Category Geopolitics

Illustrated world map showing continents, oceans, and polar ice with glowing lines, satellites, pipelines, and silhouettes of people, symbolizing global power networks, trade routes, and human movement.

Geopolitics examines how geography shapes power, conflict, and cooperation between states and other global actors. This category explores how factors such as location, borders, natural resources, trade routes, and demographics influence foreign policy, security strategies, and economic competition. It covers issues like territorial disputes, energy security, military alliances, sanctions, global supply chains, and environmental pressures that alter the balance of power. By connecting political decisions to physical space, geopolitics helps explain why countries act as they do on questions of war and peace, markets and resources, migration, and regional dominance

The Trump Administration’s Venezuelan Intervention: Legal Justifications, Resource Interests, and MAGA Politics

Nighttime street raid in Caracas showing Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores being escorted by armed soldiers between police cars with flashing lights, helicopters overhead, Trump observing from an oil-field command tent, and a toppled Lady Justice statue sinking into an oil spill.

On January 3, 2026, in a military operation code-named "Absolute Resolve," the United States conducted a dramatic raid on Caracas, Venezuela, resulting in the forcible abduction of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. The operation, involving 150 aircraft deployed from approximately 20 bases and conducted by U.S. special forces, marked the most aggressive military action of President Donald Trump's tenure.

The EU-Mercosur Agreement: A Quarter-Century Delay and the Price of Institutional Quicksand

Symbolic illustration of a trade and climate deal between the European Union and Mercosur, showing crowds walking on a golden path between a star-covered Europe and a green, leafy Earth, with shaking hands in the center and regional maps on both sides.

Without fundamental reforms that move it closer to this federal model, the European Union will remain at risk of missing strategic opportunities, reacting too slowly to geopolitical shifts, and ceding influence to more agile and decisive global rivals. The EU-Mercosur story should therefore be seen as a warning: in a world that does not wait, institutional paralysis is a direct threat to Europe's long-term prosperity and security.