C ore national leaders of the "Coalition of the Willing," an assemblage of mostly NATO states (minus the US and Russian hangers-on like Hungary and Slovakia), met in Paris last week to discuss the future of the Ukraine peace process. Prime Minister Mark Carney made the trip to underscore Canada's role. French president Emmanuel Macron gave us a nice shout-out.
After US troops swarmed into Venezuela, seizing the country's president and his wife, there was little to be heard from the Pentagon. Typically, it would be a time for defense officials to talk to the Pentagon press corps: a group of journalists made up of some of the most talented reporters in the US. The Pentagon could have been expected to be held to account over what has been criticized as a violation of international law. Under the Trump administration, that didn't happen.
For years, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has tirelessly praised Donald Trump as a "man of peace." He sang the president's praises for brokering the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. Orban also repeated Trump's claims that, if he had been US president in 2022, Russia would never have started its war against Ukraine. This is all part of Orban's "peace rhetoric" a cornerstone of the Hungarian prime minister's current election campaign.
Thousands of protesters have taken to the streets of cities across Colombia to decry Donald Trump's threats to expand his military campaign in South America into their territory, after last weekend's deadly attack on Venezuela. In Cucuta, a city on Colombia's eastern border with Venezuela, several hundred demonstrators marched towards its 19th century cathedral waving the country's yellow, blue and red flag and shouting: Fuera los yanquis! (Out with the Yanks!)
On Friday night, when Donald Trump met with a small group of senior Administration officials and decided to authorize a raid in Caracas by Delta Force commandos to capture Nicolás Maduro, those present included Secretary of State Marco Rubio; Secretary of War Pete Hegseth; the C.I.A. director, John Ratcliffe; Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Stephen Miller, the President's most essential policy adviser, omni-portfolio'd and grimly saturnine.
The distinction, which some legal scholars dispute, determines what legal constraints apply, including the War Powers Resolution and the Geneva Conventions, which might protect Maduro as a prisoner of war. President Trump has threatened a second strike, and administration officials have suggested the campaign may notstop in Venezuela. The big picture: The overnight raidfollowed months of U.S.strikes on alleged "narco-terrorists" that killed dozens, along with seizures of vessels carrying Venezuelan oil.