标签： North America

On April 28, the U.S. State Department released a joint statement purporting to stand “in solidarity with Panama” after an alleged increase in detentions of Panama-flagged ships at Chinese ports. The statement frames these detentions as a “blatant attempt to politicize maritime trade” — a framing that collapses under scrutiny when examined against the backdrop of recent U.S. and Panamanian actions targeting Chinese-controlled logistics infrastructure across the region. This diplomatic move is just the latest step in a broader, coordinated U.S. geostrategic push that includes blockades of the Strait of Hormuz, new defense partnerships with Indonesia, and aggressive rhetoric targeting China-backed infrastructure projects like Peru’s Port of Chancay.

Five Latin American and Caribbean nations joined the U.S. as co-signatories: Costa Rica, Bolivia, Paraguay, Guyana, and Trinidad and Tobago. A closer look at this group reveals a deliberate alignment with longstanding U.S. economic and security priorities in the Western Hemisphere, rather than a random collection of like-minded states.

The irony of the U.S.’s sudden stance on Panama is difficult to overstate. Just a few months prior, Washington executed a coordinated two-pronged campaign to oust Chinese operators from key Panamanian ports: diplomatic coercion through high-stakes bilateral security dialogues, and a politicized legal campaign targeting Chinese concession agreements near the Panama Canal. This effort culminated in a widely expected Panamanian Supreme Court ruling that forced Hong Kong-based port operator CK Hutchinson to exit its operations at the Balboa and Cristobal terminals. The contract was subsequently awarded to a subsidiary of Danish logistics giant Maersk. This history of interference undermines the State Department’s claims of defending neutral maritime trade: even as far back as the Trump administration, U.S. negotiators openly threatened to retake the Panama Canal by force if Washington’s demands were not met, turning hollow the rhetoric about defending Panamanian sovereignty and opposing politicization of trade.

Breaking down the co-signatories further exposes the strategic logic behind the joint statement. Guyana, one of the world’s fastest-growing producers of high-quality sweet light crude, has attracted major new downstream investment as a result of U.S. blockades of Persian Gulf oil exports. Trinidad and Tobago is a leading regional producer of critical petrochemicals including urea and ammonia. Costa Rica has long been a dependable U.S. ally and hosts the Caribbean’s most technologically advanced commercial port. Paraguay, meanwhile, remains the only South American nation that recognizes Taiwan, a longtime point of alignment with U.S. foreign policy goals.

The most surprising co-signatory is Bolivia, a landlocked Andean nation that would seem to have no direct stake in Caribbean maritime security. This move makes strategic sense, however, when viewed through the lens of global green energy competition: Bolivia holds the world’s largest proven lithium reserves, a critical mineral for manufacturing electric vehicle batteries and large-scale grid energy storage. Extraction of Bolivian lithium, however, faces major barriers: the country’s brine deposits have an unusually high magnesium-to-lithium ratio, requiring costly, largely unproven extraction technology. There is also the massive logistical challenge of moving extracted lithium hundreds of kilometers over rugged terrain to Pacific ports in neighboring Chile, before shipments travel north through the Panama Canal to reach major consumer markets. These constraints push up the cost of every ton of exported Bolivian lithium dramatically.

Bolivia’s new President Rodrigo Paz has signaled a clear shift away from the previous socialist government’s partnerships with China and Russia. His recent decision to replace the leadership of state-owned lithium producer Yacimientos de Litio Bolivianos indicates a willingness to scrap existing deals in favor of new agreements with Western capital, provided Western markets offer guaranteed access for Bolivian lithium exports. For Paz’s administration, signing onto the U.S.-led statement framing Panama as a “pillar of our maritime trading system” is a low-cost, transactional diplomatic gesture to curry favor with Washington.

As a landlocked nation, Bolivia’s ability to become a major lithium export powerhouse depends entirely on access to ports through Chile, its longstanding historical rival that borders the Pacific. Chile already has a thriving, profitable lithium sector of its own, and was the source of Bolivia’s loss of coastline in the 19th century War of the Pacific. By aligning with the U.S. against China’s trade and infrastructure presence in the region, Bolivia is signaling to Chile, Panama, and other Latin American states that it will abide by Washington’s rules of the game in exchange for access to their critical maritime logistics networks.

This coordinated U.S. diplomatic push in Panama and Bolivia cannot be separated from broader global geostrategic shifts. In the Persian Gulf, the U.S. military has enforced a blockade that blocks most crude oil exports from reaching key Asian markets. At the same time, the State Department has worked aggressively across the Caribbean and Latin America to oust Chinese-owned logistics assets through a mix of diplomatic pressure and politicized legal campaigns. This pattern of activity makes clear that the modern iteration of U.S. dominance in the Western Hemisphere, sometimes called the “Donroe Doctrine” (a updated take on the 19th century Monroe Doctrine), does not aim to benevolently integrate the U.S. and Latin American economies. Instead, its core goal is to redirect global commodity supply chains away from West Asia and back into the Western Hemisphere by establishing U.S.-controlled maritime trade routes.

While it remains too early to tell whether Washington’s gambit will succeed, the pattern is deliberate: the State Department has actively built a new U.S.-aligned maritime consensus with Latin American countries that produce critical energy, agricultural, logistics, and green mineral inputs, many of which have already rejected recent Chinese investment offers. Any framing of the U.S. as a neutral guardian of free global maritime trade ignores clear, on-the-ground reality: the U.S. military is seizing commercial ships in West Asia to enforce its blockade, while the State Department simultaneously demands that China adhere to Washington’s rules for trade in Central and South America. When the Trump administration abandoned the longstanding Carter Doctrine commitment to secure free trade through the Persian Gulf, the myth of a neutral, free global maritime commons died.

In the long term, this power play is likely to work to the advantage of China and other coastal emerging economies seeking a more multipolar global order. But in the short term, it has created unprecedented instability in the global maritime trading system — instability that the U.S. State Department is actively exploiting to advance American energy, agricultural, and mining interests across the Western Hemisphere.

A high-stakes constitutional and political debate has erupted in Washington over President Donald Trump’s refusal to seek congressional approval to continue U.S. military operations against Iran, as the 60-day deadline mandated by the 1973 War Powers Resolution expired this Friday.

Speaking to reporters ahead of the deadline, Trump insisted that he has no legal requirement to secure congressional authorization for the ongoing conflict, claiming that no prior U.S. president has ever sought such approval for military action. “It’s never been used. It’s never been adhered to. Nobody’s ever asked for it before,” Trump said, adding that past commanders-in-chief have long viewed Congress’s claimed authority to limit presidential war powers as “totally unconstitutional.”

The reality of presidential compliance with the 1973 law, however, is far more nuanced than Trump’s framing. Enacted in the aftermath of the Vietnam War to curb unilateral executive war-making and restrict then-President Richard Nixon’s ability to escalate conflict without legislative backing, the War Powers Resolution requires the president to terminate any U.S. military engagement within 60 days of notifying Congress of its launch, unless lawmakers explicitly vote to extend the operation. This Friday marked exactly 60 days since the Trump administration notified Congress of the start of strikes against Tehran on February 28.

Both Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth argue that the 60-day clock was paused when the current ceasefire between U.S. and Iranian forces went into effect, triggering ongoing disagreement over whether ceasefire periods count towards the congressionally mandated deadline. Legal experts, however, reject this interpretation. “Nothing in the War Powers Act suggests a pause of hostilities changes the requirements of the law,” said David Schultz, a professor of political science and legal studies at Hamline University in Minnesota. “Just because other presidents haven’t invoked the law doesn’t mean that what Trump is doing here is correct. Here, Trump has basically committed us to combat without any support from Congress. And if we go back to the founding of this country, one of the core fears the framers had was a strong executive committing the nation to war without the support of the elected legislative branch.”

A look at modern U.S. history reveals that multiple of Trump’s predecessors did comply with the War Powers Resolution by securing congressional approval before launching large-scale military operations. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan obtained congressional approval to deploy U.S. Marines to Lebanon within the 60-day window, bringing his campaign into full compliance with the law. President George H.W. Bush sought and received congressional authorization for the 1991 Gulf War ahead of launching Operation Desert Storm, even as he maintained that he did not legally require the approval. His son, George W. Bush, won explicit congressional backing for the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

That said, Trump is correct that several past administrations did find ways to circumvent the 1973 law. President Bill Clinton allowed the 1999 NATO bombing campaign in Kosovo to run 18 days past the 60-day deadline without seeking congressional authorization, with the entire operation lasting 78 days. President Barack Obama argued that the 2011 U.S. military intervention in Libya did not qualify as “hostilities” under the War Powers Resolution, allowing the campaign to continue for more than seven months without congressional approval.

Trump has pushed back against criticism by noting that the current conflict with Iran has been far shorter in duration than many past U.S. wars, pointing to the 19-year Vietnam War, nearly nine-year Iraq War, six-year World War II, and three-year Korean War as points of comparison. Still, a clear path to ending the conflict remains elusive: Washington and Tehran remain deadlocked over two core issues, control of the strategic Strait of Hormuz and Iran’s nuclear program, leaving Trump’s exit strategy from the conflict unconfirmed. Echoing a line former President Barack Obama used in 2014 about the war in Afghanistan, ending the U.S. engagement in Iran appears far harder than starting it.

A fierce public debate has erupted over the full financial burden of former President Donald Trump’s Iran war, with multiple independent analysts, lawmakers, and even Iran’s top diplomat challenging the Pentagon’s official $25 billion cost estimate as a deliberate undercount that misleads U.S. taxpayers.

The controversy ignited after Jules Hurst, the Pentagon’s acting comptroller, testified under oath before U.S. lawmakers that the Trump administration had accumulated $25 billion in expenditures on the conflict, a widely unpopular war of choice launched by the former administration. The New York Times noted that Hurst offered no additional details to contextualize the figure, which is dramatically lower than the $200 billion the Pentagon initially requested for the conflict. The low number also indicates a sharp slowdown in spending, despite early war data showing the conflict cost more than $11 billion in its first six days alone.

Independent and institutional analysts have repeatedly pushed back against the official estimate, releasing their own assessments that place the direct cost of the conflict far higher. This month, the liberal-leaning Center for American Progress calculated that direct Pentagon spending exceeded $33 billion in just the first 39 days of fighting. A ceasefire-era assessment from the conservative American Enterprise Institute, released April 10, put the total direct cost between $25 billion and $35 billion. Independent policy analyst Stephen Semler went further, estimating the U.S. spent nearly $29 billion on the war in its opening two weeks – an average of $2.1 billion per day. Semler accused Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth of lying to Congress in a social media post Thursday, arguing that the total opening two-week cost alone already exceeded the Pentagon’s full $25 billion official estimate.

The debate went cross-border Friday when Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi joined the criticism, taking to social media to reject the Pentagon’s figure as a deliberate fourfold undercount. “The Pentagon is lying,” Araghchi wrote, claiming the conflict – which he framed as a gamble tied to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – has already cost U.S. taxpayers $100 billion in direct spending, four times the official claim. He added that indirect costs borne by American households are far higher, putting the current monthly burden at $500 per household and rising rapidly.

Beyond direct military spending, experts and lawmakers have drawn attention to the massive indirect costs the conflict has imposed on U.S. consumers through soaring energy and food prices. Democratic U.S. Representative Ro Khanna of California told the House of Representatives Thursday that when accounting for these price hikes, the total cost of the war to Americans surges to more than $630 billion – an average of $5,000 per household. “We need to end this war now, and help the American people reduce costs,” Khanna said.

Long-term projections paint an even starker picture of the conflict’s financial toll. Linda Bilmes, a public policy scholar at the Harvard Kennedy School, warned in early April that when factoring in long-term obligations like veterans’ health care and other sustained outlays, the total lifetime cost of the Iran war to U.S. taxpayers could top $1 trillion. Bilmes noted that pinning down an exact exact cumulative cost is challenging in the early stages of the conflict, but current data shows the conflict runs about $2 billion per day in short-term direct costs alone – a figure that represents just the tip of a much larger financial iceberg.

On a Friday ruling that has upended the ongoing national battle over abortion access in the United States, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has issued a temporary order that sharply curtails access to mifepristone, the core medication used in most US pregnancy terminations, by banning mail distribution and telemedicine pharmacy dispensing. The decision reverses a 2023 U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) policy that permanently eliminated the longstanding requirement that patients pick up the drug in person from a clinical provider, a rule that grew out of pandemic-era access expansions first enacted in 2021.

The legal challenge that led to this ruling was brought by the state of Louisiana, which argues that the FDA’s relaxed distribution rules directly invalidate the state’s total ban on abortion. In its official order, the appellate court wrote that every abortion enabled by the FDA’s policy overrides Louisiana’s abortion ban and contradicts the state’s official stance that “every unborn child is a human being from the moment of conception and is, therefore, a legal person.”

Mifepristone is the first drug in the two-step medication abortion regimen endorsed by the FDA: it blocks progesterone, a hormone required to sustain a pregnancy, and is followed by misoprostol, which empties the uterus. The drug was first approved for use up to seven weeks of pregnancy in the U.S. in 2000, with approval extended to 10 weeks in 2016. It is also used off-label to treat incomplete miscarriages and Cushing syndrome, while misoprostol has long been prescribed for stomach ulcers and postpartum hemorrhage, a non-abortion use that has kept it out of most recent regulatory battles.

Mainstream U.S. medical bodies including the FDA and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists have repeatedly confirmed mifepristone’s safety after more than two decades of use. FDA data shows more than 3.7 million American women used the drug between 2000 and 2018, and clinical data puts the effectiveness of the full two-drug regimen at roughly 95%, with less than 1% of cases requiring additional invasive medical intervention.

This latest ruling comes against a shifting legal backdrop for abortion access in the U.S. In 2022, the Supreme Court overturned the federal constitutional right to abortion established in Roe v. Wade, leaving regulation up to individual states. Two years later, in 2024, the Supreme Court unanimously rejected one high-profile effort to restrict mifepristone, but left open the possibility for future state-led challenges to the drug’s distribution rules. Friday’s ruling also overrides a recent lower court decision that paused the case to allow the FDA time to complete a regulatory review of the 2023 policy.

Reaction to the ruling has split sharply along pro-choice and anti-abortion lines. American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) attorney Julia Kaye condemned the decision in an official statement, arguing it ignores established medical science and existing legal precedent to advance an anti-abortion policy that a majority of Americans oppose. Kaye added that for vulnerable groups including rural patients, survivors of intimate partner violence, and people living with disabilities, eliminating telemedicine and mail access will cut off access to the vital medication entirely.

Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill, who brought the challenge, celebrated the ruling, claiming the Biden-era FDA rule enabled the deaths of thousands of unborn children in Louisiana and millions across the country. “I look forward to continuing to defend women and babies as this case continues,” she said.

Other state officials have moved to reassure patients that abortion access will remain unchanged in jurisdictions where it remains legal. New York Attorney General Letitia James confirmed Friday that abortion care, including medication abortion, will remain legal and accessible in New York regardless of the appellate ruling. “Mifepristone is safe, effective, and essential. Restrictions on abortion care are restrictions on life-saving health care. This decision puts lives at risk,” James said.