In this week’s episode, Claire and I turned our gaze westward—from the familiar storms in Europe and the Middle East to the gathering tempests across the Americas. What we found was an unsettling picture: saber-rattling, delusion, and a mounting sense that reality itself has become an expendable tool of power.
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We began in the Caribbean, where the US destroyer USS Gravely has docked in Trinidad and Tobago for what the Pentagon calls “joint counter-narcotics exercises.” In truth, it’s there to menace Venezuela. Washington has quietly escalated air and naval operations near Venezuelan waters, while the aircraft carrier Gerald Ford — the largest in the world — now looms nearby. The Trump administration’s talk of “direct action against narco-terrorists” is new code for something darker, Claire argued: a license to kill anyone it deems connected to Nicolás Maduro or the drug trade, without oversight, due process, or congressional approval. I had once had patience with this policy; it has run out.
The United States has long pursued drug interdiction by military means, but this is different. For months, boats have been blown out of the water without inspection or identification. Analysts now speak of “limited strikes” against Venezuelan territory. Maduro, predictably, has called this a hostile act — and for once, he’s right. What makes it dangerous isn’t sympathy for Caracas but the precedent. When the world’s preeminent democracy treats international law as optional, it invites others — Russia, Iran, perhaps even China — to do the same.
The real story may be Marco Rubio’s obsession with regime change in Venezuela, Stephen Miller’s appetite for bloodier “solutions,” and Trump’s own craving for spectacle. It’s a potent mix of ideology, opportunism, and pathology. I support regime change action in some cases. But this way seems wrong, we agreed.
Claire also suggested that Trump conflates “political asylum” seekers with the “insane” people from mental asylums. Fascinating. I can rule nothing out.
Critical Conditions is a co-production of Ask Questions later and Claire’s The Cosmopolitan Globalist. The CG is well worth checking out.
Argentina, by contrast, offers a different—if equally volatile—experiment. President Javier Milei’s coalition, La Libertad Avanza, just scored a midterm win, taking 41 percent of the vote against the Peronists’ 31. His unorthodox gamble —borrowing heavily to stabilize the peso and defying orthodox economists — has, for brought inflation down. Yet Argentina remains deeply divided, with poverty near 50 percent. Milei’s victory — which Trump essentially demanded of the Argentinian public —reflects exhaustion more than faith.
And then there is Trump’s renewed trade war with Canada — triggered, absurdly, by an Ontario government ad quoting Ronald Reagan’s critique of tariffs. Trump’s response: a 10 percent levy that will be paid not by Canada, but by Americans. It’s policy by tantrum, an extension of the same narcissistic rage driving his global provocations. The Reagan Library’s decision to distort its namesake’s words to appease Trump completes the portrait of decay.
We closed on a sobering note: when power is wielded to soothe psychological wounds, anything becomes possible. We blamed Trump’s craven Republican enablers. And if the method succeeds, resistance may indeed begin to feel futile.
