USA

Trump’s realists are reorienting American power from Europe to the Indo-Pacific.

Government bureaucracies change very slowly. There is a tendency among governments — call it bureaucratic inertia — to keep doing what you have been doing for decades, even in the face of changed conditions. The United States emerged from the Second World War with a globalist outlook because, alone among the world’s great powers, it escaped the worst consequences of that war and faced a global ideological and geopolitical challenge from the Soviet Union. Those circumstances created in the United States an Atlanticist outlook that prioritized Europe over Asia with the Marshall Plan and the formation of NATO.

Nearly half of the households that watched the Super Bowl tuned out halftime performer Bad Bunny, per Samba TV.

This also represents a 39 percent decline in Bad Bunny viewers when compared to last year’s halftime show.

In the 20th century, it was customary for Latin American military juntas to start a putsch by seizing control of the national broadcasting company. This often happened during the night or in the early hours of the morning. On 11 September 1973, Augusto Pinochet and his troops took over the radio and TV stations in Chile by 8am. On 24 March 1976, the leader of the Argentinian military junta captured Isabel Perón at 1am. By 3.10am, all TV and radio stations started to play military marches.

The actors have changed since then and so have their methods. What is unchanged is the idea that political power is about the control of the media. This is why the US and the EU have been engaged in a raging dispute over social media regulation and content moderation since JD Vance criticised the Europeans at last year’s Munich Security Conference for suppressing free speech.