On Trump, Putin, and the Veiled Axis from Kyiv to Caracas“

In recent weeks, I’ve watched with growing unease as foreign policy decisions under Donald Trump unfold with a peculiar symmetry—one that echoes, benefits, or subtly enables the strategic priorities of Vladimir Putin.  While these choices are framed by officials as matters of diplomacy, security, or immigration control, the pattern that emerges—when traced across geography and timing—is harder to dismiss.  It suggests not only a convergence of interests but also a convergence of silence, of things not said, not questioned, not confronted.

A sharply argued opinion piece in The Washington Post by Marian Da Silva Parra, a scholar at Columbia Law School’s Human Rights Institute, called out the administration’s expanded travel bans for what they are:  policies that punish Venezuelan dissidents and effectively strengthen Nicolás Maduro’s grip by allowing him to portray his opponents as foreign threats.  But what is more telling than the piece itself is the fact that it appeared only as an op-ed, not as a subject of sustained front-page reporting.  For all its substance, the critique is offered through a medium that functions more like commentary than alert.

At the same time, U.S. support for Ukraine is being retracted and reissued with increasing hesitation.  Aid deliveries were quietly paused and only resumed after public pressure following the July 4 missile strike on Kyiv.  Multilateral sanctions coordination has reportedly faltered, and new diplomatic pressure is being placed on Ukraine to accept a ceasefire—one the Kremlin has shown no real interest in reciprocating.

These are not isolated gestures.  They land, again and again, in Moscow’s favor.

This invites a broader question:  Are we witnessing the quiet shaping of a two-front geopolitical shift—from Eastern Europe to the Western Hemisphere—where American policy, whether by intention or inertia, now facilitates Russia’s global posture?  Or is this merely the result of domestic calculations with unintended consequences abroad?

There is, to be clear, no proof of deliberate collusion.  But outcomes matter.  A weakened Ukraine.  An emboldened Maduro.  A distracted and demoralized press.  A public fed more performance than substance.  The effect is less of a conspiracy than of a stage being set—unexamined, unchallenged, and disturbingly aligned with a worldview in which democratic resistance is treated as destabilizing and authoritarian consolidation as order restored.

In such a climate, perception is not a matter of optics.  It becomes the only terrain left to navigate what official language refuses to name.

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Ricardo F. Morin

Bala Cynwyd, Pa, July 7, 2025

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