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Ninety percent of the more than 6,000 killed by landmines last year were civilians, and half of them were children. There can be no justification for weapons such as these.
One step can be the difference between life and death in many communities around the world. Srey Neang, a young girl living in rural Cambodia, ran outside to play in her uncle’s backyard, and her life was upended in a moment when she stepped on a landmine. She was rushed to the hospital, where her leg was amputated at only four years of age. Her story—like so many others—shows that even decades after conflict ends, the threat of these weapons never does.
Every year, thousands of civilians, particularly children, are injured or killed by landmines and cluster munitions. The use of landmines and cluster munitions had been on the decline since the signing of the Mine Ban Treaty in 1997 and the Convention on Cluster Munitions in 2010.
But despite progress, we are seeing more countries return to the use of landmines and cluster munitions as security concerns rise globally. Some will argue that these weapons make countries safer, but that’s faulty thinking. Security can’t come at the expense of innocent lives. Nor do these weapons actually provide meaningful military advantage; they leave behind contamination that destabilizes communities, limits economic recovery, and threatens peacekeeping forces long after conflicts end. You can’t be safe from a weapon that can’t distinguish between a soldier and a child.
The 2025 Landmine Monitor, out today, reports that more than 6,000 people were killed or injured by landmines and explosive remnants of war in 2024—the highest annual figure since 2020, and a 9% increase from the previous year. Ninety percent of those victims were civilians, and half of them were children. The 2025 Cluster Munition Monitor, published on September 15, also revealed that all reported casualties from this weapon in 2024 were civilians. New uses by countries like Russia, Myanmar, and Syria challenge the treaty. Lithuania’s withdrawal from the Convention, effective March 2025, sends a dangerous message to other countries in the region.
As these findings are released, there is a growing need for clear analysis and public understanding. On December 3, I’ll be joining fellow experts for a virtual briefing hosted by the US Campaign to Ban Landmines—Cluster Munition Coalition to discuss the latest Monitor reports, the human cost of these weapons, and the role US leadership must play at this pivotal moment. Bringing these insights directly to policymakers and advocates is essential to strengthening global norms and advancing effective solutions.
Despite never joining either treaty, the United States has long been one of the world’s largest supporters of mine clearance and victim assistance, helping make former battlefields safe for farming, economic investment, and community life. These investments are among the most cost-effective and high-impact uses of US international assistance, directly saving lives and restoring livelihoods.
The case for action is both moral and pragmatic. Every mine removed or cluster bomb destroyed reopens land for cultivation, enables displaced families to return home, and prevents future casualties. These are tangible, measurable outcomes that support U.S. foreign policy priorities: stability, economic recovery, and the protection of civilians in conflict.
Humanity & Inclusion, which has worked in mine action for more than 40 years, witnesses the human toll daily, as seen in the case of Srey and her family in Cambodia. The organization where I work, Humanity & Inclusion, supported Srey, now 13, in receiving a new prosthetic leg, which allows her to ride her bike to school, help take care of her family, and play soccer, one of her favorite hobbies.
Srey’s story and those of many others are reminders that behind every statistic is a person whose future depends on the choices policymakers make today. US leadership has always mattered. When the United States aligns its policies, funding, and diplomacy toward a humanitarian goal, the world follows. The US has made progress in recent years. In 2022, the Biden administration restricted US landmine use to the Korean Peninsula and reaffirmed the goal of ultimately joining the Mine Ban Treaty. But the transfer of US cluster munitions to Ukraine in 2023 and landmines in 2024, undercut those commitments and send mixed signals to the world.
US leadership in aligning policy with the Mine Ban Treaty and the Convention on Cluster Munitions, and in sustaining robust funding for mine action, comes at a critical time. Washington can once again set the global standard for protecting civilians and strengthening international law.
In a time of never-ending partisan fights, this is a place where both sides can come together and agree on the right steps forward. This is not an abstract debate. It’s about whether children can walk to school safely. Whether farmers can plant crops without fear. Whether communities emerging from war can build futures on land that no longer hides deadly remnants of the past. Eliminating landmines and cluster munitions aligns with American values, advances security, and reflects our nation’s enduring commitment to human dignity.
The world doesn’t need new reasons to fear these weapons. Instead, we must take the kind of step that brings hope rather than harm. If we lead with courage now, our next steps can help ensure that every step, everywhere, is safe.
Trump’s second term is indeed so much worse than the first, and I fear that we haven’t seen anything yet.
Does it feel like the Trumpian nightmare has been around forever? How and when will it end? Does Trump’s second term signify the end of the neoliberal order? Is his cronyism unique in the history of US capitalism? And why is the wannabe emperor of the world preparing to strike Venezuela?
Political scientist, political economist, author, and journalist C. J. Polychroniou takes a crack at these questions posed in the interview below by the French-Greek independent journalist and writer Alexandra Boutri.
Alexandra Boutri: Donald Trump’s second term in the White House began on January 20, 2025. Yet, although he has been in office for a little over 10 months, it already feels like he’s been there forever. Do you have that same odd feeling? If so, why is that?
C. J. Polychroniou: Yes, sometimes it does feel like he’s been in power forever because his actions as President during the relatively short time since his return to power have been appalling, marked by depraved cruelty, moral blindness, and unprecedented corruption. He has unleashed something utterly terrifying, chaos by distraction around the world and terror on the USA. The first tactic is part of his wish to reassert US dominance in global capitalism. The second tactic is part of his plan to spread fear and oppress all those who stand on his path of constructing a neofascist, white Christian America run by oligarchs. He is not just a pathological liar and the biggest con artist in US history, traits which the liberal media frequently applies to him, but also a malignant narcissist, a sadistic and tyrannical buffoon who believes he can do whatever he pleases, that is, operate outside his legal and constitutional authority, by virtue of the fact that he is in charge of the world’s most powerful nation. Trump hates democracy and the idea of an open society and detests the rule of law. Trump’s second term is indeed so much worse than the first, and I fear that we haven’t seen anything yet. The Trumpian nightmare is really just underway, and it will take a lot more resistance than what has already taken place to stop the dictator’s attacks against civil society, his destruction of the environment, and the acceleration of the climate crisis.
Alexandra Boutri: Trump’s approval ratings are sinking. Is this important? Can we subsequently hope to see a shift in some of his policies on account of the fact that his approval rating is dropping even among core Republican voters?
C. J. Polychroniou: I have looked closely at the latest data on Trump’s job approval rating and popularity. According to the most recent Gallop poll, Trump’s approval rating was at 36%. However, RealClear Polling shows that 42% of Americans approve of Trump’s job performance, which is utterly shocking considering the horrifying consequences of his actions. It is something that makes one wonder whether the real problem is Trump himself or a rather huge chuck of the US electorate. While I don’t know how important these job approval ratings really are, it is probably more important to look at Trump’s approval rating by state. There, we find that Trump’s popularity remains positive in Republican-dominated states, although the Gallop poll mentioned earlier also shows that Republicans’ approval has slipped by eight points. Equally worth noting is that Trump’s disapproval rating (55.3%) is not far off from what it was during his first term (54.9%), according to statistician and political analyst Nate Silver. In sum, Trump’s base is still very much with him and the main issue dividing his MAGA movement appears to be over the Epstein files! I do not have hopes for a shift in any of his odious and outright evil policies.
Alexandra Boutri: It has been said that Trump’s turn to protectionism is a death blow to neoliberalism and that what best describes his regime is cronyist state capitalism. What are your own thoughts on these matters? Has Trump abandoned neoliberalism?
C. J. Polychroniou: Politics and economics aren’t black and white. Politics is more of an art than science, and economics is definitely not a hard science. As academic disciplines, both politics and economics are regarded as social sciences. But while hard science is based on concrete laws, social science, though it can follow the scientific method, lacks universal laws and subjectivity all too often enters rather freely into analyses. As Richard Feynman once quipped, “Social science is an example of a science which is not a science….They follow the forms…but they don’t get any laws.”
To be more specific, there is no such thing as a “free market” and no such thing as a “pure” capitalist system. Neoliberalism, which relies heavily on free-markets and advocates privatization and marketization, has always depended on the state to carry out its anti-social agenda. The state not only shapes and enforces rules for markets but most of the major technological developments and innovations have been fueled by the federal government. Global neoliberalism itself has been a state-driven enterprise. It was initiated by the United States sometime around the mid-1970s and revolved around a regime of an unimpeded movement of capital, good and services. The global economy itself was regulated by global governance institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization (WTO) although the United States itself played a significant role in enforcing the rules of global neoliberalism. The new political order in global economic affairs served quite well the United States on account of its financial hegemony, but China’s full integration into the global capitalist economy saw the rise of a new imperial power and its emergence as something of a model for the developing world. China’s growth over the past four decades was many times over that of the US. Eventually, China would displace the US and become the “manufacturing workshop of the world” and overtake the US to become the top trading partner to more than 140 countries.
Enter Trump. Since coming to power, Trump has been obsessed with the idea of bringing manufacturing back to the US and reducing the trade deficit. To do so, he inaugurated a new protectionist age, which is in full swing during his second term in office. Trump’s protectionist economic policies, which we should file under the label “economics nationalism,” represent a strategy for restoring US supremacy (and thus profitability) in global economics affairs and reindustrializing the United States. In practical terms, this means not only enforcing “reciprocal tariffs” on all countries exporting goods to the United States but using military force to regain hegemonic control over Latin America and the Pacific and threatening China into submission. I believe all these policies are destined to fail, rather miserably, while causing in the process a lot of pain and suffering to a lot of people.
Does Trump’s approach to global economic affairs represent the end of the neoliberal order? I don’t think so. What he is trying to do is “Make American Corporations Great Again.” He is trying to change the relation between state, corporations, and the world economy, not the nature of the global capitalist system. The main dynamic and contradiction will remain between capital and labor, exploitation and oppression. Other states will be even more inclined than before to resort to even more extreme forms of neoliberal capitalist exploitation for the benefit of their own capital bosses. Indeed, workers’ rights are collapsing across the world, according to the 2025 Global Rights Index published by the International Trade Union Confederation. On the domestic front, Trump’s policies are unmistakably neoliberal. In fact, he has gone beyond deregulation and liberalization by embarking on the grand project of making workers even more vulnerable to abuse by eliminating key workplace protections and making it even more difficult for them to form a union. And his whole approach to the environment is as neoliberal as it can get.
I have a rather similar line of analysis regarding the debate between crony capitalism (describing an economy of close relationship between businesspeople and government officials) and neoliberalism. First, capitalism coexists and connects with greed and corruption. In fact, cronyism is inherent to capitalism. Capitalism tends to oligopoly, which strengthens the relationship between key government officials and business people. The US has had a crony oligarchy all along. People speak today of Trump’s cronyism as if it is a new phenomenon in American capitalism when the reality is that it has been around for a very long time. The George W. Bush administration was accused in fact of taking cronyism to a new level. Now of course we can say with certainty that Trump has not only taken cronyism to a new level but is actually using the presidency for self-enrichment. But let’s not fool ourselves by thinking that cronyism has somehow surfaced in the US because of Donald Trump. As far as neoliberalism specifically is concerned, research has shown that the neoliberal policies promoted by the IMF in the developing world foster crony capitalism. In sum, I do not accept the distinction between cronyism and (neo)liberal capitalism.
Alexandra Boutri: Why is Trump preparing to strike Venezuela?
C. J. Polychroniou: I can think of a number of reasons. One is because of his need to manufacture crises in order to draw attention away from his domestic crimes and shenanigans. He also wants to bring down the Maduro regime because of its close ties to China and Russia. I think geopolitical calculations figure large in Trump’s plan to strike Venezuela and it’s part of a new strategy in Latin America with the intent being to reassert US dominance over a region that Washington used to control not long ago. The US military build-up in the Caribbean is not to fight drugs. Of course, don’t expect Trump to seek the authorization of Congress to wage war against Venezuela. And he won’t be the first president not to do so. Many presidents have acted without Congress declaring war. The imperial presidency was established long before Trump, although the orange man is bent on being both “imperial president at home and emperor abroad.”
Instead of following through on his proposed tax credit for family caregivers, Trump has made their lives even harder with Medicaid cuts and immigration crackdowns.
In a searing op-ed in the New York Times entitled "'We Had No Idea What Was Coming’: Caring for My Aging Father,” opinion writer Michelle Cottle shares her caregiving story and discusses how we as a nation support our family caregivers today. The substance and the emotions of Cottle’s essay will be all too familiar to anyone who has been a caregiver. In particular, the fact that no matter how much you know about health policy or navigating bureaucracy, or think you knew—when you are caregiving for someone you love, you realize you know far too little. For most of us, one of the first steps on a caregiving journey is the realization that you are alone and have to build your support team.
Caregiving was a hard task before Trump was reelected. Trump did not create the unrelenting and cruel world that family caregivers must navigate. He did, however, make it much harder. Cottle summarized this pain:
While caring for loved ones is a deeply personal charge, the weight of that responsibility is influenced by public policy in areas ranging from taxes to labor law to entitlement spending. In his 2024 campaign, Donald Trump promised a tax credit for family caregivers. “They add so much to our country and are never spoken of, ever, ever, ever, but they’re going to be spoken of now,” he vowed during a rally at Madison Square Garden the week before Election Day. Back in office, however, Mr. Trump promptly abandoned the idea. It was not among the raft of tax cuts in his domestic policy bill. Worse still, he has taken steps likely to make families’ caregiving burdens far heavier. Two major moves stand out. One is the slashing of Medicaid. The other is the broad-based assault on immigration. Together, those actions risk upending a caregiving ecosystem already under strain, throwing millions of families into crisis.
Let’s look at Cottle’s claims one by one. The most grievous blow that the Trump administration has wielded against America’s caregivers is the cuts to the Medicaid program which provides 61% of the nursing-home care in this country. According to the University of California at Berkeley School of Public Health, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBB), which Trump signed into law on July 4, 2025, includes cuts to Medicaid of almost $1 trillion over the next 10 years.
In addition to providing care in an institutional setting, Medicaid pays for a substantial amount of care for people in their homes. As the Kaiser Family Foundation reports, “Over one-third of Medicaid spending pays for long-term care, with most of the spending paying for home care—also known as ‘home- and community-based services’ or HCBS. Medicaid pays for almost 70% of all home care spending in the US, nearly all of which is provided through optional services.” The bottom line in all of these statistics is that Medicaid is the lifeblood of America’s caregivers.
Another way Trump has made life even harder for caregivers is through his immigration policies. As Cottle explains:
As Mr. Trump throttles the flow of immigrants into the United States, families are likely to have more and more difficulty finding help. Already, the cancellation of the temporary protected status of hundreds of thousands of migrants is causing upheaval. “We’re seeing a jarring, sudden loss of workers, of people who are being sent back” to their home countries, said Katie Smith Sloan, the head of LeadingAge, an association of community-based organizations that provide services for seniors.
Caregivers often depend on immigrants to provide care for our loved ones. You also know, if you have been on the frontlines of caregiving, how wonderful so many of these people are. Surely, if we can have an H-1B visa category to bring skills we do not have here in the USA, we can figure out a category for those who help us take care of our most vulnerable.
Finally, there is the question of the tax credit for caregiving. For all of Trump’s praise for his self-styled “One Big Beautiful Bill,” why did he not put in a simple tax credit that would benefit family caregivers? When you review a list of the tax changes in the OBBB, leaving out a tax credit for caregiving stands out as especially egregious. Furthermore, to add insult to injury, too many members of Congress and opinion writers have been silent on Trump’s refusal to provide the promised caregiving tax credit.
A tax credit is not the most effective way to help our beleaguered caregivers in the moment. Family caregivers need immediate help with things like finding at-home care and managing medications. A tax deduction they have to apply for when they file their income tax returns the following year is not the salve for our caregiving crisis. But, the president couldn’t even acknowledge the financial pain that caregiving afflicts on millions of Americans.
There is not a lot of good news for caregivers these days coming from Washington, DC. Almost all caregivers know this fact. However, many elected officials and opinion leaders turn a blind eye toward how Trump has failed caregivers. Recognizing this sad fact is not pleasant, but it is the first step toward giving America’s family caregivers the support they deserve.
The path from COP30 requires fewer pledges and more enforceable governance. Countries already know what must be done. They must do it.
It appeared to be a grim déjà vu when the final gavel dropped in Belem, Brazil and the COP30 text once again avoided naming fossil fuels.
But this apparent diplomatic failure obscured something more consequential: after hours of fraught, last-minute negotiations, countries reaffirmed the “United Arab Emirates consensus” from COP28 — the only UN agreement to date to reference a fossil-fuel phaseout. And the pathway it implies is already taking shape. In April, Colombia and the Netherlands will convene governments in Santa Marta, Colombia for the first global summit dedicated explicitly to the transition away from fossil fuels.
At COP28 in Dubai, governments committed to tripling renewable energy and doubling energy efficiency by 2030. Combined with deep cuts to fossil methane, these pledges form a powerful trio. According to the Climate Action Tracker, fully implementing them would reduce projected warming by about 0.9°C this century, from 2.6˚C to 1.7˚C — enough to determine whether Paris Agreement targets remains within reach. If delivered, they would do more to collapse fossil-fuel demand than any language missing from the COP30 outcome text.
The energy system is already shifting. In the last two years, China has driven an unprecedented solar surge — adding more capacity in 2024 alone than the rest of the world combined, now hosting roughly half of global installed solar power, and exporting ultra-cheap panels that are flooding markets globally. As solar prices plunge, renewables are undercutting coal and gas markets globally. Doubling energy efficiency, if it can be achieved, cuts demand at a scale equivalent to adding vast new clean-power capacity, but without the economic and environmental burden of new plants.
Deep cuts to fossil methane — the primary component of gas, and a climate pollutant roughly 80 times more powerful than CO₂ over 20 years — require producers to eliminate leakage, venting, and routine flaring. These measures raise compliance costs, increase saleable gas, and make new fossil expansion harder to justify. Taken together, these commitments amount to a key part of the de facto fossil-fuel phaseout pathway.
But voluntary pledges alone won’t get us there. The Global Methane Status Report 2025 finds that despite over 150 countries endorsing the Global Methane Pledge, methane emissions continue to rise.
And even when we look beyond voluntary pledges to the domestic laws, regulations, and policy measures that represent a plan of action — as reflected in countries’ Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and National Methane Action Plans — the gap remains enormous. Fully implementing all NDCs would cut global methane emissions by only about 8 percent below 2020 levels by 2030. That is far short of the 30 percent Global Methane Pledge goal and well below the 45 percent cut UNEP associates with keeping 1.5°C within reach.
The missing ingredient is enforcement — and the most important development on that front is not the Global Methane Pledge but the EU Methane Regulation.
Adopted in 2024, the EU rules apply not only to methane emitted within Europe but also to imported fossil fuels. Because the EU is the world’s largest importer of oil and gas — and its suppliers account for roughly 30 percent of global oil and gas methane emissions — these rules may do more to cut global methane than any voluntary pledge ever could. For the first time, countries exporting gas and oil to Europe must meet strict leak-detection, monitoring, and venting and flaring requirements. Non-compliant fuels can effectively be shut out of the EU market.
This is regulatory gravity: when the world’s largest buyer sets a standard, producers must adapt or lose access.
Some already have. Companies like ConocoPhillips have set near-zero methane-intensity targets by 2030 and earned top-tier marks for emissions reporting — clear signals that they intend to compete under strict import regimes. Meanwhile, fossil-fuel trade groups are lobbying aggressively to weaken the EU rules, arguing they threaten U.S. LNG exports. Investors disagree: in October, asset managers representing over €4.5 trillion urged the EU not to dilute nor delay its methane law, highlighting methane as a material financial risk.
The deeper truth is that the EU methane rules are already going beyond the Global Methane Pledge and achieving reductions in fossil-methane emissions across borders, backed by market access and legal penalties rather than voluntary promises.
Science points in the same direction. The International Energy Agency concludes that methane from fossil-fuel operations could be cut by around 75 percent by 2030 using technologies available today. Combined with renewable and efficiency pledges, these reductions undermine the economic case for expanding fossil-fuel production. New LNG terminals, oil fields, and long-lived gas infrastructure would rapidly become uneconomic — stranded assets in the making.
Methane is responsible for roughly a third to a half of today’s warming, and because it is short-lived, rapid reductions can deliver measurable cooling within a decade. Without binding limits on fossil methane, the world cannot meet its climate goals, no matter how fast renewable energy grows.
This is the real lesson of COP30: pledges are not a plan. Tripling renewables, doubling efficiency, and slashing methane can transform global energy systems — but only if they are backed by binding rules, border measures, and enforcement. The EU methane regulations represent the first serious attempt at such enforcement.
The next opportunity to broaden that effort will not come at COP31, but in April 2026, when Colombia and the Netherlands co-host the First International Conference on the Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels in Santa Marta.
It will be the first global summit to center the production side of the climate crisis. And it exists because grassroots movements made it unavoidable: years of pressure from youth organizers, Indigenous land defenders, and frontline communities pushed governments and companies toward positions once dismissed as radical — including today’s mainstream demand for a fair, full fossil fuel phaseout. Santa Marta is happening not as a symbolic gesture, but because people insisted on real action.
If COP30 could not bring itself to state that fossil fuels must be phased out, Santa Marta can. And it can ground that commitment in the tools governments have already endorsed: accelerated renewables, deep efficiency gains, and enforceable methane standards — led, in practice, by the EU.
For the United States, the moment is defining. Federal methane rules are being dismantled. But U.S. states need not wait. Colorado, New Mexico, and California already have some of the strongest methane rules in the world. By aligning with Europe’s approach — and sending governors or senior officials to Santa Marta — they can help build a transatlantic coalition for binding methane limits and an orderly fossil-fuel phase-down.
The path from COP30 requires fewer pledges and more enforceable governance. Countries already know what must be done. The task now is to turn an implicit roadmap into a binding framework capable of delivering the cuts that matter most — starting with methane in the oil and gas sector.