Editorial Roundup: United States

Excerpts from recent editorials in the United States and abroad:

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Dec. 29

The Washington Post on Trump's China policy, deal with Taiwan

The Trump administration's approval of an $11.1 billion arms sale will help Taiwan gear up for, and therefore deter, a potential Chinese attack. It's an overdo correction after months of policy changes that favored Beijing over Taipei.

The package, which has bipartisan support on Capitol Hill, will be one of the largest-ever arms sales to the island democracy. It includes High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS), which Ukraine has proved are critical when fighting a better armed and more populous enemy. This helps add coherence to U.S. policy toward the looming threat the Chinese Communist Party poses to Taiwan.

The Taiwanese have grown more serious about self-defense. The country's president announced last month, in these pages, that the island's defense spending would rise to 5 percent of gross domestic product by 2030 and that a ''$40 billion supplementary defense budget'' would focus on enhancing Taiwan's ''asymmetrical capabilities.'' That's military jargon for relatively cheap, mobile and survivable weapons designed to deter a stronger adversary.

Still, while Beijing's frustration with the arms sale is nothing to lament, there is understandable confusion on both sides of the Pacific. The Trump administration is ramping up tensions in one area while extending the hand of friendship in others. On Tuesday, the administration suspended additional tariffs on China's semiconductor industry for an additional 18 months, in an attempt to further relax trade tensions.

A yet-to-be determined tax will be imposed on semiconductors in June 2027, despite national security concerns. Earlier this month, Trump greenlit the export of Nvidia's H200 chips to China, ignoring national security concerns. When it comes to trade, at least rhetorically, the president has acted too often as though the Chinese are less of a threat than the Canadians.

This arms package would surpass what the Biden administration provided Taiwan, but money only goes so far. A friend to all, after all, is a friend to none.

ONLINE: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/12/24/taiwan-china-arms-sale-trump/

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The Wall Street Journal says deregulation of broadband deployment will save taxpayers billions

Did economists underestimate the damage of the Biden regulatory barrage? One reason the U.S. economy is outperforming expectations may be that the Trump Administration's deregulation is offsetting tariff harm. Consider how it has uncorked broadband investment and saved taxpayers billions by slashing the Biden team's red tape.

Congress appropriated $42 billion in the 2021 infrastructure bill for states to expand broadband to ''unserved'' and rural communities. The spending was unnecessary since satellite services like SpaceX's Starlink and 5G fixed wireless services were rapidly closing the so-called digital divide. Upward of 99% of households already had high-speed internet.

But Democrats wanted the money, and the Biden team then used it in an attempt to micromanage broadband nationwide. States receiving funds had to consult with unions, native American tribes and ''local community organizations'' on their plans to expand broadband. This gave liberal special interests a veto and let them extort developers.

States also had to submit plans for Commerce Department review, explaining how they would make broadband ''affordable'' for middle-class consumers. Biden-era guidance suggested that states hand out subsidies to consumers or use ''their regulatory authority to promote structural competition''—i.e., industrial policy.

The Biden crowd also stipulated that broadband providers give hiring preferences to ''underrepresented'' groups, including ''aging individuals,'' prisoners, racial, religious and ethnic minorities, ''Indigenous and Native American persons,'' ''LGBTQI+ persons,'' and ''persons otherwise adversely affected by persistent poverty or inequality.''

Fiber projects were also given heavy preference over satellite and fixed wireless services, even though the latter could be installed faster and at a fraction of the cost. These requirements delayed projects, raised costs, and added uncertainty across the industry.

Enter the Trump team, led by assistant Commerce secretary Arielle Roth, which removed nearly all of the Biden mandates and prioritized projects in which private operators put up more capital so they would have more skin in the game. Ms. Roth said this month the Administration's deregulation is on track to save taxpayers $21 billion.

The average cost for each new household or business connected in Louisiana fell to $3,943 from $5,245. Louisiana's most expensive project had run at $120,000 per connection under the Biden rules—almost as much as a starter home—but the Trump team brought the cost down to $7,547 per connection. Similar savings have occurred in other states.

The broadband program illustrates how the Biden combination of spending and regulation created market distortions and raised costs. It would be better if Congress let markets allocate capital, but the Trump Administration is ensuring taxpayer funds are spent in a more cost-effective way that does less economic harm.

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Dec. 26

The Boston Globe says Trump's mass firing of diplomats is dangerous

President Trump, would-be peacemaker on a global scale, has apparently decided he can fulfill that role with a decimated diplomatic corps that by mid-January will see more than half of the US embassies around the world lacking an ambassador.

Nearly 30 ambassadors were told just before Christmas to pack up and leave their postings next month, adding to the 79 ambassadorial vacancies already on the books, according to the Ambassador Tracker maintained by the American Foreign Service Association, the union that represents career diplomats. The United States at full complement has some 195 ambassadorships.

No, Charles Kushner, father of the president's son-in-law Jared and a convicted felon, isn't about to vacate the Paris embassy any time soon for the new vacancy in Papua New Guinea, and Kimberly Guilfoyle, ex-fiancee of Donald Trump Jr., is likely to remain the US ambassador to Greece, despite the new opportunity in Somalia.

About a dozen of the posts in question are in sub-Saharan Africa, another half dozen in Asia, including Vietnam and the Philippines, and several in the Balkan region such as North Macedonia and Montenegro, along with Armenia and Slovakia.

So no, not glamorous, but strategically critical, which is why this precipitous move — for reasons not entirely clear — is so utterly reckless, if not downright self-indulgent.

''This is standard process in any administration,'' the State Department insisted in a statement. ''An ambassador is a personal representative of the president, and it is the president's right to ensure that he has individuals in these countries who advance the ‘America First' agenda.''

Wrong, actually.

''Removing senior diplomats without cause undermines U.S. credibility abroad and sends a chilling signal to the professional Foreign Service: experience and an oath to the Constitution take a backseat to political loyalty,'' the foreign career diplomats' union said in a statement on its website.

''After reviewing our archives, we have found no record of comparable actions in the century,'' the organization added, and certainly not since ''the Foreign Service Act of 1924 ended the spoils system in U.S. diplomacy and established a professional, merit-based Foreign Service.''

It appeared nearly all the ambassadors just recalled had been named to their current posts during the Biden administration, a largely irrelevant fact among career members of the foreign service, although the ambassador to Montenegro, Judy Rising Reinke, was appointed in 2018, during the first Trump administration.

And while the diplomats have been given a couple of weeks to clear out their embassy desks, they have already been ''disappeared'' from the State Department website.

''We have about 80 vacant ambassadorships,'' Senator Jeanne Shaheen, a New Hampshire Democrat and ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told Politico. ''Yet, President Trump is giving away U.S. leadership to China and Russia by removing qualified career ambassadors who serve faithfully no matter who's in power.''

A round of foreign service layoffs, originally scheduled for July, also kicked in earlier this month, hitting some 250 officers under the rank of ambassador.

Those who remain report being demoralized, overworked, and operating on too tight budgets. A survey of 2,100 Foreign Service employees conducted by the union and released earlier this month found 98 percent reported reduced morale since January and 86 percent said recent changes have ''undermined their ability to carry out US foreign policy.''

John Dinkelman, the union's president, said at the time the survey was released, ''America's diplomats are being asked to represent and defend this country at a time of growing global instability — while the institution that supports their work is being hollowed out in real time.''

Ambassadors are the boots on the ground that send the message to nations large and small that they matter to the United States. No, not that this nation supports everything they do or even anything they do, but that they and their people are worth the time and effort of the United States to engage with.

So recalling ambassadors to a large segment of Africa sends a message too — one Trump has already made clear. But every time he writes off another nation, China and Russia stand ready to pick up the slack. That's a dangerous way to play the foreign policy game.

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Dec. 29

The Houston Chronicle says Americans deserve to know why Trump wants war with Venezuela

What does '' America First '' mean? It's a question that President Donald Trump may have to finally answer in his escalating campaign against Venezuela. The stakes for Americans couldn't be higher.

Across Trump's runs for the presidency, he appealed directly to Americans who were tired of high-minded talk of defending the ''international order,'' nation building, regime change and spreading American values abroad. He tapped into popular discontent about the long, difficult wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

One group imagined that Trump, who called his 2024 campaign the '' peace ticket,'' would pull back from conflicts elsewhere — in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and the South China Sea — and focus on problems at home. This group included Trump's Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who has long warned against what George Washington, in his farewell address, described as the dangers of ''foreign entanglements.'' Another group wanted roughly the opposite. They wanted America to use its power more aggressively — without all the talk of our values and principles. This group includes Stephen Miller, the president's most important advisor, who recently wrote on X that ''for years the United States operated as a ‘reverse empire,''' whose military too often ''enrich(ed) foreign nations'' instead of our own. ''All we got in return were migrants,'' he claimed.

Never mind the global order we shaped in our own image, placing the United States firmly at the center. The values of liberty and freedom that we helped spread and support. The vast wealth created and accumulated through America's global dominance.

''No more,'' Miller vowed.

Here in Houston, we know that neither camp has it right. From its founding, our city has been bound up in international conflicts. Our political leaders, like President George H.W. Bush and Secretary James Baker, never shied away from our nation's global aspirations and commitments. Our varied immigrant communities reflect the United States' long history of foreign intervention. During the Cold War and in the decades since, hundreds of thousands of people fled the resulting violence and repression, often settling in Houston. They ultimately made us stronger and more vibrant.

Yet Miller takes the wrong lesson from this chapter in our history. The Washington Post reports that the deputy White House chief of staff even hopes to use conflict with Caracas as an excuse to invoke the Alien Enemies Act and deport hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan immigrants.

The Venezuelan government under Nicolás Maduro is deplorable in many ways. But the American people deserve to hear directly from the president why it is in our interest to meddle so aggressively — and what the goal is. Is there some actual just cause driving the sabre rattling, or is Miller simply so eager for mass deportation that he convinced the rest of the White House to put service members' lives on the line as part of some grand legal gambit?

If you voted for Trump, you should want to hear that explanation even more. The 2003 invasion of Iraq, misguided though it may have been, came after President George W. Bush made a lengthy, concerted effort to rally public support for the war. It was based on false claims about weapons of mass destruction — claims this editorial board saw as insufficient — but he succeeded.

Trump has barely even tried.

Today, polls show that just about 30% of Americans approve of a campaign against Venezuela, and that number has been dropping. That may be because recently, Americans have too often had to try to find out what their country is doing through contradictory social media posts from members of the administration. Earlier this month, following the imposition of the blockade, Trump gave a primetime address on major broadcast networks in which he was widely expected to address the situation in the Caribbean. He didn't mention it once. On Truth Social, however, his preferred social media network, he wrote that Venezuela had stolen our ''land'' and ''oil'' — a shift from previous claims about drugs. He seemed to be referring to previous rounds of nationalization in the Venezuelan oil industry, which took place in 1976 and 2007, and wants our military to conduct the equivalent of a smash-and-grab robbery to get it back. Luckily for Trump, those expropriated private companies are in the process of being compensated. No war required.

And anyway, America is hardly in need of more oil, as the collapsing price of West Texas Intermediate shows.

America's war in Vietnam, we should remember, only really took off with the Gulf of Tonkin incident, when American ships became frightened of hostile torpedoes that didn't actually exist, giving President Lyndon B. Johnson the perfect pretext to escalate the conflict. And the blockade of Cuba during the Missile Crisis almost resulted in a hot war between the United States and the Soviet Union.

There's also the fact that the Constitution mandates that Congress debate and approve a decision to begin a military conflict. This is a responsibility that Congress has too often tried to duck. Last week, the House failed to pass a narrow measure which would have barred military strikes in Venezuela by a vote of 211 to 213.

Congress should affirmatively debate what is happening in the Caribbean more broadly and make clear its preferences, putting itself on the record. And Texans should ask their candidates for Congress — especially Rep. Wesley Hunt, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Sen. John Cornyn in the Republican primary for Senate — what they would support in office.

Perhaps the crisis around Venezuela will pass, as other foreign policy crises have passed in the first and second Trump administration. But we may be muddling through an inflection point. Houston has long been shaped by the geopolitics of oil as well as our deep ties with Latin America. We understand that the foreign entanglements Washington warned against are inevitable in the 21st century, but war should be a last resort.

ONLINE: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/editorials/article/deserve-know-trump-wants-war-venezuela-editorial-21259435.php

Dec. 30

The Guardian says Trump's forceful approach to the western hemisphere comes at a cost

Donald Trump is not generally noted as a student of history. Yet over the past year, his decisive reorientation of US foreign policy towards the Americas has revived a playbook dating back two centuries, to the fifth president, James Monroe. Now the 47th is doubling down. An anti-interventionist is having second thoughts. Remarks that sounded at first like bad jokes or random outbursts from the presidential id have become more sinister through repetition or accompanying actions. Only a fool would take all of Mr Trump's comments literally – but they should certainly be taken seriously.

He has refused to rule out using military force to take control of Greenland and repeatedly floated the idea of making Canada the 51st state. He threatened to seize the Panama canal. He has imposed swingeing tariffs on key partners, and says he might abandon the Canada-Mexico trade pact signed in his first term. He has meddled outrageously in elections in Honduras and Argentina, and sought to interfere with Brazilian justice. He imposed sanctions on Colombia's president in October. He has launched deadly attacks on alleged drug boats in international waters – extrajudicial killings that the administration has sought to legitimise by arbitrarily designating traffickers as terrorists – and threatened military strikes on Mexico, Venezuela and any other country he blames for drugs consumed in the US.

Gunboat diplomacy is back. The US has positioned an extraordinary display of military might off the coast of Venezuela – its largest presence in the Caribbean for decades – and is seizing oil tankers. Mr Trump reportedly gave Venezuela's authoritarian president, Nicolás Maduro, an ultimatum to quit when they spoke recently, and has put a $50m bounty on his head. Mr Trump is unconcerned by the regime's repression. Purportedly this is about tackling drugs – but Venezuela is not a producer or major conduit for narcotics, and Mr Trump has just pardoned the former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández for major drug-related offences.

The US seems convinced that it can strongarm the leftist Mr Maduro into fleeing, or persuade other members of his regime to oust him. The question is what happens if its confidence is misplaced – as it was in Mr Trump's first term, when recognising the then opposition leader Juan Guaidó as president failed to dislodge Mr Maduro. The CIA has reportedly used drones to strike a Venezuelan port facility. How much further will the US go?

In 1823, President Monroe warned European powers not to interfere in the western hemisphere. In 2025, Mr Trump's actions reflect concern about China's growing role. ''The United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe doctrine to restore American preeminence,'' states the new national security strategy.

What it calls the ''Trump Corollary'' is a nod to the ''Roosevelt Corollary''. The 26th US president turned Monroe's defensive, exclusionary stance into ''big stick'' hegemony. The pledge of a ''potent restoration of American power and priorities'' will depend on ''enlisting'' allies and pressuring others, and on an ''adjusted'' military presence. The ''Donroe doctrine'' is also spurred by promises to prevent mass migration, a fixation on drug trafficking, hopes of trade advantage and a hunger for minerals, plus a craving for headline-grabbing, ego-bolstering symbols of domination.

Mr Trump appears unperturbed by stronger Chinese and Russian spheres of influence – as long as he has a domain to match Xi Jinping's and Vladimir Putin's. The new US ''doctrine'' is in reality subject to his whims, grudges and personal relations with leaders, and inconsistencies within his court. There are clear divisions in his foreign policy team, notably on Venezuela. Richard Grenell, the mercantilist presidential envoy for special missions, has promoted talks with Mr Maduro. Marco Rubio, secretary of state, remains unabashedly hawkish – and, with the Middle East and Ukraine largely out of his hands, has plenty of time to devote to Latin America.

Pushing back Beijing

It's not only about ideological bedfellows: Mexico seems to be shifting towards the US under pressure, and a series of new security deals will see American troops deployed across the region. Yet elsewhere, fear of an unpredictable, bullying administration may warm relations with Beijing. Mr Trump's tactics often backfire. Sanctions and tariffs were meant to kill Brazil's case against Jair Bolsonaro for plotting a coup after losing the 2022 election – but the former president got a 27-year sentence. The popularity of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva rose. The US has since eliminated key food tariffs too.

An attack on Venezuela would fuel a backlash in the region – and, experts predict, a refugee surge to the US. Mr Trump's vociferous complaints about China ''controlling'' the Panama canal spurred the private Hong Kong-based company CK Hutchison, which owned two ports in Panama, to announce that it would sell all its port holdings to a grouping led by the US investment firm BlackRock. But Beijing blocked the deal – then said the price for approval would be adding the Chinese state-owned shipping company Cosco to the consortium. Cosco would be excluded from Panamanian locations, but could reportedly gain a stake in dozens of ports worldwide.

Few in the region would choose to rely on either hegemon, and anxiety in Latin America at increased US forcefulness is matched by concern from allies in Asia and Europe at both US bullying and US withdrawal. Canada is interested in bolstering transatlantic relations. The European Union and Latin America would benefit from better ties too, but the long-awaited trade deal between Brussels and the Mercosur bloc, due to be signed this month, has stalled again. Europe should make it a priority.

Sharp political divides within Latin America, as well as diverging interests between continents, will place limits on cooperation. But Mr Trump's reckless and regressive behaviour is spurring changes that the US too may live to regret.