Therapy teaches us that healing begins the moment we admit the wound is real. So it is mind-bending to watch entire nations — across continents, alliances, and ideological divides — participate in a global performance of denial. In the language of narcotics, this is classic enabling: the problem grows, the behavior worsens, and those who should intervene instead minimize, excuse, or look away.
At some point, we must all take ownership. Not as political blocs, not as color-coded maps, but as societies, institutions, and international partners who have allowed dysfunction to normalize itself right in front of us.
Across the United States. Across Africa and Europe. And especially across Latin America and the Caribbean, where geopolitical imbalances have too often been treated as inevitability, and where silence is too often extracted under the banner of “cooperation.”
If there is one universal truth in this moment, it is this: Every society must find the courage to call out what is unhealthy, unsustainable, and corrosive. To name the dysfunction plainly. To push back when power becomes unchecked. To stop rewarding behaviors that destabilize rather than strengthen.
Addiction — whether to power, influence, chaos, or control — is real. And the rule of One has never, in any era, served the good of All. This is where accountability begins: in honesty, in clarity, and in the willingness to stop pretending the asylum is a palace.
The Nugget Inside the Spectacle
In the first place, why were U.S. military assets carrying out lethal strikes on boats in Caribbean waters without any publicly acknowledged Congressional authorization or War Powers notification? That question lingers unanswered, and in U.S. constitutional terms, unanswered questions about the use of force are never benign.
Any military action outside immediate self-defense requires Congressional approval or a properly documented emergency. To date, neither has been offered.
And now, in the post-mortem, comes the most troubling detail of all: the extra strike — the one senior officials cannot align in timeline, legality, or intent. This should be the national conversation: How did this operation unfold? Who authorized it? Why was the public told only after the fact?
