U.S. Seizes Tanker Loaded with Sanctioned Oil. Smoothie Wes Moore Has Some Explaining To Do. Will GOP Blow Healthcare Opportunity? MAGA’s Future. More
We’re seeing the Monroe Doctrine being taken off the shelf, dusted off, and restored to its rightful place, after feckless former Secretary of State John Kerry declared it dead. Yep, rumors of its death were exaggerated.
“U.S. Steps Up Campaign Against Maduro in Seizing Tanker Off Venezuela,” trumpets the New York Times. I was surprised to see a good account of why the tanker—the “Skipper”—was seized in the same outlet:
“Skipper has transported nearly 13 million barrels of Iranian and Venezuelan oil since joining the global dark fleet of tankers in 2021,” said Samir Madani, the co-founder of TankerTrackers.com, referring to ships that obscure their true locations. The ship delivered Iranian oil to Syria in 2024 when it was under the control of Bashar al-Assad, helping his government prolong a civil war, Mr. Madani said….
The ship, under a previous name, was placed under sanctions in 2022 by the U.S. Treasury Department, which said the vessel was part of “an international oil smuggling network that facilitated oil trades and generated revenue” to support the Iranian-backed forces of Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’s Quds Force.
“President Trump is right to get tough on Maduro,” former Secretary of State Michael Pompeo argues this morning:
The Venezuelan narco-state poses a clear threat to America’s security and prosperity. Two decades of socialism have destroyed this once wealthy country, spreading instability and transnational crime across the Western Hemisphere. After four years of appeasement under President Joe Biden, we cannot afford to ignore the problem any longer.
President Donald Trump is sending a clear and necessary message to the Maduro regime that its days of destabilizing the Western Hemisphere with impunity are over. Trump is putting drug traffickers around the world on notice. Let’s be clear: Venezuelan narco-terrorists and their drug shipments represent a threat to the American people. Trump has both the right and the responsibility to use military force to stop them.
The Nobel Committee snubbed President Trump, who coveted the Nobel Peace Prize, by awarding it to María Corina Machado. What the Committee didn’t grasp was that giving the prize to the Venezuelan opposition leader was a gift disguised as a rebuff to President Trump. She risked her life to show up in Oslo this week, where her message was clear:
Ms. Machado has been a steadfast supporter of President Trump’s pressure campaign against Mr. Maduro, whom the Trump administration has accused of flooding the United States with drugs and criminals.
The 2025 White House National Security Strategy has generated a lot of controversy. Robert B. Zoellick, former World Bank head, U.S. Trade Rep., and Deputy Secretary of State, argues in the Wall Street Journal that the document reflects the thinking of Vice President J.D. Vance:
European policy represents the biggest change. The administration contends that Europe faces economic stagnation and “civilizational erasure.” It abhors the European Union’s shared sovereignty. Mr. Vance’s faith in national populism leads him to object to European democracies’ responses to historical fears about political extremism and Russian influence. The language disturbingly echoes Vladimir Putin’s criticism of Europe. For a document that praises America’s “past glories,” the plan dismisses beneficial ties with Britain, lumping it with Ireland as a place to which the U.S. is “sentimentally attached.”
The Free Press’ Niall Ferguson also addressed the strategy a few days ago, as did Walter Russell Mead; Mead highlighted the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine.
WSJ politics guru Karl Rove asks, “How Isolationist Are Trump’s Voters?” Not as much as you might think.
Maryland’s supremely poised Governor Wes Moore is being touted as a contender for the Democratic presidential nomination. But does he have resume problems? The Free Beacon scrutinizes Moore’s claims about his studies of Islam as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University. Was the then 27-year-old Moore really the “foremost expert” on the Islamic threat, or was that puffery?
The GOP is getting another chance at reforming the healthcare system foisted upon Americans by the misnamed Affordable Care Act. Healthcare expert Michael Cannon argues that “On Obamacare, Trump Already Showed Republicans the Way.”
Meanwhile, “Why Republicans Lose Every Healthcare Debate” is the headline on Yuval Levin’s piece at The Free Press. “The new fight over Obamacare shows why the GOP keeps getting dragged into debates it can’t win,” argues the piece.
Ms. Must doesn’t understand why conservatives are getting smeared with an alleged connection to Nick Fuentes. Fuentes is not a conservative. An editorial in the New York Post is vastly illuminating.
Most of Fuentes’ followers are foreign bots, but as the Post observes:
Fuentes does have real followers — but a lot fewer than it seemed; his sudden rise in popularity is phony (though the fakery might pay off in enough publicity to gain fresh fans).
Who would benefit from such a thing, other than Fuentes himself?
Well, his seeming rise appeals to those eager to gin up fear of a rising nativist right; that explains well the glossy feature in Rolling Stone headlined, “The War on Nick Fuentes is Over. He Won,” as well as the New York Times profile, “Nick Fuentes: A White Nationalist Problem for the Right.”
But the folks actually paying for the bot farms are most likely hoping to see America torn apart from within by extremist ideas, for starters.
“The Intersectionality of Nick Fuentes” is the headline on a story by Rod Dreher at The Free Press. “The Groypers’ [followers of Fuentes] worldview is a Frankenstein made out of the race essentialism of the progressive left,” argues Dreher. Read at Your Own Risk: A previous Dreher piece on Fuentes was described by National Review’s Jim Garaghty as “troubling” and “thought provoking.”
New York’s Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani promised while campaigning to protect vulnerable students. The best way to do that, Danyela Souza Egorov argues in City Journal, would be to support charter schools, which hizzoner-in-waiting opposes.
Kalam and other charter leaders urge Mamdani to recognize that their schools achieve better educational outcomes at lower costs than traditional public schools. “Anyone who says that they are serious about affordability, they have to focus on the data on which models are working and are delivering more,” he says. “If you look at charter schools, we are delivering more.”
We’re always being told the possible horrors of AI. Brian J. Gross’s “AI Is a Gift to Human Creativity” in the Wall Street Journal is an antidote to fear.
Ms. Must has saved a very good essay for you for last. It’s provocative; you might not like its headline: “2028 Is MAGA’s Expiration Date.” It’s by Barton Swaim:
The first and most obvious thing to be said about Mr. Trump’s Make America Great Again “movement” is that it isn’t a movement. MAGA, as I am not the first to observe, is Mr. Trump and nothing else. When he changes his mind or reverses course, as he often does, his enthusiasts do the same. That isn’t a movement. Nor is it a personality cult, as his detractors like to say. MAGA, as I read the acronym, is shorthand for the connection Mr. Trump has with a large segment of right-leaning voters. Their anxieties intensify and numbers grow when the progressive left gains cultural ascendancy. …
Not until 2015 did the Donald exhilarate Republicans. His fiery message resonated for one reason: Over the previous several years the progressive left had taken an imperious and at times revolutionary attitude. …
That Mr. Trump’s electoral success is a measure of the left’s insanity rather than of Republicans’ unprodded aggression has been obvious to many of us for years. It’s dawning on liberals. ..
All of which brings us back to the question of the 2028 GOP nominee. Let’s pretend the MAGA message is a coherent thing, which it isn’t. MAGA works when an emboldened Democratic left rides roughshod over ordinary Americans’ sensibilities and traditions. As was the case in 2016 and 2024—and is not the case now.
What may attract, emphasis on may, is competence, experience, a safe pair of hands. A record of achievement rather than wild culture-war fulminations.
Discuss peacefully among yourselves.
