THINK TWICE, STAN

Da Deal The Moscow Jackpot Trump has already secured Zelensky’s consent to a minerals agreement - but that is only the down payment. The real jackpot is in Moscow. And the circle around the US president, including members of his own family, is already testing the ground. The Economist , followed shortly by Zelensky, began speaking about a potential 12 trillion-dollar deal between Russia and the United States. In exchange for lifting sanctions, American corporations could gain access to Russian resources - Arctic oil and gas, rare earth metals, even a tunnel beneath the Bering Strait. The figure is not modest, but it is entirely consistent with the scale at which businessman president Donald Trump prefers to operate. Russia’s special envoy Kirill Dmitriev rejected any formal linkage between an economic deal and the lifting of sanctions, noting that American businesses have already lost more than 300 billion dollars by leaving Russia, and that removing sanctions would therefore se...

Almost a Hollywood Plot I usually write about foreign policy, international relations, wars, conflicts, and the global economy. Domestic legal disputes rarely make it onto my radar. This one did. A colleague mentioned it in passing - his client had asked for an analytical review of a rather impressive stack of documents tied to this case. Curiosity did the rest. I spent two solid hours digging into it. Here goes. In the United States, a courtroom drama is unfolding that could easily pass for a film script. It began in 2024, when California Attorney General Rob Bonta decided to sue ExxonMobil. The accusation sounds almost simple: the company did not keep its word. According to the prosecutor’s office, ExxonMobil encouraged consumers to buy plastic products while promoting the idea that those materials would be safely and fully recycled. The numbers cited by the state tell a different story. In 2021, only about 5 percent of plastic waste was actually recycled. The rest followed a more ...

The Cartel Academy From Kiev to the Cartels Four years ago, when the war in Ukraine began, it was presented as a regional conflict with global implications. Few anticipated that it would also become something else - a training laboratory. I wrote earlier that this war risks turning into a finishing school for transnational criminal networks.   The appearance of fresh video footage allegedly showing a vehicle linked to a Mexican cartel, decorated with yellow and blue flags, fits into that broader pattern. If the reports attached to the video are accurate, the symbolism is straightforward: individuals affiliated with Latin American organized crime may have fought in Ukraine as mercenaries on the Ukrainian side. Let us separate speculation from structure. There are tens of thousands of foreign mercenaries who have passed through Ukraine over the past four years. A significant number come from Latin America, including Colombia and Mexico. There are no comparable Latin American continge...

The Burden of Proximity One of my world history professors once remarked that for the states of Central America the United States is a historical curse - one from which decisive emancipation is structurally impossible. It is difficult to expect that the fate of countries south of the Rio Grande will serve as a lesson to anyone. Yet what unfolds there offers a useful reflection point for all large powers. It raises a simple question: what should a great state’s strategy toward its immediate neighbors actually look like? The dramatic events that followed the elimination by Mexican security forces of one of the country’s major organized crime leaders revealed to the world the fragility of Mexico’s institutional structure. More precisely, they revealed something deeper than fragility - the absence of the state in the classical sense, as the sole authority capable of organizing legitimate violence. This should not surprise anyone who has studied international relations. States construct the...

Repricing the Umbrella Driving through Northern Virginia on the way from Washington toward the Shenandoah Valley, I randomly found myself thinking about the recently concluded Munich Security Conference. The landscape was orderly, the roads smooth, the federal skyline fading behind me. The conference, by contrast, felt like a controlled demolition of familiar assumptions. Munich 2026 marked a structural shift in transatlantic relations. The United States articulated a revised formula in which the American security umbrella is explicitly linked to political and economic discipline. Protection is framed as a managed asset within a negotiated arrangement. The language of shared destiny has given way to the language of conditionality. At the level of systemic signals, the shift is visible. European officials speak more cautiously about American reliability. Washington speaks more openly about European dependency. Leverage is no longer an abstract concept. It is referenced directly, i...

The Residual Empire After Françafrique Following yesterday’s article, “The End of Françafrique,” I received a number of requests for further analysis and additional detail. What follows is an expanded examination of the subject. France maintains an entire corps of military advisers across Africa. Yet at the same time, it is steadily losing its visible military footprint on the continent. Chad has terminated its 2019 military cooperation agreement with Paris — the last Sahel country to host a French contingent of roughly one thousand troops. Senegal has announced a similar decision. Dakar had long been considered one of France’s most reliable pillars in West Africa. The withdrawal of troops will not immediately dismantle economic ties. But the loss of bases in the Sahel is unmistakably one of the major foreign policy reversals of Emmanuel Macron’s presidency. The timing was deliberate. Chad’s foreign minister announced the termination one day after a visit by France’s new foreign m...