Six months after Maduro's fall, Washington controls Venezuela's oil and its transition but answers for neither. The June earthquakes, with a confirmed toll above 3,300, turned that control-without-accountability into a mass-casualty test the arrangement fails. Our new analysis traces how an oil-first order supervises without governing, offers aid as charity rather than obligation, and leaves responsibility for the dead resting nowhere.

The U.S. Supreme Court, in Trump v. Barbara, struck down an executive order redefining birthright citizenship, reaffirming that children born on American soil are citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment. Yet the decision leaves the president's core immigration tools untouched: TPS terminations, asylum limits, deportations, and new visa fees. Our analysis explains why Barbara is an exception, not a reversal, and its consequences for Latin America and global talent flows.

De la Espriella's narrow runoff win has markets betting on a hydrocarbon revival. But our new analysis separates what the incoming government can do quickly from what Congress and the courts will block — and finds that while the political shift is immediate, the structural change is anything but.

Colombia's June 21 runoff is framed as a choice between Cepeda's negotiated continuity and de la Espriella's Bukele-style mano dura backed by Washington. We argue both misread a structural crisis: incarceration cannot dislodge territorial, drug-financed armed groups, and an overextended patron offers conditional returns.

Colombia’s June 21 runoff is widely read as an American story — a polling upset, a Trump-captured right, a global rightward wave. Our new analysis argues most of that framing breaks on arrival. The math favors Abelardo de la Espriella, the pattern is the Latin American pendulum rather than a global tide, and the real challenge is governing afterward — whoever wins inherits a country without a legislative majority and a contested result.

Colombia's security crisis is a structural failure — not a problem awaiting the right foreign patron. Petro’s Paz Total has failed. But the U.S. that underwrote Plan Colombia no longer exists: its arsenals are depleted, its attention overextended, its reliability conditional. Whatever government Colombians elect, it will need a security strategy calibrated to the hemisphere that exists — not the one from twenty years ago.

Six months after Operation Absolute Resolve, Venezuela has not produced a democratic transition — it has produced a supervised kleptocracy. Maduro is gone; the apparatus that sustained him is not. Washington secured the oil, sidelined the opposition, and deferred the elections. The trial in New York extends the intervention by other means. What the post-Maduro moment reveals is not a liberation but an update of the Monroe Doctrine — authoritarianism reordered, not dismantled.

Colombia's 2026 election is a foreign policy inflection point. Each leading candidate represents a distinct strategic orientation: Cepeda toward autonomy and South-South cooperation; Valencia toward realignment with Washington; De la Espriella toward ideological rupturism without a coherent roadmap. This analysis maps the consequences of each scenario across U.S. relations, Chinese investment, regional positioning, counternarcotics, and migration.

As the United States deepens its military commitment in the Persian Gulf, its capacity to sustain hemispheric dominance is quietly eroding. This piece traces the concrete channels through which the Iran conflict is already reaching Latin America — energy price shocks, tightening dollar liquidity, expanding criminal economies, and weakening security partnerships — and argues that the region is absorbing the costs of a war it did not choose, without the protection the Monroe Doctrine once promised in exchange for deference.

Viktor Orbán — Europe's longest-serving autocrat, Moscow's man inside the EU, and the global hard right's favorite template — may be on the verge of losing power. If Tisza's lead survives Hungary's gerrymandered electoral system, the implications are immediate: Hungary's veto on Ukraine aid disappears, Brussels gets back a cooperative member state, and the illiberal model loses its crown jewel. For Washington, Trump's most important European ally could be gone — replaced by a government seeking to repair the very ties the White House has spent months undermining. Sixteen years. Possibly over.

The United States is concentrating military assets in the Caribbean and signaling willingness to use force. The problem is that no one appears to have a clear answer to what using that force would actually mean — or what would follow. Projecting coercive power without a coherent political strategy, a long-term vision, or a realistic post-military plan is not a policy. It is a posture. History is unambiguous about what tends to happen when Washington mistakes visible dominance for effective control.

As the global order shifts toward hard power, Europe faces a security crisis. With Trump reducing U.S. commitments, NATO underfunded, and Russia expanding militarily, Europe must accelerate strategic autonomy. However, achieving military self-sufficiency remains a decade-long challenge amid growing geopolitical instability.