when CIA officers infiltrated Venezuela and began gathering intelligence about the habits and movements of Maduro. They were assisted by stealth drones high in the sky overhead and

Nicolas Maduro is a very lucky man. The Venezuelan dictator – or ex-dictator now – might not feel that way as he enjoys the hospitality of the U.S. justice system after being snatched from the safety and comfort of his own capital on the orders of President Trump. But once he’s had a bit of time to relax, he should compare photos of his capture, Nike-clad and brandishing a water bottle, to the way Saddam Hussein looked when he was dragged out his “spider hole” in 2003 – or the way Muammar Gaddafi looked when a mob of his own people got done with him. Maduro didn’t lose a war