Intrigue Insight: elections in the US

New Yorkers have elected 34-year-old democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani as their next mayor, cruising to a ~nine-point victory on the biggest turnout in half a century.

Our quick take? In a city where half the tenants burn a third of their income paying rent, maybe there’s nothing surprising about a guy then winning on promises to freeze rent.

But what’s ostensibly a local affair is still making global waves, not just because of what New York is (the world’s financial capital), or what his victory speech included (India’s famous Nehru quip about a nation stepping “out from the old to the new”). There’s also…

• Who Mamdani is (the city’s youngest and first Muslim mayor)

• What he’s promising (everything from cheaper groceries to transit and childcare)

• How he’s promising it (a bigger public sector funded by higher taxes), and

• How Trump is responding (he says he’ll now withhold federal funds).

The result is some easy one-liners that can lap the world in a heartbeat, whether it’s this staunch critic of Israel as mayor of the world’s most Jewish city (ex Israel), or a staunch socialist running the world’s financial capital.

Elsewhere, Democrats also won the governor races in New Jersey and Virginia, scored big legislative swings across Virginia, and won a major redistricting in California. It’s always easy to read too much into limited data, but that’s a rough day for Trump’s White House.

Testing boundaries

We’ve all seen the scenes: whether it’s Homer at the embassy gates in Australia, or Matt Damon at the consulate in Zurich, a chiselled marine then takes a break from his protein shake and bicep curls to yell something like “this is US soil!”

If we were sitting next to you on the couch, we would’ve hit pause then purred those sweet words “well actually”, before diplo-splaining that embassies aren’t home soil.

Rather, they’re inviolable under international law — ie, local authorities can’t enter without permission. Firefighters generally can’t even burst through to douse flames!

Why? It’s a kind of global truce (via Vienna Conventions) to ensure everyone’s diplomats can do their jobs without fear of interference from the host country.

But as you can imagine, that kind of tag safe-zone has meant not just pivotal plot points for Lethal Weapon 2, but also quite the legal loophole as we’ve seen in Peru this week.

Peru just severed its ties with Mexico after Mexico’s local embassy granted asylum to Peru’s former PM (Betssy Chávez) — she was out on bail while fighting charges that she helped former president Pedro Castillo attempt his alleged ‘self-coup’ in 2022 (dissolving other branches of government to accumulate power). 

So with Mexico and Peru now in a stand-off, we thought we’d take a closer look at how this kind of impasse typically plays out, starting with…

1. Negotiated exile or release 

This is what happens when a government’s costs outweigh any benefits.

Take the 2017 assassination of Kim Jong Un’s half-brother in Kuala Lumpur. It quickly became a diplomatic crisis, not just because Kim was casually assassinating rivals in a major international airport, but because three of the North Korean nationals named as suspects (including a ✌️diplomat✌️ and airline employee) ended up fleeing to North Korea’s local embassy. They were spies for Pyongyang’s ministry of state security.

How’d they escape? Malaysia eventually relented after North Korea conveniently detained nine random Malaysians elsewhere. Classic hostage diplomacy, and it worked, though it’s really only a viable option for pariah states like North Korea and Iran.

2. Rescue mission or escape

Earlier this year, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced a “precise operation” had rescued five Venezuelan opposition figures from the Argentine embassy in Caracas where they’d been hiding for over a year from local dictator Nicolás Maduro.

The details are still shrouded in mystery, though Italian outlets have referred to Rome possibly playing a role. This might’ve involved (say) exfiltrating the hostages in the back of an Italian diplomatic vehicle making a humanitarian visit — that’s likely how a convicted Ecuadorian ex-minister escaped the Argentine embassy in Quito in 2023, for example.

But that would’ve been tricky here given the sheer scale of Maduro’s siege around the embassy: spooks, soldiers, drones, power cuts, and even neighbouring homes seized!

The Italian reference, however, does remind us of the ✌️rescue✌️ of two hostages from Somali pirates back in 2012. Later leaks suggested Italy’s intelligence agency fabricated the rescue to hide the fact they just paid a ransom, which brings us to the fact that…

Maduro’s regime indeed claims there was no rescue here, but rather just a negotiated release. Though of course, Maduro wouldn’t admit failure either, would he?

3. Forceful capture 

Very rarely, you also get governments going full Kool-Aid Man through the embassy walls, like Ecuador famously did last year to arrest its former veep in Mexico’s embassy. The incident triggered world outrage (and a case at the ICJ), though Ecuador got its guy. 

But if you don’t have the stomach for that, then your only other remaining option is…

4. Indefinite stay

Julian Assange’s seven year stint in Ecuador’s London embassy is the most famous, but there are others pulling an Assange even today: back in his home country of Australia, for example, there’s a pro-Kremlin propagandist who’s been hiding in Russia’s Sydney consulate for three years to evade a warrant for assaulting a pro-Ukrainian protester.

Intrigue’s Take

Two things jump out from this story.

First, why does this keep happening so much in Latin America? It’s partly a reflection of both a) the region’s ideological pendulum (you’re only ever an election away from “let’s protect Assange” becoming “can somebody come get Assange”); and b) there’s enough public distrust in institutions for folks to believe maybe it’s all just political persecution after all.

Second, where’s the line between normal diplomatic business versus interfering in domestic affairs? In our own experience, the job was literally to interfere in domestic affairs (ie, push for changes your country wants). Most of the time it’s dull stuff like getting those pistachio tariffs eased, though it starts to cross the line as it becomes increasingly covert, coercive, or deceptive.

And believe us, dear Intriguer — that line still gets crossed every day.

Meanwhile, elsewhere…

Extra Intrigue

The Intrigue jobs board 💼

• Lead, Grant Governance and Donor Relations @ WEF in Geneva

• Senior Video Producer @ 10 Downing Street in London

• Senior Director, Policy @ Milken Institute in Washington, D.C.

• Director, Global Security @ NetJets in Columbus, Ohio

Gift of the day

The Grand Egyptian Museum finally opened in Cairo over the weekend, with the world’s largest archaeological exhibit now displaying some 100,000 artefacts.

Naturally, a conga line of foreign dignitaries was there to help cut the ribbon, but none made quite the splash like Denmark’s foreign minister, Lars Løkke Rasmussen. He arrived with a custom Danish Lego set of Egypt’s Great Pyramids, leaving his Egyptian counterpart Badr Abdelatty grinning like, well, a kid who just got some sweet sweet new Legos.

Shout-out to whichever embassy official thought of that gift idea.

Today’s poll

Yesterday’s poll: Do you think the nuclear arms race is back?

☢️ Yep, it's on (60%)
🥱 Chill, it's just noise (37%)
✍️ Other (write us!) (3%)

Your two cents:

• ☢️ D.M.K: “I’m not sure it ever stopped.”

• 🥱 M.S: “Other than North Korea's perennial black swan act, I think the other powers would all like to keep this particular genie in the bottle, even if they'll never admit it to each other.”

• ✍️ A.F: “China has been in a nuclear arms race with the West and Russia for many years now… this isn't new.”