Global Politics

Out on the dark water where the rules get thin and the trigger gets heavy, Southern Spear is less a drug bust than a deliberate message: if you run narco-terror cargo under a cartel flag, the United States will hunt you down and end the problem at sea, not in court.

Liberal democracies did not fail because they defended themselves after 9/11, but because they spent the next two decades pretending that ideology, borders, and integration no longer mattered in a world where all three still kill people.

I am not crossing into Cambodia because I want to, but because borders now behave like quiet intelligence services, and once you have been attached to a war, even a routine visa run starts feeling like you are moving through someone else’s threat matrix.

Fuentes sells antisemitism and Kremlin-friendly authoritarian nostalgia the way the internet sells everything else, as meme-flavored entertainment stripped of consequence, and Europe cannot afford to treat that kind of cultural poison as harmless content.

From Kabul evac fallout to a deadly ambush in Abyei and the mess of armed factions in Gaza, these stories all point to the same truth: rushed decisions and fragile ceasefires always get paid for by people standing post. Whether it’s Guard troops at home, peacekeepers abroad, or IDF units hunting bomb-makers, the work is still dirty, dangerous, and done without applause.

Zelensky’s refusal to trade away a single inch of Ukrainian soil is not stubbornness but the last solid line between a world of rules and a world where every dictator thinks they can redraw the map at gunpoint.

From where I sit in Phuket, watching FPV suicide drones carve into Thai positions from a frontier run by casinos and scam compounds, it is clear this is no border misunderstanding but a conflict engineered by foreign operators using Cambodia’s criminal economy as cover.

Hard-nosed realism that trades away our commitment to democracy in favor of cutting deals with dictators is not strength; it is strategic blindness that will cost America both credibility and security.

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.