World

With the end of Title 42, Donald Trump’s helpful bequest to Joe Biden of a means to exclude asylum-seekers on grounds of a health emergency that has long since passed, the administration is bracing for scenes of alien hordes thronging the border. But if there’s one picture the Biden administration least wants to see again, it’s that striking image from September 2021 of a mounted border patrolman appearing to whip a cowering Haitian migrant with his reins.  Then-White House press secretary Jen Psaki reported at the time that Biden found the photo “horrific” and “horrible,” adding “that’s not who the Biden administration is.” That same month, the US deported over 6,000 Haitians, flown with shackled hands and feet to a country many of them had left years before.

Mexico’s president, the increasingly authoritarian and erratic leftist Andrés Manuel López Obrador, aka AMLO, visited Veracruz this past Friday to commemorate the 1914 American occupation of that city. In his remarks was a startling declaration: the Mexican state and military, under his leadership, will defend Mexico’s criminal cartels from the Americans.  “There is talk in the United States,” said AMLO, “of intervening and confronting organized crime, drug traffickers, treating them as terrorists and that for this reason they will come to 'help' us, to 'support' us to confront organized crime... we do not accept any intervention... if they did, it will not be only the sailors and soldiers who will defend Mexico, all Mexicans will defend Mexico.

Reports of the death of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency are greatly exaggerated. Fortunately for America, while the dollar is by no means unsinkable, it will not be toppled anytime soon. Threats exist, but rather than coming from abroad, to paraphrase Lincoln, they spring up among us. How the US manages its economy will largely be the determinant factor in the dollar’s continued supremacy. Currently, the dollar makes up about 58 percent of foreign currency reserves worldwide, well ahead of its competitors. The next closest currency is the euro at 20 percent, and then the yen and pound sterling, both at about 5 percent — China’s renminbi is at a paltry 3 percent (just ahead of a real powerhouse, the Canadian dollar).

Why should the man presiding over the single greatest cause of death for people ages eighteen to forty-five in America be reframed as a hero for social traditionalism? We live in strange times. Sohrab Ahmari wrote in defense of Andrés Manuel López Obrador's "irrepressible social conservatism" last week, views which he also promoted to Fox News audiences this weekend. Ahmari described AMLO as a "man of the old left" who is "not a cultural progressive." "In Latin America, there is this possibility of this combination of being relatively on the left on economic issues, but culturally conservative," Ahmari said. "AMLO represents that." Sadly, this is an example of hopes outpacing reality and searching for a foreign model that largely doesn't exist.

Vladimir Kara-Murza dies hard. He has withstood not one but two poisoning attempts by Vladimir Putin's government. He has withstood the targeting of Russia's officials. And he has borne the ramifications of the West's turn away from confrontation with a regime he understands for its villainy. Now, Kara-Murza is facing what could be a final challenge — a trial against him based on the 2022 laws against "misinformation" about the Russian military in the Ukraine war, by an authoritarian regime bent on silencing all its critics and sending them into the dark quiet of a cell where they will end their days. Kara-Murza is forty-one, the father of three, a former advisor to assassinated Putin critic Boris Nemtsov and a longtime advocate against the regime.

God bless Emmanuel Macron for his perseverance and self-confidence. The French president seeks to lead Europe and turn the continent into a strong, independent player in its own right. And he is eager to take on the hard, thankless diplomatic work that few of his peers are willing to do. Whether it was his ploy in 2019 to connect then-US president Donald Trump and then-Iranian president Hassan Rouhani on the phone or his months-long, intensive personal dialogue with Russian President Vladimir Putin before the war in Ukraine, Macron invests a lot of time and capital into these gambits. Unfortunately for him, many of them fail to accomplish anything of substance. Macron wasn’t able to convince Rouhani to speak with Trump (although Trump reportedly agreed to the call).

I almost feel sorry for John Kirby, the National Security Council spokesman tasked with tidying up after the icky messes deposited about the landscape by Joe Biden.  Let me emphasize the adverb “almost.” Kirby’s job is unenviable. Basically he has to lie and pretend that his boss and that excruciating, illiterate muppet of a press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, make sense. It’s always a horrible goulash that Kirby has to contend with. He has my sympathy for that.  But yesterday, when Kirby stood before the press to answer questions about the administration’s report on Ameirca’s humiliating flight from Afghanistan in August 2021, his performance was not just cringe-making. It was infuriating.

After thirteen months of war, Ukraine’s infrastructure is in a dire state. Its armies are preparing for a counteroffensive, and its economy is not likely to fare any better this year than it did in the last. Kyiv will need more money from the West — and the West will have to provide. The need is clear, but the will, in the United States and Europe, less so. Thankfully there is a way around this looming problem, courtesy of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation.  Representative Stephanie Bice of Oklahoma has submitted the Make Russia Pay Act, which authorizes the federal government to seize, deem as forfeited, and liquidate Russian assets that are currently frozen in the US.