Geopolitics

For three days straight, Romania has shot down a Russian drone over its territory. The pattern is new. The incursions are not. A Romanian F-16 pilot intercepted and destroyed a drone about 12 kilometers northeast of Sulina, over Romanian territorial waters in the Black Sea, the defense ministry said Sunday. The drone was flying close […]

The numbers come in every day. At least ten dead on July 26. Six in areas under Russian control, four in areas under Ukrainian control. The dead include a nine-year-old girl and a child whose age was not released. The drone war grinds on and produces these figures like a factory. On the Ukrainian side, […]

An Australian tribunal has ruled that three Israeli siblings facing compulsory military service should be granted protection visas because they genuinely fear being forced to commit war crimes in Gaza. The ruling is a legal first, and it exposes a gap between what Israel requires of its citizens and what other nations consider acceptable. The […]

After 13 nights of bombing Iran, the United States stopped. Not because Iran surrendered, or the Strait of Hormuz reopened, or a diplomatic breakthrough arrived. Because the American commander on the ground told the president there was nothing left to bomb. Admiral Brad Cooper, the overall commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, advised […]

The Pentagon’s official casualty count for the Iran war dropped from 18 dead to 14 last week. The four missing names did not come back to life. They were moved. A new category called “Overseas Operations” appeared on the Defense Casualty Analysis System website over the weekend. It lists four Army deaths by name and […]

An Indian shipyard delivers a new warship roughly every six weeks. The pace is deliberate, and it is about to accelerate. India’s ambition to grow its navy past 200 ships within the next decade has taken on fresh urgency as China operates the world’s largest naval fleet and Pakistan adds advanced Chinese-built attack submarines to […]

The United States and Japan completed five days of joint naval and air defense exercises with the Philippines in the South China Sea on Saturday, the same week Chinese coast guard vessels fired water cannons at Philippine ships in two separate incidents. The timing was not coincidental. The drills, held from July 21 to 25, […]

Japan is quietly constructing an alternative network of artificial intelligence partnerships designed to reduce its reliance on the two countries that dominate the field: the United States and China. Tokyo has established or is building AI dialogue frameworks with France, India, Malaysia, the United Kingdom, and Brazil, according to officials familiar with the strategy. The […]

Russia has asked North Korea to send an additional 30,000 troops and more ballistic missile launchers to support its war in Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Saturday, citing Ukrainian intelligence. Preparations to receive the new contingent are underway in Russia’s Voronezh region, near the Ukrainian border, Zelensky said in a social media post. North […]

The UNESCO World Heritage Committee on Sunday inscribed Japan’s Asuka-Fujiwara archaeological sites on the World Heritage List, recognizing a collection of sixth- to eighth-century ruins that trace the birth of a centralized Japanese state. The decision, made at the committee’s 48th session in Busan, South Korea, adds Japan’s 22nd cultural World Heritage site to the […]