American foreign policy

Earlier this month, two American supersonic fighter jets flew over Georgetown, the capital city of Guyana. The US show of force is not only for the attention of Venezuela’s socialist regime who has been escalating toward a military conflict with its smaller neighbor since at least September 2023 when Nicolás Maduro returned from Beijing. The message of sending two F/A-18 Super Hornets flying from a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier sailing in the Caribbean Sea is also for the Islamic Republic of Iran. At first glance, the Venezuela-Guyana conflict is about a century-old border dispute of a dense territory called the Esequibo that makes up two-thirds of Guyana’s land mass but only 15 percent of its population.

The US crackdown on trade finance for Russia from international banks — designed to impede imports needed for the continuing assault on Ukraine — is biting hard, reports the FT, quoting an investor who thinks “the logical endpoint of this is turning Russia into Iran.” Quite right too: sanctions like these are a vital non-military way to hobble Vladimir Putin’s campaign. But war and finance intersect in many different ways. Consider also the fate of 400 western-owned commercial aircraft that were leased to Russian airlines before the invasion in February 2022. Now stuck in Russia or its satellites, unmaintained to western standards and unfit to fly back into our airspace, they’re a potential multibillion loss for their owners and insurers.

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.

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 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.