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Make Denmark angry. Make Norway angry. Make NATO’s leaders angry.

(THE CONVERSATION) — Make Denmark angry. Make Norway angry. Make NATO’s leaders angry.

President Donald Trump’s relentless and escalating drive to acquire Greenland from Denmark, whose government – along with that of Greenland – emphatically rejects the idea, has unnerved, offended and outraged leaders of countries considered allies for decades.

It’s the latest, and perhaps most significant, eruption of an attitude of disdain towards allies that has become a hallmark of the second Trump administration, which has espoused an America First approach to the world.

Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have all said a lot of things about longtime allies that have caused frustration and outright friction among the leaders of those countries. The latest discord over Greenland could affect the functioning and even existence of NATO, the post-World War II alliance of Western nations that “won the Cold War and led the globe,” as a recent Wall Street Journal story put it.

As a former diplomat, I’m aware that how the U.S. treats its allies has been a crucial question in every presidency, since George Washington became the country’s first chief executive. On his way out of that job, Washington said something that Trump, Vance and their fellow America First advocates would probably embrace.

In what’s known as his “Farewell Address,” Washington warned Americans against “entangling alliances.” Washington wanted America to treat all nations fairly, and warned against both permanent friendships and permanent enemies.

The irony is that Washington would never have become president without the assistance of the not-yet-United-States’ first ally, France.

In 1778, after two years of brilliant diplomacy by Benjamin Franklin, the not-yet-United States and the Kingdom of France signed a treaty of alliance as the American Colonies struggled to win their war for independence from Britain.

France sent soldiers, money and ships to the American revolutionaries. Within three years, after a major intervention by the French fleet, the battle of Yorktown in 1781 effectively ended the war and America was independent.

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Isolationism, then war

American political leaders largely heeded Washington’s warning against alliances throughout the 1800s. The Atlantic Ocean shielded the young nation from Europe’s problems and many conflicts; America’s closest neighbors had smaller populations and less military might.

Aside from the War of 1812, in which the U.S. fought the British, America largely found itself protected from the outside world’s problems.

That began to change when Europe descended into the brutality of World War I.

Initially, American politicians avoided involvement. What would today be called an isolationist movement was strong; its supporters felt that the European war was being waged for the benefit of big business.

But it was hard for the U.S.to maintain neutrality. German submarines sank ships crossing the Atlantic carrying American passengers. The economies of some of America’s biggest trading partners were in shreds; the democracies of Britain, France and other European countries were at risk.

President Woodrow Wilson led the U.S. into the war in 1917 as an ally of the Western European nations. When he asked Congress for a declaration of war, Wilson asserted the value of like-minded allies: “A steadfast concert for peace can never be maintained except by a partnership of democratic nations.”

Immediately after the war, the Allies – led by the U.S., France and Britain – stayed together to craft the peace agreements, feed the war-ravaged parts of Europe and intervene in Russia after the Communist Revolution there.

Prosperity came along with the peace, helping the U.S. quickly develop into a global economic power.

However, within a few years, American politicians returned to traditional isolationism in political and military matters and continued this attitude well into the 1930s. The worldwide Great Depression that began in 1929 was blamed on vulnerabilities in the global economy, and there was a strong sentiment among Americans that the U.S. should fix its internal problems rather than assist Europe with its problems.

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Alliance counters fascism

As both Hitler and Japan began to attack their neighbors in the late 1930s, it became clear to President Franklin Roosevelt and other American military and political leaders that the U.S. would get caught up in World War II. If nothing else, airplanes had erased America’s ability to hide behind the Atlantic Ocean.

Though public opinion was divided, the U.S. began sending arms and other assistance to Britain and quietly began military planning with London. This was despite the fact that the U.S. was formally neutral, as the Roosevelt administration was pushing the limits of what a neutral nation can do for friendly nations without becoming a warring party.

In January of 1941, Roosevelt gave his annual State of the Union speech to Congress. He appeared to prepare the country for possible intervention – both on behalf of allies abroad and for the preservation of American democracy:

“The future and the safety of our country and of our democracy are overwhelmingly involved in events far beyond our borders. Armed defense of democratic existence is now being gallantly waged in four continents. If that defense fails, all the population and all the resources of Europe, and Asia, and Africa and Australasia will be dominated by conquerors. In times like these it is immature – and incidentally, untrue – for anybody to brag that an unprepared America, single-handed, and with one hand tied behind its back, can hold off the whole world.”

When the Japanese attacked Hawaii in 1941 and Hitler declared war on the U.S., America quickly entered World War II in an alliance with Britain, the Free French and others. Throughout the war, the Allies worked together on matters large and small. They defeated Germany in three and half years and Japan in less than four.

As World War II ended, the wartime alliance produced two longer-term partnerships built on the understanding that working together had produced a powerful and effective counter to fascism.

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Postwar alliances

The first of these alliances is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO. The original members were the U.S., Canada, Britain, France and others of the wartime Allies. There are now 32 members, including Poland, Hungary and Turkey.

The aims of NATO were to keep peace in Europe and contain the growing Communist threat from the Soviet Union. NATO’s supporters feel that, given that wars in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s and in the Ukraine today are the only major conflicts in Europe in 80 years, the alliance has met its goals well. And NATO troops went to Afghanistan along with the U.S. military after 9/11.

The other institution created by the wartime Allies is the United Nations.

The U.N. is many things – a humanitarian aid organization, a forum for countries to raise their issues and a source of international law.

However, it is also an alliance. The U.N. Security Council on several occasions authorized the use of force by members, such as in the first Gulf War against Iraq. And it has the power to send peacekeeping troops to conflict areas under the U.N. flag.

Other U.S. allies with treaties or designations by Congress include Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Israel, three South American countries and six in the Middle East.

Many of the same countries also created institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Organization of American States and the European Union. The U.S. belongs to all of these except the European Union. During my 35-year diplomatic career, I worked with all of these institutions, particularly in efforts to stabilize Africa. They keep the peace and support development efforts with loans and grants.

Admirers of this postwar liberal international order point to the limited number of major armed conflicts during the past 80 years, the globalized economy and international cooperation on important matters such as disease control and fighting terrorism.

Detractors point to this system’s inability to stop some very deadly conflicts, such as Vietnam or Ukraine, and the large populations that haven’t done well under globalization as evidence of its flaws.

The world would look dramatically different without the Allies’ victories in the two World Wars, the stable worldwide economic system and NATO’s and the U.N.’s keeping the world relatively peaceful.

But the value of allies to Americans, even when they benefit from alliances, appears to have shifted between George Washington’s attitude – avoid them – and that of Franklin D. Roosevelt – go all in … eventually.

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.

By Nicole M. Bennett
Indiana University

(THE CONVERSATION) — 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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.

By Spencer Overton
George Washington University

(THE CONVERSATION) — 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.

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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.

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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.

Eileen Higgins won a historic victory in December. She became the first woman ever elected mayor of Miami, as well as its first Democratic mayor since 1997.

(THE CONVERSATION) — Eileen Higgins won a historic victory in December. She became the first woman ever elected mayor of Miami, as well as its first Democratic mayor since 1997.

Although the stakes in the city’s Dec. 9, 2025, runoff election were high, interest was not - 4 in 5 registered voters stayed home.

Low turnout is common in municipal elections across the country. While much of the nation’s political attention stays focused on Washington, the leaders who control the nation’s streets, schools and neighborhoods are typically chosen by a small fraction of citizens.

Although many Americans can identify their U.S. senators or members of Congress, far fewer can name even one of their local elected officials, such as a city council member. To cite one example, a North Carolina study, found that 86% of state residents could not identify their own elected leaders, including local government officials.

Turnout in local elections regularly falls below 20%, often leaving critical decisions in the hands of small, unrepresentative groups, creating an electorate that’s disproportionately white, elderly and affluent.

My research as a political scientist suggests an overlooked factor explains why some people engage with their communities while others tune out: local patriotism, or how they feel about their town.

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The power of local patriotism

For my book “Patriotism and Citizenship,” I commissioned a nationally representative survey of 500 Americans. We asked a simple question: How do you feel about the town you live in? Those who responded could choose from five options, ranging from “hate it” to “love it.”

About half said they “liked” their town, 20% loved it, but a full quarter expressed no positive feelings whatsoever; 3% said they outright “hated” where they lived.

Such attitudes have real-world effects. Even after accounting for factors such as age, education, income and general interest in politics, loving one’s town strongly predicted participation in local politics.

People who loved their town were more likely to attend city council meetings, contact local officials, volunteer for campaigns and discuss local issues with friends. The same pattern held for civic participation – from volunteering with community groups to organizing neighborhood cleanups.

Local patriotism also correlated strongly with trust in local government.

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Determining the stakes

To test whether these feelings actually change civic behavior, I ran two experiments.

Participants were first asked to identify the biggest problem facing their town. Some mentioned traffic congestion, others cited crime or homelessness. Then came the test: Would they donate $1 they’d earned for taking the survey to help solve that problem?

In the first experiment, one group was asked “Thinking about feelings of love or hate toward your town, would you like to donate this $1 to help your town solve the problem that you just listed above?” The other group received no such prompt about their feelings and was just asked to donate to solve the problem.

The results were striking. Among those primed to consider their feelings about their town, 18% gave away their payment. In the control group, just 3% donated – a sixfold difference.

A second experiment replicated this finding. When people were prompted to think about loving their town, 8% donated. Even asking them to consider feelings of hate led 5% to give. But in the control group with no emotional prompt? No one donated.

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Why this matters for democracy

Local patriotism appears to address a fundamental puzzle in political science: why anyone participates in local politics at all. The time and effort required almost always exceed any tangible benefit an individual would receive.

But when people care deeply about their community, the calculation changes. The emotional reward of helping a place you love becomes a plus. The sacrifice feels worthwhile not because it will definitely make a difference, but because you’re investing in something that matters to you.

This has important implications. The positive feelings people have toward their community translate directly into civic engagement, without the risk of increasing negative feelings such as jingoism or xenophobia.

For local leaders frustrated by low turnout and apathy, the message is clear: Before asking residents to show up, give them reasons to care. Build pride of place, and engagement will follow.

The good news is that local attachment isn’t fixed. My experiments showed that simply prompting people to think about their feelings toward their town could motivate civic action.

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A few ways to foster local patriotism

Here are some strategies that can help foster local patriotism:

• Create civic rituals: Regular community events, from farmers markets to fireworks, build emotional ties to place.

• Celebrate iconic places: Whether it’s a waterfall, clock tower or mountain view, promote the landmarks that symbolize your community. These shared images give residents a common point of pride and visual shorthand for what makes their town special.

• Bring children to community events and have them participate in local organizations: Parents who take their kids to town festivals, parades and events, or sign them up for youth art and sports programs, aren’t just keeping them entertained. They’re building the next generation’s emotional connection to place and creating civic habits that can last a lifetime.

The evidence shows that emotional connection to community is a powerful but largely untapped resource for strengthening democracy from the ground up.

In an era of declining civic engagement and deepening partisan divisions, fostering local patriotism might be exactly what the country needs.

“Taco night” for many across the United States consists of an Americanized idea of Mexican food: ground beef cooked with a packaged seasoning mix, taco shells, lettuce, tomato and sour cream.

“Taco night” for many across the United States consists of an Americanized idea of Mexican food: ground beef cooked with a packaged seasoning mix, taco shells, lettuce, tomato and sour cream.

Let’s just say that if you’re reading this and have enjoyed a similar meal, you will be blown out of the water by this authentic version from my cookbook “Plantas: Modern Vegan Recipes for Traditional Mexican Cooking. “ These tacos were a favorite of mine as a kid. I remember watching my Tía Chela making them, and they felt like such a treat. The secret here is using salsa to season your meat, rather than dried herbs and spices. It creates much juicier, deeper flavor.

Tacos Dorados de Picadillo/Crispy
 “Beef” Tacos
Makes 12 tacos

Ingredients

FILLING:

2 tablespoons neutral oil, such as avocado oil

½ medium white onion, diced small

3 garlic cloves, minced

2 large carrots, peeled and diced small

2 Yukon Gold potatoes, peeled and diced small

½ cup low-sodium vegetable broth

1 (12-ounce) package plant-based ground meat (such as Impossible or Beyond Meat)

¼ teaspoon sea salt

SALSA:

1 tablespoon neutral oil, such as avocado oil

2 ripe Roma tomatoes

¼ medium white onion

1 serrano or jalapeño pepper, stemmed and seeded

2 garlic cloves, peeled

¼ cup low-sodium vegetable broth

¼ bunch cilantro

¼ teaspoon sea salt

TACOS:

12 corn tortillas, store-bought or homemade

6 to 8 tablespoons neutral high-heat oil, such as avocado oil

Guacasalsa (guacamole mixed with salsa verde), for serving

Directions

1. To make the filling, heat the oil in a large sauté pan over medium-low heat. Add the onion and sauté for 2 minutes, then add the garlic, carrots, and potatoes and sauté for 4 minutes. Turn the heat down to low and add the broth. Cover and steam for 10 to 12 minutes, until the vegetables are fork-tender. Add the ground meat and cook, using a spatula to break up any large clumps, for 7 to 10 minutes, until browned. Season with the salt.

2. Meanwhile, make the salsa. Heat the oil in a large skillet or sauté pan over medium heat. Add the whole tomatoes, onion quarter, serrano or jalapeño pepper, and garlic cloves and cook for 2 to 4 minutes on each side, until blackened and charred (the garlic might char more quickly, after 2 to 3 minutes total). Transfer the contents of the pan to a blender. Add the broth, cilantro, and salt and blend on high until smooth.

3. Add the salsa to the meat and vegetable mixture and stir to combine. Cook for 10 to 12 minutes. Taste and add more salt to your liking.

4. To make the tacos, heat a medium skillet or comal over high heat. Add a tortilla and cook for 30 to 40 seconds on each side, then transfer to a tortilla holder or wrap in a kitchen towel. Repeat to heat the remaining tortillas.

5. Add 2 tablespoons of the picadillo mixture to one half of each tortilla and fold to close. They should stay closed as you fry them, but feel free to use toothpicks if necessary.

6. Heat the oil in a large, deep sauté pan over medium heat. Working in batches, add a few tacos and fry for 2 minutes on each side, or until golden brown. Using a spatula, transfer the tacos to a paper towel–lined plate.

7. Serve with salsa and guacasalsa.

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Alexa Soto is a Mexican-American recipe creator, mental health advocate and the creator of the blog Fueled Naturally. She lives in San Diego with her husband Chancy, son Santino and their two dogs. Excerpted from PLANTAS by Alexa Soto. Copyright (copyright) 2024 by Alexa Soto.

Donald Trump has flagged Venezuelan drug trafficking as a key reason for the U.S. military operation on Jan. 3, 2026, that captured President Nicolás Maduro and whisked him to New York to face federal drug charges.

(THE CONVERSATION) — Donald Trump has flagged Venezuelan drug trafficking as a key reason for the U.S. military operation on Jan. 3, 2026, that captured President Nicolás Maduro and whisked him to New York to face federal drug charges.

Trump has described Maduro as “the kingpin of a vast criminal network responsible for trafficking colossal amounts of deadly and illicit drugs into the United States.”

In 2025, the administration presented the U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean and repeated strikes on alleged drug trafficking vessels off Venezuela’s coast as necessary to counter the flow of cocaine into the United States.

But as an international relations scholar focused on Latin America, I know that when assessed against hard data on cocaine production and transit, the U.S. pretense for military action against Venezuela falters.

Venezuela has never been a major cocaine producer. That distinction belongs overwhelmingly to Colombia, which accounts for the vast majority of coca cultivation and cocaine processing in the Western Hemisphere.

That means the arrest of Maduro and subsequent U.S. attempts to control Venezuela’s government are unlikely to stem the influx of cocaine into the U.S.

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Justifying intervention

While Venezuela’s geography and governance gaps make it a transit country for Colombian products, most U.S. cocaine originates and flows through corridors north and west of Venezuela. This contradicts the claim that Caracas was the central hub of cocaine trafficking into the United States.

Moreover, the opioid overdose crisis in the U.S. today is overwhelmingly driven by synthetic drugs such as fentanyl, which have supply chains rooted in Mexico and Asia, not Venezuela.

So why did Washington elevate Venezuela’s role in narcotics?

The answer, I believe, lies less in illicit markets than in power. By conflating criminal networks with government authority, an act amplified through legal designations and indictments, the Trump administration could justify military intervention without explicit congressional authorization.

Once Maduro was removed, the substance beneath the rhetoric became clearer. The U.S. has not turned power over to an opposition democratic coalition. Instead, it facilitated the swearing-in of Vice President Delcy Rodríguez as interim president, a figure deeply tied to the existing regime and whose network includes people long accused by U.S. authorities of illegal activities.

The release of political prisoners by the interim government and U.S. moves to reopen Venezuela’s oil sector to American interests underscore that what unfolded was not purely a counternarcotics mission but a reconfiguration of governance in Caracas.

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Pretext for military action

The role of the Cartel de los Soles – or Cartel of the Suns – in this narrative deserves particular scrutiny. Originally a label for alleged trafficking networks within Venezuela’s security forces, U.S. legal indictments and terrorist designations expanded that concept. That amplified the narrative that Maduro was at the head of a transnational criminal enterprise.

In fact, the Cartel de los Soles is not a structured cartel at all. Yet the narrative of Maduro as head of a narco-terrorist empire was politically and legally potent. It provided a pretext for military action, creating a justification that could be sold domestically and internationally as an effort to defend U.S. citizens from an external criminal threat.

But the U.S. attack in Venezuela was not, in substance, a counternarcotics mission. It was a strategic economic and geopolitical operation framed in the language of law enforcement.

Two days after the Venezuela attack, the Justice Department retreated from its November 2025 claim that Maduro was the head of Cartel de los Soles, underscoring that the link between drug enforcement and regime removal was more instrumental than evidentiary.

Rodríguez said just days after the U.S. attack, “Drug trafficking and human rights were the excuse; the real motive was oil.”

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No meaningful reduction

While the U.S. operation in Venezuela undoubtedly disrupted the trafficking networks that operated under Maduro’s umbrella, at least temporarily, the action cannot be convincingly framed as a drug supply intervention.

The reality of drug trafficking itself underscores this point.

Cocaine production and distribution networks are dynamic. When one route is disrupted, traffickers invariably find alternative pathways.

Routes that once used Venezuelan territory have likely rerouted rather than collapsed. This has historically characterized drug flow in Latin America in response to pressure from law enforcement.

Even if Venezuelan transit networks are briefly destabilized, there is no evidence that U.S. intervention will lead to a meaningful reduction in the volume of illegal drugs flowing into the United States. The most significant drivers of U.S. drug problems, including Mexico-based distribution systems and the surge of synthetic opioids, operate largely outside Venezuela.

The U.S. operation may benefit Venezuela politically by toppling a long-standing authoritarian figure. That opens the possibility of political change.

But if the lens through which policymakers view these events is drug policy, they are misreading both the evidence and the incentives. The action was centered on energy and strategic realignment, with counternarcotics rhetoric serving as a justification rather than a driver of the U.S. attack.

And while trafficking networks adapt and survive, these shifts will not reduce the flow of drugs into the United States, which has long been shaped by factors far beyond Venezuela’s borders.