War and Peace
By 
As Scott has alluded, we are effectively at war with Venezuela:
President Trump on Tuesday ordered a “complete blockade” on sanctioned oil tankers going to and from Venezuela, an escalation of his administration’s monthslong pressure campaign against Nicolás Maduro, the leader of Venezuela.
“Venezuela is completely surrounded by the largest Armada ever assembled in the History of South America,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media. “It will only get bigger, and the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before.”
The move could hobble Venezuela’s oil exports, which are the lifeblood of the country’s economy. Venezuela relies entirely on tankers to export its oil to world markets. There were more than 30 vessels operating in Venezuela earlier this month that had been sanctioned by the United States, according to the independent tracking service Tanker Trackers.
Except for… Chevron?
The threat of another U.S. seizure has disrupted the country’s usually bustling traffic of dark-fleet vessels ferrying the Latin American country’s oil to China and Cuba. Several tankers are idling at Venezuelan ports, and others are veering away from the region, vessel-tracking data show.
President Trump on Tuesday ordered a complete blockade of all sanctioned oil tankers going into and out of Venezuela, escalating his administration’s pressure campaign against strongman Nicolás Maduro.
For Chevron, though, it remains business as usual. The company is still sending oil tankers to the U.S. Gulf Coast, its operations unimpeded thus far by rising tension between Trump and Maduro.
Ok. Anyway, fentanyl is now a WMD and additional military means are being deployed to a campaign that has no clear ends:
The Pentagon is continuing to pour assets into the Caribbean to beef up the Trump administration’s military pressure on Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro and enhanced drug interdiction operations. As additional aerial refueling tankers arrive in the region, the White House is also reportedly preparing to seize more sanctioned oil tankers to further impact Maduro’s income.
In other news, talks between Ukraine, the EU, and the United States on a ceasefire deal with Russia are moving forward:
The U.S.-European peace plan to deter future Russian attacks on Ukraine calls for a more robust Ukrainian military, the deployment of European forces inside the country and increased use of American intelligence, according to officials familiar with drafts that detail the proposal.
American and European diplomats meeting with Ukraine’s leaders over the past two days in Berlin have mostly signed off on two documents that outline the security guarantees, the officials said publicly and privately.
The security documents are designed to serve as the cornerstone of a broader agreement aimed at reaching a cease-fire to end the nearly four-year-old conflict. They are also intended to persuade Ukraine to concede territory in a peace deal and give up on formal inclusion in NATO.
Devil is in the details, of course, but it’s possible to see the contours of a deal that might make sense for Ukraine. Unfortunately, the staggering amateurishness of US diplomacy over the last six months is in fact an actual problem. I think that the Jonathan Guyer article suffered from a truly awful opening headline and is in fact more nuanced than its critics initially allowed:
In typical Trump hyperbole, the administration has repeatedly claimed the president has ended “8 wars in just 8 months.” Those numbers don’t add up. But through conversations with more than a dozen current and former Trump and Biden appointees and career diplomats, I’ve learned that many seasoned foreign policy experts find a certain utility in Mr. Trump’s approach. The practitioners I spoke to said there are real benefits of operating outside of the strictures of diplomatic precedent, even if there are also serious risks of inexperienced envoys running policy. The problem, they said, is that after the evisceration of the State Department, there are not enough experienced professionals to finish the job after Mr. Trump’s envoys get back on their jets and go home. Cowboy diplomacy can be highly effective for the opening salvo, but if the experts aren’t around to step in to finalize the details, these flashy deals may soon fall to pieces.
Yes, they fall to pieces.
The chatter is that the big speech tonight will have some Ukraine-themed content. We shall see… by which I mean read about it later, because there’s no chance whatsoever I’m actually going to watch.
Photo Credit: By WeatherWriter – Own work, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=178782884