As the shadow war on Venezuela continues, our team chose the following courtesy the team at The Rest is Politics (in addition to other thoughts) and Al Jazeera, as it had an interview with the 2025 Nobel Peace Laureate Marina Corina Machado along with NDTV's World Summit 2025: :
We present some clips from the West Wing, an NBC Show depicting life during the Fictional Bartlett Administration, about a Sense of Service and the True Art of the Political Possible as we also note this on #TrumpWatch as the President departed for Asia as noted by Politico after an interesting week that saw the destruction of the East Wing of the White House for the President's New Ballroom that is being underwritten by leading companies in the United States:
President Donald Trump is heading to Malaysia today for a three-country Asia trip. | Win McNamee/Getty Images | |||
With help from Sophia Cai and Daniel Lippman Subscribe here | Email Daniella | Email Gigi President DONALD TRUMP takes off for Malaysia today on a three-country trip that carries big risks of falling short of his goals — including sweetening defense partnerships and gathering more peacemaker accolades. Most likely on his itinerary: presiding over a peace deal between Cambodia and Thailand, pushing Japan to up defense spending and revisiting major trade deals with Tokyo and Seoul that have implications for naval shipbuilding. The biggest wildcard of course is Trump’s planned meeting with Chinese leader XI JINPING on Thursday in South Korea. On the table will be China’s new restrictions on rare earths exports — which are set to complicate the lives of defense manufacturers. The White House says Trump will also address China's purchases of Russian oil. China will be trying to get the U.S. to lift tariffs and revoke national security export controls on the most advanced artificial intelligence chips. And Taiwan is reaching out to MAGA influencers for fear that Trump may wobble on longstanding unofficial U.S. support for Taipei in an effort to cut a deal with Xi. The trip “could redefine U.S. influence in the region as tensions with China simmer,” our own Sophia Cai wrote in as she prepared to board Air Force One. “President Trump doesn’t travel to have dialogue for dialogue’s sake. He is going to Asia to close major trade deals, secure huge investments and dramatically advance peace and security in the Indo-Pacific,” an administration official told our own Megan Messerly and colleagues. House Foreign Affairs ranking member GREGORY MEEKS (D-N.Y.) had his doubts: "Trump will be meeting with Xi from a position of weakness having started a trade war that China is showing it can not only weather, but make equally painful for the United States," he told NatSec Daily in a statement. Here are a few of the potential flashpoints beyond the Xi meeting: In Malaysia, Trump is so sure he will sew up a deal between Cambodia and Thailand that he has listed a “signing” with their leaders on the White House schedule, on the sidelines of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations Summit. That agreement isn’t confirmed; Thailand’s Defense Minister NATTHAPHON NARKPHANIT said Thursday there had been "meaningful progress" on talks to resolve hostilities that flared in July, killing 48 people. ASEAN is trying to deploy a "border observer force" to keep the peace, two people familiar with those plans told Phelim. We granted them anonymity because of the sensitivity of the talks. But member nations might not rush troops to the border considering the group’s policy of noninterference in their nations' internal affairs. On to Japan, where Trump will meet new hardline Prime Minister SANAE TAKAICHI. The Trump administration has scoffed at Tokyo’s defense spending target of 2 percent of annual gross domestic product — up from its current 1.8 percent. The U.S. has asked for Japan to nearly double its defense spending, which will be a tough sell to a public facing high inflation and slumping wages. Japan and South Korea have both pledged staggering investments in the U.S. — $550 billion and $350 billion, respectively, which the U.S. hopes to use in part to fund a revival of naval shipbuilding. But those memorandums are now facing scrutiny from their domestic audiences. South Korea’s newly elected President LEE JAE MYUNG visited the Hanwha Philly Shipyard in August, and he will likely make the case for investment in shipbuilding to come from private companies, rather than the government. And in South Korea, the U.S. troop presence is likely to be a top concern — even as trade deals take high billing. The U.S. would like South Korea to pay more to host the 28,500 American troops on its soil, and South Korea wants more wartime operational control over its troops. Today, a U.S. commander controls American, South Korean and United Nations forces in the country. “It’s hard for me to see that the U.S. would want to give that up,” said JEAN LEE, an expert on Korean affairs at the East-West Center, a research institute established by Congress to promote cooperation between the U.S. and Asia and the Pacific. (It’s fighting to get this year’s federal funding.) One more unknown: a possible Trump meeting with North Korea’s leader KIM JONG UN. The two last met in 2019 in an impromptu face-to-face; Lee noted it only took 36 hours to organize. | |||
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AIRCRAFT CARRIER DEPLOYED TO CARIBBEAN: The Trump administration is ratcheting up its military presence in the Caribbean Sea, as the White House intensifies its campaign against alleged drug-traffickers. In a social media post this afternoon, Pentagon spokesperson SEAN PARNELL announced that the Navy had ordered the USS Gerald Ford, the Navy’s newest aircraft carrier, from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean. The carrier is set to be accompanied by three destroyers. The deployment “will bolster U.S. capacity to detect, monitor and disrupt illicit actors and activities that compromise the safety and prosperity” of the U.S., Parnell wrote. The move marks a significant escalation in the U.S.’s military presence in the Caribbean at a time when the Trump administration has used unprecedented military action to kill so-called narco-terrorists, our own Paul McLeary reports. Earlier today, Secretary of Defense PETE HEGSETH announced that the U.S. military had conducted another lethal strike against a vessel in the Caribbean Sea — the 10th such operation since September. Hegseth did not provide any evidence that the vessel was involved in trafficking drugs. According to a social media post from Hegseth, all six people aboard the vessel died in the overnight strike. He said that the military had targeted the boat because it was operated by the Tren de Aragua gang, which the Trump administration has designated as a foreign terrorist organization for its drug trafficking operations. The Thursday night strike was the third U.S. military attack on drug boats just this week — following two strikes in the Pacific Ocean. SANCTIONS FOR PETRO: In another escalatory move, the Trump administration announced sanctions on Colombian President GUSTAVO PETRO today, ramping up pressure on the leftist leader, our own Eric Bazail-Eimil reports. “Since President Gustavo Petro came to power, cocaine production in Colombia has exploded to the highest rate in decades, flooding the United States and poisoning Americans,” said Treasury Secretary SCOTT BESSENT in an announcement on the decision. Trump has turned up his threats against Petro in recent weeks as tensions between Washington and Bogota have boiled over. The U.S. president halted aid to the country and bashed Petro as an “illegal drug dealer” over the weekend, prompting Bogota to recall Colombian Ambassador to the U.S. DANIEL GARCÍA-PEÑA on Monday. Just Thursday, the Colombian Foreign Ministry confirmed that García-Peña would return to the U.S. BRUSSELS BUNGLES THE DEAL: Belgium is giving Hungary a run for its money as the EU’s problem sibling. Plans for the European Union to use frozen Russian assets to cover a €140 billion loan for Ukraine are on hold until at least December, thanks to Belgium’s efforts to derail the scheme, our European colleagues report. Belgian leader BART DE WEVER succeeded in delaying the financing move during talks with European leaders late Thursday over concerns that Belgium, which holds most of the frozen assets, would face retaliation from Moscow. The delay is a blow for Ukraine after a week of tentative optimism, as Trump announced long-awaited sanctions on Russian energy and the EU followed suit with a package of sweeping sanctions Wednesday. ALSO READ: Von der Leyen and Costa fail to cash in on Trump smacking Putin SPEAKING OF SANCTIONS…: Russia’s top economic envoy, KIRILL DMITRIEV, is in the U.S. today to meet with Trump administration officials just days after the new sanctions announcement. Dmitriev, who heads up Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, wrote in a post on X this morning that he had arrived in the U.S. to “continue the U.S.-Russia dialogue,” adding that the visit had been “planned a while ago,” per an invitation from the U.S. Conversations “must continue with the full understanding of Russia’s position and respect for its national interests,” Dmitriev insisted in his post. Dmitriev is set to meet with special envoy STEVE WITKOFF in Miami on Saturday, our own Diana Nerozzi reports. His visit comes on the heels of canceled meetings between Secretary of State MARCO RUBIO and Russian Foreign Minister SERGEY LAVROV, as well as an abandoned face-to-face with Trump and Russian leader VLADIMIR PUTIN. |
Our team pulled together this grid in Donald Trump's America, with thoughts courtesy Matt Wuercker of Politico, Jacobin Magazine on Israel, and budgetary support for the Israel Defense Force, along with thoughts on Gaza and the new World Order by the UK's New Statesman:
