Global Politics

From a beach town built on smoothies and Muay Thai camps, I am watching two neighbors drag a century of bad maps, criminal economies, and political ego back to the edge of a shooting war.

Switzerland was right to reject drafting women because any society that has seen real war knows you don’t coerce women into the zero line unless you’re out of men, and pretending biology, psychology, and the brutal math of ground combat don’t exist is how you trade restraint for barbarism.

Ukraine is plugging more women into the drone fight on the front line, while back home Pete Hegseth is pushing U.S. industry to crank out weapons faster for the next war, and Poland is set to grab about 250 U.S. Strykers for a buck each to beef up NATO’s eastern flank.

If the bombing of that vessel is ultimately judged to have targeted civilians or used grossly disproportionate force, then everyone in the chain of command, from the trigger-puller up to President Trump and his Pentagon leadership, must answer for it as a potential war crime rather than dismiss it as routine business of war.

Out in the world’s forgotten corners, America’s outposts still bet their lives on walls too thin, warnings too late, and the dangerous illusion that lightning never strikes the same place twice.

Pentagon scrutiny rises as global tensions flare from Darfur to China and the Koreas. Here’s your Wednesday Morning Brief, December 3, 2025.

Congress is tightening bipartisan oversight on the Trump administration’s Caribbean counter-narco strikes even as the White House keeps pressure on cartel networks and Maduro’s inner circle. At the same time, Maduro is trying to project calm from behind blacked-out glass in Caracas, while New York’s anti-ICE protest at Federal Plaza crossed from lawful dissent into street-level disorder and drew a firm NYPD response.

I am not interested in abstract “peace plans” drafted in Miami hotel suites; I am interested in whether the people I fought beside in Ukraine are being asked to trade their homes, language, and dead for the illusion of stability.

Nigeria is running out of runway, and every day Washington hesitates is another day armed groups tighten their grip on a country too strategically important to watch slide into chaos.

Ukraine and Russia are locked in a grinding stalemate where neither can win outright, yet both refuse to accept the cost of defeat as the political ground beneath them steadily erodes.

Parked off Venezuela like a steel cathedral, the Ford isn’t here to chase panga boats — it’s a billion-dollar warning flare meant to make someone, somewhere, think very hard about what happens next.

In a decisive, intelligence-driven sweep across six northern states, the Nigerian Air Force’s synchronized precision strikes under Operations Hadin Kai and Fanjan Yamma shredded insurgent logistics and eliminated senior fighters — a clear tactical win that nonetheless underlines how airpower, however effective, cannot by itself cure the deeper social and economic rot that fuels the violence.