World

In April 1864, the US Senate passed a bill that set in motion what would become the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Slavery was to be abolished. Seven months later, Union forces would burn Atlanta to the ground, a year after Lincoln’s address at Gettysburg marked the battle that began the South’s collapse and the April 1865 surrender of General Robert E. Lee and his Confederate army. The Civil War remains the bloodiest and most divisive conflict in American history with at least a million dead, including soldiers and civilians from both sides. You might think that given American history, if slavery had an in-your-face visibility anywhere on the planet, Congress would call for intervention by the UN, perhaps threaten to send in the Marines. Think again.

It was December 1968, and I was a twelve-year-old English schoolboy seriously obsessed with cricket. The sport’s headline news at the time concerned a thirty-seven-year-old South African-born, dark-skinned player named Basil D’Oliveira. The previous August, D’Oliveira had scored a magnificent century (baseball fans need only think of Reggie Jackson hitting three consecutive homers in the clinching game of the 1977 World Series to get the flavor) while representing his adopted home team of England in a match against Australia. Despite this achievement, just days later the English team’s selectors omitted D’Oliveira from a tour of South Africa that was due to follow in the winter. Was the decision taken on purely technical cricketing grounds?

Venezuela has been leading the United States on, maintaining the pretense that they will ensure that the upcoming presidential elections are free and fair. That's despite the US relieving sanctions, releasing prisoners and months of “diplomacy.” The Nicolás Maduro regime has also gone on offense, threatening to take back the Esequibo, an area now under Guyana’s jurisdiction, where American oil companies have invested billions. This Wednesday, Maduro mocked the Biden administration once again, arresting two high-level officials from opposition candidate María Corina Machado’s team and issuing arrest warrants against several others.

The “Trump of the Tropics,” former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, was indicted Tuesday for falsifying his Covid-19 vaccination status for his Florida vacation. The indictment is the first faced by the conservative leader, who has already been barred from running for office. More are headed his way, in what he is describing as a lawfare effort spearheaded by President Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva. The indictment was signed by Detective Fábio Alvarez Shor, who says in his report that the former president and his aides “issue[d] their respective [vaccination] certificates and use[d] them to cheat current health restrictions.

Money is often a substitute for strategy in US foreign policy. We spent $2 trillion in Afghanistan, only to lose the country the minute our troops began to pull out. How much will it realistically cost, then, to beat Russia in Ukraine? Will the next $100 or $200 billion do the trick? This is not a question that supporters of war-spending ask themselves. As in Afghanistan, spending is a way to defer thinking about actually winning — or facing the serious possibility of losing. Our aid buys delay, not results. Ironically, while the specter of World War Two is invoked every time there’s a conflict, our experience then teaches the same lesson as recent attempts to purchase victory.

It was not a Super Tuesday for either Senator Kyrsten Sinema or State Department official Victoria J. Nuland. Each announced that they were stepping down from their positions. Sinema is declining to run once more in Arizona for the Senate. Nuland is exiting her post as the number three official at State, where she was widely seen as the champion of a hawkish approach to foreign policy. Sinema delivered a mawkish message that essentially blamed the American people for failing to recognize, let alone value, her valorous attempt to restore American power and prosperity. Nuland, by contrast, had to be satisfied with a statement from secretary of state Antony J. Blinken: “She always speaks her mind.

The Haitian government declared a state of emergency Sunday evening, following two prison breaks, as major gang leader Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier seeks to oust prime minister Ariel Henry. “Barbecue” — a nickname that originates either from having set people on fire, his mother having worked as a fried chicken vendor or both  — is a former cop who is now the head of the Revolutionary Forces of the G9 Family and Allies.

Jose Antonio Ibarra, a twenty-six-year-old Venezuelan illegal immigrant, was charged in connection with the gruesome murder of Laken Riley, a nursing student at the University of Georgia last week. Another Venezuelan, thirty-two-year-old Renzo Mendoza, was arrested last week on two felony charges for sexually assaulting an underage child in Virginia.  These cases, along with a series of others connected to Venezuelan migrants, have become central to the debate on immigration policy. Tuesday morning, for instance, Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee sent a letter to the Department of Homeland Security asking for more information about Ibarra.

The death of Alexei Navalny has dramatically increased the risk for other key figures currently imprisoned by Vladimir Putin, whether for reasons of dissident behavior, protest against the war in Ukraine or supposed suspicion of espionage. The fact that Putin would cross this line, and do so with impunity in the midst of both the Munich Security Conference and a western influence push spearheaded by willing patsy Tucker Carlson, is a sign that we are now in a new reality — one that it is the duty of the next administration to irrevocably reverse. In the past, when the United States’s top officials identified an American citizen or important dissident held in another nation and said “do not touch this person, lest you find out what terror awaits you,” it meant something.

Alexei Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition leader and a constant irritant to Russian president Vladimir Putin’s regime for more than a decade, has died in a remote penal colony in the Arctic Circle at the age of forty-seven. The news was greeted with shock, outrage and sadness across the US and Europe and came at a time when the West’s most high-profile politicians and security figures were in Germany for the annual Munich Security Conference.   There’s no denying Navalny’s bravery. Most high-profile Russian figures who criticize Putin and live long enough to tell the tale choose to live a life in exile. Navalny, however, was never interested in that option.

At the time of the Afghanistan withdrawal, Biden administration officials said behind closed doors that secretary of state Antony Blinken and national security advisor Jake Sullivan “don’t give a fuck” about rescuing Americans from the clutches of the Taliban. The admission came on a late August 2021 phone call held between the Department of Defense and congressional Democrats, based on The Spectator’s review of contemporaneous text messages. During the conversation, a Pentagon official acknowledged in response to frustration from Democrats that two of the senior-most officials working on the evacuation — Blinken and Sullivan — were indifferent to the plight of their fellow Americans.

Venezuelan presidential hopeful María Corina Machado had filed a claim in December, arguing to the country’s highest court, that a ban prohibiting her from holding office was unconstitutional. The verdict came last week — and the ban was upheld. As south Florida congresswoman María Elvira Salazar told The Spectator, the conclusions reached by the “Chavista-controlled” tribunal were “unfortunate but not surprising.” The upholding of the ban comes after months of negotiations, where the Biden administration eased sectoral sanctions in pursuit of a “path to democracy.” This approach riled up Florida Republicans, a state with a vast Venezuelan-American population.

LVIV — The Japanese have a concept of forest bathing for health. Joe Rogan promotes daily ice baths for a little shock to get you going in the morning. But in Ukraine, people often experience missile-and-drone baths, and so it was in the early hours of last Friday, when Russia launched what seems to have been its biggest ever sky assault upon Ukrainian cities. It was the first major Russian attack upon Ukrainian since the summer, when Ukraine disrupted Moscow’s missile-launching Black Sea Fleet.  Since then, it’s been a brutal New Year.  Just before 5 a.m.