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Heads of state, policymakers and international law scholars are among those who have labeled U.S. military actions against Venezuela and the Jan. 3, 2026, capture of its leader as unlawful. But what exactly does that mean?

(THE CONVERSATION) — Heads of state, policymakers and international law scholars are among those who have labeled U.S. military actions against Venezuela and the Jan. 3, 2026, capture of its leader as unlawful. But what exactly does that mean?

The Conversation asked Mary Ellen O’Connell, a professor of international law at the University of Notre Dame, to explain what about recent actions by the U.S. violate international law and why that matters.

How would you describe U.S. actions in Venezuela in regards to international law?

I consider what happened on Jan. 3 as part of a series of unlawful actions by the U.S. toward Venezuela that began on Sept. 2, 2025, when the U.S. first attacked and blew up a small boat in the Caribbean alleged to be carrying illicit drugs to the U.S. Despite the worldwide outcry that those boat attacks were unlawful, the administration persisted.

The most egregious operation was the Jan 3. attacks on sites in Caracas, Venezuela, a densely populated city. They were intended as cover for special operations forces to go into the home of the president and forcefully detain him and his wife, Cilia Flores, and then bring them to the United States, where they’re now in custody and facing trial.

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What laws were broken?

I’ve been thinking about these unlawful U.S. military operations in three big categories. There’s the category of international law prohibiting the use of force.

Then there is the category of international criminal law and who may lawfully be brought before foreign national courts to face criminal charges.

And the third is intervention in and imperial control of a foreign country.

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Can you explain what you mean by each category?

In terms of international law and the use of force, we know that any use of military force of more than an insignificant kind is restricted by the United Nations charter. This would certainly include the kinds of missiles and bombs that the U.S. has been using since early September in the Caribbean and Pacific and on the territory of Venezuela. There’s a clear general prohibition on the use of force in Article 2(4). There are only two limitations on that general prohibition: when the Security Council authorizes use of force or when a state member of the U.N. has been attacked by another state with a significant armed attack.

The best example we have today of that category of self-defense is Ukraine’s defense against Russia. Venezuela would have had the right to use military force against this U.S. military intervention because the U.S. had no justification for carrying it out. So these are clear, demonstrable, major and important violations of international law by the U.S.

As for the second category, a sitting head of state has immunity from the jurisdiction of foreign national courts, period. So regardless of how Maduro was brought before U.S. courts, international law says someone who’s trying to run a government needs to be free of interference by foreign national courts.

This is a commonsense rule. Every country in the world probably has some issue with foreign national leaders, and if they started bringing criminal indictments against them, kidnapping them and bringing them in front of their courts, there would be no international travel by presidents or foreign ministers. International diplomacy would come to an end. There would be disruption, chaos and insecurity as a result.

The U.S. has an extradition treaty with Venezuela, and if the U.S. had viable criminal charges against any person in Venezuela, it is supposed to use the regular legal process of extradition to make sure that what it does is not lawless in itself. It’s one of the dark ironies of this episode that in the alleged attempt to enforce the law against these individuals, the U.S. is violating the law. The U.S. is sending the message that it is somehow above the law that we apply to others. It’s really damaging, in general, to the rule of law.

And then the third category, which is very worrying, refers to President Trump’s comments regarding how he would run Venezuela, that he would take wealth out of the ground. These are violations of the political independence and territorial integrity of Venezuela, and of its permanent sovereignty over its natural resources.

Those are core principles of international law. They have to do with people’s self-determination. They have to do with the most important rules that keep order in the world. If President Trump truly wants America to prosper in the world – to enjoy economic and cultural success – he needs to promote international law, not undermine it.

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What are the consequences of this?

I believe every country, looking at what the U.S. is doing now, will have to recalculate whether they can trust the U.S. – whether they can trust the U.S. to comply with its treaty commitments, in particular the United Nations charter.

President Franklin Roosevelt saw the consequences of the Second World War, and he never wanted any country to have to pay the price of that sort of catastrophe again. The words of the charter preamble say it all. The U.N. was founded “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” Again, that’s why we have a general prohibition on the use of force in the charter, with a Security Council that acts when there’s been a violation of that rule.

The world knows that the U.S. has played a very important role in sending the message that it cares about the charter and the law of peace, and that both reflect Americans’ deepest moral and philosophical commitments to life and community on this planet.

When that’s undermined, countries that don’t have those cares and concern will feel free to pursue their own policies, regardless of the good of the international community. I really believe that the repercussions will be very, very serious for a long time to come, even if they’re intangible.

Foreign policy is usually discussed as a matter of national interests – oil flows, borders, treaties, fleets.

(THE CONVERSATION) — 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

On Jan. 7, 2026, President Donald Trump declared that he would officially pull the United States out of the world’s most important global treaty for combating climate change. He said it was because the treaty ran “contrary to the interests of the United States.”
His order didn’t say which U.S. interests he had in mind.

By Gary W. Yohe
Wesleyan University

(THE CONVERSATION) — On Jan. 7, 2026, President Donald Trump declared that he would officially pull the United States out of the world’s most important global treaty for combating climate change. He said it was because the treaty ran “contrary to the interests of the United States.”
His order didn’t say which U.S. interests he had in mind.

Americans had just seen a year of widespread flooding from extreme weather across the U.S. Deadly wildfires had burned thousands of homes in the nation’s second-largest metro area, and 2025 had been the second- or third-hottest year globally on record. Insurers are no longer willing to insure homes in many areas of the country because of the rising risks, and they are raising prices in many others.

For decades, evidence has shown that increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, largely from burning fossil fuels, are raising global temperatures and influencing sea level rise, storms and wildfires.

The climate treaty – the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change – was created to bring the world together to find ways to lower those risks.

Trump’s order to now pull the U.S. out of that treaty adds to a growing list of moves by the administration to dismantle U.S. efforts to combat climate change, despite the risks. Many of those moves, and there have been dozens, have flown under the public radar.

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Why this climate treaty matters

A year into the second Trump administration, you might wonder: What’s the big deal with the U.S. leaving the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change now?

After all, the Trump administration has been ignoring the UNFCCC since taking office in January. The administration moved to stop collecting and reporting corporate greenhouse gas emissions data required under the treaty. It canceled U.S. scientists’ involvement in international research. One of Trump’s first acts of his second term was to start the process of pulling the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement. Trump made similar moves in his first term, but the U.S. returned to the Paris agreement after he left office.

This action is different. It vacates an actual treaty that was ratified by the U.S. Senate in October 1992 and signed by President George H.W. Bush.

America’s ratification that year broke a logjam of inaction by nations that had signed the agreement but were wary about actually ratifying it as a legal document. Once the U.S. ratified it, other countries followed, and the treaty entered into force on March 21, 1994.

The U.S. was a global leader on climate change for years. Not anymore.

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Chipping away at climate policy

With the flurry of headlines about the U.S. intervention in Venezuela, renewed threats to seize Greenland, persistent high prices, immigration arrests, ICE and Border Patrol shootings, the Epstein files and the fight over ending health care subsidies, important news from other critical areas that affect public welfare has been overlooked for months.

Two climate-related decisions did dominate a few news cycles in 2025. The Environmental Protection Agency announced its intention to rescind its 2009 Endangerment Finding, a legal determination that certain greenhouse gas emissions endanger the public health and welfare that became the foundation of federal climate laws. There are indications that the move to rescind the finding could be finalized soon – the EPA sent its final draft rule to the White House for review in early January 2026. And the Department of Energy released a misinformed climate assessment authored by five handpicked climate skeptics.

Both moves drew condemnation from scientists, but that news was quickly overwhelmed by concern about a government shutdown and continuing science funding cuts and layoffs.

This chipping away at climate policy continued to accelerate at the end of 2025 with six more significant actions that went largely unnoticed.

Three could harm efforts to slow climate change:

• The Trump administration moved to weaken vehicle emissions standards on Dec. 3. Instead of raising the industry average for cars and light trucks vehicles to 50 miles per gallon by 2031, as planned, the standard would rise to about 34.5 miles per gallon by 2031.

• On Dec. 11, the U.S. joined Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia to block part of a U.N. environment report that would have called for phasing out fossil fuels.

• Eleven days later, the U.S. Department of the Interior jeopardized billions of dollars of U.S. investment in clean energy by pausing the leases of five East Coast offshore wind farms.

Three other moves by the administration shot arrows at the heart of climate science:

• The EPA rewrote its webpage about the causes of climate change to remove human influences, including burning fossil fuels – the primary cause of global warming. That occurred on Dec. 5.

• On Dec. 17, Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, announced plans to shut down the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a world-recognized leader in earth system science.

• A week later, the administration invited the authors of the discredited Department of Energy climate report to write the next U.S. National Climate Assessment, the latest in a widely used series of reports mandated by Congress to assess the nation’s climate risks.

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Fossil fuels at any cost

In early January 2025, the United States had reestablished itself as a world leader in climate science and was still working domestically and internationally to combat climate risks.

A year later, the U.S. government has abdicated both roles and is taking actions that will increase the likelihood of catastrophic climate-driven disasters and magnify their consequences by dismantling certain forecasting and warning systems and tearing apart programs that helped Americans recover from disasters, including targeting the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

To my mind, as a scholar of both environmental studies and economics, the administration’s moves enunciated clearly its strategy to discredit concerns about climate change, at the same time it promotes greater production of fossil fuels. It’s “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!” 
with little consideration for what’s at risk.

Trump’s repudiation of the UNFCCC could give countries around the world cover to pull back their own efforts to fight a global problem if they decide it is not in their myopic “best interest.” So far, the other countries have stayed in both that treaty and the Paris climate agreement. 
However, many countries’ promises to protect the planet for future generations were weaker in 2025 than hoped.

The U.S. pullout may also leave the Trump administration at a disadvantage: The U.S. will no longer have a formal voice in the global forum where climate policies are debated, one where China has been gaining influence since Trump returned to the presidency.

Asked in December 2025 what the biggest sticking point was in negotiating peace in Ukraine, U.S. President Donald Trump got straight to the point: land. "Some of that land has been taken. Some of that land is maybe up for grabs," he added.

(THE CONVERSATION) — Asked in December 2025 what the biggest sticking point was in negotiating peace in Ukraine, U.S. President Donald Trump got straight to the point: land. "Some of that land has been taken. Some of that land is maybe up for grabs," he added.

From the very beginning of the full-scale war, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has ruled out ceding territory to the invading Russians.

Yet, when the war in Ukraine finally grinds to a halt, it seems likely that Russia will, indeed, control vast portions of Ukrainian land in the south and the east – about 20% of Ukraine's pre-2014 landmass, if today's line of actual control is any guide.

Ukrainians have spent years trying to eject Russian forces from occupied areas in the Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson administrative regions. Captured and fortified by Russia in 2014, Crimea has been mostly out of reach. But despite Kyiv's best efforts, Russia is now poised to seize even more Ukrainian territory if the war does not end soon.

The pressure on Zelenskyy to accept some sort of territorial loss only increases with each new peace plan presented – all of which include some degree of map redrawing in Russia's favor. And although a majority of the Ukrainian public is against the idea of exchanging land for peace, pragmatists in the West, and even some within Ukraine, accept that this will almost certainly be part of any peace deal.

But then what? If Ukraine accepts the de facto loss of its eastern oblasts as the price of peace, should this be understood by Ukrainians as a permanent or a temporary concession? If the latter, what measures – if any – exist for Ukraine to eventually restore its territorial integrity?

As an international security expert, I would argue that it's essential that Ukrainians and their international backers have clear-eyed answers to these questions now, before a peace agreement is put in place.

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Land lost forever?

History can provide a useful, if imperfect, guide to what happens when states are forced to cede territory to invaders.

Past precedent suggests Ukraine must be prepared for the worst: Occupied territories, once lost, often remain so indefinitely. This is what happened when the Soviet Union conquered the province of Karelia from Finland following the Winter War in 1939-1940. Finland tried to reclaim Karelia from Moscow via military means in the Continuation War of 1941-1944. But Finnish forces were ultimately beaten back.

In the aftermath, Moscow ordered the mass expulsion of ethnic Finns and implemented a program of political and cultural assimilation. Today, ethnic Russians make up more than 80% of Karelia's population.

Support for reabsorbing Karelia into Finland is low. When surveyed about the idea 20 years ago, most Finns balked at the cost of integrating poor, Russian-speaking communities into their thriving nation-state.

The same could happen to the occupied territories in eastern Ukraine. Over time, Russian-controlled areas might become "Russified" to the point of no longer being recognizably Ukrainian. In Crimea since 2014, for example, Russia is thought to have moved more than 200,000 Russian citizens into the territory, in addition to expelling ethnic Ukrainians.

Even if they are not forcibly expelled, civilians in the occupied areas who are loyal to Kyiv might choose to leave, and already millions have. But doing so means abandoning property to ethnic Russians – and once property is ceded, it makes the chances of a permanent return that much harder. Ukrainians who remain will face almost certain repression.

As occupation wears on, the social and economic differences between the ceded territories and the free areas of Ukraine will likely become ever starker. And this will be especially true if Ukraine joins the European Union – something that Kyiv has long coveted and could be a sweetener to any peace deal involving land loss.

With fewer pro-European Ukrainians living there and a wider cultural divide, the prospect of reclaiming the Russian-controlled oblasts could become markedly less attractive to Ukrainians than it appears today.

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Diplomacy and war: Dead ends

Still, Ukrainians might hope that they can avoid this outcome by moving swiftly to undo the occupation before it becomes irreversible. In theory, they could accomplish this one of two ways: through deal-making or through fighting. But in practice, neither is likely to work.

Examples of a negotiated, voluntary return of land are few and far between. In 1979, Egypt managed to negotiate the return of its Sinai Peninsula, which Israel had captured during the Six-Day War in 1967. 
Although some in Israel wanted to keep hold of the Sinai for security reasons, Israeli leaders instead decided to swap the territory in exchange for a durable peace with Egypt, a leading Arab nation, in the hope that others would follow.

The problem for Ukraine is that Kyiv has very little to offer Russia in exchange for its lost territories. If and when the present war ends, it will likely be on terms favorable to Moscow, which is why territorial concessions are on the table to begin with.

If Ukraine cannot negotiate the return of the occupied territories as part of a peace arrangement, it probably means that it will not be able to negotiate their return in the post-peace phase, either.

What about the potential to regain the occupied territories by force? Finland tried that in Karelia and failed. But other countries have been more fortunate: France regained Alsace-Lorraine from Germany after World War I, for example. But it was a reversal that took nearly 50 years to bring about – Germany had annexed the territory in the Franco-Prussian War of 1871.

Given the massive disparity in size, population and troop numbers between Russia and Ukraine, it is highly unlikely that Ukraine could reclaim the territories through war – not least of all because its international backers would very likely refuse to support Kyiv in a war of choice against nuclear-armed Russia. The task would be made harder still should Russia succeed in getting some form of Ukrainian disarmament, or a downsizing of its military, into any peace deal.

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A black swan event

There is only one other set of circumstances under which territorial conquests tend to be undone in world politics: When the international system is convulsed by a major, system-level change or crisis. This might include a regional or world war, or the implosion of a great power – in this case, Russia.

This is how Czechoslovakia reclaimed the Sudetenland from Germany in 1945, China restored its control over Manchuria from Japan at the end of World War II, and the Baltic states regained their independence from the Soviet Union in 1990-1991 – not because they fought and won a narrow war of reconquest, but because their occupiers collapsed under the pressure of an external or internal crisis.

Could Russia collapse from within in the event of the death or ouster of Putin, an economic catastrophe, or some other critical development in the decades to come?

It is impossible to predict. But in the final analysis, should Ukraine be forced to accept land loss as part of any peace deal, it may require a seismic event in Russia for the territorial changes to be reversed.

In December 2025, President Donald Trump filed a US$10 billion lawsuit against the BBC in a federal court in Florida. It was only the latest in a long series of high-dollar legal challenges Trump has brought against prominent media organizations, including ABC, CBS, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, among others.

By Kathy Kiely
University of Missouri-Columbia 
and Lyrissa Barnett Lidsky
University of Florida

(THE CONVERSATION) — In December 2025, President Donald Trump filed a US$10 billion lawsuit against the BBC in a federal court in Florida. It was only the latest in a long series of high-dollar legal challenges Trump has brought against prominent media organizations, including ABC, CBS, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, among others.

Trump has won some sizable settlements in cases legal scholars had dismissed as largely lacking in merit. But as media scholars, we believe prevailing in court is not necessarily his primary goal. Instead, Trump appears to use lawsuits as a strategic weapon designed to silence his enemies and critics – who sometimes seem to be one and the same in his eyes.

Trump has always been litigious. Over the course of his life, he has been involved in more than 4,000 lawsuits. Many of these involved Trump suing for defamation over perceived threats to his reputation. 
Relatively few, however, have been successful, if success is defined as prevailing in courts of law.

But using litigation as a tool for intimidation can produce other results that can count as victory. We are concerned that the president may be using the courts as a tool not to correct the record but to muzzle potential watchdogs and deprive the public of the facts they need to hold him accountable.

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Winning major settlements

Trump claims the BBC attempted to interfere with the 2024 election by misrepresenting statements he’d made. As with Trump’s other defamation suits, the odds appear long against the president winning his case against the British broadcaster in court.

Just after Trump’s election in 2024, ABC, whose parent company is Disney, promised to make a $15 million contribution to the Trump presidential library to settle a defamation suit many experts said had dubious merit.

CBS and its parent company Paramount Global settled an arguably weaker defamation suit involving editing of a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris that Trump said was done “to make her look better.” 
Paramount contributed $16 million to Trump’s presidential library and his legal fees in order, the company said, to avoid the “uncertainty and distraction” of litigation. That same month, the Federal Communications Commission approved the $8 billion acquisition of Paramount by Skydance Media.

Those two defamation suits were filed while Trump was still a presidential candidate. Weeks after winning reelection, Trump sued The Des Moines Register for publishing a preelection poll that suggested he might lose the swing state of Iowa. Instead, he carried the state by 13 percentage points.

Trump could have just gloated over his victory, as President Harry Truman did when he famously posed holding the Chicago Tribune’s “Dewey Beats Truman” headline the day after his reelection. Instead, Trump went to court, accusing The Des Moines Register and its pollster, J. Ann Selzer, of violating Iowa’s consumer protection laws by fraudulently deceiving consumers and campaign donors.

Even if Trump loses this suit, he has inflicted expensive litigation costs on a news organization.

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The considerable costs of defense

From the 1960s until the late 1990s, leading media outlets, rich from advertising dollars, could afford to hire lawyers to defend against governmental overreach and protect their role in the U.S.’s democratic order. Those fights led to Supreme Court decisions shielding media outlets from most libel complaints and government censorship prior to publication.

But the rise of the internet and then social media led to the collapse of the economic model supporting traditional news production. As audiences and advertisers have fled traditional media outlets, including newspapers and broadcasters, the money to hire lawyers to defend against expensive defamation suits or fight for access to government information is much harder to find.

If even media giants such as ABC and CBS are settling rather than fighting, what local news editor is going to assign a story that might trigger a presidential lawsuit? That’s why Trump’s suit against The Des Moines Register is such an ominous development.

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Giving up without a fight

What’s disheartening about the media giants’ capitulation is that they are at risk of squandering the protections afforded by the Constitution and the courts.

In medieval England, criticizing the king or peers of the realm was a crime. But early in U.S. history, attempts to enforce seditious libel laws by the British government and later by President John Adams and the Federalist-controlled Congress generated public outcry and rebuke. This was based in part on the understanding that in a democracy the people must be free to criticize those who govern them, a principle enshrined in the First Amendment.

The Supreme Court ratified this understanding of press freedom in its 1964 decision New York Times v. Sullivan. In a resounding victory for free expression, the justices held that government officials cannot prevail in defamation cases unless there is clear and convincing proof that their critics knowingly or recklessly disregarded the truth. Careless errors are not enough.

Under these protections, even Trump’s case against the BBC – where the network has admitted an ethical lapse – is not a certain winner, especially since the contested content didn’t air in Florida, where the lawsuit was filed.

Although Trump claims the BBC’s misleading edits implied that he directly incited protesters to storm the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the network can argue in court that the inaccuracy is only technical, given that Trump truly did give a firebrand speech that was widely criticized as at least indirectly leading to the violence that followed . If the edited version of Trump’s speech is not appreciably more harmful to Trump’s reputation than his actual speech, Trump’s defamation claim would likely fail.

Trump is the first U.S. president to use the weight of his office to extract private settlements from news outlets tasked with holding him accountable. Ostensibly, these suits are to recover monetary damages for harm to his reputation, but they are part of a broader attack on what Trump perceives as hostile media coverage.

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New limits from states

Some of Trump’s targets are fighting back.

One is the Pulitzer Prize Board, the defendant in yet another Trump defamation suit – in this case, over the awards the board gave for reporting on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

In December 2025, the Pulitzer Prize Board asked the judge in the case to force the president to hand over tax and medical records to prove that he had suffered the financial and emotional harm he is claiming.

Another key development: Most states have enacted anti-SLAPP laws. SLAPP stands for “strategic lawsuits against public participation,” referring to cases filed to intimidate and discourage public criticism. Thirty-eight states, plus the District of Columbia, now have anti-SLAPP laws in place. It’s probably not a coincidence that Trump filed the latest iteration of his suit against The Des Moines Register on June 30, which happened to be one day before Iowa’s anti-SLAPP law took effect.

These state laws allow targets of SLAPPs to get early resolutions of meritless suits and can force people found to have filed such suits to pick up their targets’ legal bills.

Without such tools protecting First Amendment rights – and media organizations taking steps themselves to defend such rights – dissent might be characterized as a “deceptive trade practice,” and speech is no longer truly free.

What is an election and when is it completed?

(THE CONVERSATION) — What is an election and when is it completed?

That’s the legal question at the heart of Watson v. Republican National Committee, the mail-in ballot case the U.S. Supreme Court took up in November 2025. The court will most likely hand down a ruling before the midterm elections in 2026.

Mississippi law, similar to that of 15 other states, allows for mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day to be received by election officials up to five days later, then counted.

But the Republican National Committee is arguing in the Watson case, which was brought against the state of Mississippi in January 2024, that this procedure is not legal. An election, the argument goes, includes the receipt of ballots; therefore, all ballots must be in hand at the close of Election Day – the congressionally established “Tuesday after the first Monday” in November.

President Donald Trump’s March 2025 executive order 14248 similarly calls for ballots to be received no later than Election Day if they are to be counted, saying that doing otherwise “is like allowing persons who arrive 3 days after Election Day, perhaps after a winner has been declared, to vote in person at a former voting precinct, which would be absurd.”

The Supreme Court’s decision on mail-in ballots could have major consequences for the 47.6 million Americans who voted by mail in 2024, as well as more than 900,000 overseas military and civilian voters covered under the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act. More than 28 million of the 47.6 million domestic mail-in votes and nearly 800,000 of the 900,000 votes cast and counted under the uniformed and overseas citizens act were from states that allow for return of mail-in ballots after Election Day.

As a political scientist and scholar of migration, I have conducted research for over 20 years on military service members and civilian U.S. citizens living overseas.

Currently, 16 states plus the District of Columbia allow domestic absentee ballots that are postmarked by Election Day to be counted if they arrive after Election Day; 29 states extend that right to military and civilian voters living overseas, recognizing that international mail often delays ballot return.

According to the U.S Constitution, states administer elections. Under the equal protection clause, however, the federal government can pass legislation to prevent inequalities in access to voting. This includes facilitating the right to vote of military service members and civilian U.S. citizens living overseas.

The Supreme Court will decide whether federal law overrides state election administration in determining whether ballots that are postmarked by Election Day but arrive later can be counted.

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A 250-year history

The history of absentee, or mail-in, ballots in U.S. elections stretches back 2-1/2 centuries.

Soldiers first voted by mail during the American Revolution, when men from the town of Hollis, New Hampshire, wrote their town leaders asking to have votes counted in local elections.

Pennsylvania passed the first law allowing soldiers to vote absentee in the War of 1812, a right expanded in the Civil War when 19 Union and seven Confederate states allowed soldiers to vote absentee.

Absentee voting for soldiers from all states was codified in federal law in 1942. A 1944 amendment specified that ballots that were postmarked by Election Day and arrived within two weeks after Election Day could be counted.

Some civilians residing overseas, including civilian government employees and spouses and dependents of military and civilian employees, gained absentee ballot voting rights with the 1955 Federal Voting Assistance Act. All overseas U.S. citizens were enfranchised with the 1975 Overseas Citizens Voting Act. The 1986 Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act consolidated military and civilian voting rules. Later laws addressed electronic communications.

Over 1,000 military service members requested an absentee ballot in Mississippi’s 2024 election, along with nearly 1,000 civilian overseas voters. Nationally, more than 900,000 people voted in 2024 under the uniformed and overseas citizens act.

Many of these U.S. citizens would be affected by a ballot receipt deadline on Election Day. Their votes, coming from around the world, are often not able to be counted because of late arrival.

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Under the magnifying glass in Florida

Overseas absentee military and civilian ballots came to widespread notice in Florida in the 2000 presidential election. That election – and ultimately the presidency — centered on state election law being waived by canvassing boards under pressure from the Republican Party to count military and civilian absentee ballots received after Election Day.

The Supreme Court decided in December 2000 to stop further counting of mail-in ballots received after Election Day because of tight certification deadlines, with the Electoral College meeting just six days later.

Congress was concerned about the unequal treatment of ballots at home and abroad in the 2000 election. To move toward addressing these concerns, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act in 2002, which includes measures to facilitate overseas voting.

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Ensuring that everyone gets a vote

Increasing mail-in voting has been a question of making sure everyone who qualifies to vote can do so. Oregon was the first state, in 1998, to offer mail-in voting. Surveys have shown that more Democrats than Republicans voted by mail in 2020. Sending ballots to all voters reduces that gap.

By 2020, 33 states offered “no excuse” domestic absentee voting, with others expanding or facilitating mail-in voting during the COVID-19 pandemic that year.

The Federal Voting Assistance Program is charged with making it easier for overseas voters to vote. It continues to find obstacles, including problems in returning ballots on time. Meanwhile, Florida election supervisors in November 2025 requested that Florida officials reinstate a checkbox that was dropped from Florida absentee ballots in 2021. The checkbox allowed the voter to request an absentee ballot for the next election.

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Mail-in ballot security

Following concerns about the security of mail-in ballots in the 2000 election in Florida, the 2002 Help America Vote Act required that all states have a minimum security requirement.

The multiple levels of scrutiny include signature comparison, ballot tracking and penalties for malfeasance from the moment of registration to ballot request, to ballot receipt. With these layers of security there were only an estimated four fraudulent votes cast for every 10 million mail-in ballots in the 2016, 2018, 2020 and 2022 U.S. general elections.

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Mail-in voting elsewhere

The United States is one of 32 countries worldwide that allow mail-in voting for at least some of its citizens. These include the United Kingdom since 1945 and Germany since 1957.

In Germany’s federal elections in 2025, 37% of all voters, or 18.5 million citizens, cast a ballot by mail. German citizens who are eligible to vote automatically receive ballots. In the United Kingdom’s 2024 election, just under 5%, or nearly 1.3 million citizens, applied for mail-in ballots.

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The bottom line

The Supreme Court case could reshape the voting landscape in the United States, potentially affecting 47 million people, including some 5 million military and civilian voters living abroad. Watson v. Republican National Committee could also affect laws in 29 states. The outcome of the case has the potential to make voting more difficult for millions of civilian and military voters at home and abroad.