Hi, Corey Stutte here back for another
Two Minute Drill to wrap up the week.
And we've got quite a bit to cover here
in the United States with the inauguration
of President Donald Trump, as well as
all the new policies that they've been
rolling out over the past several days.
So let's go ahead and get started.
The first item I'm going to want
to talk about today is really
focused on the new administration's
rollback of Biden era policies.
And what we've seen is a continuous
rollout of all of these backtracking
on Biden policies, including
the reinstatement of Cuba as
a state sponsor of terrorism.
And we also saw sanctions removed on
Israeli settlers in the West Bank, which
is something that the Biden administration
had put into place because they didn't
feel the Israelis were really taking
care of the seller attacks in the West
Bank over the past couple of years.
In addition, we saw the Houthi
rebels in Yemen re designated as
a foreign terrorist organization.
I don't think that any of these
are really all that surprising.
I would call these kind of low
hanging fruit things that the Trump
campaign had said that they wanted
to do and were things that they
could quickly enact coming out of
the gate here after the inauguration.
So I think that all of
those were to be expected.
It's just now that they're
actually done and we'll see how
they proceed moving forward.
The second item that we really
saw take place this week was
the designation of foreign drug
cartels as terrorist organizations.
Now historically drug cartels haven't been
viewed as terrorist organizations because
they really are focused on elicit crime.
They don't necessarily have any
sort of political ties to them.
They don't have any sort of political
outcome that they're looking to affect.
What we've seen though, is that the
Trump administration move forward with
classifying certain types of drug cartels
as foreign terrorist organizations.
This could include Ms.
13.
Groups the Trump administration
has routinely said were problems.
That obviously impact the US.
Now, this will clearly strain the
relationship between the US and Mexico
moving forward and it's really yet
to be seen exactly how this will be
enacted and what this might look like.
And finally we saw a lot of
issues come forward with China.
Obviously coming out of the
Biden administration the shutdown
of TikTok which was delayed
by the Trump administration.
We'll see how that plays out.
But we did see a reaffirmation
of the US commitment to the
Philippines, which was very important.
The Philippines was rather concerned I
would say, as far as what might actually
happen with the new administration,
how they might handle the China
problem with regard to the Philippines.
We have a lot of China Hawks that are
coming into the new administration
at a lot of the higher policy levels.
So I think that this kind of plays in
line with what we would have expected.
But we have continued to see some more.
Interesting things develop, over the
past couple of days, the Typhon missile
launcher, which has been a big contentious
point between the US and China that
was placed on Luzon in the Philippines.
It was going to be kept there.
And it was actually redeployed to a new
location in the Philippines to continue
supporting the defense of the country.
So a very interesting dynamics continued
to play out there and we'll see how
it continues to unfold over the coming
weeks as they march through their first
100 days of the new administration.
A lot of interesting things
going on around the world.
We'll continue to pay attention to
those, but I want to thank you for
joining us for another Two Minute Drill.
I hope that you will go ahead
and subscribe to the Geopolitical
Report at geopolitical.report
and consider subscribing to pro so that
you have access to all of the events, that
are logged and mapped throughout the week.
So thank you very much
for joining us today.
Have a great weekend.