Category: Global Politics

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.

I went to Ukraine thinking I could choose how to help, only to find that on the morning the war began everything I knew—plans, love, even my sense of who I was—was smashed by artillery, paperwork, and the chaotic, makeshift mercy of volunteers who’d been thrown together to survive.

Watching Pokrovsk ground to dust meter by meter, I see Washington and Budapest flirting with an alliance of convenience that would codify the stalemate into Western policy and rename exhaustion as realism.

Russia’s nuclear-powered 9M730 Burevestnik (SSC-X-9 Skyfall) is a low-altitude, long-endurance cruise missile, with a claimed 14,000 km in 15 hours still unverified, built to slip past missile defenses and push the nuclear arms race into a harder phase.

Sanctuary is a shabby myth in the Golis, where satellite eyes, patient ISR, and surgical fire are turning those wadis into dead ends for ISIS-Somalia.