I’ve steered away from posting on the U.S. raid that nabbed Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro and the subsequent saber-rattling over Greenland, Columbia, Cuba etc., figuring there’d be more than enough worldwide coverage of the topics. And there has been. But I do want to point out some impressive local coverage of recent international events, starting with James Pindell’s analysis piece in the Globe that basically lays out why the ultimate U.S. target in all of this may be Cuba. Think: Marco Rubio, our Cuban-American secretary of state. The Cuba angle doesn’t explain everything about the Venezuelan strike. But it’s one of the many threads that led to the raid, I’m now convinced. … Getting local reactions to an international event is standard operating procedure in journalism. But this GBH piece by Sarah Betancourt and Tori Bedford stood out for covering a lot of nuanced ground in a relatively short-by-design story (a story that includes the reaction of probably the only Venezuelan exile in Massachusetts who’s going to miss the thuggish Chávez-Maduro brand of socialism). …

And last but not least is Scott Van Voorhis’s Contrarian Boston, where 72 percent of 250 mostly local survey respondents expressed “strong support for requiring Trump to win congressional approval before undertaking further military moves.” Keep in mind that much of CB’s readership probably skews moderate-right – and that, to me, suggests support for the Venezuelan attack and other future international ventures by the administration are on much shakier political ground than the cheerleaders at Fox News are conveying. …

Btw: Here’s Dan Kennedy’s own review of localized coverage of the Venezuelan raid.

Btw II: the Greenland map above is via the obnoxious post by Stephen Miller’s wife, Katie, who thinks it’s funny/cute/whatever to lay playful imperialist claim to a territory every post-war U.S. president until now has considered the domain of our democratic ally Denmark. … Reading these NYT and Atlantic stories about Stephen Miller’s Darwinian might-makes-right world view actually depressed me a bit. His views are about as far from JFK/Reagan-like idealism as you can get. And it’s sad.