Geopolitics & international affairs
For the same narrow stretch of water, two governments now claim the same thing: total control. Washington says the United States owns the Strait of Hormuz. Tehran says the strait was never America’s to own. Both statements cannot be true. Both are being made anyway. President Donald Trump started it on Wednesday on Truth Social, […]
The world is watching two wars while a third is fought without an audience. Sudan’s war began in April 2023. It has taken at least 59,000 lives, driven around 13 million people from their homes, pushed large parts of the country into famine, and is now closing in on a city full of the displaced. […]
In an interview with CNN published on Thursday, Volodymyr Zelensky reduced the air war over Ukraine to arithmetic. Five percent of America’s Patriot interceptor stock would get the country through the winter. Ten percent would finish the Russian ballistic missile threat altogether. Ukraine currently has one percent. Zelensky said that if the United States sold […]
Vladimir Putin has done what no Russian president did before him in the one place Japan still refuses to give up: he set foot on the islands. On Thursday the Russian president visited Iturup, the largest of the four Kuril islands Japan calls the Northern Territories, in his first-ever trip to the chain the Soviet […]
The protest arrived in the usual order. First the prime minister’s statement, carefully worded, released to the press in the afternoon. Then the foreign minister’s summons, and the Russian ambassador standing in a ministry office in Tokyo, being told what his president had done. Japan’s answer to Vladimir Putin’s first-ever visit to the disputed island […]
On Tuesday, Israeli forces arrested at least 23 Palestinians across the occupied West Bank, among them two children, one with a disability, and a man taken while he was grazing livestock in the northern Jordan Valley. In the village of Tal, southwest of Nablus, the family house of Farouq Ramadan was pulled down; Ramadan was […]
The dead in Zaporizhzhia were steelworkers, all of them workers at the Zaporizhstal steelworks, which closed after the attack. At least six were killed and more than a dozen wounded in the overnight strike, and Volodymyr Zelensky has said what killed them: ballistic missiles from North Korea, fired by Russia. The plant’s workers went to […]
The sharpest words in the West Bank this week came from the man least expected to say them. Mike Huckabee, the American ambassador to Israel, a longtime friend of the settler movement who has spent decades defending Israeli claims to the occupied territory, looked at a group of Jewish settlers laying siege to an American […]
The answer to China’s near-total control of the world’s rare earths is, according to Washington and Tokyo, sitting in mud six kilometers beneath the Pacific Ocean, next to an island roughly the area of a few city blocks. The two governments announced plans this week to develop deep-sea mining around Minamitorishima, a flat Japanese speck […]
The president who moved the American embassy to Jerusalem, recognized the Golan Heights as Israeli, and took the country to war alongside Israel has now pronounced the pro-Israel lobby dead. In an interview broadcast Monday on the Real America’s Voice network, Donald Trump told host Wayne Allyn Root that the lobby that once dominated Washington […]
