Articles

President Donald Trump is often accused of being a warmonger and a rogue leader who acts in defiance of international law and global opinion. His menacing plan (abandoned for now) to seize Greenland from Denmark, the “easy way” or the “hard way,” shows why that characterization has become so widely accepted outside his MAGA base.

White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles told Vanity Fair that President Donald Trump, despite being a teetotaler, has an “alcoholic’s personality.” The president himself agreed that he has an “addictive type personality.” What Trump seems to be addicted to, at the moment, is the use of military force.

Until recently, President Donald Trump had a reputation as a quasi-isolationist. In his first inaugural address, he complained, “We’ve ... spent trillions of dollars overseas while America’s infrastructure has fallen into disrepair and decay.” In his second inaugural address, he vowed to “measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end — and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.”

In recent months, President Donald Trump has assembled the largest U.S. naval armada in the Caribbean since the invasion of Panama in 1989. There were far too many forces simply to blow up some suspected drug boats — but not enough to invade Venezuela, a nation of nearly 30 million people. Now we know what all that naval might was for. The U.S. force was the perfect size for a commando raid to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

After their meeting at Mar-a-Lago on Sunday, President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky traded happy talk about the state of peace negotiations in Ukraine. “We have made a lot of progress on ending that war,” Trump said. “We had a really great discussion on all the topics,” Zelensky said, adding that there was “90 percent” agreement on a peace plan.

The Trump administration has been reallocating scarce federal resources to combating drug cartels (“narco-terrorists”), the Venezuelan state (“a foreign terrorist organization”) and leftist groups like antifa (a “violent fifth column of domestic terrorists”). Aside from obvious concerns about legality, these actions also raise serious questions about the administration’s priorities and distribution of resources.

The Trump administration strategy of blowing up suspected drug-smuggling boats, already criticized by many legal experts as illegal, became even more controversial after The Post reported that, during the first such strike, U.S. forces had killed survivors clinging to their boat’s wreckage. Congress is now demanding the release of unedited Pentagon footage of the attack — a request that the Trump administration is stonewalling.

The 28-point “peace plan” for Ukraine that the Trump administration released last month drew heavily on an earlier Russian document. By contrast, the 29-page National Security Strategy released by the White House last week was entirely a made-in-America product. But the NSS will have the same effect: It will encourage Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and discourage America’s allies, particularly in Europe. There is nothing particularly surprising about this document in that it reflects the familiar MAGA worldview, but it is nevertheless deeply disheartening.

If you’re a law-abiding citizen and someone admonishes you that robbing banks is a crime, you would be inclined to laugh off the advice as obvious and unnecessary. If, however, you’re planning on carrying out a bank job — or have already done a few — you might react with feigned indignation that anyone could possibly ever imagine that you would ever commit such a terrible offense.

HALIFAX, Nova Scotia — The Halifax International Security Forum is an annual gathering of political and military leaders and security experts from democratic countries, with a mission “to strengthen strategic cooperation among the world’s democracies.” That was not hard to do in 2009, when the conference was founded. It has become nearly impossible now that the world’s most powerful democracy has turned into a rogue nation led by a president who is more sympathetic to dictators than democrats.

Russia’s barbaric assault on Ukraine continues: A single Russian drone and missile strike on an apartment block in western Ukraine last week killed at least 31 civilians. Meanwhile, Russia is ramping up its campaign of sabotage in Europe: Polish authorities blamed the Kremlin for a Nov. 15 explosion on a rail line used to transport supplies to Ukraine. As German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said recently, Europe “is not at war” but it is also “no longer at peace” with Russia.

Readers of this column may be surprised to learn that I don’t spend all of my time thinking about drones or diplomatic démarches. I’m also a huge — fanatical may not be inappropriate — sports fan. I devote a ridiculous amount of time to following my two favorite teams: the New York Knicks and the San Francisco 49ers. (Why New York and San Francisco? The former is my current home, and the latter is close to where I went to college.) I also follow, with lesser degrees of devotion, tennis (I never miss a U.S. Open), baseball, soccer, and college football and basketball (particularly the Cal Golden Bears).

Is President Donald Trump a peacemaker or a warmonger? An interventionist or an isolationist? The answer is: yes. He contains multitudes, and it’s nearly impossible to sort out or explain the disparate strands of his foreign policy.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney, who died on November 3 at age 84, enjoyed some unexpected respect in his last years from Democrats who once viewed him as a Machiavellian warmonger. This was because, following the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, Cheney became an outspoken critic of Donald Trump.

There are too many scandals to count in the Trump administration, but one of the most significant isn’t getting the attention it deserves. I refer to efforts by President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to politicize the armed forces and to turn them into instruments of their MAGA agenda.

The United States has a long record of fomenting regime change in Latin America, whether under the rubric of the Monroe Doctrine in the 19th and early 20th centuries or the fight against communism during the Cold War. This strategy has seldom worked out well, even when successful, and it has led to deep-rooted resentment of “The Colossus of the North.” Yet, for some reason, President Donald Trump seems eager to reprise this ignominious history in Venezuela.

Only that eminent student of human psychology, Charles Schulz, could possibly do justice to the strange relationship between President Donald Trump and Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.

One of the tropes of Schulz’s long-running comic strip, “Peanuts,” was the tale of Lucy and the football. Every autumn, for decades, Lucy van Pelt would encourage Charlie Brown to kick the football — and every time she would yank it away just before his foot connected, sending him sprawling. Charlie Brown would remonstrate with Lucy, and the next year insist that he wasn’t going to fall for her tricks again. But he always did.

Monday was a historic day in the Middle East: Hamas released its 20 living Israeli hostages only days after Israel stopped its offensive in the Gaza Strip. By brokering this agreement, President Donald Trump earned the rapturous reception he received in Israel’s parliament, with lawmakers chanting his name. Even prominent Democrats are giving Trump his due, and rightly so.

With less publicity and less pushback than the high-profile deployments of the National Guard to U.S. cities, the Trump administration has undertaken another legally dubious, and strategically problematic, use of military force: against narco-cartels in the Caribbean.

There are a lot of things to worry about in the world today. Acclaimed director Kathryn Bigelow (“Zero Dark Thirty,” “The Hurt Locker”) has made a new film — “A House of Dynamite” — warning of a danger that most of us would sooner forget.