Geopolitics & international affairs
Nearly six months into the war, the United States has bombed 13,000 Iranian targets, spent $37.5 billion, and asked Congress for another $67 billion. And Iran, by most measures, has the upper hand. That is the argument Howard W. French makes in Foreign Policy this week, laying out how a conflict that began with a […]
Washington is preparing to strike what may be the last red line in its war with Iran, the mountain redoubt where Tehran is believed to have hidden nuclear centrifuges. President Donald Trump warned Wednesday that the US would “heavily” hit Mount Kolang Gaz La, known as Pickaxe Mountain, after reports emerged that Iran may have […]
Nobody wants to say it out loud: the United States has painted itself into a corner in Iran, and the only exit involves writing a very large check. Philip H. Gordon, a former White House Middle East coordinator under Biden, laid out the argument in Foreign Policy this week with the kind of frankness that […]
The Trump administration launched another front in its global trade war Thursday, imposing tariffs of 10 to 12.5 percent on imports from 60 countries, covering nearly all goods the United States buys from abroad. The new duties take effect just after midnight Friday, replacing a previous set of global tariffs that were set to expire. […]
Israel’s national security minister led more than 2,300 Jewish settlers into the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound Thursday in one of the largest incursions at Jerusalem’s holiest site in years, as Palestinian worshippers were barred from entering and several were assaulted by Israeli forces. Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right minister who has turned provocative visits to the contested […]
Athens has formally approved the largest defense procurement in Greek history, signing contracts for a multi-layer air defense system built around Israeli technology, a $4 billion bet called “Achilles Shield.” Defense Minister Nikos Dendias announced Thursday that the country’s security council, KYSEA, had approved contracts for a comprehensive anti-ballistic, anti-aircraft and anti-drone system using Israeli […]
The war in Ukraine took a brief diplomatic turn Thursday in Manila, where US Secretary of State Marco Rubio sat down with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov for the first high-level bilateral meeting since the Iran war pushed Ukraine off Washington’s front burner. The meeting lasted roughly 30 minutes, on the sidelines of the ASEAN […]
The US-Iran war is threatening to open a second front, this time at sea, and this time aimed at America’s own Gulf allies. Yemen’s Houthi rebels claimed early Thursday that they had struck two Saudi oil tankers in the Red Sea, part of what the group calls a naval blockade on Saudi Arabia. The attack […]
A Ukrainian F-16 has shot down a Russian Su-35 fighter jet in air-to-air combat, the first confirmed aerial victory by a Western-supplied aircraft since they arrived in Ukraine two years ago. The confirmation came not from Kyiv, but from Washington. General Dan Caine, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate Appropriations […]
The Trump administration’s nuclear cooperation agreement with Saudi Arabia is not just a bad nonproliferation deal. It is a foreign policy document that jettisons two longstanding US demands at once, and the reactions from Israel and Congress suggest the administration may have miscalculated. The normalization requirement, abandoned For years, the standard US position was that […]
