How did Pakistan shoot down India’s fighter jets?

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They were used to hearing fighter jets from a nearby airbase. But this noise was louder and less familiar: a roar punctuated by repeated explosions. 

Residents of Akalia Kalan, a village in northern India, leapt from their beds as it grew closer in the early hours of May 7th. Outside, 

they saw a ball of flames pass overhead and crash into a nearby field. The wreckage was clearly identifiable as a fighter. 

Two bystanders died, according to villagers. The two Indian pilots had ejected earlier and were found, injured, in fields nearby.

Japan—and the Alliance—Prepare to Address a Taiwan Contingency

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This research project began as an effort to explore the potential security challenges that a Taiwan contingency would pose to Japan. 

Research revealed, however, that focusing solely on a Taiwan contingency overlooks the critical evolution of Japan’s defense strategy since the turn of the century.

For over half a century, Japan focused its defense strategy on the country’s northern regions and the threat posed by the former Soviet Union.

Accordingly, Tokyo concentrated the Japan Self-Defense Force (JSDF) on Hokkaido to resist a possible Soviet invasion. However, following the collapse of the USSR, China’s decades-long military modernization,

 as well as the unresolved territorial issues between Tokyo and Beijing, caused Japan to shift its strategic focus to the southwest and increasingly concentrate on the maritime domain. 

The release of Japan’s National Defense Program Guidelines and the Mid-Term Defense Program on December 17, 2010, marks this strategic shift.

On February 24, 2022, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine challenged the existing rules-based order in the Euro-Atlantic community.

 At the same time, in the Indo-Pacific, Russia’s aggression brought existing security challenges into sharper focus. Across the region, 

security concerns were heightened and acquired greater definition, particularly in the Taiwan Strait and on the Korean Peninsula.

Within Japan and across the alliance, defense planners have increasingly focused on a Taiwan contingency. In Tokyo, the government moved to enhance alliance-based deterrence and to strengthen its defense posture in the Southwest Islands. 

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Why China Should Revalue the Renminbi—And Why It Can’t Easily Do So

Michael Pettis

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China’s Reform Imperative examines China’s economic reforms and their impacts on the global economy. Curated by Carnegie Senior Fellow Michael Pettis, 

China’s Reform Imperative will focus on China’s reform trajectory and on the challenges and opportunities Beijing faces along the way.Learn More

In a recent piece for the Financial Times, Gerard Lyons, a British economist who sits on the board of the Bank of China (UK), argued that China’s currency, the renminbi, is undervalued, and that by encouraging it to appreciate, 

China would help raise its international profile. While many analysts have made similar arguments, it is not at all clear that a rising renminbi would indeed increase its international role. Even though the renminbi rose steadily in the decade after July 2009, 

Its international role during that time barely rose. In fact, it declined relative to the sharp rise in China’s share of global GDP and global trade.

There are nonetheless very good economic reasons for China to revalue its currency, along with reasons why a serious revaluation is likely to be difficult. In any economy, an appreciating currency effectively subsidizes consumption by reducing the price of imports,

while taxing production by making production of tradable goods less competitive globally. With its persistent excess production and under-consumption, a revalued renminbi would help correct some of the deep structural distortions in the Chinese economy by shifting the distribution of total domestic income from businesses to households.

China’s Aircraft Carriers Push Into Waters Long Dominated by U.S.

Chris Buckley

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As China girds for a deepening global rivalry with the United States, Beijing is testing how far its navy can operate from home, and how well its warships can work together on the open seas. In recent exercises involving two aircraft carriers, China gave a bold display of how it seeks to assert dominance in the western Pacific.

From late May and for much of June in seas near Japan, the two Chinese carriers — the Liaoning and the Shandong — practiced takeoffs and landings of fighter jets and helicopters, as many as 90 or more times on some days, according to reports from the Japanese military’s joint staff. Each carrier was protected by several warships.

The exercises, which caused Japan to express “serious concerns,” were a template for how China could use a growing collection of aircraft carriers to project armed power into the Pacific and try to overawe Asian neighbors aligned with Washington.

This was the first time that two Chinese carriers had ventured together past the “first island chain” — the barrier of islands east of China that includes the Japanese island of Okinawa, where U.S. Marines are based, and Taiwan — and toward Guam, 

a U.S. military hub, said Christopher Sharman, the director of the China Maritime Studies Institute at the U.S. Naval War College. Guam is part of what is called the “second island chain,” which stretches from Tokyo to south of Palau.

The Chinese naval activities near or past the second island chain signal that U.S. forces “operating in the vicinity of Guam could be at greater risk,” Mr. Sharman said.

How Nvidia’s Jensen Huang Persuaded Trump to Sell A.I. Chips to China

Tripp Mickle

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In April, Jensen Huang, the chief executive of the chip maker Nvidia, received a blunt welcome to the world of geopolitics when the Trump administration shut down sales of an artificial intelligence chip the company had designed specifically for China.

Since then, Mr. Huang has turned himself into a globe-trotting negotiator as he has tried to persuade President Trump to reverse course. He has traveled with Mr. Trump, testified before Congress and charmed reporters in Washington. And he has courted allies in White House who have quietly supported global business interests despite Mr. Trump’s tough talk on trade with China.

That work has started to pay off for Nvidia. Last week, Mr. Huang met with Mr. Trump in the Oval Office and pressed his case for restarting sales of his specialized chips, said two people familiar with the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. He argued that American chips should be the global standard and that the United States was making a grave mistake by ceding the giant Chinese market to homegrown rivals.

Within days, Nvidia said the administration was changing course. It was a remarkable reversal that punctuated Mr. Huang’s arrival as the tech industry’s leading geopolitical player. It also underscored Nvidia’s quick rise from little-known Silicon Valley chip maker to the most valuable public company in the world as well as the linchpin to the tech industry’s A.I. boom.

Just last week, Nvidia, which controls more than 90 percent of the market for chips needed to build A.I. systems, became the first public company worth more than $4 trillion. Since then, it has raced past that milestone thanks largely to its return to China.

Salt Typhoon’ hackers infiltrated National Guard, had 9 months of access: Memo

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Chinese hackers infiltrated the network of at least one state’s National Guard and remained in its systems for over nine months, 

a Department of Homeland Security memo says. The findings, as first reported by NBC News, shed new light on the extent of the hacking campaign against the United States by China’s “Salt Typhoon.”

The June memo, based on an investigation by the Department of Defense, says the Chinese hackers “extensively compromised” an unnamed state’s National Guard network from March to December 2024. 

The memo was provided to NBC News by the national security transparency nonprofit Property of the People, which obtained it through a Freedom of Information Act request.

Sensitive access

“A recent compromise of a US state’s Army National Guard network by People’s Republic of China (PRC)-associated cyber actors—publicly tracked as Salt Typhoon—likely provided Beijing with data that could facilitate the hacking of other states’ Army National Guard units, and possibly many of their state-level cybersecurity partners,” the memo reads.

The hackers were able to access, among other things, “a map of geographic locations in the targeted state, diagrams of how internal networks are set up, and personal information of service members,” according to NBC News.

Chinese-government links

Salt Typhoon is the nickname provided by cybersecurity companies to an elite group of Chinese hackers believed to be associated with the country’s Ministry of State Security.

A National Guard Bureau spokesperson confirmed the compromise to NBC News, but could not “provide specific details on the attack” or its response to it.

“We can say this attack has not prevented the National Guard from accomplishing assigned state or federal missions, and that NGB continues to investigate the intrusion to determine its full scope,” the spokesperson said.

Armenia-Azerbaijan Peace Process Gains Momentum with Abu Dhabi Summit

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The July 10 summit between Armenia and Azerbaijan in Abu Dhabi marks a significant step in the ongoing peace process between the two countries.

The summit reflects a broader shift in the South Caucasus, as Armenia and Azerbaijan strive for strategic autonomy rather than dependence on foreign powers such as the European Union or Moscow.

While the summit was notable for its constructive atmosphere, disputes over the Zangezur Corridor, as well as domestic pressure against Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, could stall further progress.

On July 10, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev met in Abu Dhabi, marking a historic milestone in their ongoing peace process (President of Azerbaijan, July 10). This summit, 

as the first bilateral meeting in recent decades without the mediation of a major power, signaled a new phase of direct dialogue between Baku and Yerevan, and followed a format of relations proposed by Baku in December 2024 (Caspiannews.com, 

December 12, 2024). Unlike previous talks held in EU capitals or Moscow, the United Arab Emirates provided a neutral and geopolitically unaligned platform, enhancing the credibility and focus of the negotiations. 

The choice of Abu Dhabi, proposed by Azerbaijan, underscored a push for strategic autonomy and a departure from stalled, externally brokered talks that have historically struggled to deliver results.

The Essential Jane Austen

Sarah Lyall

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The great British writer Jane Austen, whose 250th birthday is being celebrated this year, wrote only six complete novels and died without seeing her own extraordinary success. But few authors have had as felicitous, 

or as enduring, an afterlife as the inimitable Miss Austen. Her books, exquisite comedies of manners and morals set among the landed gentry in 18th- and 19th-century England, are snapshots of their time, but timeless in their appeal.

Austen’s literary preoccupations — romance, class, morality, money — might seem light, even frivolous. But they carry universal truths, and not just the ironic one in the bravura opening line of “Pride and Prejudice” about single men, fortunes and wives. 

With high wit and delectable plotting, the books skewer self-regard, hypocrisy and snobbery; lay bare unpleasant truths about the precarious position of women in Regency England and the dark origins of rich families’ fortunes; and exhibit a strikingly modern writing technique.

Using free indirect style, also known as free indirect discourse, Austen allows her omniscient narrators to inhabit the thoughts of different characters in turn, 

in ways that reflect their idiosyncratic quirks of thinking and speaking — maintaining the detachment of the third person while reflecting the biases of someone speaking in the first person. While Austen wasn’t the first to employ what is now a thoroughly familiar approach, she refined and popularized it.

Austen’s life itself was perhaps most remarkable for its unremarkability. (We know less than we should; many of her letters were destroyed after her death — some by her sister, Cassandra, and others, years later, 

Handshakes or Airstrikes: What Does Israel Want in Syria?

Patrick Kingsley

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For weeks, Israel and Syria have engaged in secret back-channel talks, searching for a diplomatic resolution to decades of tensions, mainly over territory captured by Israel from Syria during the Arab-Israeli war of 1967.

The Israeli news media has been awash with optimistic predictions of a limited nonaggression pact, or even a landmark peace deal between the Jewish state and the former jihadists who seized control of Damascus last December.

Israel’s brazen strikes this week on Syrian government forces and infrastructure, including in the capital, Damascus, have highlighted the premature nature of such expectations in such a fluid geopolitical context. It has also exemplified how Israel, 

still traumatized by Hamas’s surprise attack in October 2023 but buoyed by its more recent successes against Hezbollah and Iran, is now more likely to use force to pre-emptively address perceived threats — even if it derails diplomatic efforts to achieve the same goal.

“It seems very discordant,” said Itamar Rabinovich, an Israeli historian of Syria who led Israel’s negotiations with Syria during the 1990s. “It runs against the effort to negotiate.”

The strikes reflect Israel’s post-2023 military doctrine, which combines, Mr. Rabinovich said, “a very strange mixture of paranoia following Oct. 7 and a sense of power following the success in Lebanon and in Iran. And the result is this preference for using force rather than diplomacy.”

Iran and the Logic of Limited Wars

Raphael S. Cohen

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Israel's air war against Iran—“Operation Rising Lion”—may be over, but the controversy surrounding the attacks lives on. One key question is whether the U.S. strikes on the Iranian nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz, 

and Esfahan, dubbed “Operation Midnight Hammer,” succeeded in obliterating the deeply buried Fordow site or merely incapacitated it for a few months. The extent of the damage to Iran's nuclear program is, of course, important from an operational perspective. 

But the broader critique—that the 12-day air campaign was somehow foolhardy because it may not have permanently destroyed the Iranian nuclear program—misses the point.

Operation Rising Lion was a limited war fought with limited means for an even more limited period—all of which, in turn, means that the campaign's objectives were also limited. The campaign, therefore, 

needs to be judged against the alternative strategies—engaging in a longer, more protracted campaign or doing nothing militarily and sticking with diplomatic options. And by that measure, the operation was a success.

To begin with the option of a longer war: There were certainly more targets left in Iran when U.S. President Donald Trump called an end to the war. Although a full public accounting of the attacks' effects will take time, 

the Israeli military claims it eliminated roughly 1,000, or 40 percent to 50 percent, of Iran's ballistic missiles; destroyed 250 (or roughly two-thirds) of Iran's missile launchers; killed several dozen senior Iranian military leaders and nuclear scientists; 

and set the nuclear program back by “years.” In other words, even by the Israeli military's own estimates, Iran's nuclear program is not demolished, it retains most of its missiles, and most of its military leaders remain untouched.

What Will Become of the C.I.A.?

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In December, 1988, as the Soviet Union was beginning to come apart, Senator Bill Bradley, a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, convened a closed-door hearing with several of the C.I.A.’s top Soviet experts. These were analysts, 

not operatives. They did not run spies or weapons, or shoot poisoned darts at people; mostly, they sat at their desks at Langley, reading Pravda or studying photographs of Soviet military parades. The hearing found them in a melancholy mood, 

pondering life without the U.S.S.R. “The Soviet Union is so fundamental to our outlook on the world, to our concept of what is right and wrong in politics,” Douglas J. MacEachin, who ran the C.I.A.’s office of Soviet analysis, 

said, “that major change in the U.S.S.R. is as significant as some major change in the sociological fabric of the United States itself.” And so, MacEachin explained, 

a C.I.A. analyst struggled to see things clearly; not only his world view but his livelihood was at stake. If the Soviet Union disappeared, 

what would become of those who made their careers analyzing it? “There are not many homes for old wizards of Armageddon,” MacEachin said.

Soon enough, the Soviet Union collapsed with a whimper, and the United States stood alone. Perceiving no enemies on the near horizon, 

the nation stopped looking for them so fervently. Budgets were cut, retirements suggested. Agents in the field were brought in from the cold. Bill Clinton, 

the first post-Cold War President, was elected to fix the economy. So infrequent were Clinton’s meetings with his first C.I.A. director, James Woolsey,

that when a small plane crashed onto the White House lawn, in the fall of 1994, people joked that it must be Woolsey, trying to get an audience with the President.

The Limits of Putin’s Balancing Act

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Russian President Vladimir Putin has achieved an eerie calm at home. Shortly after assuming the presidency in 2000, he tied once independent oligarchs to the state while placating the growing middle class with rising living standards and greater material comforts. 

Gradually, he assembled a ruling ideology from bits and pieces of Russia’s past, one that was nationalistic enough to inspire pride but not so nationalistic as to be divisive.

As a result, after a quarter century in power, Putin has brought Russia to a point of equilibrium. Russian life can now be soothingly predictable, even if it demands adaptation at times. Chaos is engulfing the Middle East, American politics can be tempestuous, 

and Europe is witnessing its worst war since 1945. But Putin has given Russians the gift they were most eager to receive: stability. The country is not enduring visible disruptions or political tumult. Indeed, 

Russia hardly has any politics at all—it lacks real political parties and does not stage meaningful elections. The state, which reserves the right to repress, mostly represses those who dare to display their disapproval, a vanishingly small minority of Russians. 

In this arrangement, the Kremlin retains control, and most Russians can go about their business, provided that their business is unobtrusive.

Another reality shadows this carefully crafted equilibrium. Putin has long promised Russians a country gilded with ambition, power, and glory. He stressed a “belief in the greatness of Russia” as early as his 1999 “millennium manifesto,” 

an article published in a Russian daily shortly before he assumed the presidency. In that essay, Putin implied that Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, and Boris Yeltsin, the first president of a post-Soviet Russia, had brought Russia to its knees, 

Is America Breaking the Global Economy?

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The global economy is, to put it mildly, in a state of flux. Before the most recent U.S. elections, it was already being buffeted by geopolitical shocks and the prospect of transformative technological innovations. But now, 

it also has to endure an unusually high amount of policy volatility from the world’s most powerful country. The result has been a roller coaster not just for bonds and equities but also for economic forecasters and policymakers.

At a deeper level, this turmoil has called into question consensus narratives about the United States. Long-standing assumptions that underpin the choices households, companies, 

and investors make have gone away. Rules of thumb have become far less helpful. Measures of consumer and producer confidence fell off a cliff. Expectations of inflation, meanwhile, surged to levels last seen in 1981.

Amid this deep uncertainty, forecasters have struggled to predict where the U.S. economy will ultimately end up. But two main visions bookend a dispersed and unstable set of individual projections. In the first, 

the United States is on a bumpy journey that will culminate in an economic restructuring resembling the ones that took place under U.S. President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, 

where it will emerge with less debt and a more efficient private sector and where it will trade in a fairer international system. In the second scenario, the country is slowly slipping into the stagflation and, 

as happened under U.S. President Jimmy Carter,could end up in a deep recession, perhaps with pronounced financial instability.

Targeting at Machine Speed: The Capabilities—and Limits—of Artificial Intelligence

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The United States Army’s ability to deliver precision fires and effects is fundamentally tied to its doctrinal targeting methodology: decide, detect, deliver, assess (D3A). 

Field Manual 3-60, Army Targeting prescribes the use of D3A as an integrative approach requiring cooperation across multiple warfighting functions. 

As the Army advances under the pressures of multidomain operations as its operational concept, optimizes its contributions to US strategic competition with near-peer adversaries, and pursues its recently announced transformation initiative, the necessity of integrating artificial intelligence into targeting workflows is paramount.

AI technologies have already proven their utility across a range of defense applications, including intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance processing, decision support, and autonomous systems operations. 

Over the past several years, a growing body of academic research has explored these capabilities, yielding insights with significant implications for military policy and doctrine. 

Key takeaways from this body of work include:AI in targeting presents a moral dilemma—it must be employed as a tool, not as a substitute for the warfighter’s judgment.

Time is the most compelling performance metric for evaluating AI effectiveness in the targeting process.AI offers undeniable scaling advantages, particularly in data processing and decision acceleration.

Human commanders must remain the final arbiters of lethal force, preserving the principle of human-on-the-loop decision-making.

AI should augment—not replace—critical targeting functions, such as rules of engagement validation, proportionality assessments, and determinations of military necessity.

  

Red Lines and Black Boxes: Iran, Deterrence, and the Weaponization of Uncertainty

Siamak Naficy 

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In the shadow of Israel’s air campaign and amid the policy whiplash of the Trump administration’s return to the scene, Iran finds itself cornered, battered, and yet, utterly unmoved. The Islamic Republic has absorbed military strikes on critical infrastructure,

watched its economy plunge further into crisis, and received a vague threat from Washington that may or may not be real. And yet Tehran’s red lines, particularly on uranium enrichment, remain firmly in place. Why?

Because in Iranian strategic culture, compromise with a heavy-handed force isn’t pragmatism—it’s weakness. And weakness invites destruction. It’s dangerous to confuse tactical success with strategic victory—legitimacy is fluid, 

and humiliation can be politically generative. Deterrence doesn’t die with generals, political bureaucrats, or nuclear scientists. Deterrence is a wicked problem—it adapts, it mutates. Likewise, regimes don’t always end when their air defenses fall. They end when people stop believing in their necessity and legitimacy.

Iran’s security doctrine has rested on two assumptions: first, that the international system is inherently hostile to its regime; and second, that no foreign partner—no matter how transactional—can be counted on when it matters.

Too often, American policy assumes that pain is a useful teacher. The US assumes that when punished sufficiently, states will moderate their behavior to meet American interests. But for Iran’s leadership—steeped in revolutionary paranoia, 

grievances both real and imagined, as well as the memory of abandonment during the Iran–Iraq War, pain is not deterrence. It is confirmation. Each new military humiliation, each economic blow, simply proves the point: the West cannot be trusted, and only self-reliance ensures survival.

Who Was Behind the Drone Attack Against Indian Separatist Outfits in Myanmar?

Rajeev Bhattacharyya

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The small camp of United Liberation Front of Asom (Independent) at Taga, near the Chindwin River in Myanmar’s Sagaing Region, had an unusual visitor sometime in the second week of April. His stay coincided with the celebration of the traditional Assamese Bihu festival in the camp; 

he also held a series of meetings with senior functionaries of other separatist rebel groups that had camps in that region. The visitor quietly slipped away two weeks later via a meandering route – long before the Indian security agencies received information about the episode.

The visitor was none other than Paresh Baruah, the chief of the ULFA(I), which is a banned separatist outfit in India.

The ULFA(I) became active in Assam in the early 1980s with the objective of gaining independence from India. Baruah is one of the most wanted men in India, who has dodged at least five assassination attempts over the past three decades. He is believed to have traveled to Taga in Myanmar from Yunnan in China after a gap of seven years.

Almost three months after his visit to Taga came a drone attack. In the early hours of July 13, two ULFA(I) camps and one camp of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of Manipur were hit in Myanmar’s “Naga Self-Administered Zone.” 

The camps were around 10-15 kilometers from the border with India. Three functionaries of the ULFA(I), including Nayan Asom who headed the Lower Council, were killed and 19 were injured.

The needle of suspicion pointed at the Indian Army, which has been combating separatist groups in India’s Northeast since the late 1950s. The army, however, was quick to deny its involvement. An army public relations officer in Guwahati was quoted by the media as saying, “There are no inputs with the Indian Army of such an operation.”

Ukraine: The Drone Wars – Analysis

IWPR

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When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, few predicted that some of the war’s most dramatic moments would involve small, buzzing machines that you could once buy at any electronics store. 

Yet here we are, watching Ukraine use everything from repurposed hobby drones that some people used to film weddings and other family occasions, to sophisticated military UAVs that strike targets deep inside Russia, fundamentally changing how wars are fought.

When you are fighting a war of survival, and your enemy outnumbers you in both military personnel and hardware, 

you are forced to get creative. Ukraine’s drone warfare capabilities have evolved from improvised solutions to a comprehensive strategic weapons system that challenges traditional military paradigms.

The transformation has been remarkable. Early in the war, Ukrainian troops were using off-the-shelf quadcopters, mainly for scouting enemy positions. Now, both the armed forces and Ukraine’s intelligence services (SBU) are launching coordinated attacks on Russian airbases, oil refineries and military installations far from the battlefield. 

Operation Spiderweb, the June 1, 2025 covert strike in which nearly 120 drones targeted five Russian air bases, was a demonstration of the possible scale of such operations.

This isn’t just about dropping bombs anymore; it’s about projecting power across vast distances, despite being the smaller military force. 

The impact on morale extends beyond the battlefield – successful drone strikes against previously “untouchable” targets within Russia have demonstrated Ukrainian capabilities and influenced Russian public opinion about both the trajectory of the war and its costs. 

These attacks have also brought the war home to ordinary Russians, showing them that their country is not as invulnerable as their leaders claim.

The Sino-American Battle for Brains

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In the struggle for global economic, technological, and geopolitical leadership, higher education can make all the difference.

 While China invests heavily in building world-class universities, the US is actively undermining its elite institutions of higher education – not least by alienating foreign talent.

SEOUL – Around the world, governments are racing to build world-class universities. From Germany’s Exzellenzinitiative to India’s “Institutes of Eminence,” 

the goal is the same: to cultivate institutions that attract and nurture top global talent, conduct cutting-edge research, and drive innovation and growth. 

But the stakes are particularly high in the United States and China, given the escalating competition between the world’s two largest economies.

The “Trump Doctrine” Is Wishful Thinking

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US Vice President J.D. Vance has tried to spin America’s strikes on Iran as an example of overwhelming US military power fixing problems that diplomacy couldn’t. But the United States has compiled a long record of such attempts since the end of the Cold War, and almost all of them failed.

WASHINGTON, DC – US Vice President J.D. Vance recently tried to cast President Donald Trump’s strikes on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure as a wildly successful example of the “Trump Doctrine.” According to Vance, the doctrine is simple: you identify a problem that threatens US interests, 

which “you try to aggressively diplomatically solve.” If diplomacy fails, “you use overwhelming military power to solve it and then you get the hell out of there before it ever becomes a protracted conflict.

MARIANA MAZZUCATO & RAINER KATTEL think progressives have neglected the importance of delivering results that voters will feel in their own lives.

If only it were that easy. What Vance describes is neither a doctrine nor unique to Trump. It is the same wishful thinking that produced many of the long, costly, and unsuccessful US military interventions that Vance himself has often decried.

If Vance thinks that the strikes “solved” the problem of Iran’s nuclear program, then he must believe that they fully destroyed Iran’s nuclear capabilities: its centrifuges, its stocks of enriched uranium, and any other materials used for weaponization. Either that, or he views this display of America’s military might as powerful enough to persuade the Islamic Republic to abandon its nuclear program and not reconstitute it in the future.

There is no question that the US strike severely damaged the Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan nuclear facilities. But it is far from clear that the bombing of these sites, coupled with Israel’s assassination of senior Iranian nuclear scientists, has set Iran back to zero. It appears more likely that Iran’s program has only been delayed, though estimates of the setback vary from months to years.

Why We Don't Politicize the Military

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When I started working on this piece, it was in the context of Trump‘s announced decision to bring the National Guard and the Marines into Los Angeles to quell protests against ICE. Use of the military for domestic law-enforcement purposes is severely restricted by law for a number of good reasons, 

not the least among them the damage that happens when we politicize the military. The military’s reputation gets tarnished if it is perceived as a political tool rather than a defense force that protects the United States. The public can easily lose confidence in the military if political neutrality is abandoned.

In early June, Trump spoke to the troops at Fort Bragg. There was reporting that the soldiers in the audience were “handpicked for a political point of view,” to hear the politically charged remarks Trump delivered. MAGA merchandise was sold on base. Military.com called it “blurring the long-standing and sacrosanct line between the military and partisan politics.”

Then, on July 7, the military swept through MacArthur Park in Los Angeles. Mayor Karen Bass posted video, writing that just minutes before this happened, “there were more than 20 kids playing — then, the MILITARY comes through.” She demanded that it end immediately, 

calling it “absolutely outrageous.” Tuesday, there was news that more than 2,000 military members who have remained in federal status in California despite the absence of even a hint of violent protests have finally been released, with no fanfare.

Even though the administration seems to have backed down in California, at least for now, Trump is still intent on using the military as a political tool. There is the issue of expanded “border enforcement,” with the Trump administration turning to the Southern border and giving military troops arrest authority across an expanded border area, 

posting thousands of signs in New Mexico and West Texas, declaring a “restricted area by authority of the commander.”

Beyond Rare Earths: China’s Growing Threat to Gallium Supply Chains

Aidan Powers-Riggs, Brian Hart, Matthew P. Funaiole, 

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China is increasingly weaponizing its chokehold over critical minerals amid intensifying economic and technological competition with the United States. 

The critical mineral gallium, which is crucial to defense industry supply chains and new energy technologies, has been at the front line of China’s strategy. To date, 

China’s chokehold on rare earth metals has attracted more attention than its restrictions on gallium, and some have downplayed the potential consequences of disruptions to gallium supply chains. 

Yet CSIS analysis reveals the extent to which China can wield gallium to impose significant economic harm on the United States and its allies and partners. 

This CSIS Brief unpacks the scope of the problem and offers policy recommendations on how to bolster U.S. and allied economic security and deny China a key tool of economic warfare.

Introduction and Key Findings

Amid spiraling trade tensions with the United States, Beijing has brandished a new arsenal of economic weapons, with few proving more potent than its export controls on critical minerals. As of May 2025, 

China had restricted the export of at least 16 key minerals and alloys, many of which are essential inputs for products ranging from consumer electronics to F-35 fighter jets. These measures have struck deep into U.S. and allied supply chains, 

and appear to have given China substantial leverage in its ongoing trade and technology negotiations with the United States.

Trump losing leverage as China trade war fires duds

William Pesek

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When Donald Trump returned to office in January, he pledged to show China who’s economic boss through massive tariffs. Yet six months later, it’s the US economy that’s feeling the trade war pain, not Asia’s biggest economy.

From a 0.3% first-quarter growth contraction to rising inflation to cratering housing demand, the Trump 2.0 trade war is boomeranging back on Americans in unpredictable and painful ways. Bond traders, meanwhile, are in a whirl as Trump’s tariffs, spending plans and attacks on the Federal Reserve’s autonomy wreak havoc with global yields.

The question looming over markets now is what Trump does when he realizes that his trade war is a dud? What about when it dawns on Trump World that investors are essentially ignoring his tirades? One big wildcard is that Trump goes all-in on dispelling the #TACO theory that “Trump always chickens out.”

Trump’s threatened 50% tax on Brazil, with which the US enjoys a trade surplus, suggests Trump’s worldview has pivoted from economic strategy to personal attacks. Trump is irked that Brazil is holding former President Jair Bolsonaro accountable for an alleged 2022 coup attempt.

The latest steps Trump is taking toward Japan also suggest emotions have gotten the better of his trade war strategy. Annoyed that Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba isn’t just rolling over and signing a trade deal, Trump says Tokyo will face a 25% tariff on top of his 25% global auto levy.

Yet the real indignity will come from China, which is in no mood to bow to Trump World. Chinese leader Xi Jinping, remember, has yet to offer concrete concessions to signal fealty to Trump.

Though Trump has claimed since late June that “we just signed with China the other day,” officials in Beijing hold that US-China trade deal talks are still in the early stages, at best.

How much are liberals to blame for state failure?

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This is an edited version of an article that first appeared in the Times Literary Supplement in the 4th July issue. I’ve cut it a little to focus on the question in the headline. Many thanks to the TLS for allowing me to reproduce the article for subscribers.

Despite our polarized times, there is one thing everyone agrees on: government isn’t working very well.

For the modern right, this is axiomatic. They believe that government is incapable of working as effectively as the private sector because it lacks the right incentives and has been captured by the bureaucratic class of metropolitan graduates that is responsible for all our woes.

This certainty that the state is a force for bad is impermeable to evidence or reason. One can note that much of the modern technology that supplies the profits of our biggest companies – from the internet to touchscreens – was developed thanks to government-funded research. 

Or that state health initiatives have saved billions of lives over the past century. Or one can point to the litany of private sector failures when services have been outsourced to them.

It won’t make any difference. Even personal experience to the contrary can be subject to cognitive dissonance – recall the famous sign held aloft by a Tea Party protestor during the Barack Obama years, 

“Keep your government hands off our Medicare”. Indeed, the modern radical right is happy to use state apparatus in a highly authoritarian fashion when it suits it to do so, while maintaining that it is incapable of improving society more broadly.

Liberals tend to be more divided on the subject. They agree government should be a force for good and that it has worked in the past, and that it even works now from time to time – the Covid death toll would have been far higher without the rapid funding and distribution of vaccines. 

Gentle Parenting My Smartphone Addiction

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On a recent weekday, I sent an Instagram message to a friend of mine, an art adviser in New York named Stephen Truax, to gossip about an exhibition. 

Instead of messaging me back in the app, he texted me to say that he’d blocked Instagram on his smartphone during daytime working hours. Impressed, 

I asked him how he was accomplishing such a feat. Truax said he was using Opal, an app that makes your smartphone a little more like a so-called dumbphone, without requiring you to trade in your device altogether. He said that several of his friends swore by the app, 

and so he had begun using it, too. Opal is not new—its current iteration launched in 2022—but I took this word of mouth as evidence, 

outside of the app-hype cycle, that it might actually work. I downloaded it without any particular optimism; I considered my phone addiction to be an incurable case.

Being on the internet too much is an essential part of my job, and a requirement of writing this column. But I’m aware that there’s still such a thing as diminishing returns; a doctor doesn’t have to personally chain-smoke, 

for example, to know that cigarettes are bad for your health. When I began using Opal, a few weeks ago, the barrage of online stimulation had become even more cacophonous than usual. It was not just social-media updates; it was video podcasts,

live-streaming commentators, and celebrities on press campaigns competing to be perceived through the digital noise. The temptation to tune into everything at once was too strong. I could leave my phone in another room, or switch to a flip phone, 

or try “launcher” apps, such as Dumb Phone, that convert one’s smartphone display into a minimalist set of text-only buttons. But those solutions all rely on self-discipline, which is something I’ve proved to be short on. Opal,