2026-01-07 19:00:00
一名抗议者在美最高法院大楼外挥舞着跨性别骄傲旗帜 | 摄影：Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
坦白地说，关于跨性别运动员是否有权参加学校资助的体育赛事，一直是跨性别倡导者面临的最棘手的法律问题。最高法院在跨性别权利方面的先例，对于挑战禁止跨性别女性参加女子体育队伍的州法律的原告来说并不适用。这个问题对跨性别群体的政治影响非常恶劣。而且，最高法院目前由共和党人主导，他们去年六月还投票支持允许各州禁止跨性别青少年接受性别确认医疗。因此，最高法院很可能在“Little v. Hecox”或“West Virginia v. B. P. J.”案件中裁定，各州可以禁止跨性别女性参加高中或大学的女子体育赛事。
这两个案件的核心问题在于，跨性别女性是否应被允许参加女子体育赛事。原告的主张相对温和，他们并不主张所有跨性别女性都应被允许参加女子体育赛事，而是只主张那些没有竞争优势的特定群体。例如，在“B. P. J.”案中，原告是一位年轻的高中田径运动员，她声称自己在青春期早期就进行了性别转换，并接受了延迟青春期的药物和雌激素治疗，因此从未经历男性青春期。在“Hecox”案中，原告是Lindsay Hecox，一位前大学运动员，她目前接受睾酮抑制和雌激素治疗，称自己的睾酮水平与顺性别女性相当。她还表示自己目前不参加任何大学球队，也不打算未来参加，因此认为自己的案件已经变得无关紧要。
原告的律师认为，跨性别女性不应因性别身份而受到歧视，但目前最高法院似乎并不认同这一观点。例如，大法官艾米·科尼·巴雷特在“United States v. Skremetti”案中撰写了附议意见，认为跨性别者不享有宪法保护。而大法官布雷特·卡瓦诺则在该案的口头辩论中表示，如果给予跨性别女性更高的宪法保护，可能会让她们“在女子和女孩的体育比赛中参赛，尽管一些女性运动员已经公开表达了对这种做法的担忧”。
因此，从现实来看，跨性别运动员在最高法院的前景并不乐观。
Hecox 和 B. P. J. 案件的核心在于，原告是否应被允许参加女子体育赛事。他们并不主张所有跨性别女性都应被允许参赛，而是只主张那些没有竞争优势的跨性别女性。例如，B. P. J. 的原告是一位年轻的高中田径运动员，她声称自己从未经历男性青春期，因此没有竞争优势。Hecox 的原告则称自己的睾酮水平与顺性别女性相当，因此也不具备竞争优势。
原告的律师认为，跨性别女性不应因性别身份而受到歧视，但目前最高法院似乎并不认同这一观点。例如，大法官艾米·科尼·巴雷特在“United States v. Skremetti”案中撰写了附议意见，认为跨性别者不享有宪法保护。而大法官布雷特·卡瓦诺则在该案的口头辩论中表示，如果给予跨性别女性更高的宪法保护，可能会让她们“在女子和女孩的体育比赛中参赛，尽管一些女性运动员已经公开表达了对这种做法的担忧”。
因此，从现实来看，跨性别运动员在最高法院的前景并不乐观。
一般来说，政府可以进行歧视。例如，它可以基于资格来决定谁被雇佣，或者基于经济状况来决定谁获得福利。同样，它也可以基于犯罪记录来决定谁被监禁。几乎所有法律都会对某些人做出区分，而宪法通常允许这种区分，即使有科学证据表明这种区分是基于不合理的理由。
然而，有些形式的歧视是被宪法禁止的。例如，基于种族、性别或宗教的歧视，通常会受到“高度审查”。这种审查的细节往往取决于歧视的类型，比如宪法对种族歧视比对性别歧视更加谨慎。但大多数受到高度审查的法律都会被判定为违宪。
在“United States v. Virginia”（1996）一案中，最高法院裁定，如果要支持基于性别的政府行为，必须有“极其有说服力的理由”。因此，法院通常会判断哪些形式的歧视是允许的，哪些是违宪的。
假设Hecox和B. P. J.的律师成功说服了多数大法官，认为基于性别身份的歧视与基于性别的歧视一样令人反感，那么法院可能会对这类法律进行高度审查。然而，即使如此，法院并不总是会推翻这些法律。例如，在“United States v. Virginia”一案中，法院认为基于性别的体育赛事分隔是允许的，因为这是实现让男女都有机会参加竞技体育的重要目标。
同样，即使有少数女性运动员比男性更强，或有少数男性运动员比女性更弱，法院仍然允许将体育赛事按性别划分。例如，顺性别男性即使睾酮水平较低，也不被允许参加女子体育赛事，因为法律认为所有顺性别男性都应被归入男子队伍。因此，即使Hecox和B. P. J.的原告能够证明跨性别女性没有竞争优势，法院仍可能认为，基于性别身份的歧视与基于性别的歧视一样合理。
总的来说，支持跨性别者参与学校体育的法律主张在最高法院面临重重困难。许多现任大法官已经表明他们不支持这些主张，而且即使面对一个更友好的法官群体，当前的法律框架也不利于跨性别者。因此，跨性别者在最高法院争取权利的道路依然漫长而艰难。
Let’s be honest. The question of whether transgender athletes have a right to play school-sponsored sports was always the toughest legal issue facing trans advocates.
The Supreme Court’s trans rights precedents are particularly ill-suited for plaintiffs challenging state laws prohibiting trans women from playing on women’s sports teams. The politics of this issue are absolutely awful for trans people. And the Court is dominated by Republicans who, just last June, voted that states could ban trans youth from receiving gender-affirming medical care.
So it is likely that most of the justices will rule, in either Little v. Hecox or West Virginia v. B.P.J., that states may prohibit trans women from playing women’s sports at the high school or college level. Both cases present this question to the justices — although there is a chance the Court will dismiss the Hecox case because the plaintiff in that case makes a strong argument that the case is now moot.
To understand why trans advocates must climb such a steep hill to prevail in Hecox or B.P.J., it’s helpful to be familiar with Bostock v. Clayton County (2020), the one major victory the Court has given transgender Americans. Bostock held that a federal law which bars employment discrimination “on the basis of sex” prevents workplace discrimination targeting LGBTQ employees.
Although Bostock assumed that the word “sex” refers only to “biological distinctions between male and female” (that is, to sex assigned at birth), it concluded that “it is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex.”
The idea is that if Herman is allowed to date Janet, but Juanita is not, then Juanita is being treated differently because of her sex. Similarly, if a cisgender male worker is allowed to wear stereotypically male clothes, to use a male name, and to otherwise present as a man, then an “employee who was identified as female at birth” must also be allowed to do so, or they are also being discriminated against because of their sex.
But this rationale does not apply to sports, because the law permits sex-segregated sports teams. If a company attempted to divide its workers into male and female “teams,” that would be illegal. But schools may, and typically do, have separate sports teams for men and women.
To prevail in a case like Hecox or B.P.J., in other words, trans plaintiffs must show that they are protected from discrimination because they are transgender — and not just because they are men or women. And, while the Supreme Court held half-a-century ago that ordinary sex discrimination by the government is typically forbidden by the Constitution, it has never ruled that transgender Americans are protected because they are trans.
Meanwhile, several sitting justices appear to have already concluded that trans people do not enjoy constitutional protection. Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote an entire concurring opinion in United States v. Skremetti (2025), the trans health care case, arguing that they do not. In an even more ominous sign for trans athletes, Justice Brett Kavanaugh worried during the Skremetti oral argument that, if trans women were given heightened constitutional protection, that could enable them “to play in women’s and girls’ sports … notwithstanding the competitive fairness and safety issues that have been vocally raised by some female athletes.”
Realistically, in other words, trans athletes should expect a rough ride in the Supreme Court.
The plaintiffs’ specific claims in Hecox and B.P.J. are fairly modest. They don’t claim that all trans athletes should be allowed to play women’s sports, but rather only a certain subset whom, they argue, do not have a competitive advantage.
The plaintiff in B.P.J., who is identified only by her initials because of her young age, is a high school track-and-field athlete. According to her brief, she “transitioned early in life” and “has received puberty-delaying medication and gender-affirming estrogen,” and thus has never gone through male puberty. The plaintiff in Hecox is Lindsay Hecox, a former college athlete who “is treated with both testosterone suppression and estrogen” and who says she “has circulating testosterone levels typical of cisgender women.” (Hecox is also a college senior who does not currently play on any team and who says that she does not intend to play college sports in the future, which is why she argues her case is moot.)
Neither plaintiff argues that all transgender women should be allowed to play high school or college sports. Instead, they seek a court order that applies to trans women with testosterone levels similar to cisgender women. Their lawyers argue that this subset of trans women enjoy “no athletic advantage” over cis women.
Meanwhile, the state of Idaho, the defendant in Hecox, spends a simply enormous amount of its brief doubting this factual claim. They rely largely on statements by Gregory Brown, a professor of exercise science whose professional webpage identifies him as “the faculty advisor for Turning Point USA” on his campus. The plaintiffs, meanwhile, rely largely on testimony by professor Joshua Safer, an endocrinologist who told the trial court that heard Hecox that “there is a medical consensus that the difference in testosterone is generally the primary known driver of differences in athletic performance between elite male athletes and elite female athletes.”
For what it is worth, one of the plaintiffs’ primary arguments before the Supreme Court is that the nation’s highest Court is the wrong forum to litigate this disagreement among professors. The trial courts in Hecox and B.P.J. deemed Safer’s testimony to be more credible than Brown’s. And appeals courts like the Supreme Court typically aren’t supposed to second-guess a trial court’s factual findings unless they are “clearly erroneous.”
This Supreme Court, however, is unlikely to defer to the lower courts just because the rules of civil procedure instruct them to do so. In Kennedy v. Bremerton School District (2022), a case about a public school football coach who incorporated prayer and other Christian activity into his coaching, the Court’s Republican majority made up a fake set of facts to justify ruling in favor of that coach — and even adhered to these fake facts after Justice Sonia Sotomayor produced photographic evidence that her Republican justices weren’t telling the truth. In cases involving disagreements about medicine, Republican justices often argue that state legislatures have broad leeway to do what they want so long as “medical uncertainty” exists.
And, even if the Supreme Court does credit the lower court’s finding that Safer has a more accurate understanding of how testosterone impacts athletic performance than Brown, the outcome of this battle of the professors only matters if the plaintiffs’ lawyers can convince a majority of the justices that trans people enjoy heightened protection under the Constitution.
As a general rule, the government is allowed to discriminate. It can discriminate against unqualified applicants and in favor of highly qualified ones when deciding whom to hire. It can discriminate against rich people and in favor of poor people when deciding who receives welfare benefits. And it can discriminate against criminals and in favor of law-abiding people when deciding whom to incarcerate.
Virtually all laws draw some kind of distinction between people they do apply to and people who are unaffected. And the Constitution typically permits this kind of discrimination, even when there is scientific evidence that a particular law discriminates for unsound reasons.
Meanwhile, there are some forms of discrimination that are ordinarily not allowed. Laws that discriminate on the basis of race, sex, or religion, for example, are subject to “heightened” scrutiny under the Constitution. The details of how this scrutiny works often depend on the type of discrimination — the Constitution treats race discrimination with more skepticism than sex discrimination, for example — but most laws that are subject to heightened scrutiny fail.
The Supreme Court held in United States v. Virginia (1996), for example, that “a party seeking to uphold government action based on sex must establish an ‘exceedingly persuasive justification’ for the classification.”
So how does the Court determine which forms of discrimination are allowed, and which ones are constitutionally suspect? Under the Court’s past decisions, the most important question is whether a particular group has historically been subject to discrimination that “bears no relation to ability to perform or contribute to society.”
The Court also sometimes looks at other factors, such as whether a group exhibits “obvious, immutable, or distinguishing characteristics that define them as a discrete group” or whether the group is relatively politically powerless. But these factors are less important. Religious discrimination is constitutionally suspect, for example, even though people can change their religion. And women and people of color have not lost their constitutional protection even as they’ve gained political power relative to women and racial minorities in the past.
The lawyers representing the plaintiffs in Hecox and B.P.J. make a strong argument that discrimination on the basis of gender identity should be subject to heightened scrutiny. In their brief, they list several historical laws that targeted trans people. Over two dozen US cities, including major metropolises like Chicago, used to ban “cross dressing,” for example. Others targeted bars that served “female impersonators.” At one point, the lawyers argue, the United States effectively barred openly trans people from immigrating.
Meanwhile, someone’s gender identity bears little relationship to their ability to contribute to society. As the plaintiffs’ lawyers write, “being transgender does not make someone less capable of being a lawyer, engineer, farmer, or doctor.” And openly trans people have historically held little political power. In all of American history, there’s been exactly one openly trans member of Congress — and she hasn’t even completed a single term in office.
Will that be enough for this Supreme Court? Probably not. As Barrett noted in her Skrmetti concurrence, the Court “has not recognized any new constitutionally protected classes in over four decades.” The Court’s gay rights cases, for example, seemed to actively avoid the question of whether discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is suspect — even when those decisions found other reasons to rule in favor of gay plaintiffs. So a decision adding trans people to the pantheon of protected groups would be a highly unusual move by the Supreme Court.
And, even if the Court does conclude that trans people enjoy this protection, the plaintiffs in Hecox and B.P.J. must still overcome an additional hurdle.
Let’s say that the lawyers representing Hecox and B.P.J. somehow convince a majority of these justices that discrimination against trans people is just as odious as discrimination against women, and thus that laws that discriminate on the basis of gender identity should be subject to heightened scrutiny. Most laws subject to this scrutiny fail, but not all laws do.
As the Court held in Virginia, laws that discriminate on the basis of sex are permitted if they serve “important governmental objectives” and “the discriminatory means employed are substantially related to the achievement of those objectives.”
Indeed, one example of a law that discriminates on the basis of sex, but that courts have allowed to remain in place, is a law that segregates men and women onto different high school or college sports teams. Because highly athletic men typically outperform highly athletic women in sports, women-only sports teams are necessary to ensure that women have the opportunity to play. If women-only teams did not exist, nearly all women would be excluded from high school and college sports, because they would be unable to compete with their male classmates.
Or, to use the same language the Supreme Court used in Virginia, gender-segregated sports teams are allowed because they are substantially related to the important objective of allowing both men and women to play competitive sports.
Significantly, this rationale holds even though there are some women who can outperform nearly all men, and there are some men who underperform most women. A cisgender high school boy isn’t allowed to try out for the women’s field hockey team, even if he can demonstrate that he has unusually low testosterone levels.
The law, in other words, allows states to use the blunt instrument of declaring that all cisgender men must play on one team, and all cisgender women must play on another team, regardless of whether any particular man or woman’s athletic performance matches that of the other sex.
Thus, even if Hecox and B.P.J. can convince the Court that trans women with low testosterone levels do not enjoy a competitive advantage over cisgender women, and even if they convince the Court that laws that discriminate against trans people are subject to heightened scrutiny, there is still one more hurdle that they must overcome. The law typically permits schools to segregate sports teams based on students’ sex assigned at birth, so why should a trans athlete be treated differently than a cis athlete with similar athletic ability?
Hecox and B.P.J.’s lawyers, for what it is worth, have a pretty good answer to this question. They argue that “courts have recognized that sex separation in sports can pass constitutional muster where men and women still have equal opportunities to compete.” Thus, the hypothetical cisgender boy with low testosterone does not face discrimination because he can still try out for the men’s team. But transgender women who experience gender dysphoria, a psychological condition where the inability to express their gender identity causes great distress, cannot try out for the men’s team without triggering that distress.
That argument persuaded lower courts. As Hecox’s lawyers note in their brief, one court concluded that claiming that trans women can simply play men’s sports “is analogous to claiming [gay people] are not prevented from marrying under statutes preventing same-sex marriage because lesbians and gays could marry someone of a different sex” — an argument the Supreme Court rejected in its marriage equality decision in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015).
But even if this argument persuaded lower courts, it’s far from clear that it will persuade the Supreme Court. Three current justices dissented in Obergefell. And two other current justices, Kavanaugh and Barrett, have signalled pretty clearly that they are unsympathetic to trans women who wish to play school sports. That’s five votes — a majority in the Supreme Court.
All of which is a long way of saying that proponents of trans inclusion in school sports face a very difficult climb in the Supreme Court. Many of the Court’s current members have already indicated that they reject the pro-trans arguments in Hecox and B.P.J. And even if these plaintiffs faced a less hostile panel of justices, current legal doctrine is not very favorable to trans people, at least in areas where the Constitution typically permits the government to treat men differently than women.
2026-01-07 06:35:00
2021年1月6日，特朗普的支持者与警方发生冲突，闯入美国国会大厦。| Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images
这则新闻出现在《The Logoff》每日通讯中，帮助你了解特朗普政府的新闻，而不会让政治新闻占据你的生活。点击此处订阅。
欢迎来到《The Logoff》：今天是2021年1月6日，也就是特朗普支持者冲击美国国会大厦五周年。为了纪念这一日子，白宫推出了一页新的内容，承诺提供“真相”，称这一天是“将被载入史册的耻辱日”。简而言之，这页内容非常荒谬。
白宫是如何描述1月6日的？这页内容突出显示了前众议院议长南希·佩洛西的黑白照片，声称“实际上是民主党人发动了真正的政变”，并称2020年大选是“被偷走的”。（事实并非如此。）它还错误地声称没有执法人员在事件中丧生，并暗示国会警察与示威者“激化了紧张局势”。实际上，三名在事件后几天死亡的警察被认定为“在执行公务中殉职”。
这页内容中的歪曲和虚假陈述太多，无法一一列举。也许更容易列出它说对了哪些地方。例如，页面顶部用大写字母明确标注了正确的日期：2021年1月6日。
这有什么意义？特朗普和共和党一直在试图重塑1月6日的叙事，但这次是他们迄今为止最全面的一次尝试。值得注意的是，这不是在特朗普集会上即兴发挥的言论，而是一次有计划、由纳税人资助的历史重塑行动（似乎还带有挑衅特朗普反对者的意图）。
从大局来看，特朗普在许多方面已经成功了。他再次当选总统，而且他的政党完全支持他在这个问题上的立场。例如，马尔科·鲁比奥曾是1月6日事件发生时的参议员，当时他称该事件是“反美无政府状态”，如今他已成为特朗普的国务卿。尽管这次袭击在广大选民中仍不受欢迎，但它作为推动政治议题的影响力也在逐渐减弱。白宫的这页内容或许更像是一次胜利的庆祝。
好了，现在是时候下线了……这周的新闻真是令人沮丧。让我们以一件小事结束，然后离开互联网。我特别喜欢本周《纽约客》的封面，描绘了一只猫在窗户里，外面行人冒着严寒行走。这种小而温馨的场景，即使在现实生活中出现，也能让我的一天变得明亮。
祝你有一个美好的夜晚，我们明天再见！
This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.
Welcome to The Logoff: Today marks five years since the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol by a mob of President Donald Trump’s supporters. To commemorate the occasion, the White House launched a new page promising the “TRUTH” about “a date which will live in infamy.” Put simply, it’s bonkers.
How does the White House describe January 6? The page, which prominently features a black-and-white image of former Speaker Nancy Pelosi looming over other members of Congress, claims that “it was the Democrats who staged the real insurrection” and describes the 2020 election as “stolen.” (They did not, and it was not.)
It also claims, falsely, that no law enforcement officers lost their lives and suggests Capitol Police “escalate[d] tensions” with rioters. In reality, three officers who died in the days following the attack are considered to have died “in the line of duty.”
The full list of distortions and false statements is too long to get into here, and it might be easier to list the things the page does get right. For example, the correct date, January 6, 2021, is in block letters at the top of the page.
Why does this matter? Trump and the Republican Party have both taken many swings at rewriting the narrative of January 6, but this is their most comprehensive effort to date. Notably, it’s not merely coming off the cuff in a Trump rally speech. This is a deliberate, taxpayer-funded attempt to rewrite history (and, seemingly, to troll Trump’s opponents).
What’s the big picture? In many ways, Trump has already succeeded where it counts on January 6. He’s president again, and he has his party fully behind him on this issue. Marco Rubio, who was a senator on January 6 and described it as “anti-American anarchy,” is now his secretary of state. And while the attack still isn’t popular with voters writ large, it’s also fading as an animating issue. The White House page may be best viewed as a victory lap.
Boy, that was a bleak one. Let’s end with one quick good thing and get off the internet. I really enjoyed this week’s New Yorker cover, which depicts a cat in a window as passersby trudge through winter weather outside. It’s the kind of small moment that always brightens my day when it happens in real life, too. Have a great evening, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow!
2026-01-07 04:15:00
2010年，美国总统巴拉克·奥巴马签署了《平价医疗法案》（即“奥巴马医改”）。| Alex Wong/Getty Images 本周二，怀俄明州最高法院裁定，尽管该州在2023年通过了一项试图禁止堕胎的法律，但堕胎仍应保持合法。此案名为State v. Johnson。怀俄明州是美国最保守的州之一——2024年总统大选中，唐纳德·特朗普以46个百分点的优势赢得该州，这一差距是全美最大的。因此，该州允许堕胎并不令人意外。事实上，怀俄明州允许堕胎完全是因为2012年通过的一项州宪法修正案，该修正案旨在削弱《平价医疗法案》。当时，围绕《平价医疗法案》的立法斗争是近年来国会最具争议和党派色彩的事件之一。共和党反对者经常用夸张的措辞称该法案是“政府接管医疗体系”，会剥夺许多美国人对自身医疗决策的自主权。在这些攻击之后，怀俄明州成为少数几个通过州法律或宪法修正案以“保护患者选择权”的州之一。该修正案规定：“每个有行为能力的成年人都有权自主决定自己的医疗决策。”这些“患者选择权”法律在很大程度上只是象征性的，至少在试图削弱《平价医疗法案》方面如此。美国宪法规定，当州法律与联邦法律相冲突时，联邦法律优先。因此，即使《平价医疗法案》限制了患者的选择权，而州宪法又禁止这些限制，联邦的《平价医疗法案》仍然会覆盖任何与之冲突的州法律。然而，尽管怀俄明州2012年的修正案并未阻止《平价医疗法案》，但其措辞非常宽泛，对州内试图禁止任何医疗程序（包括堕胎）的法律具有明确的含义。正如首席大法官林恩·布姆加登在Johnson案中所写，虽然该修正案“是为了回应《平价医疗法案》而提交给选民的，且没有涉及堕胎问题”，但“选民通过的修正案的明确措辞已经超越了对《平价医疗法案》的担忧，赋予了‘每个有行为能力的成年人’‘自主决定医疗决策的权利’。”因此，只要寻求堕胎的患者是成年人且具备做出医疗决策的意识能力，他们就有权终止妊娠。（该修正案还规定，对于未成年人或不具备行为能力的人，其医疗决策应由“父母、监护人或法定代理人”做出，而不是由州政府决定。）因此，Johnson案的判决结果是，一项象征性的反对奥巴马医改的举措，反而意外地破坏了共和党在医疗政策上的一个重要立场——禁止堕胎。不过，尽管如此，怀俄明州最高法院并未裁定该州永远不能通过任何限制堕胎的法律。法院认为，针对堕胎的州法律必须通过“严格审查”标准，这是法院通常用于审查侵犯基本宪法权利的法律的最严格测试。严格审查通常要求法律必须服务于“重大的政府利益”，并且采用“最不具限制性或最不苛刻”的手段来实现这一目标。虽然布姆加登大法官在她的意见中假设“保护未出生生命”是一个足够重大的利益，但她指出，怀俄明州的反堕胎法律对寻求堕胎的患者施加了不必要的限制。例如，该法律允许医生在“孩子出生后几小时内有极高死亡风险”的情况下进行堕胎，但不允许在孩子可能存活更长时间的情况下进行堕胎。布姆加登大法官指出，在Johnson案中，证据表明医生可能知道某些异常情况会导致胎儿死亡，但无法提前确定妊娠是否会以活产结束，以及胎儿是否会在出生后几小时或几天内死亡。因此，她认为，该法律在医生无法准确判断胎儿生命长度的情况下，不必要地阻止了对“明显致命胎儿状况”的堕胎。Johnson案的结论是，这种法律“在无法实现保护未出生生命这一州利益的情况下，却过度限制了女性获得堕胎的权利。”同样，该州法律允许在“对女性生命或健康构成即刻威胁”的情况下进行堕胎，但这一例外仅适用于那些有“身体状况”威胁健康的人，而不适用于有类似危险的“精神健康状况”的人。布姆加登大法官指出：“如果怀孕的女性因精神健康问题而死亡，比如因该问题导致自杀，那么未出生的婴儿很可能也会死亡。”因此，不允许有生命危险的精神健康问题女性获得堕胎，对堕胎权施加了不必要的限制，且这些限制并未针对保护胎儿生命这一目标进行精确设计。然而，这些对州堕胎禁令的反对意见相对狭窄，因此州立法机构仍有可能通过一项禁止大多数堕胎但提供更广泛例外的新法律，届时该法律的合宪性将需要重新进行法律诉讼。怀俄明州仍然是一个非常保守的州，因此也有可能再次修改其宪法，以撤销或限制2012年保护医疗选择权的修正案。然而，目前堕胎在怀俄明州仍然是合法的，这一切都要归功于一次试图羞辱奥巴马总统的失败努力。
The Wyoming Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that abortion must remain legal in that state, despite a 2023 law seeking to ban it. The case is known as State v. Johnson.
Wyoming is America’s reddest state — President Donald Trump won Wyoming by 46 points in 2024, a wider margin than in any other state — so it is more than a little surprising that abortion is legal there. It turns out, moreover, that abortion is legal in Wyoming entirely because of a largely performative state constitutional amendment enacted in 2012 to undercut the Affordable Care Act, the landmark health care legislation often referred to as Obamacare.
The legislative fight to enact Obamacare was one of the most contentious, and most partisan, congressional battles of the last several decades. Republican opponents of the law argued, often in hyperbolic terms, that the Affordable Care Act amounted to a “government takeover of health care” that would strip many Americans of their ability to make health care decisions.
In the wake of these attacks on President Barack Obama’s signature legislative accomplishment, Wyoming was one of a few states that enacted state laws or constitutional amendments purporting to protect patient choice. Wyoming’s amendment provides that “each competent adult shall have the right to make his or her own health care decisions.”
These patient choice laws were almost entirely symbolic, at least to the extent that they sought to undercut Obamacare. The US Constitution provides that, when a state law is at odds with an act of Congress, the federal law prevails. So, even if Obamacare did restrict patient choice, and even if a state constitution forbids those restrictions, the federal Affordable Care Act supersedes any state law that conflicts with it.
Yet, while Wyoming’s 2012 amendment did nothing to halt Obamacare, it is written in very broad terms and its language has clear implications for Wyoming state laws that seek to ban any medical procedure — including abortion.
As Chief Justice Lynne Boomgaarden writes in Johnson, though the 2012 amendment “was put to the voters in response to the Affordable Care Act, with no discussion of abortion care,” that historical reality “does not change the fact that the plain language of the amendment the voters ratified went beyond addressing concerns with the Affordable Care Act and granted ‘[e]ach competent adult’ ‘the right to make his or her own health care decisions.’”
Thus, so long as a patient seeking an abortion is an adult and is mentally competent to make health decisions, they have a right to terminate their pregnancy. (The 2012 amendment also provides that health decisions regarding minors or people who are not mentally competent shall be made by their “parent, guardian or legal representative,” and not by the state.)
So the upshot of the Johnson decision is that a symbolic effort to repudiate the Democratic Party’s signature health care initiative instead wound up sabotaging one of the Republican Party’s key health policies — a ban on abortion.
All of this said, the state supreme court did not rule that Wyoming may never, under any circumstances whatsoever, enact any law that restricts abortion. Instead, the court held that state laws targeting abortion must survive “strict scrutiny,” a test that courts often apply to laws that tread upon fundamental constitutional rights.
Strict scrutiny is typically the most skeptical test that a court can apply to a law that is allegedly unconstitutional. As Boomgaarden’s opinion explains, a law fails strict scrutiny unless it advances a “compelling interest” and it uses the “least restrictive or onerous” means to advance that interest.
Although Boomgaarden assumes in her opinion that “protecting unborn life” is a sufficiently compelling goal, she points to several features of Wyoming’s anti-abortion law which place greater restrictions on patients seeking abortions than are necessary.
One provision of the law, for example, permits physicians to perform abortions if “there is a substantial likelihood of death of the child within hours of the child’s birth,” but it does not permit an abortion if the baby would live slightly longer if born. As Boomgaarden writes, the evidence in Johnson showed that “physicians can know that certain anomalies are lethal, but they may not know whether a pregnancy will result in a live birth, and if so, whether it is substantially likely the child will die within hours or days.”
Thus, she argues, the law needlessly prevents physicians from performing an abortion on “a fetus with an unquestionably fatal condition” if the doctor is not able to determine in advance the precise length of a very short life span. Such a law, Johnson concludes, “unduly restricts a woman’s right to obtain an abortion even when it will not serve the State’s interest in protecting unborn life.”
Similarly, the state law permits an abortion when “necessary to preserve the woman from an imminent peril that substantially endangers her life or health.” But this exception applies only to patients with a “physical condition” that endangers their health, and not to patients with similarly dangerous mental conditions.
As Boomgaarden writes, “it is obvious that, if a pregnant woman dies from a mental health condition,” perhaps because that condition results in suicide, then “the unborn child is very likely to die, too.” Thus, by not permitting women with life-threatening mental health conditions to obtain an abortion, the law places excessive restrictions on the right to an abortion that are not narrowly tailored to protect fetal life.
These are fairly narrow objections to the state’s abortion ban, however, so it is possible that the state legislature may enact a new law that prohibits most abortions but that provides broader exceptions — and then the constitutionality of this new law would have to be litigated all over again. Wyoming remains a very red state, so it is also possible that it will amend its constitution again to remove or limit the 2012 amendment protecting health care choice.
For the moment, however, abortion remains legal in the state of Wyoming — all thanks to a failed attempt to spite President Barack Obama.
2026-01-07 01:00:00
2026年1月3日，一名示威者在德克萨斯州凯蒂市的集会上举着美国和委内瑞拉的国旗。| Mark Felix/Bloomberg via Getty Images
要点总结
特朗普政府可能比自1960年代以来的任何白宫都更加关注拉丁美洲。但这种关注的目标并不十分明确。在美国对拉丁美洲的历史干预中，像逮捕马杜罗这样的行动并不罕见。真正不寻常的是冷战结束后35年，美国大多避免了此类行动。如今，包括哥伦比亚、古巴和墨西哥在内的国家必须认真考虑，美国新的干预主义是否会针对它们。目前，这些国家很难有效反击，但长期后果尚不明确。特朗普政府最近在美洲地区采取了出人意料的干预主义政策，例如上周逮捕委内瑞拉总统马杜罗，并威胁对其他几个国家进行军事干预。但不可否认的是，特朗普在上任时就曾承诺重新掌控巴拿马运河、兼并格陵兰岛甚至加拿大。他还将墨西哥湾更名为“美洲湾”。上任不到一个月，他就对加拿大、墨西哥和哥伦比亚加征关税，以惩罚这些国家对他的政策的“不合作”。特朗普的国务卿人选马尔科·鲁比奥对拉美事务有长期兴趣，许多观察家认为他在特朗普第一任期期间实际上从参议院办公室主导了美国对拉美的政策。特朗普的国家安全顾问迈克·沃尔茨（现为联合国大使）曾将白宫的区域政策称为“门罗主义2.0”。而特朗普最近似乎更倾向于《纽约邮报》提出的“唐罗主义”。他认为，前任政府让门罗主义——原本主张外国势力不得干涉美洲事务，后来演变为美国在该地区应占据主导地位——严重失效了。他曾在周六表示：“门罗主义是个大事，但我们已经远远超越了它。”无论称其为何种“主义”，可以肯定的是，拉丁美洲不再是美国外交政策中的“失落大陆”。无论马杜罗行动的性质如何，它都表明特朗普最近发布的国家安全战略中关于“恢复美国在美洲的主导地位”的言论并非空谈。但美国对拉美地区的新关注究竟意在何为，仍不明确。美国到底想从拉美获得什么？拉美各国政府是否愿意提供这些？
美国对拉美的干预并非新鲜事
尽管过去几天有关于美国使用武力和违反国际规范的讨论，但美国在拉丁美洲或加勒比地区使用军事力量或秘密行动推翻政府的情况并不罕见。从1898年的美西战争中美国入侵古巴，到克林顿在1994年对海地的军事干预，大约有17次成功的美国支持的政权更迭，还有更多间接干预导致政府倒台的案例。拉丁美洲政治分析家、《美洲季刊》杂志编辑布莱恩·温特告诉《 vox 》：“从历史的宏观角度来看，这并不特别。”“真正不寻常的是过去35年。”温特指出，这指的是冷战结束后的时期，他提到：“这个白宫自上世纪60年代以来，对拉美关注最多，当时正值菲德尔·卡斯特罗的古巴革命之后，美国进行了一系列军事干预，以防止共产主义在该地区扩散，并与苏联在古巴问题上发生核战争边缘的冲突。”然而，美国对拉美的干预在1980年代和1990年代初相对常见。例如，马杜罗的被捕恰逢纪念1990年巴拿马曼努埃尔·诺列加被逮捕的36周年，诺列加也曾因毒品走私被美国起诉。美国政府在此次行动中明确引用了门罗主义的历史。特别是特朗普提出的“特朗普修正案”与1904年罗斯福修正案相呼应，后者主张在“外国政府严重不当或无力”时，美国可以使用武力。这种做法被称为“军舰外交”。与之前的时代相比，最近的美国政权更迭似乎缺乏明确的动机。过去美国干预的动机包括防止外国干涉（如欧洲殖民主义或共产主义）、保护美国经济利益或清除疑似毒品贩子。此次针对委内瑞拉的行动则混合了这三种动机。从12月开始，美国开始针对加勒比海的毒品船只进行打击，其宣传重点是马杜罗作为“毒品恐怖分子”和贩毒集团头目的角色。随着竞选活动的推进，特朗普及其助手开始强调委内瑞拉过去对美国石油利益的国有化，并将重点转向重新获取委内瑞拉的石油资源。自行动以来，美国官员强调了32名古巴安全人员在马杜罗被捕时被杀，以及拆解伊朗和真主党网络。有趣的是，马杜罗的被捕发生在与中国外交官会面后不久。然而，在事件发生前的几个月，美国政府的言论中并未强调外国干涉的问题。特朗普似乎并不特别关注恢复委内瑞拉的民主，尽管该国的民主反对派仍抱有希望。
特朗普的“冷战”式外交
特朗普在马杜罗被捕后曾表示美国将“掌控”委内瑞拉，但实际情况是，只要该国政府满足美国尚未明确的条件，马杜罗下台后政府仍将维持原状。鉴于美国过去一年的行动，其他拉美国家的公民或许会怀疑，这种“掌控”是否也适用于他们自己的国家。特朗普今年支持了阿根廷和洪都拉斯的亲信候选人，并威胁对巴西加征关税，以阻止其对盟友雅伊尔·博尔索纳罗的起诉。2026年，巴西和哥伦比亚将举行总统选举，届时可能会有更多行动。在哥伦比亚，左翼总统古斯塔沃·佩特罗自去年以来一直是特朗普的对手。特朗普最近称佩特罗应“小心他的屁股”，并称他为“喜欢制造可卡因并卖给美国的病态之人”。（尽管哥伦比亚是可卡因的主要生产国，但几乎没有证据表明佩特罗与该贸易有关。）与委内瑞拉不同，哥伦比亚是美国在该地区最亲密的安全伙伴之一。国际危机小组的哥伦比亚分析师贝丝·迪克森表示：“如果哥伦比亚选民选择一位与华盛顿关系密切的候选人，比如更偏右的人，双边关系可能会恢复到正常状态。但如果左翼候选人当选，我真的很担心会发生什么。”
对中国的干预
在拉丁美洲，美国的外交政策与特朗普团队一贯的国内优先事项——犯罪和移民问题——密切相关。他们认为，由于前几届政府忽视该地区，导致危机加剧，从而引发了毒品和移民问题。这一观点并非特朗普政府独有，拜登政府也曾试图解决移民的“根源”，只是方法不同。此外，美国还希望遏制中国、伊朗和俄罗斯的影响（这正是“特朗普修正案”所讨论的内容），并对抗左翼势力。这些目标在历史上并不罕见。然而，特朗普的策略是否能真正实现这些目标，仍是另一回事。马杜罗可能参与了可卡因贸易，但推翻他并不能阻止已经摧毁美国社区的阿片类药物。目前，美墨边境的移民数量下降，但委内瑞拉全面崩溃可能导致新的移民潮。也许各国政府会因此避免与中国的深入合作，或者在面对不可预测的美国时，寻求与其他国家的安全和经济合作。（即使特朗普最亲密的南美盟友胡安·米莱，也不拒绝向共产党国家出售大豆。）
意外后果
詹姆斯·塞恩斯，前拜登政府反毒品事务副助理国务卿表示：“特朗普政策中有一些‘我们强大且危险，展示肌肉’的意味。”“但过去我们选择不这么做，是因为长期考虑，发展全球朋友和盟友，以保障我们的安全和经济利益。”过去一年，一些欧洲国家已经切断与美国的情报共享，因为他们担心这些情报会被用于非法打击民用船只。目前，对马杜罗的推翻在国际上反应较为平淡，甚至在拉美左翼中也几乎没有惋惜之情。如果美国在哥伦比亚、墨西哥或格陵兰采取行动，可能会对美国的盟友关系产生更深远的影响。
拉美政治向右倾斜
就拉美地区本身而言，目前政治似乎正在向右倾斜。在厄瓜多尔、阿根廷和玻利维亚等国的最近选举中，马杜罗的糟糕统治至少在一定程度上推动了这一趋势。新一代的拉美领导人未必总是愿意听从特朗普的命令，但也不急于挑战他。长期影响更加难以预测，但历史可以提供一些参考。布莱恩·温特表示：“你可以直接将罗斯福的‘大棒’政策与拉丁美洲民族主义的兴起联系起来，这最终催生了像卡斯特罗这样的领导人。”所有这些都表明，未来的美国总统将不得不面对“唐罗主义”的遗产。
The Trump administration may be more focused on Latin America than any other White House since the 1960s. But the goals of all that focus are not quite as clear.
In the sweep of US history in Latin America, interventions like the capture of Maduro aren’t particularly unusual. It was the last 35 years since the end of the Cold War, when the US mostly refrained from these kinds of actions, that were the anomaly.
Countries including Colombia, Cuba, and Mexico now have to take seriously whether America’s new interventionism will target them next. For now, there’s not much they can do to push back–but the long-term consequences are less clear.
The Trump administration is taking a shockingly interventionist approach to the Western Hemisphere, as shown by last weekend’s capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his threats of military intervention against several other countries in the region. But we can’t say we weren’t warned.
Donald Trump came into office a second time pledging to retake the Panama Canal and annex Greenland and possibly Canada. He renamed the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” Less than a month into his term, he was slapping tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and Colombia for their perceived defiance of his agenda. His choice for secretary of state, Marco Rubio, had such longstanding interests in Latin American affairs that many observers saw him as effectively running US policy toward the region from his Senate office during Trump’s first term.
Trump’s short-lived national security adviser, Mike Waltz (now ambassador to the UN), had dubbed the White House’s regional approach “Monroe Doctrine 2.0.” Trump lately appears to prefer the New York Post-coined “Donroe Doctrine.”
In Trump’s view, his predecessors had let the doctrine, which originally stated that foreign powers should avoid meddling in the Western Hemisphere but evolved into a view that the US should be the preeminent power in the region,dangerously lapse. “The Monroe Doctrine is a big deal, but we’ve superseded it by a lot, by a real lot,” he said on Saturday.
Whatever you call it, it’s clear that the region is no longer the “lost continent” of US foreign policy. Whatever else the Maduro operation was, it made clear that all the language in Trump’s recently released national security strategy about restoring “American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere” after “years of neglect” wasn’t just bluster.
What’s less clear is the purpose of the new attention focused on the region. What is the US actually trying to get out of Latin America, and are the region’s governments going to provide it?
For all the talk in the past few days about how a Rubicon has been crossed in the use of force and the violation of international norms, the use of military force or covert action to depose a government in Latin America or the Caribbean is far from unprecedented.
Between the US invasion of Cuba in 1998 during the Spanish-American war and Bill Clinton’s military intervention in Haiti in 1994, there were roughly 17 instances of successful direct US-backed regime change in the region — and far more cases where indirect US pressure may have played a role in bringing down a government.
“In the broad sweep of history, it’s amazing how unexceptional this is,” Brian Winter, Latin American politics analyst and editor of Americas Quarterly magazine, told Vox. “The exceptional period was the last 35 years” following the end of the Cold War.
Winter added that “this White House is more focused on Latin America than any other since probably the 1960s,” referring to the era that followed Fidel Castro’s Cuban revolution, and included a number of military interventions meant to prevent the spread of Communism in the region as well as a confrontation with the Soviet Union over Cuba that brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.
But US interventionism in the region was relatively common up through the 1980s and early 1990s. As many have noted, Maduro’s capture took place on the 36th anniversary of the arrest of Panama’s Manuel Noriega, another dictator indicted in US courts for drug trafficking.
The administration has explicitly harkened back to this history with its invocations of the Monroe Doctrine.
In particular, Trump’s assertion of a “Trump corollary” to the doctrine links his policy to the 1904 Roosevelt Corollary, which asserted that the US would use military force as a last resort in “flagrant cases of…wrongdoing or impotence” by regional governments — an approach that became known as “gunboat diplomacy.”
If there’s a difference between the most recent case of US regime change and the previous era, it may be the lack of clarity in American motives. The US has intervened in the past to prevent foreign meddling (European imperialism in an earlier era, Communism later on), to protect US economic interests, or to remove a suspected drug trafficker.
The justification for the Venezuela operation was a shifting mix of the three. For months, starting in December, as the US targeted suspected drug boats in the Caribbean, the administration’s messaging focused on Maduro’s role as an alleged “narcoterrorist” and cartel boss.
Months into the campaign, Trump and his aides began focusing on Venezuela’s past nationalization of American oil interests and the president is now heavily focused on retaking Venezuela’s oil resources for American countries.
Since the operation, US officials have made much of the 32 Cuban security personnel guarding Maduro who were killed as well as dismantling Iranian and Hezbollah networks in the country. It’s also interesting that Maduro’s capture came just hours after a meeting with Chinese diplomats. Foreign meddling wasn’t a major feature of the administration’s rhetoric in the months leading up to the event, however. Trump doesn’t appear particularly interested in restoring democracy to Venezuela, though the country’s democratic opposition are nonetheless hopeful this will work out in their favor.
In the end, different high-ranking Trump officials may have been interested in Venezuela for different reasons —crime, migration, energy, foreign influence — and put together a strong enough case for Trump. Calling it emblematic of a “doctrine” is probably generous.
Trump repeatedly stated the day after Maduro was captured that the US would be “running” Venezuela, though the reality appears to be that the country’s government will be left in place–minus Maduro–so long as it meets the administration’s as-yet unspecified demands.
Given the US’s actions over the past year, citizens of other Latin American countries could be forgiven for wondering if this definition of “running” applies to their countries as well. Trump has endorsed favored candidates in elections in Argentina and Honduras this year, and threatened tariffs against Brazil in order to stop the prosecution of his ally, Jair Bolsonaro.
More is likely to come in 2026 with presidential elections being held in Brazil and Colombia. At this point, it would be surprising if we don’t see Truth Social messages endorsing a preferred candidate.
Colombia’s left-wing president, Gustavo Petro, has been a particular foil for Trump since the beginning of last year. In recent days, he has said that Petro — the leading regional critic of the Venezuela intervention — should “watch his ass” and called him a “sick man who likes making cocaine and selling it to the United States.” (Colombia is a major producer of cocaine but there’s little evidence linking Petro to the trade.) Unlike Venezuela, which has been a thorn in the side of US administrations for years, Colombia is one of America’s closest security partners in the region.
“If Colombian voters choose a Washington allied candidate, someone more on the right, the bilateral relationship might return to its normal state,” said Beth Dickinson, a Colombia-based analyst with the International Crisis Group. “But I do really worry about what could happen if a left-leaning candidate is elected.”
There’s precedent for this kind of meddling as well. President Woodrow Wilson famously quipped that he would “teach the South American republics to elect good men” and his successors intervened in overt and covert ways dozens of times in the region’s elections in the subsequent decades.
In Trump’s case, the meddling often seems less motivated by ideology commitment (Trump has gotten along quite well with the Communist leaders of China and North Korea) than personal animus. “Petro and Trump have found one another to be useful political enemies,” Dickinson noted.
In the case of Honduras, it appears to have been a concerted lobbying campaign by Trump allies on behalf of the country’s imprisoned ex-president rather than ideological affinity that prompted that caught his interest in the country.
Likewise, Trump has chosen not to get behind Venezuela’s democratic opposition in the wake of Maduro’s ouster, but to work with his vice president, a committed if more pragmatic Chavista who seems willing to work toward better relations while continuing to publicly decry Yankee imperialism. (One major outstanding question of the past week is the degree of support the US may have had from elements of the Venezuelan regime in arranging for Maduro’s extraction.) As much as anything else, it was reportedly Maduro’s public displays of defiance and disrespect — notably his televised dancing — that pushed the administration to make the final decision to capture him.
The personal factor also seems to be paramount when it comes to Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum, on paper exactly the sort of lifelong committed leftist Trump should despise, who appears to have been able to keep him relatively satisfied over the past year with limited “wins” on fentanyl and border security and the two seem to have a friendly rapport. (Trump had a similarly friendly relationship with Sheinbaum’s predecessor and mentor Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who had literally written an entire book attacking the US president.)
Whether that will continue now that Trump appears to be gaining a taste for military action is not clear. In the past week, Trump has resurrected an idea — discussed by him and allies in Congress since his first term — of taking military action against drug cartels on Mexican soil.”
“Is a unilateral use of force on Mexican soil probable? No,” said former Mexican ambassador to the United States Arturo Sarukhán. “Is it possible? Absolutely, and given what has just happened in Venezuela, I think the Mexican government should really take this very seriously.”
The stakes of Sheinbaum’s ability to manage the Trump relationship couldn’t be higher heading into a pivotal year in the relationship which will include a renegotiation of the US-Mexico-Canada trade agreement.
Taking a pragmatic approach to managing Trump may be harder for the other country currently in the US crosshairs: Cuba. Even at the worst of times, there was always a degree of pragmatism built into the US-Venezuela relationship: US firm Chevron continued to pump oil in the country, for instance. That gave at least an opening for negotiations between the two countries early in the Trump administration and may yet allow the relationship to get back on track now that the dancing boogeyman is gone. That king of accommodation is much harder to imagine from the far more ideological Cuban regime.
The hope in Washington is that the loss of its ally and the ongoing embargo on sanctioned oil shipments will cause the sclerotic and economically distressed Cuban regime to collapse on its own. And yet this is a regime that has defied predictions of its imminent demise for more than 60 years. If it doesn’t fall, could it be the next target for military intervention?
“These folks could look at Cuba and say, ‘well, compared to Venezuela, which is a country of 30 million people, Cuba is easy. We can put boots on the ground,” said Michael Bustamante, a professor of Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami. “On the other hand, Cuba doesn’t have the largest oil reserves in the world, so is it worth the risk?”
There’s always a risk when it comes to Trump’s foreign policy of retroactively trying to map a coherent worldview onto a set of seemingly impulsive and often contradictory actions. But in the case of Latin America, the foreign policy is tied to the Trump team’s much more consistent domestic priorities: crime and migration.
The view is that by neglecting the region, previous administrations have allowed crises to develop which have driven illegal drugs and migrants into the United States. This is not necessarily a view unique to this administration. The Biden administration also made a much maligned effort to address the “root causes” of migration, albeit with much different methods. The administration is also interested in countering Chinese, Iranian and to a lesser extent Russian influence (that’s what the Trump corollary actually discusses) and combating leftism. These are not historically unusual goals.
Whether the Trump strategy will actually accomplish any of this is another story. Maduro may have had a hand in the cocaine trade but deposing him isn’t going to stop the opioids that have devastated American communities. Migration numbers are down at the US-Mexico border now, but a full-scale collapse in Venezuela could lead to a new uptick. Perhaps governments will be dissuaded from deepening their ties with China, perhaps faced with an unpredictable America, they will look to hedge with security and economic partnership elsewhere. (Even Trump’s closest South American ally, Javier Millei, is not above selling soybeans to the communists.)
Then there are the unintended consequences. “There’s some level of ‘we’re big and bad and flexing our muscles’ [in the Trump policy.],” said James Saenz, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for counternarcotics in the Biden administration. “But in the past, we’ve chosen not to do these things for the long-term considerations of developing friends and allies around the world, because it provides for our security and our own economic opportunities.” The past year has already seen several European countries cut off the sharing of intelligence with the US that they believed could be used in illegal strikes against civilian boats.
The international response to Maduro’s ouster has been somewhat muted and divided so far — very few, even on the Latin American left, are sorry to see him gone. Actions in Colombia, Mexico, or for that matter Greenland could have more profound consequences for US alliances.
As for the political consequences in Latin America itself, at the moment, the region appears in an overall rightward political drift after recent elections in countries like Ecuador, Argentina, and Bolivia, which Maduro’s disastrous rule can take at least some credit for. The current generation of regional leaders won’t necessarily always look to do Trump’s bidding, but they may not be eager to defy him either. The longer term consequences are more unpredictable, but again, history can provide some guidance.
“You can draw a direct line between, you know, Teddy Roosevelt’s use of the “big stick” and the rise of Latin American nationalism, which eventually gave us figures like Fidel Castro,” Winter said.
All of which is to say that future US presidents are likely to have to reckon with the legacy of the Donroe Doctrine.
2026-01-06 20:15:00
2026年1月4日，美国总统唐纳德·特朗普在华盛顿特区白宫降落之后，走在南草坪上。| 阿历克斯·黄/Getty Images 在非法入侵委内瑞拉并俘获其独裁领导人之后，特朗普威胁要对一系列国家采取类似行动。周日，他重申了美国必须兼并格陵兰岛的信念，因为那里的水域“被俄罗斯和中国船只占据”。他还宣称，美国可能会对哥伦比亚采取军事行动，因为该国总统“拥有可卡因工厂和制造可卡因的设施”。此外，特朗普还暗示，如果墨西哥未能有效控制其贩毒集团，美国可能会对其发动空袭。他还警告伊朗的独裁政权，如果该国开始镇压街头抗议者，那么“美国将对其实施严厉打击”。
当然，总统经常说很多话。如果特朗普的言论是美国政策的完美指南，那么美国现在应该统治加沙地带。因此，直到这个周末，人们似乎可以放心地认为，特朗普最夸张的军事威胁只是虚张声势。然而，现在他批准了推翻一个从未对美国发动过攻击的外国领导人的行动，因此很难再这么确定了。然而，有一个重要的原因让我们认为，从军事角度来看，特朗普的威胁仍多于实际行动。
在考虑为何世界突然对美国入侵格陵兰岛等场景认真起来之前，有必要先了解特朗普在任期间的军事行动日益大胆。自他上任以来，特朗普的军事行动逐渐变得更加激进。2020年，他下令暗杀伊朗高级军事官员；2024年4月，他下令对伊朗的核设施进行大规模空袭；现在，他推翻了委内瑞拉总统尼古拉斯·马杜罗，这一行动导致至少80人死亡。在这些案例中，特朗普都忽视了警告，认为这些行动可能引发混乱和不稳定，甚至全面战争。而在每种情况下，美国的直接损失似乎都比批评者预测的要小。
很明显，这种模式让特朗普更加有恃无恐。在与福克斯新闻的采访中，他称赞自己在委内瑞拉的行动是“不可思议的”，并表示“我们必须再次这么做，我们也能再次这么做，没人能阻止我们。”鉴于特朗普的言行，世界应为未来几年美国更频繁、更大胆地使用军事力量做好准备。显然，特朗普已经表明他并不受国际法或宪法的约束，他坚持认为美国有权“主宰”西半球，并掠夺较弱国家的资源。
然而，特朗普似乎仍然受到一个主要限制，即自伊拉克战争以来美国公众对美军伤亡的低容忍度。特朗普尚未下令进行一场导致大量美军伤亡的新型军事行动。在暗杀伊朗高级将领卡西姆·苏莱曼尼或轰炸其核设施时，没有美军人员伤亡；在袭击马杜罗总统府的行动中，也没有美国人死亡。在这些情况下，美国的政策似乎都旨在避免美军伤亡。伊朗在苏莱曼尼被杀和核设施被轰炸后，曾向中东的美军基地发射弹道导弹。然而，由于这些导弹未能造成美军伤亡，特朗普选择不进行报复，以避免局势进一步升级。
在委内瑞拉，美国似乎决定让马杜罗的政党继续执政，而不是冒着长期军事占领的风险去推翻这个独裁政权。这种克制在政治上是明智的。即使没有美军伤亡，根据《雷优士/伊普索斯》的一项民意调查，只有33%的选民支持特朗普对委内瑞拉的行动。普通美国人并不认为委内瑞拉由一个他们从未听说过的左翼独裁者统治比由其他独裁者统治更有利。如果美军在加拉加斯遭遇伤亡，对特朗普冒险主义政策的反对将更加激烈。美国公众对美军死亡的反感也可以从乔·拜登的总统任期中看出。尽管通货膨胀削弱了拜登的受欢迎程度，但美国在阿富汗的血腥撤军，导致13名美军士兵丧生，使他的支持率骤降。特朗普清楚地知道这一事件对拜登造成了多大的伤害，因此在2024年竞选期间，他出席了这些士兵的纪念仪式。如果美国入侵格陵兰岛或哥伦比亚，引发的反对声浪可能会更加激烈。毕竟，选民在入侵阿富汗之前其实就支持美军撤离。相比之下，很少有美国人想要购买格陵兰岛，更不用说征服它了。
当然，特朗普仍有可能引发一场重大战争。即使是再谨慎的领导人也难以完全预测其军事行动的后果，冲突可能升级。而特朗普并不以深思熟虑其政策决策而著称。此外，即使特朗普不愿为了他的帝国幻想而牺牲大量美军生命，他仍可能造成大量死亡和混乱。凭借美国的无人机舰队和空中力量，特朗普无需牺牲大量美军士兵就能破坏整个国家的稳定。然而，即使是强大的国家，若不付出大量士兵的代价，也难以在军事上取得重大成就。美国可能无法征服格陵兰岛，或在南美洲引发真正的政权更迭，而不会接受大量裹着国旗的棺材。而特朗普至今仍未表明他愿意为此付出代价。
After illegally invading Venezuela — and capturing its dictatorial leader — President Donald Trump is threatening to launch similar attacks against a wide array of countries.
On Sunday, the president reiterated his belief that the United States must annex Greenland, since its waters are “covered with Russian and Chinese ships.” He further declared that the US may take military action against Colombia, as its president “has cocaine mills and cocaine factories.” Mexico may also warrant a bombing, Trump suggested, in light of its failure to police its cartels. And he also warned Iran’s authoritarian regime that, if it starts killing the protestors who’ve recently amassed in its streets, “they’re going to get hit very hard by the United States.”
Of course, the president says a lot of things. If Trump’s words were a perfect guide to US policy, America would currently be governing the Gaza Strip.
Therefore, until this weekend, it seemed safe to assume that the president’s most outlandish military threats were mere bluster. Now that he has greenlit the overthrow of a foreign leader, who had ordered no attack against the United States, it is hard to be so sure.
Yet, there is one big reason to think that, in military terms, Trump’s bark still exceeds his bite.
Before turning to the causes for doubts about America storming the beaches of Greenland, it’s worth noting why the world is suddenly taking such scenarios seriously.
Since the beginning of his first term, Trump’s acts of war have grown steadily more audacious. In 2020, he ordered the assasination of Iran’s top military official; in April, he ordered large-scale air strikes against that nation’s nuclear facilities; now, he has deposed Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, a sitting head of state, killing at least 80 people in the process.
In each of these cases, Trump ignored warnings that his actions could sow chaos and instability — if not all-out war. And in every instance, the intervention’s immediate costs to the United States appeared lower than skeptics had predicted.
It is clear that this pattern of events has emboldened Trump. In an interview with Fox News Sunday night, he hailed his own operation in Venezuela as “incredible” and said that “we have to do it again. We can do it again, too. Nobody can stop us.”
Given Trump’s words and deeds, the world should prepare for the US to deploy military force more frequently — and perhaps, ambitiously — in the coming years.
Certainly, the president has shown that neither international nor constitutional law constrains his martial ambitions. And he insists that America has a right to “dominate” the Western Hemisphere and seize the resource wealth of weaker nations.
Yet, the president still appears bound by the primary constraint on American war-making since the invasion of Iraq: the US public’s low tolerance for American casualties.
Trump has yet to order a novel military operation with a substantial American death toll. No US troops died in the course of assassinating Iran’s Major General Qasem Soleimani or bombing its nuclear sites, nor did any Americans perish in the raid on Maduro’s palace.
And the desire to avoid US casualties appeared to structure American policy in all of these cases. Iran responded to both the killing of Soleimani and bombing of its nuclear facilities by firing ballistic missiles at American airbases in the Middle East. When these failed to kill any US soldiers, Trump declined to return fire, evidently to avoid further escalation.
In Venezuela, meanwhile, the US has evidently decided to leave Maduro’s party in power, rather than hazard the sustained military occupation necessary to displace that authoritarian regime.
Such restraint is politically wise. Even in the absence of American bloodshed, public support for Trump’s operation in Venezuela remains tepid, with just 33 percent of voters approving of the strike in a Reuters/Ipsos poll. The typical American does not perceive any compelling national interest in Venezuela being governed by one leftist dictator they’ve never heard of rather than some other one. Had any US troops died in Caracas, political opposition to Trump’s adventurism would surely be orders of magnitude more intense.
The American public’s aversion to US military deaths can be seen in the trajectory of Joe Biden’s presidency. Although inflation corroded Biden’s popularity, his approval initially collapsed amid America’s bloody withdrawal from Afghanistan, which claimed the lives of 13 American servicemembers. Trump is well aware of the damage that this did to Biden; the Republican attended an anniversary memorial for those fallen soldiers in the heat of the 2024 campaign.
The backlash to American deaths from an invasion of Greenland or Colombia would likely be even more intense. After all, voters had actually supported withdrawing US troops from Afghanistan before it happened. By contrast, few Americans want to buy Greenland, let alone conquer it.
Of course, there is still no guarantee that Trump will steer clear of a major war. It is impossible for even the most judicious leaders to perfectly anticipate the consequences of their military operations; conflicts can escalate. And Trump is not known for rigorously thinking through all of his policy decisions.
Moreover, even if Trump is unwilling to shed much American blood in service of his imperial fantasies, he could still reap a lot of death and chaos. Given our nation’s drone fleet and aerial might, Trump need not sacrifice many US soldiers to destabilize entire countries.
Yet, there are limits on what even a great power can achieve militarily without forfeiting its soldiers in large numbers. America probably can’t conquer Greenland — or cause genuine regime change throughout South America — without accepting a great many flag-draped coffins. And Trump still has not indicated that this is something he’s prepared to do.
2026-01-06 20:00:00
拥有“草莓朋友”就像打理一座花园。当山姆·迪伦·芬奇（Sam Dylan Finch）在二十多岁时，他有一群他认为自己一直想要的朋友。他说：“我们有节日聚餐，也有游戏之夜，感觉非常美好。”但后来，一些朋友之间的恋爱关系以及其中一位朋友的去世，使他们分开了。芬奇表示，人们开始分开并选择谁愿意继续做朋友，而他发现自己并不是被选中的那一个。这段经历让他进入了“隐士模式”，开始深入分析自己的友谊及其模式。他意识到自己的一些倾向：他难以像对待浪漫关系那样优先考虑友谊，他是个取悦他人的人，总是觉得必须努力才能获得别人的善意，而且他常常与那些情感上并不可用的人建立友谊。此外，当别人一开始对他很友善时，他会感到紧张——“这感觉不像是我应得的，也不像是我努力得来的。”意识到这些模式后，芬奇决心改变。他想要开始有意识地与那些对他友善、与他相处让他感到安全和滋养的人建立友谊。他首先列出自己周围的所有人，包括现在的朋友们、过去的朋友们、同事和熟人。然后，他在手机联系人中挑战自己，给那些对他非常友善的人加上草莓表情符号。“那些让我感到紧张的温暖和善意。”他说道。这少数的“草莓朋友”成为了他优先考虑的朋友，他甚至告诉其中一些人自己想要培养这段友谊的意图。他还给那些挑战他思维方式并帮助他成长的人加上了“种子”表情符号。芬奇说：“这完全改变了我的生活。”明确标记出自己要投入精力的地方，为他建立更有意义的人际关系提供了一条清晰的路线。以前，他很容易被短信淹没，选择不回复任何人。但现在，如果收到草莓朋友的短信，这个表情符号会提醒他，这段友谊对他很重要，即使他很累，也应该尽量及时回复。这种做法也让他更加关注与他人互动时自己的真实感受。每次和朋友相处后，他都会问自己：“我感觉怎么样？”或者“我的身体感觉怎么样？”他注意到自己有时会感到紧张或放松，有时会感到滋养或疲惫，并确保自己的草莓朋友是那些让他感到前者的人。
受到这一小改变对他生活的影响启发，芬奇在X（原推特）上发布了一条关于“草莓朋友”策略的帖子，这可能就是社会心理学家德文·普莱斯（Devon Price）了解到这一策略的地方。普莱斯在他们的著作《揭开自闭症》（Unmasking Autism）中提到了这一策略，而心理咨询师米凯亚·沃克（Michaia Walker）则通过这本书了解到这一方法。沃克从纽约市家中远程提供咨询服务，今年年初开始与客户讨论这一策略。“这与我们经常用于神经多样性人群的‘安全朋友’概念非常相似。”他们说。自闭症人士通常被鼓励寻找“安全”的朋友，以便在他们面前放松，不必担心自己是否能做真实的自己。沃克表示，草莓朋友的方法可以帮助他们更好地识别和追踪这些朋友。在危机时刻，或者当你需要依靠某人时，大多数人会本能地转向家人或最常联系的朋友，但沃克指出，这些人可能并不是能最好地支持你情感需求的人。将草莓表情符号添加到那些你感到情感亲密的朋友联系人中，可以为你提供一个视觉提醒和心理捷径。沃克表示，这一策略对所有人来说都可能非常有用，无论你是否属于神经多样性群体。而且，你还可以根据自己的需求，对这一方法进行个性化调整。例如，如果你想更明确地区分朋友类型，可以给工作朋友加上草莓和行李箱的表情符号，给普通朋友加上草莓和花朵的表情符号。你也可以根据你想要关注的友谊方面，选择不同的草莓含义或不同的表情符号。甚至可以教孩子使用这种方法，帮助他们从小理解什么是健康、情感安全的友谊。沃克说。
如果你有兴趣尝试这一策略，沃克建议从少量开始，比如先挑选三到五个“草莓朋友”。如果你不习惯主动培养友谊，拥有超过几个“草莓朋友”可能会让你感到压力。但根据你的能力和对社交生活的期望，你可以逐渐增加到10个或更多。沃克的建议与心理学家对社交能量的理解相吻合。鉴于我们有限的社交和情感能量，没有人能够维持大量亲密的朋友关系。事实上，进化心理学家罗宾·邓巴（Robin Dunbar）提出，我们通常只能维持三到五段非常亲密的友谊，尽管他的研究显示，我们最多可以拥有15个“最好的朋友”（即你主要的社交圈和在需要帮助时可以求助的朋友），以及50个“普通朋友”（即你偶尔会联系的朋友，比如周末烧烤聚会的人）。一旦你确定了你的“草莓朋友”，就要决定你有意建立友谊的含义是什么。你是想定期与他们联系？还是只是希望他们能及时回应你？明确你对这些友谊的处理方式与其他人不同，有助于你更清楚地理解“草莓”所代表的意义。芬奇表示，他至今仍在使用这一策略，发现当你告诉朋友你正在这样做时，这种方法效果最为显著。他说，你不一定非要告诉他们“你是我的草莓朋友”，因为“这需要过多的解释”。但告诉他们你希望有意识地培养这段友谊，可以让他们明白你对这段关系的重视，并邀请他们一起努力。谈到“草莓朋友”时，芬奇喜欢提醒大家，这并不是在给朋友排名，也不是创建一个专属的“顶级”群体。“我们并不是在做MySpace的Top 8。”他说。对他而言，草莓表情符号只是提醒他可以找到友善和充实的友谊的地方，也是提醒他要有意识地与这些人建立更紧密的关系。此外，草莓表情符号并不是永久的标签；随着时间的推移，人们可能会获得或失去草莓或种子表情符号。芬奇说：“我觉得这就像打理一座花园。”
When Sam Dylan Finch was in his early 20s, he had the friend group he thought he always wanted. “We had holiday dinners, and game nights, and it felt really lovely,” he said.
But then, some dating within the friend group and then a death in the circle split them apart. People split up and chose who they wanted to stay friends with, Finch said, “and I was not the chosen friend.”
The whole experience sent Finch into “hermit mode,” where he began intensely analyzing his friendships and their patterns. He realized certain tendencies: He struggled to prioritize friendships the same way he prioritized romantic prospects, he was a people pleaser who felt he always had to earn people’s kindness, and he often sought friendships with people who were not emotionally available to him. And he would feel nervous when people were kind to him right off the bat — “It didn’t feel earned, and I didn’t feel like I deserved it.”
Realizing his patterns, Finch was determined to break them. He wanted to start intentionally cultivating friendships with the people who were kind, whose interactions left him feeling safe and nourished. He started by making a list of everyone in his orbit, from current friends to old friends, coworkers, and acquaintances. Then, in his phone contacts, “I challenged myself to put a strawberry emoji next to the people who were really kind to me,” he said. “The kind of warmth and kindness that made me nervous.”
This handful of “strawberry people” became Finch’s priority friends, and he even told some of them about his intentions to cultivate their friendship. He also put seedling emojis next to the names of people who challenged his ways of thinking and helped him grow.
“It completely changed my life,” said Finch. Clearly marking where he would channel his energy gave him a roadmap to building more purposeful relationships. Previously, he would get easily overwhelmed by text messages, opting to respond to no one. But now, if a text from a strawberry person popped up on this phone, the emoji acted as a reminder to Finch that he values this friendship and should try to respond without too much delay, even if he was tired.
The practice also made Finch more mindful about how interactions with others really made him feel. After hanging out, he made a practice of asking himself “how did that feel?” or “how did that feel in my body?” He noticed times when he was tense versus relaxed and nourished versus drained and made sure his strawberry people were those who left him feeling the former.
Inspired by the impact this little change made in his life, Finch posted about the strawberry people strategy in a thread on X, which is likely where social psychologist Devon Price heard about it. Price included the strategy in their book Unmasking Autism, which was where psychotherapist Michaia Walker heard about it.
Walker, who practices virtually from their home in New York City, began talking about the strategy with clients earlier this year. “It’s really similar to a concept of ‘safe people’ that we often use with folks with neurodivergence,” they say. People with autism are often encouraged to find “safe” friends who they can let their guards down around and not worry about being themselves, said Walker, and the strawberry people method can be super helpful for keeping track of those people.
In times of crisis, or in moments when you need to find a person to lean on, most people reflexively turn to family members or the friends they see most often, Walker said. But those might not actually be the people who can best support you emotionally. Attaching a strawberry emoji to the friends with whom you feel emotional intimacy provides a good visual reminder and mental shortcut, Walker said.
Walker said that this strategy could be really helpful for anybody looking for ways to track and maintain emotionally close friendships, whether you’re neurodivergent or not. And you can make it your own. If you wanted to differentiate your strawberry people a little more, you could, for example, “put a strawberry and a suitcase for work friends, and then a strawberry and a flower for regular friends,” they say.
You could choose a different meaning of the strawberry, or a different emoji, based on the aspect of friendship you’re trying to focus on. You could even teach this method to kids to help them learn from a young age what a healthy and emotionally safe friendship is supposed to feel like, said Walker.
If you’re interested in implementing this strategy, Walker recommends starting small, with just three to five strawberry people at first. If you’re not used to actively cultivating friendships, having more than a few strawberry friends can be overwhelming. But depending on your capacity and what you want out of your social life, “you can build up to 10 or more,” Walker said.
Their suggestions align well with psychologists’ understanding of our social bandwidths. Given our own limited tanks of social and emotional energy, no one is capable of maintaining huge numbers of close friends. In fact, the evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar has posited that we only have the capacity to maintain three to five very close friendships at a time, though his research suggests we can have up to 15 “best” friends (your main social circle and the friends you might turn to for favors like child care) and 50 “good” friends (your “big-weekend-barbecue people,” as Dunbar has described them).
Once you have your designated strawberry people, decide what purposefully building a friendship means to you. Do you want to check in regularly with them? Or are these simply the friends who you’ll always respond to in a timely manner? Clearly outlining how your treatment of these friendships will differ from others will help crystallize the meaning of the strawberry.
Finch, who uses this strategy to this day, said he’s found the strawberry people method most impactful when you tell your friends what you’re doing. You don’t necessarily have to say “you’re one of my strawberry people,” he said — “that requires more explanation than is actually necessary” — but it can be nice to voice to them that you want to be intentional about cultivating your friendship.
“The meta conversation, the conversation about the relationship, is normalized in romance and not enough in friendship,” said Finch. But that conversation can be so powerful because, unless you tell them, “it’s difficult for people to know how important they are to you.” Telling someone that you are serious about your friendship can help make sure you’re on the same page and invites them to make this a joint endeavor.
When talking about strawberry people, Finch likes to remind folks that it’s not about ranking your friends or creating some exclusive top tier. “We’re not doing a MySpace Top 8,” he said. Rather, for him, the strawberry emoji is simply an indicator of where he can find kind and fulfilling friendships and a reminder that these are the folks he wants to intentionally build closeness with.
The strawberry emoji is also not a permanent designation; people can gain or lose strawberry emojis or seedling emojis over time. “I think of it like tending a garden,” Finch said.