Geopolitics & international affairs
On Friday in Mecca, the Saudi crown prince, Turkey’s president and Pakistan’s prime minister signed a joint defense agreement whose central clause is the strongest military promise three states can make: an armed attack on any one of them is to be treated as an attack on all three. The signing ended nearly a year […]
The arrangement has one obvious flaw, and everybody involved is pretending not to see it. Lebanon and Israel have settled on a shortlist of states that might send soldiers to certify the disarmament of Hezbollah, under an American-brokered accord, and the United States will make the final call, with the option of choosing several countries […]
On Thursday, four ships crossed the Strait of Hormuz. One was a supertanker hauling about two million barrels of Iraqi crude. Two carried liquefied petroleum gas. The fourth was a small bulk carrier. For the week as a whole, Monday through Thursday, the count was 33 vessels, down from 50 in the same period a […]
The United States Senate on Friday passed the most sweeping Russia sanctions package of the war, 86 votes to 11, and handed the president a weapon that had nothing to do with Russia’s borders: authority to slap duties of up to 100 percent on the five biggest customers for Russian oil and natural gas. The […]
Spain has begun imposing entry checks on travelers arriving from Italy, answering Rome’s border controls with controls of its own. The two countries do not share a land border, which makes the spat unusual even by the standards of European migration politics: a crisis at Spain’s African enclave of Ceuta has ended with two Schengen […]
The 36th meeting of the India-China border mechanism produced no breakthrough on Friday, because none was intended. What it produced was a statement of intent: keep the frontier quiet, keep talking, and hold the machinery together until September, when Xi Jinping is expected in New Delhi for the BRICS summit, his first visit to India […]
Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said Thursday that Japan is upholding its three non-nuclear principles, speaking at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Ceremony for the first time since taking office. The sentence, on its face, was the standard reassurance delivered every August 6 by every prime minister since the principles were declared in 1967. The verb was […]
Japan’s new defense white paper, approved by the cabinet on August 4, is the clearest admission yet that Tokyo has stopped trying to build forces as large as China’s. Instead it is betting on the weapons of the Ukraine war: cheap drones, artificial intelligence, and the ability to keep fighting after the first month. The […]
The United Nations is again warning that a Sudanese city is about to become a crime scene, and this time it is describing the crime as it happens. In el-Obeid, the capital of North Kordofan, up to forty drones at a time hang over a city of more than half a million people, plus at […]
Russia’s overnight barrage on Kyiv was not stopped. It was absorbed. Moscow sent 24 ballistic missiles and 115 drones at Ukrainian cities, and Ukraine’s defenses, built around the American Patriot system, brought down none of the ballistic weapons. The drones were mostly caught; the missiles were not. Twenty-one people died, eight of them at Kvitneva […]
