Foreign Policy

The Art of the Hemisphere, Part V

Tanbreez, Greenland Delivers the Heavy REE Proof Point When I launched The Art of the Hemisphere last December, the core argument was straightforward: 21st-century American statecraft must treat the Western Hemisphere—not as a polite neighborhood watch, but as a strategic operating theater. Geography is leverage. Proximity is power. And in the great-power contest for critical minerals, “hemispheric hustle” beats distant dependencies every time. Four months and four installments later, the thesis is no longer theoretical. It is playing out in southern Greenland, where a U.S.-listed company has just secured operational control of one of the world’s largest and most strategically valuable…

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Adieu, Ayatollah

The New York Times Has Been Wrong About Iran for More Than a Century The New York Times has spent more than a century getting Iran wrong—sometimes through outright distortion, more often through a stubborn refusal to see the board as it actually is. Pull up a chair, maybe grab a good cigar if that's your thing, and let's walk through the record. It starts in 1979 and lands right here in late February 2026, with the paper once again sounding the alarm over decisive action while ignoring the century-old machinery that made that action inevitable. 1979: “Trusting Khomeini” – The…

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Trump’s Arctic Framework Triumph

Realpolitik in Action – Time to Read The Art of the Deal In the high-stakes theater of Davos, President Donald Trump did not arrive to play by the old rules. On January 21, 2026, after a substantive meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, he posted on Truth Social: “We have formed the framework of a future deal with respect to Greenland and, in fact, the entire Arctic Region. This solution, if consummated, will be a great one for the United States of America, and all NATO Nations.” He immediately canceled the February 1 tariffs that had been set to hit…

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An Offer They Won’t Refuse

Why US Control of Greenland Will Save NATO from Europe's Own Weakness As the World Economic Forum opens in Davos, the transatlantic conversation is not about climate models or AI ethics. It is about Greenland. President Trump has escalated tariffs on eight NATO allies-Denmark, Germany, France, the UK, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and Finland-unless a path opens to American control of the world’s largest island. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has made the position crystal clear on the sidelines: the United States will not back down, because Europe projects weakness while America projects strength. As I have said repeatedly on X and in…

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The Mullahs’ Last Stand

Why This Iranian Uprising Could Change Everything The rial is in freefall, hitting record lows of 1.4–1.8 million per dollar, inflation is ravaging households at over 42% annually (with food prices surging 70–72% year-on-year), and bazaars that once propped up the regime are now shuttered in open revolt. What began as bread riots on December 28, 2025, has exploded into the most widespread, sustained challenge to the Islamic Republic since the 1979 revolution itself. Protests now rage across all 31 provinces and over 190 cities, with crowds in the hundreds of thousands battling security forces in Tehran, Mashhad, Isfahan, Tabriz, Ahvaz,…

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Trump’s 21st-Century Real Estate Masterstroke

The Strategic Imperative of Acquiring Greenland On January 6, 2026, President Donald J. Trump's renewed campaign to secure Greenland stands as one of the most audacious foreign policy initiatives of his second term. What began as a provocative idea in his first administration has matured into a deliberate strategic push, grounded in national security necessities, resource imperatives, and the realities of great-power competition in the Arctic. This is no mere diplomatic theater; it is the art of the deal applied to geopolitics-a visionary endgame where the United States emerges with control over a pivotal asset on terms overwhelmingly favorable to American…

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America First in Our Backyard

Donroe Rising: How Trump Restored U.S. Dominance in the Western Hemisphere In the early hours of January 3, 2026, President Donald Trump shattered years of diplomatic paralysis with a swift military operation that captured Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, extraditing him to New York to face narco-terrorism charges. This bold stroke, launched from 20 U.S. bases with 150 aircraft, not only toppled a regime long allied with adversaries like China, Russia, and Iran but also signaled a seismic shift in U.S. hemispheric policy. Contrast this with the 2009 Honduran crisis, where President Manuel Zelaya's illegal bid to rewrite the constitution for reelection…

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The Art of the Hemisphere, Part IV

The Noriega Playbook Executed – Maduro’s Extraction and the Dawn of Realignment N.B. Read part 1, part 2, and part 3 of this series. The operation-dubbed "Operation Absolute Resolve" by the Trump administration-unfolded with clinical precision in the pre-dawn hours of January 2: elite Delta Force operators, supported by DEA attachments and backed by precision airstrikes on key regime nodes-Fuerte Tiuna barracks, La Carlota airbase, and Miraflores security perimeters-extracted Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores from the presidential palace. Within hours, the couple was airborne, en route to federal custody in the United States aboard the USS Iwo Jima to face the…

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The Art of the Hemisphere, Part III

Reclaiming the Caribbean: The Cuban Cascade Three weeks after detailing how Trump's pardon of Juan Orlando Hernández turned Honduras into a strategic ally and intensified pressure on Nicolás Maduro, and just a day after Part II outlined the escalating actions of Operation Southern Spear—targeting strikes, seizures, and a shadow-fleet blockade—the Wall Street Journal delivers a stark report: Cuba on the edge of economic collapse, driven by the same Venezuelan oil restrictions. This development underscores the broader implications of Trump's strategy, not as unintended fallout, but as a deliberate ripple effect designed to dismantle the Havana-Caracas alliance and compel both regimes toward…

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The Art of the Hemisphere, Part II

Trump's Corollary in Action: Choking the Narco-Nexus Three weeks ago, I laid out how President Trump's pardon of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández (JOH)-a man convicted of turning his country into a cocaine superhighway-was no act of mercy, but a stroke of asymmetric genius. Low domestic cost, high strategic yield: Flip Honduras, isolate Nicolás Maduro, and dangle a "golden bridge" of exile and asset unfreezing in exchange for Venezuelan oil concessions, base closures, and a clean break from his narco-terror cronies. Critics howled hypocrisy; I called it the biggest real-estate deal since Manhattan, with 300 billion barrels of Orinoco heavy…

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