Category: Politics

Here’s the story of contemporary Iran in a nutshell: A decade ago, Iran was relatively stable, led by a reformist president, Hassan Rouhani, who’d just signed a nuclear agreement with half a dozen world powers, including the United States. Its economy, long plagued by economic sanctions imposed most emphatically by the United States, began to […]

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Vladimir Putin has been attempting to influence Donald Trump to seize both Venezuela and Greenland since at least 2017. The effort, rooted in Putin’s ambitions in Ukraine, hinged on American embrace of the Monroe Doctrine, the 1823 policy framework that focused American influence within the Western Hemisphere. Putin’s reasoning, according to witnesses familiar with the […]

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Having removed Nicolás Maduro from power in Venezuela through military force, the United States is now the decisive external actor shaping Venezuela’s near-term political and economic trajectory. Much attention will focus on the legality of the operation, on Maduro’s fate in U.S. courts, and on how other major powers respond. Those debates will play out […]

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On December 15, 2025, Donald Trump issued the latest in a series of unprecedented executive orders, designating the narcotic drug fentanyl—used daily as an anesthetic in hospitals throughout the United States and the world—“a weapon of mass destruction” (WMD). This designation is a true innovation. Fentanyl has never before been defined as any kind of […]

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Earlier this month, Reed Brody—an international war crimes prosecutor and member of the International Commission of Jurists—sat down with the BBC to discuss the legal issues that have been raised by the US strikes against small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. BBC: Reed Brody, thank you very much for joining us. As you […]

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