Geopolitics

Brazil has denied visas to two senior US State Department officials who planned to travel to Brasilia this week to discuss “election integrity,” accusing the Trump administration of seeking to interfere in Brazil’s October presidential election. Assistant Secretary Riley M. Barnes, from the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, and Deputy Assistant Secretary Samuel […]

The United States hit seven Southeast Asian countries with a new wave of tariffs on Saturday. The day before, Secretary of State Marco Rubio stood in Manila and told ASEAN foreign ministers that Washington was “with ASEAN 100 percent.” The gap between the message and the action is wide enough that analysts in the region […]

Ukraine is pressing Japan to open the door to defense industrial cooperation on Patriot missile production, pitching a partnership that would test how far Tokyo’s loosened arms export rules can actually stretch. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has identified Mitsubishi Heavy Industries as the partner he wants. The Japanese conglomerate is one of the few companies outside […]

The Chinese Coast Guard fired a water cannon at a Philippine fisheries vessel near Scarborough Shoal on Friday, the third confrontation in disputed South China Sea waters in a single week, and the timing was not accidental. Manila was hosting the annual ASEAN foreign ministers’ meetings when the Chinese escalation unfolded. On Monday, Chinese personnel […]

A Russian IL-20 reconnaissance aircraft crossed into Japanese territorial airspace on Friday, flying directly over the Northern Territories that Moscow seized at the end of World War II and has never given back. Japan scrambled an Air Self-Defense Force fighter in response. The Russian plane’s flight path traced a wide arc: from the Asian continent […]

For the first time in two weeks, no American bombs fell on Iran. President Trump ordered the US military not to conduct new strikes on Friday, according to two sources cited by Axios, breaking a streak of 13 consecutive nights of attacks that had become as routine as they were relentless. Whether the halt lasts […]

For the first time in 17 years, a UN secretary-general stood in Damascus and heard Syria’s new foreign minister demand the withdrawal of foreign troops from its soil. The moment itself was the news. Antonio Guterres traveled to the Syrian capital at a time when the country is still reorganizing itself after the fall of […]

Donald Trump wore a “Trump 2028” cap to the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner on Friday and told the assembled press that he intends to run for a fourth term as president. He was joking, you could tell by the venue, the hat, the tone of the room. But the joke landed in a particular […]

The Houthis have declared a “maritime embargo” on Saudi Arabia and attacked at least one Saudi-flagged tanker in the Red Sea, pushing Brent crude past $100 a barrel for the first time since May. The attack on the tanker Encelia, struck by an unknown projectile about 130 kilometers southwest of al-Shuqaiq on Wednesday night, was […]

Marco Rubio says the United States is ready to help end the war in Ukraine. He also says there is no quick path to a deal. Both statements, delivered after a meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Manila, tell the truth about where things stand. The US secretary of state spoke Thursday on […]