Excerpts from recent editorials in the United States and abroad:
April 4
The Washington Post on the U.S. cutting aid to Africa
The Trump administration’s sharp reduction in aid to Africa last year seemed likely to cause a continent-wide crisis of apocalyptic proportions. While there has been pain, particularly in health care, many African nations displayed remarkable resilience.
U.S. aid fell to $7.86 billion in 2025 from $12.1 billion in the last year of the Biden administration. That’s a decade-long low for America, and rich European countries like Germany and France also scaled back donations. Total overseas development assistance was projected to fall by $42 billion in 2025, according to Donor Tracker.
About 80 percent of projects administered by the U.S. Agency for International Development were canceled. That caused real harm in places like eastern Congo, where clinics assisting victims of sexual violence closed. Funding for an American anti-HIV/AIDS program was drastically curtailed, despite saving millions of lives for relatively little expense to American taxpayers.
Some aid targeting dire needs in places like war-torn Sudan makes sense. Yet the previous system allowed too many governments to plan their budgets around a perpetual flow of foreign dollars. Countries are better off when their leaders are focused on growing the economy rather than winning more aid dollars.
Indeed, despite the cuts, sub-Saharan Africa’s economy as a whole grew by 4.1 percent in 2025. The continent is projected to beat the global average this year with growth of 4.3 percent. Turns out charity isn’t the main driver of Africa’s destiny.
Growth was driven partly by a global rise in minerals prices, especially those critical to the green economy like lithium, cobalt and copper. Yet the continent has been rich in natural resources for centuries. Facing the aid cuts and forced into self-reliance, many African governments stepped up with long-needed reforms.
It’s hard to grasp in much of the developed world, where high taxes stymie growth, but too many African nations struggle to collect money to fund basic services. Broadening the base of taxpayers is a healthy and necessary reform that became more critical as aid dollars dried up.
Some countries, including Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda and Nigeria, have made revenue collection more efficient through digitization. Kenya, Nigeria, Angola and Ethiopia, meanwhile, began removing inefficient fuel subsidies to free up money to cover the fiscal gap (although higher oil prices as a result of the Iran war have temporarily stalled the effort).
One reason that Africa hasn’t fully maximized the benefits of its natural resource wealth is that it doesn’t trade enough with itself. Regional free trade zones have been a boon for North America and Europe, but African nations have struggled to do business with their neighbors.
The aid cutoff, however, has accelerated previously sluggish efforts to integrate African economies. Ratifying a continental free trade deal would make the continent more competitive globally while helping Africans prosper more than donor schemes ever could.
In fact, foreign aid is no longer the continent’s main source of capital. It’s foreign investment and remittances from Africans working abroad. Africa has deepened ties with alternative global partners — China and the Gulf Arab states. They believe more in building infrastructure and strengthening trade ties than aid.
In February President Donald Trump signed a one-year extension of the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act, which gave duty-free access to U.S. markets for qualifying countries. He wants changes to the program to open African markets to U.S. goods through bilateral trade deals.
African nations are showing that they don’t want to be charity cases. Will the U.S. have the foresight to do business with them? Or will Washington simply allow China to fill the void?
April 3
The Wall Street Journal on Trump telling the U.S. Postal Service to create a voter list
Can the President order the U.S. Postal Service not to deliver mail he doesn’t like? Add this to the list of, er, innovative questions that President Trump is posing to the courts. On Tuesday he signed an executive action to create a federal list of people pre-approved to vote by mail, while telling the USPS to refuse to deliver ballots from anybody who isn’t on it.
Democrats have already filed lawsuits, saying Mr. Trump’s plan tramples on the authority over elections that the Constitution gives to the 50 states. The USPS is an independent agency, and the Postmaster General is appointed by its board of governors, not the President.
“The Postal Service’s authority to reject mailpieces is defined by statute,” one suit argues, meaning Mr. Trump lacks the power to halt unapproved ballots.
The judiciary will sort this out, so hold the alarmism that the White House is stealing the midterms. The order does indicate, though, that Mr. Trump sees profit in continuing to talk election nonsense. As his approval rating gets ugly, he wants to be able to blame illegal votes for whatever happens in November.
Here’s the gist of Mr. Trump’s order: At least 60 days before a federal election, states would have to send the USPS a list of voters “to whom the State intends to provide a mail-in or absentee ballot.” The post office would maintain its own list of people “who are enrolled with the USPS, pursuant to a process specified in the rulemaking.” The mailman “shall not transmit” ballots “from any individual unless those individuals have been enrolled.”
How this is supposed to work in practice is anyone’s guess. Plenty of voters ask for absentee ballots closer to Election Day. What if somebody, two weeks before, gets stuck in the hospital or sent on a work trip? Mr. Trump’s order tells regulators to devise procedures for states to “routinely supplement and provide suggested modifications or amendments” to the USPS’s voter list.
That still sounds as if the postmaster is left in charge of deciding which ballots to deliver. Is the USPS prepared to play this role well, given how often it struggles to do its basic job? Imagine if states run into trouble updating the post office list: Maybe they will send ballots to voters anyway, in effect daring the USPS not to return them.
Mr. Trump speaks as if voting by noncitizens is so common that democracy is hanging by its fingernails, yet real investigations keep finding otherwise. Montana Secretary of State Christi Jacobsen said last month that an audit of voter records identified 23 noncitizens. To compare, 602,990 Montanans cast presidential ballots in 2024.
Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson said in January that a review of the state’s more than two million voters found “one confirmed noncitizen who never voted.” Another 486 people were unconfirmed, but she expected most of them “just need to update their information.”
Louisiana Secretary of State Nancy Landry announced last fall that a review of voter registrations back to the 1980s identified 390 noncitizens, 79 of whom cast at least one ballot. The state’s 2024 turnout: 2,006,975.
Similar meager numbers have been found in other states, such as Texas, Georgia, Michigan, and Iowa. It’s good deterrence to go after any illegal ballots, no matter how few, and maintaining voter rolls is vital. Still, this is far from the kind of coordinated mass fraud that Mr. Trump conjures in the MAGA mind.
April 5
The Boston Globe says drones are the future of warfare, and the U.S. needs to catch up
There is nothing quite like war to shine a light on a nation’s strengths — and weaknesses. Take the American war on Iran.
The astonishing reach and dominance of US airpower is on display almost daily, as American (and Israeli) fighter jets strike Iranian military targets, manufacturing plants, and government leaders. (An American F-15E downed on Friday was the first US plane to be lost over Iran in the month-long campaign.) That they have significantly undermined Tehran’s military is unquestioned.
And yet the limits of brute American force are also all too apparent, as two of the war’s nominal goals, overthrowing the regime and ending its nuclear program, appear increasingly unlikely. No one, even President Trump, seems to believe that the Islamic regime can be toppled with airpower alone. Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium remains buried, possibly out of reach except by invading ground troops.
And most importantly to the world economy, Iran’s grip over the narrow Strait of Hormuz remains steadfast, seemingly impervious to US and Israeli bombardment.
Oil from the Persian Gulf must pass through the 30-mile-wide strait to a petroleum-thirsty world, and Iran’s ability to shut down tanker traffic means that as much as 20 percent of the global supply is bottled up. And that has caused gasoline prices to soar, even in parts of the world like the United States that import little oil from the Middle East. Trump has attempted to cajole, bully, and shame US allies into deploying warships to escort tankers through the strait, but to little avail. He has also threatened to rain hell on Iran if it doesn’t release oil tankers from their watery pen. Yet Tehran has held fast.
Why, you might ask, does the US Navy not do the job itself? The answer is astonishingly simple: Mighty warships might prove no match for far less mighty, and far less expensive, Iranian missiles, mines, and drones. Putting a $2.7 billion destroyer at risk of being sunk by a swarm of Iranian seaborne drones loaded with explosives that together might cost a few million dollars is not a great bet.
The same calculus explains why allies are hesitant to send their equally expensive and precious warships to the Gulf. And why Tehran — even as its leaders are picked off by Israeli missiles one by one — can feel confident that the rising cost of oil will force Trump to make concessions in negotiations with them.
Iran’s ability to hold out against a superior US military is just the second example of how modern warfare has been upended by drones. Russia’s war on Ukraine has evolved from grinding, World War I-like trench warfare involving artillery, tanks, and foot soldiers to a more sophisticated but also relatively low-cost conflict of drones against drones. Russia’s favored weapon today is no longer the artillery shell but its own version of an Iranian drone known as the Shahed, which can deliver heavy payloads with relative accuracy to targets more than 1,000 miles away.
Shaheds are slow and relatively easy to shoot down. But at a cost of about $30,000 each, Iran and Russia are able to mass produce them swiftly. In contrast, the United States has been using a variety of far more expensive interceptors, such as Patriot missiles that go for about $4 million a piece, to shoot them down. So while the Iranians are draining their own supply of ballistic missiles and drones, so too is the United States depleting its supply of anti-drone interceptors — at a much steeper cost.
“Sometimes mass beats sophistication,” said Kateryna Bondar, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, who has studied drone warfare in Ukraine.
Now the United States is turning to Ukraine for help because its anti-drone strategies and technology are more battle-proven — and cost effective — than the Pentagon’s. The Pentagon has also financed a reverse-engineered version of the Shahed, known as Lucas, which is being deployed in the Gulf now.
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Despite these catch-up efforts, the US is still behind in anti-drone technology, which is why Iranian drones have been able to seriously damage US military bases around the Gulf, terrorize Abu Dhabi and Dubai, knock out energy infrastructure in Kuwait, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia — and, of course, help keep the Strait of Hormuz shuttered.
“It doesn’t take that much with some drones or explosives in a dinghy boat racing out to a tanker” to halt shipping through the Strait, explained energy expert Jason Bordoff on Ezra Klein’s podcast recently. “You just have to take a few out for insurance to be canceled and for ships to just say: We’re not going to take the risk.”
US vulnerability to unmanned weapons should have been apparent to anyone paying attention to what has been happening in Ukraine. Yet the fact that President Trump took the country into war with Iran without better preparing for this inevitable moment simply underscores the general callowness of his administration’s use of the American military.
He impulsively committed US forces to a mission he suggested could quickly and relatively painlessly (for the US, anyway) reap huge gains. Yes, he has weakened Iran’s ability to make war. But he has also single-handedly brought the world to the brink of recession by driving up fuel and fertilizer prices in most nations — costs that affect everyone from US truck drivers to Indian restaurant owners to African farmers. And still his shape-shifting goals have been largely unmet.
Nowhere is the White House’s confused approach to this war clearer than in the president’s decision to lift sanctions on Iranian oil sales, a gambit intended to hold down the price of oil. In effect, the president is giving the very Iranian mullahs that Israel is trying to assassinate capital to keep waging the war Trump claims will end in two or three weeks. Make sense yet?
It should surprise no one that he is reportedly casting about for ways to declare victory and get out. But he is also contemplating using US ground troops to seize coastal territory to reopen the Strait of Hormuz — a hugely risky idea.
Beyond the obvious lesson about Trump’s fecklessness is a deeper one about the future of the US military. The world’s most formidable military is largely built on the premise that future wars will be waged against similarly equipped traditional militaries, like China’s, that employ high-speed missiles, armored tanks and battleships, and stealthy fighter jets and submarines.
But the wars in Ukraine and now the Persian Gulf underscore that future war is just as likely to involve unmanned ships, submarines, and aircraft — relatively inexpensive and produced in mass to overwhelm underprepared defenses. The Pentagon is trying to respond, but the system moves slowly.
“The American arsenal — offensive and defensive — since the end of the Cold War has revolved around a small number of exquisite, expensive, and hard-to-produce items,” Michael Horowitz, director of Perry World House, a research and policy center at the University of Pennsylvania, told the editorial board. “Even when everyone recognizes how big a threat (drone warfare) is, the system is not built to scale capability quickly.”
Perhaps even more important than the challenge of waging foreign wars using unmanned technology is domestic security against that technology. Drones recently penetrated the airspace around Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, triggering a shelter-in-place alarm. Mexican drug cartels are using them to surveil the US Southern border. It seems only a matter of time before someone uses off-the-shelf technology to launch a terrorist attack within the 50 states.
There are companies — including some in Massachusetts — working to develop lower-cost anti-drone technology, including jamming devices, anti-drone drones, and directed energy such as lasers. But experts say that technology designed to defend against drones hasn’t kept up with advances in drones designed to kill.
The Pentagon needs to invest heavily in anti-drone technology. And while there are valid reasons for Democrats to be against this war, they should not stand in the way of improving such technology. We are seeing the future of warfare now. It is not too early to prepare.
April 2
The Houston Chronicle says Trump's speech was an insult to struggling Americans
Parents of rambunctious toddlers may rejoice. Whereas in the days of yore, one might be expected to grasp a child’s hand firmly in a store where breakable objects perch tantalizingly close to the edge of display shelves, it’s now fine to let the kid loose.
Go ahead, knock over the vase worth a fortune. Someone else can clean it up. And hey, the store can eat the cost, right?
That, essentially, was the message of President Donald Trump in his Wednesday evening address to the nation defending his war in Iran.
Trump’s war of choice has led to the deaths of hundreds of schoolchildren, as we’ve written before. The president has betrayed the trust of his own voters, many of them veterans of the Global War on Terror, who believed his promise to keep the United States out of the Middle East. And though the U.S. has devastated Iran’s military and decapitated much of its leadership, the regime remains in place. More hardline and abusive to its own people than ever. And they are still capable of launching missiles at ships in the Strait of Hormuz.
Eschewing the rambling style of his rallies, he read from a script in a flat monotone.
“ We don’t need their oil,” he said, referring to the exports of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait and Iraq held hostage by Iran. In a sense, the president is right about that, thanks in great part to the roughnecks working the West Texas oil patch and Houston’s own engineers, geologists, bankers and C-suite executives.
And we don’t just export raw fossil fuels but also the plastics, fertilizers and other products that have become so essential to contemporary life. This weekend, take a little spin down Texas 225 to see for yourself the storage tanks, refineries and tankers. Walk along Sylvan Beach and behold the tankers one after another navigating the Ship Channel.
And yet, Houstonians know the miles of pipelines underneath our feet are but a fraction of a pulsing international infrastructure. It binds our livelihoods to foreign economies.
Trump is a genius when it comes to shaping perceptions, but oil is a global commodity, not a meme stock that he can bend to his will. No amount of presidential bloviating can instantaneously deglobalize our economy. No midnight tirade of social media posts can overcome the slosh and jostle of crude.
Houstonians understand the stubborn physicality of oil. Our friends disappear for years at a time to work on energy projects in Nigeria, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia. They come home sore from shifts at plants that ship products to Japan, France, China. We care about Tuk Tuk drivers in Bangkok not just out of goodwill but because we are linked by the pocket book.
And things are not looking good. Across Asia, governments are rationing fuel. The president of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos Jr., declared a national energy emergency. Vietnam Airlines is canceling flights for lack of fuel. Singapore, a major hub for refueling cargo ships, can’t get the bunker oil that powers propellers. Higher shipping prices will affect nearly everything else in the global supply chain.
So if you drive an electric car and think you’re immune to spiking gas prices, wipe that smug smile off your face. Nearly everything we buy is getting more expensive because of what Trump has chosen to do.
The longer the war lasts, the worse price hikes will get. In his speech, the president said the attacks could end “very shortly” but gave no timeline. Regardless, as energy expert Amy Myers Jaffe explained in her op-ed for the Chronicle, “The ripple effects are going to be large and long.” Remember how the economic upheaval of COVID-19 came not so much in ripples but waves over several years?
And the industry most at risk may be our own. Sure, some oil and gas companies are minting money with prices this high. But Trump has essentially accelerated a disorderly transition to renewables as countries suddenly and acutely aware of the risk of depending on foreign oil and gas are speeding up the build out of solar panels, wind turbines and battery storage on their own territory.
Oh, but Trump has another solution for countries whose economies are being held hostage by Iran.
“Go to the strait and just take it, protect it, use it for yourselves,” he said Thursday.
So much for the old Pottery Barn rule — you break it, you buy it. Trump has wrecked international trade and everyone else will pay for it. Treating the Strait of Hormuz as the rest of the world’s problem will come back to haunt us.
In his speech, Trump boasted he has made America “the hottest country anywhere in the world by far, with no inflation.”
What an insult to the millions of Americans struggling to make ends meet. Trump can break the vase. And he can refuse to pay for it. But please, stop telling us it’s still beautiful.
ONLINE: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/editorials/article/trump-iran-speech-insult-22186019.php
April 6
The Guardian says Trumps threats signal moral and ethical weakness
Article 52 of the first additional protocol to the Geneva conventions prohibits attacks on civilian targets. It is on those grounds that the international criminal court has issued arrest warrants for Russian military officers and officials responsible for attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. Such assaults, and the missiles rained on Ukrainian cities and towns in order to terrify and demoralise, constitute war crimes. Exactly the same would apply to the United States, should Donald Trump’s threats to bomb Iran back to the “stone age” this week be carried out.
Such basic tenets of international law bear repeating at a time when Mr Trump and his defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, appear to speak as if from within a bloodthirsty fever dream. Glorying repulsively in his capacity to order death and destruction from the Pentagon, Mr Hegseth, an Evangelical Christian, has presented Operation Epic Fury as a 21st-century crusade “to break the teeth of the ungodly”. On social media at the weekend, Mr Trump topped that by unleashing a stream of expletive-ridden abuse, ranting that unless Iran reopens the strait of Hormuz to shipping, “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day … Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell”.
Ahead of the 250th anniversary of the declaration of independence this summer, this is language which shames the office that Mr Trump holds and the administration he leads. It further diminishes the global reputation and moral credibility of the US, which he has already done so much to undermine. In a saner political time, members of his cabinet would be following the Democratic senator Chris Murphy’s advice and exploring constitutional options to remove him. But given the craven complicity of the team that Mr Trump has surrounded himself with, the prospects of that are remote.
The rest of the world has no option but to wait and hope that a devastating escalation of the US and Israel’s illegal war does not take place, leading to unknowable and spiralling consequences. Iran has threatened to respond by expanding the reach of its own attacks within and beyond the neighbouring region. Despite Mr Trump’s vainglorious claims to have annihilated its military capacity to resist, that is not an empty threat – as the closure of the strait of Hormuz itself illustrates.
Nato allies have rightly refused to endorse Mr Trump’s folly by joining the war, recognising both the absence of a coherent strategic plan and any legal justification. They must now hope that the US president’s apocalyptic rhetoric disguises an actual search for a swift off-ramp, as global economic pressure mounts. Mr Trump followed up his dire warnings by claiming that there was a “good chance” of a ceasefire agreement with Iran before the latest Tuesday deadline expires. Yet hours later, Israel bombed a key petrochemical plant in Iran’s biggest natural gas field.
It appears Mr Trump is making it up as he goes along. At a White House press conference on Monday, he and Mr Hegseth preened themselves at length over the dramatic rescue of the missing crew member of a US fighter shot down in southern Iran. In the coming hours, thousands of lives – and the immediate future of the global economy – will depend on the erratic will of a US president guided only by his own self-aggrandising instincts and the sycophantic echo chamber of his advisers.
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