Jan. 27: King Trump Swats Impudent Latin Vassal, Floats Merciful Peace Plan for Gaza

BREAKING: Lebanon is Hezbollah; 8 of 26 remaining Phase 1 hostages are dead; NASDAQ craters amid Chinese AI panic

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The Big Story

During Donald Trump’s first term in office, foreign leaders were sometimes open in defying the president and pandering to “the Resistance” peanut gallery, presumably in the belief that Trump was an aberration who would soon be chucked out of office and have his policies promptly reversed. On Sunday, Colombian President Gustavo Petro discovered the hard way that it isn’t 2017 anymore.

Petro, a former left-wing terrorist and friend of the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez who severed ties with Israel last year, began the day by announcing that his government would refuse permission to land two previously approved military flights carrying Colombian citizens deported from the United States in protest of what he called the “inhumane treatment” of the migrants. That quickly proved to be a mistake. Within hours, Trump had announced a wave of retaliatory measures: 25% tariffs on all Colombian goods, to be raised to 50% by the end of the week; closure of the U.S. Embassy in Colombia’s visa section; the revocation of visas for all Colombian government officials; a visa ban on all members of Petro’s Humane Colombia Party and their family members; and financial and banking sanctions on Colombia. Petro was briefly defiant, posting a long boomer-leftist diatribe on X, in which he called Trump a “white slaver,” pledged to “take refuge” in Colombia’s “African songs” and “survive in my people” if Trump chose to assassinate him, shouted out “Sacco and Vanzetti,” and praised “Walt Whitman and Paul Simon and Noam Chomsky and [Henry?] Miller” while condemning the United States as “a bit boring.” He also offered to discuss “oil” with Trump over a “glass of whiskey,” “despite my gastritis,” apparently unaware that the president has famously never taken a drink in his life.

At this point, someone in Petro’s orbit must have told him to cut the crap, because by Sunday evening, the Colombian president had reposted a press release from White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announcing that “the Government of Colombia has agreed to all of President Trump’s terms.” And so it had, though Petro later undid the repost. The Colombian foreign ministry announced Sunday that the country would accept all deportation flights and “guarantee dignified conditions” for Colombians on board, according to The New York Times. Washington, in turn, backed off the threat of financial sanctions but said that visa sanctions would remain in place until the first deportation flights had arrived. Social media users, meanwhile, dug up video footage from last summer, in which Petro, who is married, canoodles in Panama with a transgender model— a “vulgar blonde with installations of breasts out to this,” as filmmaker Werner Herzog said in another context. Petro had addressed rumors of the affair at the time by announcing on X, “I am heterosexual,” which is the sort of thing that’s always less convincing if you have to say it out loud. It was, all told, a poor showing from the former guerilla.

The whole episode was a nice reminder, after the past four years, that the U.S. government can, in fact, take action on behalf of the American people, rather than do nothing while claiming to be overawed by the diplomatic or military might of, say, Colombia or Yemen—or by fear of popular backlash on the “Latin American street.” It remains to be seen whether Trump will adopt a similar approach to the Middle East, though in comments to reporters on Saturday, he said he’d like to see Jordan, Egypt, and other Arab and Muslim countries take more Gazan refugees as a prelude to reconstruction. “You’re talking about probably a million and half people, and we just clean out that whole thing. You know, over the centuries it’s had many, many conflicts, that site. And I don’t know, something has to happen,” Trump said. He added that he’d “rather get involved with some of the Arab nations and build housing at a different location where they can maybe live in peace for a change.”

Trump’s eminently reasonable suggestion met with swift backlash from Arab leaders. But as the president’s brusque treatment of Petro showed, the United States still has a lot of leverage in foreign affairs—when it chooses to use it.

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The Rest

→Scroll readers may want to grab hold of something to prepare for the shock of the next item: The Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) intelligence chief for southern Lebanon, Suhil Bahij Garb, has been passing intelligence to Hezbollah from a joint control room run by the United States, France, and the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon, according to a report in The Times. Citing an “intelligence report,” The Times reports that Garb is “one of dozens of officers in the Lebanese army who have leaked information to Hezbollah, giving them advance warning of raids or patrols, allowing them to remove weapons and evade detection.” It’s almost as if the distinction between the LAF and Hezbollah is entirely artificial, given that Hezbollah controls the government of which the LAF is a part … which is what we’ve been saying this whole time. For instance, two weeks after the Oct. 7 attack, Tony Badran noted for Tablet that the United States had been funding Hezbollah counterintelligence through the cutout of the Lebanese state security services for more than a decade—a fundamental problem with the entire ill-conceived U.S. project of building Lebanese “state capacity” that the current cease-fire deal, which tasks the LAF with removing Hezbollah from southern Lebanon, does not even pretend to address.

Indeed, the Hezbollah-affiliated journalist Ali Mortada told Al Jazeera Arabic on Sunday that Hezbollah had already returned south of the Litani River in violation of the cease-fire’s terms—which shouldn’t come as a huge surprise, given that Lebanese social media was plastered with videos of Hezbollah members and supporters parading through the streets of Beirut over the weekend:

The presence of Hezbollah south of the Litani should, in theory, render the entire agreement null and void, and the Israelis announced Monday that they had reached a deal with the Lebanese government, with U.S. blessing, to extend the deadline for IDF troops to withdraw from southern Lebanon until Feb. 18. At that point, we suppose, the new “Lebanese president,” acting on behalf of the “Lebanese people,” will finally “rise up against Hezbollah” and transform Beirut back into the “Paris of the East,” where French businessmen can indulge their appetites for Lebanese wine and high-end pederasty in view of the $1 billion U.S. embassy. And if Hezbollah tries any of its old tricks? Well, then Israel can always file a complaint with the joint U.S.-French monitoring mechanism, which will make sure the LAF looks into it.

→Eight of the 26 Israeli hostages still to be released in the first phase of the cease-fire agreement are dead, according to Israeli accounts of a list provided by Hamas on Sunday evening. Three hostages are set to be released on Thursday, and another three on Saturday; the identities of the dead hostages have not yet been revealed, but the IDF said Sunday it had “grave concerns” about the fate of Shiri Bibas and her two young sons, Ariel and Kfir, according to a report in The Times of Israel (reports circulating social media on Monday claimed that Shiri and the Bibas children had been confirmed dead, though we haven’t seen any official statement from government channels). Also on Monday, as part of the agreement, Gazan civilians began returning to northern Gaza as the IDF withdrew from the Netzarim Corridor. On X, the account @sentdefender shared a video of U.S. contractors with the private military company UG Solutions entering the Netzarim Corridor to “oversee the return of Palestinians” and conduct security checks on vehicles moving north. While they’re mercenaries, and not U.S. military personnel, it does strike us as ironic that for all the fear of an “all-out war” requiring U.S. “boots on the ground” over the past 15 months, it’s the U.S.-brokered cease-fire that’s finally put American boots on the ground in a warzone.

→The tech-heavy NASDAQ dropped by 3.5% on Monday morning amid a wave of panic about DeepSeek, a Chinese artificial intelligence company that appears to have matched the output of U.S. chatbots, such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini, at a fraction of the cost. DeepSeek unveiled its model in late December, but the panic did not begin, according to a report in The New York Times, until last week, when the company’s researchers published a paper revealing that they had built the cutting-edge chatbot using “only a fraction of the highly specialized computer chips that leading A.I. companies relied on to train their systems,” allowing DeepSeek to build its model for roughly $6 million, or about one-tenth of what Meta spent developing its latest AI. DeepSeek’s rapid and cheap development, per the Times, not only raises questions about the effectiveness of the strict export controls that the United States has placed on advanced chips but also threatens the sky-high stock valuations of AI industry leaders such as Nvidia (a chip manufacturer whose stock fell 16% Monday morning), Google, Microsoft, and Oracle.

→Pete Hegseth was narrowly confirmed as secretary of defense on Saturday, with Vice President J.D. Vance casting the deciding vote in a deadlocked 50-50 Senate. In comments since his confirmation, Hegseth pledged to get rid of DEI programs in the Pentagon and to focus on “lethality and readiness and warfighting” and “Iron Dome for America,” which was one of Trump’s more amusing campaign promises. The fight to influence Hegseth has already begun; on Saturday, Tucker Carlson published an interview with Curt Mills of The American Conservative that seemed aimed squarely at the incoming SecDef, in which Mills and Carlson warned of “neocon attempts to subvert the Trump agenda” by engineering an invasion of Iran that will, somehow, prevent the United States from closing its southern border. The neocons’ motivation, of course, is their “love” for “war, death, and bankruptcy”—after all, it’s the Israelis and their American boosters who are constantly saying things like, “We love death as you love life.” While we’ve been vocally critical of a few of DOD’s new hires, we’re skeptical that Hegseth will bite on the idea that a Jewish death cult is attempting to destroy the world by picking on poor old Hezbollah. On X, author Uri Kurlianchik posted a video of Hegseth from a 2018 conference in Jerusalem, in which the evangelical future secretary stated, “There is no reason why the miracle of the reestablishment of the temple on the Temple Mount is not possible.”

→The Danes are “utterly freaked out” after a phone call last week between Trump and Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen in which Trump reiterated his desire to purchase Greenland, according to the Financial Times. European officials, according to the report, had previously hoped that Trump’s talk of acquiring Greenland was merely a “negotiating ploy” to gain more influence, but the call was a “cold shower.” “Before, it was hard to take it seriously,” said one European official briefed on the call. “But I do think it’s serious, and potentially dangerous.” Trump was reportedly “aggressive and confrontational” after Frederiksen reiterated that Greenland was not for sale, and threatened retaliatory measures against Denmark, such as targeted tariffs, if it refused to sell. According to one official, “The Danes are now in crisis mode.”

→Federal employees are “terrified” of Trump’s slate of week-one executive orders overhauling the federal bureaucracy, according to a report in Politico. During his first week in office, Trump ordered a federal hiring freeze, mandated a return to in-office work, eliminated all DEI positions across the federal government and placed their employees on administrative leave, and established a reporting line for employees to identify disguised DEI positions—a horrific onslaught for the workforce that brought you racially segregated listening sessions to discuss Gaza trauma during the Biden administration. But while employees at the State Department and elsewhere may be “startled,” according to Politico, at least some of them are also prepared: Some employees, per the report, “had begun working months ago with outside nonprofits to archive websites they feared would be taken down by the Trump administration—including information on ending gender-based violence around the world.”