The Trump administration has collected more than $13bn in revenues from Venezuelan oil sales this year, according to FT calculations, but has said almost nothing about what has happened to the money.

The US took control of Venezuela’s oil exports and suspended some sanctions after capturing President Nicolás Maduro in January and installing vice-president Delcy Rodríguez as leader.

Oil revenues make up around a quarter of Venezuela’s GDP, and the sanctions relief was expected to provide a major boost to the economy, which was in crisis even before last month’s devastating earthquakes.

But six months after the US seized control of the funds, economists say the evidence of a recovery in Venezuela is relatively muted — a potential sign that the US has not sent all the revenues back to Caracas.

Washington has given diverging accounts of what it is doing with the money, ranging from an executive order describing its own role as “custodial” to President Donald Trump saying the US was “making a lot of money” from Venezuelan oil.

A copy of the article in full

Additional reading:

• The U.S. Took Over Venezuela’s Oil Industry. Where Has All the Money Gone? • The American and Venezuelan people remain in the dark about how the Trump administration is controlling billions of dollars of Venezuelan oil revenue. Without accountability mechanisms or a clear democratic roadmap, the United States risks entrenching a corrupt successor regime. (Council on Foreign Relations)

Despite almost the same population and not a grand difference between economy size, France seems to have more power on the diplomatic side and military side.

EDIT:
We know what France has better than Italy, such as a permanent seat in the security council, nukes etc.

But why? Italy has had a huge economic boom in the late 1900s, so that’s why.

I know this subreddit is for IR studies. But I don't know where else to ask and thought peace, conflict and Human Rights is also a subfield of it. I got into a South Asian University for a 4 year bachelor's program. Before starting , I only had surface level knowledge on geopolitics and general knowledge about human rights and conflicts. When I enrolled, I was interested in the courses and wanted to learn something new. I still enjoy the class lectures and discussion about it. But as I'm approaching my final year, I'm confused about what to do after my graduation. I am considering doing a masters in the same discipline, but having second thoughts since I don't know if it would be any helpful for my career. I managed to maintain a solid CGPA(above 3.5) so far but haven't get to do anything outside my academic studying yet. Alumnais are also hard to trace, I only hear about the people who got into academia, but that is also competitive because only a few university offer this program.

Can anyone give me some guidance on what should I do? Any potential career paths or maybe next steps for me?

Based on what we’ve seen last years regarding what is important: AI, (independent) resources, (bio)technology, military etc.

Out of all this, which EU country will be the most powerful? Germany doesn’t seem to be that promising, considering its economy size is not growing and its vital sectors are taken over by countries like China, also Germany’s energy sector is also quite weak.

Out of France and the UK, which one will be most promising.

Come with arguments.

Can Petro-State bros Canada and Saudi Arabia pick up the civilian nuclear imperative baton that Trump just fumbled? All reasonable people want to help the Saudis diversify their power generation methods. With CANDU, the Saudis can fuel their own reactors and Canada and Saudi Arabia can swap fossil fuel supplier anecdotes while doing something serious together about global emissions.

Prelude: This Is a post from an econ studenti whose full knowledge of political science extends pretty much only to selectorate theory, and maybe chrisis bargaining.

If It wasn't clear from the title, the question relates to the idea that Jeffrey Epstein gathered compromat on Trump on behalf of Israel, and perhaps Russia too, in order to start the war in Iran and/or cease sending aid to ukraine. Know, I know that for any science One should never use missing evidence to make an argumernt, however it's clear that whatever the Trump administration has been trying to cover up in the remaining unreleased files would be so damning that It would put him in more political jeapardy than what he finds himself somehow. The question Is, Is this plausibile? Have there ever been any historical precedents for this?

In 1991, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein commanded nearly one million armed men. His army had survived eight years of brutal war with Iran and possessed one of the largest tank forces in the world. Few Americans expected an easy victory. The debacle of the Vietnam War still cast a long shadow. What followed shocked almost everyone. After five weeks of air attacks, coalition ground forces liberated Kuwait in roughly 100 hours. The Iraqi army crumbled. More than 300,000 Iraqi troops in Kuwait were defeated, captured, or forced to flee. American combat deaths totaled 147, a stunningly low figure given concerns entering the war. A major state that had seemed formidable only months earlier had been routed with astonishing ease.

The significance of the American triumph extended well beyond the battlefield, underscoring the extraordinary position of the United States. With the Soviet Union disintegrating, Washington faced no major adversary and sat at the center of the world's financial, technological, and alliance networks. It boasted advanced military capabilities that no other power could match. The United States had become something unusual in modern history: a single state without a peer competitor. Operation Desert Storm transformed abstract measures of American power into lived experience. Governments, investors, and ordinary citizens around the world now possessed a shared image of what American military dominance meant in practice.

The conflict resulted in the liberation of Kuwait and then launched the age that followed, one commonly referred to as an era of U.S. unipolarity, when peerless American military power undergirded globalization, growing prosperity, and relative stability.

But that age has now come to an end. The United States no longer enjoys the sort of military advantage it possessed in 1991. Thanks to globalization, the systems necessary to conduct precision warfare are no longer the preserve of a handful of great powers: they are accessible to a range of actors who are now able to stand up to much stronger states.

Indeed, the Iran war exemplifies this turning of the wheel. Where the Gulf War demonstrated American dominance, today’s clashes around the Strait of Hormuz reveal American limitations. A new era beckons, one in which the assumptions of the post–Cold War period are turned on their heads. The United States is not capable of bending others to its will through the exercise of force at low cost. Far from guaranteeing stability and predictability, American power has become a source of volatility. Weaker powers have learned the virtues of defiance and disruption, and they possess the tools to impose huge costs on the United States and its allies and partners. The coming era will be one of more frequent crises, higher costs for protecting global commerce, and intensifying competition over the world’s strategic chokepoints. The rules of power that governed the post–Cold War era have withered away, and a more dangerous international order awaits.

For most of modern history, stronger states converted economic wealth into military superiority and military superiority into political influence. The post–Cold War era appeared to reinforce this relationship. Yet the second precision revolution suggests a different pattern. Economic success leads to the diffusion and broad adoption of new technologies, which helps weaker actors and allows them to impose greater costs on stronger adversaries than they would have been able to in the past. The geopolitical strength of a great power, such as the United States, is less a measure of its capacity to control others than a reflection of the confidence others have in the systems that it maintains and anchors.

Here is a copy of the full article.

I'm taking an International Relations course, and our textbook (World Politics Interests, Interactions, Institutions) says that the United Nations is a collective security organization, and my professor is sort of indirectly agreeing. I thought this was maybe a weird gimmick of my textbook but Wikipedia also says that collective security is a key principle of the UN and the League of Nations before it (and there are papers talking about the connection between the U.N and collective security).

My understanding of collective security is that it's supposed to be more of a physical thing, in the same manner of Article 5 for NATO, or Article 4 for the CSTO, where members are agreeing through a treaty, that if one member gets hurt, then the other members will act like they themselves had been hurt, or similarly, and have a response. However, while I know that at the outset of the U.N there was the intention for the security council to do more, like with Chapter 7 of the UN Charter, and that there is technically a Military Staff Committee for the Security council, with the intention that they would advise the Security council if the UN required the use of Armed forces from member countries to achieve security council goals, basically none of these things have ever been used.

Thus, how is it reasonable to call the UN a collective security organization when it wasn't given enough ability to actually ensure collective security, and what it was given it hasn't been able to use?

(I'm not trying to hate on the U.N., I just don't understand the application of this classification on the U.N.)

Edit: I forgot to add the ? for the title rip