Geopolitics & international affairs
The bombing has stopped, or at least paused, and the president has a new word for what comes next: low keying it. In an interview with Axios on Sunday, Donald Trump said the United States is watching economic pressure do what five months of air strikes could not, and said the two governments are only […]
The mayor of the only city still entitled to say never again used the 81st commemoration of the atomic bombing to attack the doctrine that is supposed to prevent it. Speaking at the Peace Park in Nagasaki on Sunday, Shiro Suzuki called nuclear weapons an absolute evil that can never coexist with humanity. He went […]
On Saturday, Iran stopped hinting and published its price list. The Supreme National Security Council, speaking through its secretary Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, a Revolutionary Guard commander, said the Strait of Hormuz will stay shut until the United States changes its behavior. Then it listed what changed behavior means: never threaten Iran again, end the war […]
On Thursday, in the Oval Office, Trump told reporters the war with Iran is almost over, saying it has to end pretty soon and that the Iranians cannot go much longer. On the Hormuz talks he was equally certain, saying he was involved in the negotiations, that the talks were going fine, and that a […]
Just outside Abuja, farmers do not say the company’s name. They say it is where the Chinese sell magic rice seeds. For Ahmed Yusuf, 42, the magic was arithmetic. He had farmed for more than a decade, and for years the losses stacked up: yields of about two tonnes per hectare (roughly 0.9 tons per […]
The word Netanyahu chose was fictitious. Addressing his cabinet on Sunday, the Israeli prime minister rejected the US Board of Peace plan for Gaza in plain terms, saying that what was at stake was real disarmament, not fictitious disarmament. The document is the 15-point plan at the heart of President Donald Trump’s Gaza initiative, endorsed […]
The memo was blunt. On Wednesday, the Pentagon’s number two, Steve Feinberg, gave the leaders of the American defense industry 21 days to submit production plans meant to drive significantly faster, more aggressive delivery schedules and/or increased production for critical capabilities. Then came the sentence that matters: years-long development cycles are not acceptable, and the […]
On Saturday morning, a drone exploded in a sunflower field in northeastern Bulgaria, some 200 meters (about 660 feet) from the Romanian side of the Trans-Balkan line’s compressor station and about a kilometer (0.6 miles) from the Bulgarian one. No one was hurt. The pipeline, which carries gas between Turkey and Ukraine, was not damaged. […]
On September 20, Russia holds its first State Duma election since the full-scale war began. The liberal Yabloko party enters it with roughly three percent support against a five percent threshold for seats. By any normal measure it will lose, as it has lost every federal election since it was founded three decades ago. The […]
In the small hours of Saturday, a missile struck an ADNOC tanker transiting the Strait of Hormuz. No one was hurt, and the company said the situation was under control. By the standards of this war, nothing happened. Read it as politics, and everything happened. ADNOC is not just any oil company. It is the […]
