World

A landslide election defeat for Argentine President Javier Milei’s Libertad Avanza party has made money markets doubt whether he will be able to push through his radical economic reforms.The Argentine peso lost 5.6 percent to the dollar and the Merval stock index plunged by 13 points on Monday after the flamboyant President’s party trailed the leftist opposition Peronist party of former President Cristina Kirchner by 13 points (47 percent to 34 percent) in local elections in Buenos Aires province – which, with 40 percent of the country’s voters, is the country’s biggest and most populous area.Bond markets also reacted negatively to the shock result, posting their biggest daily falls since they recommenced trading in 2021 after a debt reconstruction deal.

Think of the first Trump administration’s North Korea policy, and the bright lights, photo ops and eventual lack of deals in Singapore and Hanoi come to mind. The first two years of Trump 1.0 saw the then-new US president fluctuate between threatening "fire and fury" on the hermit kingdom to calling Kim Jong-un a "great leader". Yet, the recent and as-of-yet unconfirmed revelations of an abortive US mission in early 2019 – wherein US Navy SEALs sought to intercept communications of Kim Jong-un – may seem to contradict the unusual bromance between Trump and Kim at the time. But in fact, they only emphasize Trump’s desperation for a deal with North Korea at the time.

First the boat, then the buzz. On Tuesday, an American strike in the Caribbean shredded a vessel ferrying narcotics out of Venezuela, killing eleven alleged members of the Tren de Aragua gang – which Caracas, strategically, dismissed as an AI hallucination. Two days later, Nicolás Maduro tried his own spectacle, dispatching a pair of F-16s to roar over the USS Jason Dunham, one of the U.S. destroyers recently sent on a counter-narcotics patrol off Venezuela’s coast. The maneuvers – and the steady drumbeat of pressure that preceded them – have regime-changers daydreaming about intervention and restrainers losing sleep. But before mistaking the noise for reality, it’s worth asking: what is Washington trying to achieve?

Yesterday, September 3, President Trump welcomed Karol Nawrocki, the newly inaugurated president of Poland to the White House. It was a stirring occasion, replete with a surprise military fly-over of F-16 and F-35 fighter jets flying in “missing man” formation to honor  Major Maciej “Slab” Krakowian, the Polish pilot who died in a crash in Radom, Poland, last Thursday.  Nawrocki, who narrowly won the presidency in June, is often described as “the Polish Trump.” It’s an accurate epithet. Nawrocki is as much a “Poland First” president as Trump is an “America First” president. The 42-year-old historian (Nawrocki holds a PhD in history) supports a list of policy initiatives that could have come right out of the MAGA playbook.

“The purpose of NATO,” Lord Hastings Ismay, the alliance’s first secretary general, once quipped, was “to keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down.” That formula defined Europe’s security for decades, and it worked because US power anchored the alliance. But as President Donald Trump’s administration demands its European allies carry their share of the burden, shows little appetite for sending troops to Europe and worries more about the Southeast Asian theater, Europeans are being forced to confront their lack of political will for their own security, underinvestment in defense and dwindling public appetite to fight for their country.

A crack has developed in the NATO alliance, but surprisingly it has nothing to do with Ukraine. On Wednesday, the Danish foreign minister summoned the American envoy to answer for allegations that US citizens were carrying out covert influence operations in Greenland. According to reports, the men were seeking to incept a Greenlandic liberation movement meant to “pave the way for a US takeover” of the world’s largest island. They compiled lists of potential secessionist recruits who would support becoming part of the United States, going so far as to cultivate contacts during repeat visits to Greenland. Research was also done into those on the island who may fervently oppose such an alteration of the status quo, a far less routine action.

The authoritarian left wing regime of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has mobilized his ruling Socialist party’s paramilitary militia in response to US President Donald Trump sending a task force of warships into Venezuelan waters as part of a US crackdown against alleged cocaine trafficking by the poverty-stricken country.Declaring that “no empire will touch the sacred soil of Venezuela “ Maduro sent his militia to reinforce the country’s borders with neighboring Colombia, who he has accused of collaborating with America in a pincer movement against his country.

“WHAT IS GOING ON IN SOUTH KOREA?” President Trump posted over breakfast. “Seems like a Purge or Revolution. We can’t have that and do business there. I am seeing the new President today at the White House. Thank you for your attention to this matter!!!” Trump wasn’t talking about the global box-office success of K-Pop Demon Hunters, and wasn’t warning about the proliferation of zombies on the Train to Busan. Instead, word had reached Trump of recent raids by the government of newly-elected liberal South Korean President Lee Jae-myung on some conservative churches, including the Unification Church. These were related to documents about the coup that embroiled the country last December and nearly toppled Lee’s newly-elected government.

Two terror attacks which hit Colombia on Thursday revealed a scary new level of sophistication among the country’s ever present narco-terrorists – and threatened to return the country to the violence and chaos that many had hoped it had finally escaped.The double terror strikes killed 18 people and involved a car bomb in Colombia’s third most populous city of Cali in which at least six people died, and an earlier drone downing of a police helicopter near the city of Medlllin – long notorious as Colombia’s drugs capital – in which 12 people died.