China

Donald Trump’s second term has been revolutionary in many ways, particularly in his administration’s approach to foreign affairs. From the get-go, the nomination of Marco Rubio as his top diplomat and Chris Landau as Rubio’s deputy signaled a break from orthodoxy. In picking Rubio, previously the most vocal senator on hemispheric affairs, and Landau, Trump’s ambassador to Mexico in his first term, the message was clear: our neighborhood is a top priority.  In his first exclusive magazine interview of his second term, Trump met with The Spectator’s Ben Domenech in the Oval Office, where a large portion of the conversation delved into Latin-American affairs.

The recent American interest in the Panama Canal is grounded and rational — contrary to media characterizations of the renewed focus as a byproduct of the president’s impulsive fixations. The Canal, as President Trump has correctly noted, was an American development in a nation that existed mostly as a consequence of American intervention. Panama provided the setting for the Canal — and America provided the Canal itself, having taken on, in 1903, the project France failed to complete in 1890. In the 1960s, when the United States began preparing its handover — not its return — to the Panamanian state, the concession was understood as the price of peace with an ascendant Third World.

President Donald Trump posted an AI-picture of a gangster version of himself on Instagram at around 3 p.m. Sunday. Behind the fedora-clad figure, the text “FAFO” — short for “fuck around and find out” — appears alongside a smiling face.  What happened earlier that Sunday, and the machine-made picture that followed, tells us a lot about how Trump 2.0. will deal with the world.  After two planes carrying Colombian illegal aliens departed the United States this weekend, self-proclaimed humanist and former guerrilla fighter Gustavo Petro, Colombia’s president, refused to allow the plane to land. “I deny the entry of American planes carrying Colombian migrants into our territory,” Petro said on X.

New Year’s marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the collective freakout known as Y2K, when overwrought tech aficionados joined forces with Luddites to warn the world of the pending apocalypse of computer infrastructure that could run the global economy but was evidently incapable of resetting to “00” in date codes. Those chiliastic projections obviously did not come to pass, which is why we can spend 2025 reflecting on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the day’s other Chicken Little situation — consternation over the transition that would, some skeptical parties feared, have catastrophic consequences for infrastructure central to the daily functioning of global markets, the final turnover of the Panama Canal.

Before he agrees to be interviewed, He Jiankui has one request: that he is introduced as a ‘gene editing pioneer’. This may come across as grandiose, but it is also indisputable. No one else in history, after all, can say they have created genetically edited human beings. In 2018, He dropped the mother of all scientific bombs when he announced that he had used Crispr, a gene-editing technique, to alter the DNA of two babies. In a YouTube video, He explained that the twins, ‘two beautiful Chinese girls’, codenamed Lulu and Nana, had been born safely just a few weeks before in Shenzhen. Both had had their embryos edited to prevent them catching HIV from their father. Later, it emerged that another woman was pregnant with a genetically modified baby.