By mid-afternoon, the gray, windowless corridors of the Harry S. Truman Building, the headquarters of the State Department, feel less like the nerve center of the world’s most consequential foreign-policy institution and more like the catacombs for diplomacy. A disorienting and disheartening quiet has settled in, following last year’s sweeping cuts at State and its sister agency USAID.
The coffee corner at Hotel Bayerischer Hof in Munich is so mobbed with diplomats and executives exchanging business cards and guzzling caffeine that it’s easy to miss even the most recognizable faces. And Jens-Frederik Nielsen is not one of those.
In November 1999, Havana’s Latinoamericano stadium sold out for a baseball game that was billed as a friendly rivalry between Latin America’s oldest and newest revolutionary leaders. Hugo Chávez had been Venezuela’s president for fewer than nine months when he took the field opposite Cuba’s Fidel Castro, who had led his country’s revolution 40 years earlier, when Chávez was just 4 years old.
American forces’ surgical capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, carried out in a daring raid shortly after 1 a.m. local time today, had been planned and rehearsed for months. Informants monitored the first couple’s movements, more than 150 aircraft provided cover starting late last night, missile strikes on military installations knocked out air defenses, and low-flying helicopters landed Delta Force soldiers in the center of Caracas. U.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick went on CNBC this fall to promote a deal so great that he deemed it “off the rails.” The government of Japan, he explained, had brought down its tariff rate by giving President Donald Trump $550 billion to spend on whatever he wants. “They are going to give America money when we ask for it to build the projects,” he said with a grin.
Volodymyr Zelensky clearly learned some lessons from his calamitous Oval Office meeting with Donald Trump back in February. That much was apparent today just from the Ukrainian leader’s outfit. Back then, Zelensky took heat from Trump allies who felt that a suit—and not his trademark wartime ensemble—would have been more appropriate attire for an audience with the American president.
Vladimir Putin is coming to America, despite the international warrant for the Russian president’s arrest, despite his years of hostile threats against NATO, and despite him showing no remorse for his invasion of a sovereign nation.
None of that matters to President Donald Trump, who announced Friday night that he would meet the globally shunned leader this Friday in Alaska.