Morocco Deepens Military Ties With Ethiopia In Strategic East Africa Pivot

RABAT/ADDIS ABABA (MEO) – Relations between Morocco and Ethiopia entered a new strategic phase, marked by expanding military cooperation that reflects Rabat’s broader push to deepen engagement with African partners and strengthen regional integration across the continent.

The growing defence partnership signals a significant shift in Moroccan diplomacy, as the kingdom moves beyond its traditional West and Central African focus towards a more assertive geopolitical presence in East Africa and the Horn.

This momentum was underscored by the first meeting of the Moroccan-Ethiopian Joint Military Commission, held in Addis Ababa on January13 and 14. The meeting follows a bilateral military cooperation agreement signed in May 2025, which formally established the commission and laid the groundwork for collaboration in training, capacity-building and the exchange of expertise across a range of military and security fields.

For decades, Morocco concentrated much of its political and economic influence in francophone West Africa. However, policymakers in Rabat have increasingly recognised that aspiring to continental power status requires a tangible presence in East Africa, particularly in Ethiopia, a demographic heavyweight, a rising economic force and host country of the African Union.

The rapprochement with Addis Ababa represents a deliberate effort by Morocco to diversify its African alliances and demonstrate its ability to forge South-South partnerships that transcend regional, linguistic and historical divides. A foothold in Ethiopia also strengthens Rabat’s diplomatic leverage on key continental issues and helps neutralise opposition to its core national interests, notably the Western Sahara, in regions that have historically lain beyond its sphere of influence.

Morocco’s engagement with Ethiopia has evolved from major economic investments to strategic security cooperation. Among the most prominent projects is a $3.7 billion fertiliser plant developed by the OCP Group, Morocco’s state-owned phosphate giant. That economic foundation is now being complemented by closer military and security ties.

The kingdom brings to the partnership a well-established reputation in counterterrorism, border security and military training. By sharing this expertise, Rabat is positioning itself as a credible provider of security on the African continent, a role that aligns with its wider diplomatic ambitions.

In May, Morocco’s Minister Delegate to the Head of Government in charge of National Defence Administration Abdellatif Loudiyi received Ethiopian Defence Minister Aisha Mohammed Mussa during an official visit to Rabat.

According to a statement from Morocco’s National Defence Administration, the talks reviewed bilateral cooperation and explored ways to enhance it, while reaffirming both countries’ commitment to peace, stability and security in Africa. The visit culminated in the signing of a military cooperation agreement covering training, scientific research, military health services and the exchange of expertise.

The defence accord built on earlier high-level military contacts. In April, Morocco’s Inspector General of the Royal Armed Forces, General Mohammed Berrid, visited Addis Ababa, where he met Ethiopian Chief of General Staff Birhanu Jula. The two sides discussed a draft framework for broad-based military cooperation aimed at expanding and institutionalising the partnership.

During the visit, General Berrid toured several Ethiopian military facilities, including cyber security units, an artificial intelligence institute, Bishoftu Air Base in central Ethiopia and an ammunition factory, signalling the depth and technical scope of the emerging relationship.

Morocco and Ethiopia’s ties are rooted in a longer diplomatic history. During a visit by King Mohammed VI to Addis Ababa in November 2015, the two countries signed 12 agreements spanning air transport, mining, agriculture, tourism, water cooperation and diplomatic coordination, laying the foundations for today’s expanded engagement.

Military analyst Mohamed Chakir said the defence cooperation reflects Morocco’s broader African outreach strategy, noting Ethiopia’s pivotal role in the Horn of Africa and its status as host of the African Union. He described the Joint Military Commission as a key mechanism for advancing practical cooperation in security and defence.

From Ethiopia’s perspective, Chakir added, Addis Ababa is keen to benefit from Morocco’s military expertise, particularly in advanced defence technologies. Morocco has been steadily upgrading its military capabilities through partnerships with the United States, under a 10-year defence cooperation agreement signed in October 2020 and running until 2030.

Chqir noted that Morocco has invested heavily in military training and education infrastructure, and that the new commission provides an institutional framework to sustain long-term cooperation. He also pointed to Rabat’s parallel efforts to develop a domestic defence industry, including the launch of a combat vehicle manufacturing plant in partnership with India last October, aimed at supplying both the Moroccan armed forces and international markets.

For Ethiopian officials, the Joint Military Commission marks a turning point. The Ethiopian National Defence Force said the initiative aims to expand cooperation across military education, training, defence industries and technology transfer.

Speaking after the meeting, Director-General of Foreign Relations and Military Cooperation at the Ethiopian National Defence Force Teshome Gemechu described the first session of the commission as a historic milestone that opens a new phase of practical implementation across agreed areas of cooperation.

On the Moroccan side, Abdel Kahar Othman, head of Logistics at the Royal Armed Forces, called the meeting an important development in bilateral military relations, stressing Rabat’s determination to further elevate defence cooperation with Ethiopia and describing progress to date as encouraging.

Together, the developments point to a recalibration of Morocco’s African strategy, one that blends economic investment, security diplomacy and institutional partnerships, and signals Rabat’s ambition to play a more influential role across the full breadth of the continent.

From Ancient Rome To Today, War-Makers Have Talked Constantly About Peace

When is war peace? When someone in power says it is. Dimitri Otis, DigitalVision via Getty Images

BY TIMOTHY JOSEPH

PROFESSOR OF CLASSICS AND THE

DIRECTOR OF PEACE AND CONFLICT

STUDIES, COLLEGE OF THE HOLY CROSS

In a week filled with news about President Donald Trump’s aggressive moves to take control of Greenland, the world got a window into his thinking about the concept of “peace.”

“Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America,” Trump said in the message to Norway’s prime minister, Jonas Gahr Støre.

Trump has long coveted the Nobel Peace Prize. In his second term as president, he has styled himself as a peacemaker, as his message to Støre demonstrates. But as I have learned from my work as a scholar of Roman history and rhetoric, the word “peace” can mean something entirely different when used by those wielding power.

In the year 98 CE, the Roman historian Tacitus wrote, “With lying names they call theft, slaughter, and plunder ‘control,’ and when they make a wasteland, they call it ‘peace.’”

This line, said of the Romans by an enemy of Rome in Tacitus’ work “Agricola,” has had a long and varied afterlife among those commenting on imperialism.

Nearly 2,000 years after Tacitus’ time, U.S. Sen. Robert Kennedy used the phrase in a 1968 speech questioning the U.S. war in Vietnam; the Irish poet Seamus Heaney echoed it in a 1974 poem figuring his homeland’s centuries of desolation; more recently still, the HBO series “Succession” reworked the words into a critique of the show’s despotic central character.

The quotation has had staying power because it cuts to the core of how talk of peace can be used as a tool of war and power acquisition.

At the one-year mark of the second Trump administration, these words from two millennia ago speak as presciently as ever.

Time and again over the last year, Trump has branded acts of war with the language of peace. More broadly, his administration’s persistent styling of Trump as a “President of Peace” and his continuous claims of entitlement to the Nobel Peace Prize have moved in tandem with a growing agenda of military aggression, both foreign and domestic.

‘War is peace’

Tacitus, who lived from c. 55 to c. 120 CE, places his critique of Roman imperial rhetoric into the mouth of Calgacus, the possibly fictionalized chief of the Caledonians in northern Britain. The words, delivered in a speech before the Battle of Mons Graupius in 83 CE, anticipated what was to come: a crushing Roman victory and the devastation of the Caledonian people.

Calgacus’ aphorism gets at something fundamental about Roman imperial propaganda, which presented the cessation of war – on their terms – as “peace.” A physical representation of this is the Altar of Augustan Peace, from 9 BCE, which was built after the warlord Augustus’ victories in foreign and civil wars. A reconstruction of one of the monument’s friezes includes the personified goddess Roma sitting atop war spoils. Peace for Rome was tantamount to victory for Rome – or, as in this case, for one of Rome’s strongmen.

And while Tacitus, an accomplished Roman politician and provincial governor, was himself no opponent of Roman imperialism, it is significant that he crafts a speech for an enemy of Rome that gives the lie to the Roman rhetoric of peace. The non-Roman’s perspective on Romans’ “lying names” cuts through the posturing of the imperialist.

Calgacus’ critique thus puts into relief the jarring juxtapositions the world has seen and heard from Trump over the last year.

On Dec. 31, 2025, Trump declared that his New Year’s resolution for 2026 was “peace on Earth.” Three days later, he invaded Venezuela and captured President Nicolás Maduro, a military action that left 100 dead and a humanitarian crisis looming. Apart from claiming control of some $2.5 billion of Venezuela’s oil reserves, Trump has provided few details about how he will personally “run the country.”

A similarly striking disconnect between rhetoric and reality came earlier in 2025 with the U.S.’s June 21 bombing of Iran, which the White House X account celebrated with the declaration “CONGRATULATIONS WORLD, IT’S TIME FOR PEACE!” Some seven months later, as the Iranian regime violently suppresses broad protests, Trump is weighing additional acts of war, saying that “the military is looking at it and we’re looking at some strong options.”

In Gaza, Trump is chairing a “Board of Peace” to oversee the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas and to implement a new government. The Israel/Hamas War is one of eight wars Trump claims credit for ending.

As with the seven other cases, the claim to have brought peace in Gaza lacks substantiation.

From the announcement of the ceasefire on Oct. 10, 2025, through Dec. 30, 2025, 414 Palestinians have been killed and 1,145 injured by Israeli attacks. That is, the war rages on.

Now Trump, apparently out of resentment at not being award the Nobel, declares that he will seize Greenland “one way or the other” and that Cuba must accept his terms on Venezuelan oil shipments “before it is too late.”

At home, Trump ramps up the presence of ICE, whose violent approach to enforcement has had deadly consequences for 32 people in custody and one woman protester.

All this as FIFA, the international governing body for soccer, awards Trump its first-ever Peace Prize; and as he stamps his name on – after defunding – the U.S Institute of Peace.

Spread of ‘peace’ rhetoric

Today’s dizzying clashes in word and deed are illuminated by Calgacus’ searing words, which show how easily the rhetoric of peace can be used to cover for or distract from acts of war.

At the same time, Tacitus points readers to the prevalence and thus the normalization and commonness of this rhetoric, which can become an inseparable corollary of a program of making war.

Indeed, Tacitus presents similar indictments of Roman imperial rhetoric twice elsewhere in his writing, again from the perspectives of those threatened by Rome.

For both the Batavians, of modern-day Netherlands, in the “Histories” and another group of Britons in the “Annals,” the great menace to their peoples is Roman “peace.”

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Federal Immigration Enforcement Near Schools Disrupts Attendance, Traumatizes Students And Damages Their Academic Performance

High school students gather for an anti-ICE protest outside the state capitol in St. Paul, Minn., on Jan. 14, 2026. Octavio Jones/AFP via Getty Images

BY CAROLYN SATTIN-BAJAJ

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION,

UC SANTA BARBARA

The Trump administration’s recent surge of more than 3,000 federal agents to Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, is creating ripple effects for students, teachers and parents that go well beyond ongoing protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection. These protests escalated after an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Good on Jan. 7, 2026.

Some Twin Cities parents are arranging security patrols to look out for ICE agents, while others are keeping their kids home altogether. Several large Minneapolis-St. Paul school districts announced on Jan. 15 that they would offer remote learning so students could stay home.

Amy Lieberman, The Conversation U.S. education editor, spoke with Carolyn-Sattin-Bajaj, a scholar of education and immigrant youth, to better understand what regulations restrict ICE’s presence at schools – and how schools can support students and parents concerned about the recent surge of immigrant arrests and deportations in Minnesota.

What prevents ICE from walking into a school building?

The Obama administration issued a memo in 2011 that said federal officials should not conduct immigration enforcement work near sensitive locations, meaning schools and houses of worship. The Biden administration also had this policy in place.

President Donald Trump revoked this memo in January 2025. So now, schools are no longer off-limits to federal immigration agencies, including ICE.

That doesn’t mean ICE or Border Patrol agents can march into a school building to arrest someone. While these officers can freely enter public areas of a school, like a parking lot or lobby, school officials are not legally obligated to admit ICE agents into private spaces like classrooms. ICE officers can enter a classroom if they show a valid federal judicial warrant, signed by a judge – or if there are extreme circumstances that allow them to legally circumvent having a warrant.

School officials are also not required to release information about which kids are enrolled at their school or not, and schools do not collect information about students’ immigration status, so that data cannot be shared.

Some school districts have been developing or revising protocols on how to respond if ICE comes to their schools. A lot of these protocols include recommendations on naming a district superintendent or another local official as the point person for ICE.

How unprecedented is it for ICE to arrest people outside or inside a school?

ICE’s presence at – or near – schools has significantly increased under the second Trump administration.

We have seen violence on school grounds, with ICE attacking students and protesters at Roosevelt High School on Jan. 7 in Minneapolis. In Crystal, Minn., a student’s parent was arrested by ICE personnel on Jan. 14 while waiting for their child at a bus stop.

Even just the threat of ICE agents approaching and arresting people en route to school, or at a school itself, is changing people’s behavior. Some parents in Minnesota and other places no longer take their children to and from school, and have to find other ways to get their kids there. This also affects how many people come to community events and activities held at school.

At one California middle school, the annual moving-up ceremony for students typically held outside had to be delayed in June 2025 after there was a credible rumor that ICE was planning to show up. The district had procedures in place. Because the event was held in an open public space, administrators were stationed at every entrance in case ICE agents turned up – though they didn’t. However, some graduates did not have any relatives there to watch them watch across the stage during the ceremony.

What other considerations are at the forefront of school administrators’ minds in regard to ICE?

The question that is top of mind for many district administrators, school leaders, teachers and other school personnel is “What happens if ICE shows up at our school?”

I think it is important that districts and schools have a clear plan in place that is widely communicated to all adults working in schools, and to students and parents. This should be paired with straightforward and recurrent training for educators on what they might expect if ICE comes to their schools and how to put their schools’ plans in place.

Yet, considering what to do if ICE comes to a school is just the tip of the iceberg. There are approximately 1.5 million children under 18 who are undocumented immigrants and about 4.4 million U.S.-born children who are citizens but have at least one undocumented parent. Many of these students are experiencing significant hardship, including interruptions to their schooling, and other forms of instability that affect their ability to learn and overall well-being.

What does your research show on the effects immigration enforcement can have on these students?

My research in seven large California school districts, conducted in 2021, showed that immigration arrests were linked to declines in students’ academic achievement, attendance and other measures of a school’s climate and safety for these students. The biggest declines were among Latino students, especially those who were English language learners.

In another 2023 study of an immigration workplace raid in Texas, a colleague and I found increased student absenteeism, declines in reading and math test scores, and sharp rises in the number of high school students leaving the district. Most often, it was the Latino and multilingual students enrolled in schools in the four counties closest to the raid who were not attending school immediately after the event, or experienced declining test scores.

These consequences persisted. Some of these students were less likely than others to later enroll in four-year colleges. Significantly, not just students who are most likely to have relatives targeted for deportation experienced these effects.

My own research and that of other scholars also show that many teachers are not well prepared for the current realities. But they are eager to know more about their immigrant students’ rights, the resources available to them and how they can serve as allies and advocates.

I believe that to best support students during these troubling times, teachers need better training and guidance on how to navigate challenging conversations about immigration enforcement threats, and how to deal with students’ (and their own) anxiety, uncertainty and trauma.

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Filming ICE Is Legal But Exposes You To Digital Tracking – Here’s How To Minimize The Risk

BY NICOLE M. BENNETT

PH.D CANDIDATE IN GEOGRAPHY

AND ASSISTANT DIRECTOR AT THE

CENTER FOR REFUGEE STUDIES,

INDIANA UNIVERSITY

When an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Good in south Minneapolis on Jan. 7, 2026, what happened next looked familiar, at least on the surface. Within hours, cellphone footage spread online and eyewitness accounts contradicted official statements, while video analysts slowed the clip down frame by frame to answer a basic question: Did she pose the threat federal officials claimed?

What’s changed since Minneapolis became a global reference point for bystander video in 2020 in the wake of George Floyd’s murder is how thoroughly camera systems, especially smartphones, are now entangled with the wider surveillance ecosystem.

I am a researcher who studies the intersection of data governance, digital technologies and the U.S. federal government. The hard truth for anyone filming law enforcement today is that the same technologies that can hold the state accountable can also make ordinary people more visible to the state.

Recording is often protected speech. But recording, and especially sharing, creates data that can be searched, linked, purchased and reused.

Video can challenge power. It can also attract it.

Targeting the watchers

Documentation can be the difference between an official narrative and an evidence-based public record. Courts in much of the U.S. have recognized a First Amendment right to record police in public while they perform official duties, subject to reasonable restrictions. For example, you can’t physically interfere with police.

However, that right is uneven across jurisdictions and vulnerable in practice, especially when police claim someone is interfering, or when state laws impose distances people must maintain from law enforcement actions – practices that chill filming.

While the legal landscape of recording law enforcement is important to understand, your safety is also a major consideration. In the days after Good’s killing, Minneapolis saw other viral clips documenting immigration enforcement and protests, along with agents’ forceful engagement with people near those scenes, including photographers.

It’s difficult to know how many people have been targeted by agents for recording. In Illinois in late 2025, the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, operated by advocacy group Freedom of the Press Foundation, documented multiple incidents in which journalists covering ICE-facility protests reported being shot with crowd-control munitions or tackled and arrested while filming.

These incidents underscore that documentation isn’t risk-free. There is an additional layer of safety beyond the physical to take into account: your increased risk of digital exposure. The legal right to record doesn’t prevent your recording from becoming data that others can use.

Both camera and tracking device

In practical terms, smartphones generate at least three kinds of digital exposure.

The first is identification risk, including through facial recognition technology. When you post footage, you may be sharing identifiable faces, tattoos, voices, license plates, school logos or even a distinctive jacket. That can enable law enforcement to identify people in your recordings through investigative tools, and online crowds to identify people and dox or harass them, or both.

That risk grows when agencies deploy facial recognition in the field. For example, ICE is using a facial recognition app called Mobile Fortify.

Facial recognition accuracy also isn’t neutral. National Institute of Standards and Technology testing has documented that the technology does not perform equally across different demographic groups, meaning the risk of misidentification is not evenly distributed across groups. For example, studies have shown lower recognition accuracy for people with darker skin color.

Second is the risk of revealing your location. Footage isn’t just images. Photos and video files often contain metadata such as timestamps and locations, and platforms also maintain additional logs. Even if you never post, your phone still emits a steady stream of location signals.

This matters because agencies can obtain location through multiple channels, often with different levels of oversight.

Agencies can request location or other data from companies through warrants or court orders, including geofence warrants that sweep up data about every device in a place during a set time window.

Agencies can also buy location data from brokers. The Federal Trade Commission has penalized firms for unlawfully selling sensitive location information.

Agencies also use specialized “area monitoring” tools: ICE purchased systems capable of tracking phones across an entire neighborhood or block over time, raising civil liberties concerns. The tools could track a phone from the time and place of a protest – for example, to a home or workplace.

There are more pathways for tracking than most people realize, and not all are constrained by the courtroom rules people picture when they think “warrant.”

The third type of potential exposure is the risk of having your phone seized. If police seize your phone, temporarily or for evidence, your exposure isn’t just the video you shot. It can include your contacts and message history, your photo roll, location history and cloud accounts synced to the device.

Civil liberties groups that publish protest safety guidance consistently recommend disabling the face and fingerprint unlocking features and using a strong passcode. Law enforcement officials can compel you to use biometrics more easily in some contexts than reveal memorized secrets.

Digital safety when recording police

This isn’t legal advice, and nothing is risk-free. But if you want to keep the accountability benefits of filming while reducing your digital exposure, here are steps you can take to address the risks.

Before you go, decide what you’re optimizing for, whether it is preserving evidence quickly or minimizing traceability, because those goals can conflict. Harden your lock screen with a long passcode, disable face and fingerprint ID, turn off message previews and reduce the risk of what you carry by logging out of sensitive accounts and removing unnecessary apps. Even consider leaving your primary phone at home if that’s realistic.

If you’re worried about having your recording deleted, plan ahead for how you’ll secure footage. You can either send it to a trusted person through an encrypted app or keep it offline until you’re safe.

While filming, keep your phone locked when possible using the camera-from-lock-screen feature and avoid livestreaming if identification risk is high, since live posts can expose your location in real time. Focus on documenting context rather than creating viral clips: Capture wide shots, key actions and clear time-and-place markers, and limit close-ups of bystanders. Assume faces are searchable, and if you can’t protect people in the moment, consider waiting to share until you can edit safely.

Afterward, back up securely and edit for privacy before posting by blurring faces, tattoos and license plates, removing metadata, and sharing a privacy-edited copy instead of the raw file. Think strategically about distribution because sometimes it’s safer to provide footage to journalists, lawyers or civil rights groups who can authenticate it without exposing everyone to mass identification. And remember the “second audience” beyond police, including employers, trolls and data brokers.

A new reality

Recording law enforcement in public is often a vital democratic check, especially when official narratives and reality conflict, as they have in Minneapolis since Jan. 7, 2026.

But the camera in your pocket is also part of a maturing surveillance ecosystem, one that links video, facial recognition and location data in ways most people never consented to and often don’t fully recognize.

In 2026, filming still matters. The challenge is ensuring the act of witnessing doesn’t quietly become a new form of exposure.

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12 Ways The Trump administration Dismantled Civil Rights Law And The Foundations Of Inclusive Democracy In Its First Year

Lyndon Johnson at the base of the Statue of Liberty on Oct. 3, 1965, before signing the Immigration and Nationality Act, which prohibited racial discrimination in the immigration process and repealed quotas heavily favoring immigration from northern and western Europe. Yoichi Okamoto, LBJ Library

BY SPENCER OVERTON

PROFESSOR OF LAW, GEORGE

WASHINGTON U NIVERSITY

One year after Donald Trump’s second inauguration, a pattern emerges. Across dozens of executive orders, agency memos, funding decisions and enforcement changes, the administration has weakened federal civil rights law and the foundations of the country’s racially inclusive democracy.

From the start, the U.S. was not built to include everyone equally. The Constitution protected and promoted slavery. Most states limited voting to white men. Congress restricted naturalized citizenship to “free white persons.” These choices were not accidents. They shaped who could belong and who could exercise political power, and they entrenched a racial political majority that lasted for generations.

That began to change in the 1960s. After decades of protest and pressure, Congress enacted laws that prohibited discrimination in employment, education, voting, immigration and housing.

Federal agencies were charged with enforcing those laws, collecting data to identify discrimination and conditioning public funds on compliance. These choices reshaped U.S. demographics and institutions, with the current Congress “the most racially and ethnically diverse in history,” according to the Pew Research Center. The laws did not eliminate racial inequality, but they made exclusion easier to see and harder to defend.

The first year of the second Trump administration marks a sharp reversal.

Cumulative retreat

Rather than repealing civil rights statutes outright, the administration has focused on disabling the mechanisms that make those laws work.

Drawing on over two decades of teaching and writing about civil rights and my experience directing a GW Law project on inclusive democracy, I believe this pattern reflects not isolated administrative actions but a cumulative retreat from the federal government’s role as an enforcer of civil rights law.

Over the past year, the president and his administration have taken a series of connected actions:

• On its first day in office, announced the end of all federal diversity, equity and inclusion programs, including diversity officers, equity plans and related grants and contracts.

• Shut down or sharply cut funding for federal programs aimed at reducing inequality, including offices focused on minority health, minority-owned businesses, fair federal contracting, environmental justice and closing the digital divide in broadband.

• Warned schools that diversity programs could jeopardize their federal funding, opened investigations into colleges offering scholarships to students protected under DACA – the Obama-era policy providing deportation protection for undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children – and signaled that colleges risk losing federal student aid if their accrediting agencies consider diversity.

• Revoked security clearances and access to federal buildings for employees at law firms with diversity policies. The FCC investigated media companies for promoting diversity and threatened to block mergers by companies with similar programs, leading several companies to drop their initiatives.

• Issued a government-wide memo labeling common best practices in hiring, admissions and other selection and evaluation processes – such as compiling diverse applicant pools, valuing cultural competence, considering first-generation or low-income status and seeking geographic and demographic representation – as potentially legally suspect. The memo warned that federal funding could be cut to schools, employers and state and local governments using such practices. Federal prosecutors reportedly investigated federal contractors that consider diversity, characterizing such initiatives as fraud.

• Weakened enforcement against discrimination by ordering agencies to stop using disparate impact analysis. That kind of analysis identifies disparities in outcomes, assesses whether they are justified by legitimate objectives, and intervenes when they are not. The Department of Justice, the EEOC, the National Credit Union Administration and other agencies complied and dropped disparate impact analysis. Because algorithmic systems typically operate without explicit intent, eliminating disparate impact analysis reduces federal agencies’ ability to detect and address discriminatory outcomes produced by increasingly automated government and private-sector decision-making.

• Rescinded an executive order that barred discrimination by federal contractors, required steps to ensure nondiscriminatory hiring and employment, and subjected contractors to federal compliance reviews and record-keeping. This weakened a key mechanism used since 1965 to detect and remedy workplace discrimination.

• Eliminated data used to track inequality, including rolling back guidance encouraging schools to collect data on racial disparities in discipline and special education. The administration also removed data used to identify racial disparities in environmental harms.

• Dismantled or sharply reduced civil rights offices across federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, the Social Security Administration and the Department of Education. About three-quarters of lawyers in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division left.

• Pressured the Smithsonian to remove exhibits about racial injustice, restored Confederate monuments and military base names, and barred schools and teacher training programs from including material the administration labeled divisive, such as unconscious bias.

• Declared English the nation’s only official language, repealed a requirement that federal agencies provide meaningful access to government programs and services for people with limited English proficiency, and prompted the General Services Admininistration and the departments of Justice, Education and other agencies to scale back language-assistance requirements and services.

• Attempted to limit birthright citizenship guaranteed by the 14th Amendment, and adopted practices that treat ethnicity and non-English accents as legitimate reasons for immigration stops.

The pattern is hard to miss

Taken together, these shifts have practical consequences.

When agencies stop collecting data on racial disparities, discrimination becomes harder to detect. When disparate impact analysis is abandoned, unfair practices with no legitimate purpose go unchallenged. When diversity programs are chilled through investigations and funding threats, institutions respond by narrowing opportunity. When history and language are recast as threats to unity, truth and freedom of speech and thought are suppressed and undermined.

Administration officials argue that these steps are needed to prevent discrimination against white people, promote unity, ensure “colorblind equality” and comply with a Supreme Court decision that struck down affirmative action in college admissions. But that ruling did not ban awareness of racial inequality, or neutral policies aimed at reducing it. Many of the administration’s actions rely on broad claims of illegality without providing specific violations.

The selective nature of enforcement is also telling.

Books about racism and civil rights were removed from military libraries, while books praising Nazi ideas or claiming racial intelligence differences were left untouched. The administration suspended admissions of refugees – over 90% of whom have been from Africa, Asia and Latin America in recent years – but then reopened the refugee program for white South Africans.

One year in, the pattern is hard to miss.

The administration is not simply applying neutral rules. It is dismantling the systems that once helped the U.S. move toward a more open and equal democracy. It is replacing them with policies that selectively narrow access to economic, cultural and educational participation.

The result is not simply a change in policy, but a fundamental shift in the trajectory of American democracy.

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Wars Without Clear Purpose Erode Presidential Legacies, And Trump Risks Political Consequences With Further Military Action In Venezuela

The body of U.S. Army Spc. Israel Candelaria Mejias is carried in a transfer case at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware after he was killed on April 5, 2009, near Baghdad. AFP Photo/Paul J. Richards via Getty Images

BY CHARLES WALLDORF

PROFESSOR OD POLITICS AND

INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS,

WAKE FOREST UNIVERSITY

Despite public support in the U.S. for deposing Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, President Donald Trump is unlikely to find that level of support for fighting an actual war in that country.

Even as Trump tries to work through Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s vice president and now the acting leader of the country, to manage Venezuela, there are echoes of President George W. Bush in Iraq with Trump saying that the United States will “run” Venezuela and “nurse it back to health” with Venezuelan oil wealth. None of that – which requires a lot of control by Washington and a major presence on the ground – can or will happen without a significant commitment of U.S. military forces, however, which Trump hasn’t ruled out.

“We’re not afraid of boots on the ground,” Trump said.

Yet U.S. citizens have been and remain deeply skeptical of military action in Venezuela. From Lyndon Johnson to George W. Bush, history shows that leaders often pay a high political price – and costs to their legacy, too – when wars they start or expand become unpopular.

As an expert on U.S. foreign policy and regime change wars, my research shows that every major U.S. war since 1900 – especially those that involved regime change – was buoyed at its outset by a big story with a grand purpose or objective. This helped galvanize national support to bear the costs of these wars.

During the Cold War, a story about the dangers of Soviet power to American democracy and the need to combat the spread of communism brought strong public support, at least initially, for wars in Korea and Vietnam, along with smaller operations in the Caribbean and Latin America.

In the 2000s and 2010s, the dominant narrative about preventing another Sept. 11 and quelling global terrorism generated strong initial public support for wars in Iraq – 70% in 2003 – and Afghanistan, 88% in 2001.

A big problem Trump now faces is that no similar story exists for Venezuela.

What national interest?

The administration’s justifications for war cover a hodgepodge of reasons, such as stopping drugs that flow almost exclusively to Europe, not the U.S.; seizing oil fields that benefit U.S. corporations but not the wider public; and somehow curtailing China’s efforts to build roads and bridges in Latin America.

All these are unrelated to any story-driven sense of collective mission or purpose. Unlike Korea or Afghanistan at the start, Americans don’t know what war in Venezuela will bring them and whether it is worth the costs.

This lack of a holistic story or broad rationale shows up in the polls. In November, only 15% of Americans saw Venezuela as a national emergency. A plurality, 45%, opposed an overthrow of Maduro. After Maduro was removed in early January 2026, Americans’ opposition to force in Venezuela grew to 52%. No rally around the flag here.

Americans also worry about where things are heading in Venezuela, with 72% saying Trump has not clearly explained plans going forward. Few want the mantle of regime change, either. Nine in 10 say Venezuelans, not the United States, should choose their next government. And more than 60% oppose additional force against Venezuela or other Latin American countries.

Only 43% of Republicans want the United States to dominate the Western Hemisphere, indicating Trump’s foreign policy vision isn’t even popular in his own party.

Overall, these numbers stand in sharp contrast to past U.S. wars bolstered by big stories, where there was generally a deep, bipartisan consensus behind using force.

For the moment, 89% of Republicans support removing Maduro. But 87% of Democrats and 58% of independents are opposed.

Reflecting the national skepticism – and in a rebuke of Trump – the U.S. Senate advanced a measure to final vote requiring Trump to get congressional approval before taking further military action in Venezuela. Five Senate Republicans joined all Democratic senators in voting for the measure.

All told, the U.S. political system is flashing red when it comes to war in Venezuela.

Hubris can turn deadly

Research shows that U.S. regime change wars almost never go as planned. Yet, the hubris of U.S. leaders sometimes causes them to ignore this fact, which can result in deadly trouble. In Iraq, influential Vice President Dick Cheney told one interviewer, “We’ll be greeted as liberators.” We weren’t, and U.S. forces got bogged down in a bloody insurgency war.

Experts say the same trouble could come in Venezuela.

What might stop the United States from rolling into a deeper war that’s not in line with how the public views U.S. interests? My research shows that the answer lies with U.S. leaders taking steps to back away from owning what comes next in Venezuela.

This turns a lot on presidential rhetoric. When leaders make robust commitments to action, it often boxes them in politically later on to follow through, even if they don’t want to do so. Their words create what political scientists call “audience costs,” which are domestic political setbacks, or punishment, that leaders will face if they fail to follow through on what they promised to do.

Audience costs can even form in a case like Venezuela, because despite limited public support for force, the media along with proponents of war inside and outside government often pick up on a president’s words and produce a churning conversation. That conversation is visible now in the news cycle, with leading Republicans and other prominent voices calling for more robust action. It’s the “you broke it, you fix it” discussion.

This churn raises questions about the president’s credibility that sometimes makes leaders feel boxed in to act, even when public support is questionable.

As a presidential candidate in 2008, Barack Obama promised to devote greater attention and resources to the war in Afghanistan. When he got in office, Obama’s words came back to bite him. Political pressure generated by his campaign pledge made it almost impossible for Obama to avoid surging troops into Afghanistan at a much higher level than what he intended.

While presidents should always strive to keep the public informed of the direction policy is headed, research shows that leaders can avoid the trap of audience costs by remaining relatively vague and noncommittal, which the public now prefers, about future military actions.

On Venezuela, Trump has done some of this vague language work already by sidestepping specifics about when and if force will be used again, and by also downplaying talk of U.S.-led democracy promotion. If he stops talking about “running” Venezuela and adopts the more measured language used by advisers such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who says the goal is to “move (Venezuela) in a certain direction” but not run the country, Trump could take another step away from being boxed in to do more militarily.

Events on the ground in Venezuela might also factor into future U.S. policy. Obama would not have faced the political pressure for the surge that he did when coming to office if the Afghan war had been going in a more positive direction.

Venezuela is close to economic collapse, according to some experts, due to Caracas’ inability to reap the profits of selling oil abroad. If that happens, political chaos could follow and leave Trump, like Obama in Afghanistan, feeling lots of pressure to act militarily, especially if Trump is still saying he “runs” Venezuela.

Again, Americans don’t want that, which means taking steps, such as loosening the current oil embargo, to alleviate economic pain in Venezuela might make sense for Trump. Otherwise, if American troops are sent in by Trump and deaths mount, even a president deemed virtually untouchable by scandal and failure could find himself finally paying a political price for his decisions.

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Venezuela’s Leader May Be Gone, But His Regime Remains – With A New Chief In Washington

Venezuelan military personnel attend the funeral of fellow soldiers killed in the US capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife in Caracas, Venezuela, Wednesday, Jan. 7. Ariana Cubillos/AP

BY LUIS GOMEZ ROMERO

US President Donald Trump has insisted the United States will now be “running” Venezuela after US forces bombed the capital on January 3 and whisked Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife out of the country to face federal charges in New York.

Trump has promised that “large US oil companies” would be going into Venezuela to “start making money”. And in passing, he has also declared that with Maduro gone, Venezuelans “are free” and the country is already becoming “rich and safe” again.

But autocratic regimes do not depend on their leaders alone. They get their strength from the vast bureaucracies and security apparatuses under the leader and the complicity of individuals down the chain of command.

These structures have been shaken in Venezuela, but not dismantled. Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s loyal vice president, has assumed the presidency and the powerful interior minister (Diosdado Cabello) and defence minister (Vladimir Padrino) – the “men with the guns” – are still in control.

So, rather than bringing regime change, Trump is now propping up the Maduro regime from Washington.

The rise and decline of chavismo

Venezuela has been dominated by two leaders for the last nearly 30 years – Hugo Chávez (president from 1999–2013) and Maduro (2013–26).

After his election on a left-wing, populist platform, Chávez launched sweeping social programs inspired by the Venezuelan military officer Simón Bolívar, who is revered in much of Latin America for leading several countries to independence from Spain in the 19th century.

Chávez’s moves to lead a second “Bolivarian revolution” created a new ideology in Venezuela known as chavismo that aimed to build a socialist society and fight against what Chávez called the new US imperialism taking hold in the region.

After Maduro took power on Chávez’s death, chavismo was slowly replaced with a new ideology centred on Maduro’s increasingly authoritarian rule, known as madurismo.

Chávez’s previous confrontations with the US lost their ideological power. During Maduro’s reign, the US imposed sanctions that crippled the Venezuelan economy. However, Chevron, a US oil and gas company, continued to operate in the energy sector despite those sanctions, signalling the Maduro government’s pragmatic transformation.

And unlike the charismatic Chávez, Maduro’s legitimacy eventually began to suffer. After the contested 2024 presidential election, Maduro claimed victory, but voting tallies collected by the opposition and independent monitors pointed to fraud.

The regime became increasingly isolated internationally – an easy target for Trump’s campaign to dislodge Maduro from power.

Maduro’s isolation, however, did not mean madurismo had magically disappeared. What frayed under Maduro was the movement’s ideological basis. What hardened was its governing system. As oil revenues fell and Maduro’s electoral support narrowed, the regime shifted away from mobilising the public in the same way Chavez did. It instead focused on institutional survival.

This survival led to a heavily militarised security state and tight chains of command. The regime also deepened its patronage networks within the main political party, the Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (PSUV), and extended its control over the courts and electoral authorities. Pro-regime civilian armed groups were tolerated or employed when useful.

These institutional apparatuses do not vanish when a leader loses legitimacy. They can be rebranded quickly. That is why the machinery remained strong when Trump removed Maduro. It is also why it could be handed over to Delcy Rodríguez.

New leader, same system

Rodríguez’s rise to power suggests a third mutation of chavismo is now underway.

As sociologist Rafael Uzcátegui notes, Rodríguez is dropping the movement’s defining confrontation with the United States to survive, now with Washington’s blessing.

Hours after Maduro’s abduction, a pre-signed decree by the president declared a state of emergency. It authorised members of the military and police to “search and capture” anyone accused of promoting or supporting the US attack on Venezuela. The emergency declaration extends to the Bolivarian Militia and its 200,000 or so members, who have been placed under the military chain of command.

The state of emergency, therefore, strengthens Rodríguez’s capacity to deliver what Washington wants because it consolidates coercive control at home.

Then, on January 5, Rodríguez was sworn in as president after Venezuela’s Supreme Court deemed Maduro to be in “forced absence” from the country. Yet, Article 233 of the Venezuelan constitution requires elections within 30 days if there is an “absolute absence” of the president.

By the regime’s own legal terms, a democratic transition was available. Instead, continuity has been secured.

Rodríguez has been installed on the basis of a “temporary absence” for 90 days, extendable by the National Assembly for another 90 days. Then, the assembly may decide there is an “absolute absence” of Maduro and call for elections. Rodríguez has a powerful hold over the assembly, which is led by her brother, Jorge Rodríguez.

Trump is in no hurry to have elections because the interim government is giving the US “everything that we feel is necessary”. He has also dismissed Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado as lacking the “respect” and “support” to be a future leader of the country.

Meanwhile, Rodríguez is consolidating power. In the first cabinet meeting, she was photographed with the regime’s two main strongmen, Padrino and Cabello, at her side. She has also begun careful appointments to shape the regime to her liking.

She ordered General Gustavo González López to assume command of the presidential guard and appointed Calixto Ortega Sánchez as vice president for the economy.

Both posts are sensitive: the first will oversee her personal security; the second will negotiate the distribution of Venezuela’s oil wealth with the Americans.

A new chavista-in-chief

Trump’s orders are now being implemented in what many critics are now calling his Venezuelan protectorate.

A few political prisoners have been released in what has been seen as a goodwill gesture. The core US interest, however, is oil. Trump has said “billions” of barrels will be handed over to the US. Exclusive trade agreements will be signed. The ground is prepared for the reopening of a US embassy, destined to function as the office of a proconsul (an administrator of a colony or occupied territory).

This is not a democratic transition. It is chavismo in a new form: power without Chávez’s anti-imperialist rhetoric, without promises, and without a people.

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George Washington’s Foreign Policy Was Built On Respect For Other Nations And Patient Consideration Of Future Burdens

At his presidency’s end, George Washington wrote to fellow statesman Gouverneur Morris, ‘My policy has been, and will continue… to be upon friendly terms with, but independent of, all the nations of the earth.’ Library of Congress

BY MAURIZIO VALSANIA

PROFESSOR OF AMERICAN HISTORY,

UNIVERSITA DI TORINO

Foreign policy is usually discussed as a matter of national interests – oil flows, borders, treaties, fleets. But there is a problem: “national interest” is an inherently ambiguous phrase. Although it is often presented as an expression of sheer force, its effectiveness ultimately rests on something softer – the manner in which a government performs moral authority and projects credibility to the world.

The style of that performance is part of the substance, not just its packaging. On Jan. 4, 2026, on ABC’s This Week, that style shifted abruptly for the U.S.

Anchor George Stephanopoulos pressed Secretary of State Marco Rubio to explain President Donald Trump’s declaration that “the United States is going to run Venezuela.” Under what authority, Stephanopoulos asked, could such a claim possibly stand?

Rubio dodged the question. He just said that the United States would enact “a quarantine on their oil.” Venezuela’s economy would remain frozen, unable “to move forward until the conditions that are in the national interest of the United States and the interests of the Venezuelan people are met.”

Rubio’s point presumed authority rather than pausing to justify it. It was a diplomacy of dominance – coercion dressed up as concern. The unspoken assumption was pure wishful thinking: that “national interest” would immediately prevail, flowing smoothly in all directions.

As a historian of the early republic and the author of a biography of George Washington, I’ve been reminded these days of how Washington – amid harsh storms unlike anything the country faces today – forged a vision that treated restraint, not self-justifying unilateralism, as the truest measure of American national interest.

Acknowledging burdens and consequences

In the 1790s, the United States faced a world ruled by corsairs and kings. The Atlantic was not yet an American lake. Spain blocked its western river, the Mississippi. Britain still held forts on U.S. soil. Revolutionary France tried to recruit American passions for European wars. And in North Africa, petty “Regencies,” as Europe politely called them, seized American ships at will.

The young nation was humiliated before it was strong. George Washington understood that humiliation intimately. Independence had freed America from Britain, but not from the world.

“Would to Heaven we had a navy,” he confessed to the Marquis de Lafayette in 1786, longing for ships “to reform those enemies to mankind, or crush them into nonexistence.” But such a fierce wish never became Washington’s foreign policy. Visibility invited peril; peril required composure.

In 1785, two American merchant vessels – the Maria of Boston and the Dauphin of Philadelphia – were captured by Algerian cruisers. Twenty-one sailors were chained, stripped and sold into slavery. Their families begged the government to pay ransom. Negotiators proposed paying tribute, a kind of protection-in-advance payment system. The price kept rising.

President Washington refused to be rushed by either pity or anger. Paying the extravagant sum, he warned his cabinet in 1789, “might establish a precedent which would always operate and be very burthensome if yielded to.”

Precedent mattered to Washington. A republic must measure not only what it can afford, but what it will be forced to feel tomorrow because of what it pays today.

The Trump administration’s approach to Venezuela demonstrates the opposite instinct. It represents a readiness to take unprecedented steps without pausing to acknowledge their burden and consequences.

Washington feared that habit of nearsightedness in foreign affairs precisely because he believed it corrupted empires – and could corrupt republics as well.

Neutrality as ‘emotional discipline’

The storms soon multiplied.

By 1793, Europe was already “pregnant with great events,” Washington wrote to Lafayette. The French Revolution, welcomed at first as a triumph of “The Rights of Man,” slid into terror and general war.

Citizen Genet, the French envoy to the United States, landed in Charleston, South Carolina, and proceeded to enlist American citizens’ help in France’s war with Britain by commissioning privateers in U.S. ports to prey on British ships. Genet did not request permission to do this from Washington.

Gratitude to France – indispensable ally during the Revolution, provider of fleets, soldiers and hard-to-forget loans – clashed with alarm at her new demands. A single misstep could have dragged the United States into another catastrophic conflict.

And yet, Washington responded to Genet not with rashness and bravado but with restraint made public law.

The 1793 Proclamation of Neutrality insisted that the “duty and interest of the United States” required “a conduct friendly and impartial toward the belligerent powers.” Neutrality was an emotional discipline – the only source of authority.

Friendliness: strategy, not concession

President Washington knew that the road to successful pursuit of national interests was paved with international credibility.

Washington wanted America “to be little heard of in the great world of Politics,” preferring instead “to exchange Commodities & live in peace & amity with all the inhabitants of the earth.”

The first president pitched the republic’s voice toward ordinary people rather than rival powers. He spoke of “inhabitants,” not foreign enemies. He treated restraint – not self-justifying unilateralism – as the truest measure of national interest.

Even when insulted or thwarted – by Spanish intrigues on the Florida frontier, by British seizures in the Caribbean, by pamphleteers accusing him of being a monarch in disguise – Washington’s tone remained measured.

On March 4, 1797, he would leave the presidency. His final creed was simple and devout: “My policy has been, and will continue … to be upon friendly terms with, but independent of, all the nations of the earth.”

For Washington, friendliness was a strategy, not a concession. The republic would treat other nations with civility precisely in order to remain independent of their appetites and quarrels.

Foreign policy as civic mirror

The statements from the Trump administration about Venezuela revive habits Washington once deplored: sovereignty managed through fear, pressure enforced by economic asphyxiation, domination smoothed over with promises of kindness. In this performance, U.S. interests function as a blank check, and restraint appears obsolete.

Yet foreign policy has never been only a ledger of advantage. It is also a civic mirror: the emotional register of a government that tells citizens what kind of nation is acting in their name, and whether it tries to balance national interest with responsibilities to others.

Washington believed America’s legitimacy abroad depended on patience and respect for the autonomy of others. The current approach to Caracas announces a different imagination: a power that boasts of quarantines, sets conditions – and calls the result partnership.

A republic must still defend its interests. But I believe it should also defend the temperament that made those interests compatible with independence in the first place. Washington’s America learned to stand among stronger powers without demanding to run them.

The question asked on “This Week,” then, is only the beginning.

The deeper question remains whether the United States will continue to perform power with the discipline of a constitutional republic – or surrender that discipline to the easy allure of what seems to only serve national interest, but fails to build credibility or relationships that endure.

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