Foreign Policy

The war in Ukraine, which is Europe’s largest land war since 1945, has entered the peculiar phase familiar to historians and unbearable to those living through it — the phase in which catastrophe becomes routine. Loud air raid sirens still interrupt dinners in Kyiv. Young men still disappear into the trench lines of Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia. Russian drones still arrive nightly, buzzing in the dark like giant mechanical mosquitoes. As the rumble draws nearer, exhausted people rise from their beds and head into the narrow corridors of their apartments or into the basements of their houses. It happens night after night, year after year, while outside the region, the war increasingly competes with other crises for attention, just becoming a part of the atmospheric background of modern life.

At a recent press conference, U.S. Defense Secretary and Christian nationalist Pete Hegseth justified the Trump administration’s unconstitutional act of starting the war with Iran by saying that before launching missiles, “We sent our best people to negotiate — Steve and Jared.”

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, better known as NATO, has been one of the most influential political and military alliances in modern history. Formed in 1949 by 12 countries, NATO has grown into a 32-member alliance across Europe and North America, with Sweden becoming the newest member in March 2024. Its stated purpose is to guarantee the freedom and security of its members through political and military means, especially through the principle of collective defense: under Article 5, an attack against one member is treated as an attack against all.

Iran has vowed retaliation after a US destroyer fired on an Iranian-flagged cargo ship in the Gulf of Oman late last week.

Space exploration has transitioned from a public endeavor driven by international cooperation to a heavily privatized industry dominated by billionaire-backed mega-corporations. At the center of this shift is Low Earth Orbit (LEO), defined by the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee (IADC) and NASA as the region of space at an altitude of 2,000 kilometers (1,240 miles) or less. Low Earth Orbit, once viewed as a pristine global commons, is rapidly becoming a celestial dumping ground. The exponential deployment of satellite megaconstellations by private tech monopolies has drastically accelerated the accumulation of space junk, raising profound environmental and safety concerns. While these networks boast of bridging global connectivity gaps, their unchecked proliferation commodifies the orbital environment, prioritizing corporate dominance over the long-term sustainability of the cosmos.

Unmanned aerial vehicles, commonly known as drones, have fundamentally reshaped modern conflict, transforming the skies into a perpetual zone of surveillance and lethal action.

On February 28 2026, Israel and the United States engaged in joint attacks on Iranian territory, far larger and more devastating in scale than the first direct attacks on Iran in June 2025. Secretary of War, (Defnse) Pete Hegseth has said the US is only “accelerating, not decelerating” its war on Iran, with more assets heading to the region as the conflict ricochets from Dubai, to Saudi Arabia, Turkey to Sri Lanka where an Iranian ship was recently sunk using torpedoes.

As the global community enters the second quarter of 2026, the geopolitical landscape is dominated by the upcoming summit between President Donald Trump and President Xi Jinping, scheduled for the first week of April in Beijing. This meeting follows a period of extreme volatility in bilateral relations that defined the first year of the second Trump administration. Throughout 2025, the relationship was characterized by a reignited trade war, with the United States imposing aggressive reciprocal tariffs that at times reached triple digits on Chinese imports. These measures were met with targeted Chinese retaliation, including boycotts of American agricultural products and export controls on rare earth minerals. However, a significant turning point occurred in October 2025 during a meeting in Busan, South Korea, where both leaders agreed to a one-year trade truce. This temporary reprieve rolled back the most punitive levies and led to a resumption of Chinese purchases of American soybeans and energy, providing a fragile stability that the April summit seeks to formalize and extend.

In the early hours of Jan. 3, 2026 the United States carried out an attack in Venezuela that saw the removal and capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. The incursion followed months of military operations in the Caribbean Sea, targeting small boats and oil tankers along the Venezuelan coast. The operation dubbed, Operation Absolute Resolve, saw US forces enter Venezuelan territory, carry out strikes on military sites around the country and in the capital Caracas. Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, were taken by US forces from Fuerte Tiuna, the country’s largest military complex. Maduro was first flown to a US military base and then transported aboard the USS Iwo Jima, which brought Maduro and his wife to a detention centre in New York, where he is being held and indicted on charges of narcoterrorism and conspiracy to import cocaine into the United States. 

European troops have begun arriving in Greenland last week in a show of support to Denmark, as leaders attempt to respond to President Donald Trump’s threats to annex Greenland.

Latin America’s shift towards the political right has continued following the recent elections in both Chile and Honduras. In Chile the election of the far-right Jose Antonio Kast marked the country’s most significant shift rightward since the former Chilean dictator, Agusto Pinochet. The election of Kast now makes three neighboring South American states formerly at odds, Argentina, Bolivia and Chile, firmly in control by the rightwing and all seeking closer relations with the United States. In Honduras the Trump backed candidate, Nasry Asfura has been declared the winner after a more than two week long vote count left those in the small Central American country in suspense. Following the election results, the opposing Liberal Party candidate, Salvador Nasralla refused to concede and alleged interference in the election process by the United States after President Trump conditioned continued aid to the country on whether the right-wing candidate won. Trump also pardoned the former Honduran President found guilty of trafficking drugs to the United States.

In October 2025, U.S. Department of Homeland Security reported on its official website that more than 2 million undocumented immigrants had already left the United States — including 1.6 million who voluntarily self-deported and more than 527,000 who were forcefully deported. “This is just the beginning,” Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin proudly stated.