Epstein Presented Himself to Indian Tycoon as a Trump White House Insider

Anupreeta Das

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Anil Ambani, one of India’s most prominent businessmen, was eager in the early days of the first Trump administration to figure out where India might fit into the new president’s national security strategy. In 2017, that led him to Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender whose fat Rolodex of politicians, diplomats and policymakers allowed him to present himself to Mr. Ambani as a White House insider and guide, according to a review by The New York Times of hundreds of messages exchanged by the men over a two-year period.

“Will need ur guidance on dealing wth white house for india relationship ad defense cooperation,” Mr. Ambani wrote to Mr. Epstein soon after their online introduction, according to exchanges released this year by the Justice Department. Mr. Epstein promised to get Mr. Ambani some “inside baseball.”

Pakistan’s Peacemaking Is a Setback for India

Sushant Singh

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When Indian External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar recently called Pakistan a dalal, or fixer, for acting as a messenger between the United States and Iran, the insult betrayed a profound sense of marginalization. In a sense, it was also an involuntary acknowledgment of reality: In U.S. President Donald Trump’s eyes, being a fixer is not a mark of shame but a badge of utility.

Trump boasts of his ability to secure the best deals in history, and he has found in Pakistani Army chief Asim Munir exactly the sort of interlocutor that he likes—a hard-power operator with direct access to the White House and a willingness to sell himself as useful. This has left Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in an awkward position, relegated to receiving a single phone call from Trump about the crisis in the Middle East (with Elon Musk listening in on the line).

No Room for Maneuver: Why Structure Forces Taiwan’s Strategic Choice

Wayne Tan and Anita Chu

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In the 21st century, the international system has returned to a bipolar structure and is heading toward a new “Cold War” (Tunsjø, 2018; Ferguson, 2019; Doshi, 2021; Beckley, 2022; Lind, 2024). Countless news reports and commentaries discuss how policymakers in the White House are obsessed with containing China’s economic and technological power, and how Beijing is attempting to break through this containment or undermine American influence. Undoubtedly, the United States and China are already in a situation of mutual confrontation. Conflicts will only proliferate, and the chain reactions of this great power rivalry will destabilize global markets and significantly heighten unpredictability. We have entered an era defined by pervasive risk and crisis.

For states situated in the Asia-Pacific, the sustained expansion of Mainland China’s economic and military power has triggered a perilous logic of hegemonic transition, compelling a strategic response from the United States (Loke, 2021). To be sure, this pessimistic Thucydidean perspective has faced academic challenges (Hanania, 2021). However, considering that the combined aggregate power of the two contemporary titans—the U.S. and China—already far exceeds that of the U.S. and Soviet Union during the previous century, this article contends that the strategic context of the current Sino-American confrontation is significantly more volatile and complex than that of the Cold War (Krickovic & Jaeyoung, 2025). Consequently, several developments merit close attention: First, in today’s international system, states such as Brazil, India, and South Africa exercise greater autonomy and agency than they did during the Cold War.

Iran’s Ballistic Missiles: Weapons of Terror That Have Failed to Deliver

Roman Pryhodko

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Iran has developed the most powerful and diverse ballistic missile program in the Middle East. It constitutes a fundamental element of the national defense doctrine and serves as an instrument of regional power projection. Over the past decades, Iran’s military and political leadership has invested enormous resources in creating a self-sufficient missile industry. This sector compensates for the technological lag in traditional weapons systems, particularly the air force, which has long been constrained by international sanctions.

The evolution of Iran’s missile arsenal reflects a transition from simply purchasing and reverse-engineering Soviet models of the 1950s to developing complex, high-precision systems. Modern designs utilize solid propellant, guided warheads, and elements of hypersonic technology.

The Banality of Resistance: How We Keep Misreading Iran

Siamak Naficy

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Western analysis of Iran suffers from a persistent, almost comforting delusion: that the Islamic Republic is fundamentally irrational. It’s easier that way. If Iran is driven by theology, fanaticism, or some opaque revolutionary mysticism, then its behavior can be dismissed rather than understood. Strategy becomes pathology. Policy becomes moral posture. But what if the opposite is true? What if Iran is not irrational—but rational in a way we refuse to take seriously? Because once you grant that premise, the last four decades of Iranian behavior stop looking erratic. They start looking disturbingly coherent.

Note that this is not an argument for sympathy. The Islamic Republic isn’t benign, and its leadership is not misunderstood in any charitable sense. But the prevailing story is analytically lazy. It replaces strategy with caricature. If you actually listen—really listen—to how Iranian leadership understands itself, a different picture emerges. Not a nicer one. A more dangerous one, precisely because it is coherent. At its core, the Islamic Republic does not think of itself as a religious project. It thinks of itself as the end of a historical condition: a century of humiliation, intervention, and subjugation. That’s the starting point. Miss that, and everything else looks like madness.

Inside the U.S. Special Operations Mission to Rescue a Downed F-15E Officer in Iran

Guy D. McCardle 

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A U.S. Air Force F-15E was shot down over Iran, leaving a weapons systems officer evading capture for more than 36 hours as American forces launched a full-scale rescue under fire. Seven thousand feet up, cut into rock and wind, a United States Air Force colonel sat alone with a pistol, a radio, and a beacon. He was bleeding. Not catastrophic, but enough to slow him down. Ejection will do that. The spine compresses. Limbs take a hit. You walk it off, or you don’t.

He moved anyway.

True to his SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) training, he climbed out of the crash basin, away from wreckage, away from heat signatures and predictable search patterns. He found a crevice and stayed small. He keyed the beacon only when needed. Iranian forces were already moving. Civilians too. There was a bounty on his head, and state television was telling people to shoot on sight.

The Carter Doctrine and the Limits of Liminal Conflict in the Persian Gulf

Richard W. Coughlin

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The U.S.-Israeli war against Iran is on the verge of superseding the limits of the liminal conflict. What is liminal conflict? Liminal conflict is a way in which states deploy bounded violence to shape the international order and to reproduce that order over time (Lacey 2024). Liminal conflict is oriented toward system maintenance rather than disruption. But in the case of the Persian Gulf, the regional order is now experiencing systemic disruption, which may escalate into systemic collapse. Both Israel’s geopolitical ambitions and Iran’s capacity to engage in horizontal escalation exceed the limits of liminal conflict. There are diplomatic responses to this conflict that can be characterized as entropic diplomacy. The goal is not to establish order but to minimize the disorder toward which the system tends.

The historical aspiration of the United States has been to order the international system rather than to permit the system to order itself (Bacevich 2010). This is because if the world orders itself, the U.S. position of the primacy within it will become eroded. But, of course, this primacy is already badly eroded from the point of view of technology and production, as Time Sahay and Kate Mackenzie (2026) emphasize with regard to energy production. The U.S. is still a financial and military power that exercises some degree of the structural power over the physical infrastructures of the global economy – financial networks, geopolitical and geoeconomic choke points. The Strait of Hormuz is significant with respect to the type of power the U.S. has – in particular, its long-term policies of power projection into the Persian Gulf to supply the world market with cheap energy.

Iran at War: Deterrence, National Identity, and Existential Stakes

Tewfik Hamel

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To read the present conflict in Iran only through the categories of the Iran-Israel rivalry or the Tehran-Washington confrontation is to miss its most consequential dimension. For Israel, the central problem is the neutralization of a military and potentially nuclear threat. By the time of the military attacks of June 2025, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) assessed that Iran had accumulated 9,247.6 kg of enriched uranium in total; by the time of the attacks in mid-June 2025, it had also accumulated 440.9 kg enriched up to 60 percent U-235, making it the only non-nuclear-weapon state under the NPT to have produced and accumulated material at that level (IAEA 2025a; IAEA 2026). For the United States, the conflict is embedded in a broader calculus of regional security, alliance credibility, energy security, and escalation control. For several Arab states, it is principally a matter of balance, containment, and spillover management. Tehran, however, increasingly appears to read the war in a different register: not simply as another episode in a long regional struggle, but as a crisis touching the continuity of the state itself.

What should be done about Iran’s potential secret chemical and biological weapons programs?

Christina McAllister, Richard T. Cupitt

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Ahead of a televised address Wednesday, critics wanted US President Donald Trump to lay out a clear roadmap for ending the now month-long war in Iran and clarify the objectives for having started it. Denying that his goal was ever regime change, Trump emphasized in his speech the objective of preventing Iran from possessing a nuclear weapon. However, the future course of the conflict remains nearly as murky on Thursday as it was the previous day, as does the future of Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium. That’s also true of the status of possible secret chemical and biological weapons programs that appear to have received scant attention during recent events—despite years of US and likeminded-partner country concerns and sanctions.

After reportedly considering a ground-invasion to retrieve Iran’s highly enriched uranium, Trump said on Wednesday the country’s “nuclear dust” was inaccessibly buried under rubble and would be monitored by satellite (notably, the same status it was left in after last summer’s US-Israeli attacks, before this latest war). That may not reassure observers who fear that now Iran—its regime under severe stress, but expected to hold on to power—has more of an incentive to cross the nuclear weapons “threshold.”

The Real War for Iran’s Future Who Will Determine the Fate of the Islamic Republic?

Afshon Ostovar

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On March 1, 2026, the Iranian government made it official. “After a lifetime of struggle,” a state broadcaster declared, “Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei drank the sweet, pure draft of martyrdom and joined the Supreme Heavenly Kingdom.” The broadcaster praised Khamenei for being “unceasing and untiring” and for his “lofty and celestial spirit.” As he read the announcement, people offscreen wailed. When he finished, he, too, broke down in tears.

Most Iranians probably didn’t cry when they learned of Khamenei’s passing. For over 35 years, Iran’s supreme leader ruled with an iron fist, repressing women, minorities, and anyone who dared

A Plan to End the Iran War?

Lawrence Freedman

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This post was largely written yesterday with the aim of identifying a possible way forward to bring an end to the Iran War. This morning Reuters is reporting that Pakistan's army chief, Field Marshal ​Asim Munir, has been in contact ‘all night long’ with US ⁠Vice President JD Vance, special envoy Steve Witkoff and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas ​Araghchi to come up with a plan to be known as the ‘Islamabad Accords’. Under the proposal, a ceasefire would take effect immediately, ​reopening the Strait of Hormuz, with 15–20 days to finalise a broader settlement. The report also notes that buy in from Iran is uncertain.

My post looks at the two alternative approaches adopted by President Trump to ending the war and why neither of them currently works, and then the challenges facing Iran. I take a critical look at the Pakistani plan and end with a suggestion that I haven’t seen made elsewhere (for understandable reasons!)

Gulf Energy Strikes Risk Catastrophic Environmental Disaster – Analysis

Gabriele Malvisi

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When Iraqi forces withdrew from Kuwait in 1991, they left more than 700 oil wells burning in their wake. The fires took eight months to extinguish, spewing smoke plumes that stretched some 800 miles and spilling 11 million barrels of crude into the Gulf. It was one of the largest man-made environmental disasters on record. More than three decades on, the current US-Israeli war with Iran, which has seen oil infrastructure bombed across the region, has ignited fears of a comparable catastrophe.

“The 1991 Gulf War oil fires, while concentrated in Kuwait, were on a far greater scale than what we are seeing presently,” said Doug Weir, director of the Conflict and Environment Observatory, a UK-based nonprofit.

There Is No Military Solution To Strait Of Hormuz – OpEd

M.K. Bhadrakumar

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Indian media have spread misconceptions over the meeting convened by the UK Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper on Thursday 2nd April regarding the situation around the Strait of Hormuz. Far-fetched conclusions are drawn that the meeting marked the first step toward forming a coalition to restore safe passage; plans include clearing mines from the waterway in consultation with military planners in the coming weeks, and so on.

We should not frighten the Indian community living in the Persian Gulf region. A military confrontation with Iran is not even in the wildest dreams of anyone in Europe. The US didn’t even attend the London meet.

DW News | Ukraine’s Quiet Push – The Success Ukraine Doesn’t Want To Talk About

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“Ukraine’s Quiet Push — The Success Ukraine Doesn’t Want to Talk About,” a DW News video report featuring an extended on-the-record interview with DW’s longtime Kyiv correspondent Nick Connolly, provides an assessment of several underreported Ukrainian operational successes in early 2025. Ukrainian forces have conducted an escalating campaign of long-range drone strikes against Russian oil refineries and Baltic port infrastructure, deploying larger warheads that have amplified economic disruption and complicated Russia’s ability to monetize elevated global oil prices—though Ukrainian commanders now face Western political pressure to curtail those attacks.

Ukrainian forces have also “quietly” recaptured hundreds of square kilometers in the Zaporizhzhia sector, surpassing the territorial gains of the much-publicized 2023 counteroffensive, but have deliberately suppressed public messaging about these advances to avoid the credibility damage from overpromising two years prior. SpaceX’s February 2025 decision to terminate unauthorized Russian access to Starlink degraded Russian drone operations and command-and-control links, opening tactical windows that Ukrainian units exploited along the southern front before Russia began fielding improvised antenna alternatives. Russia’s spring offensive has produced negligible territorial returns at extraordinary human cost, with combined killed and wounded estimated in the hundreds of thousands, and Connolly assesses that, absent a collapse in Western financial support, a withdrawal of intelligence sharing, or an unexpected internal rupture within Russia itself, no near-term end to the conflict is plausible.

From Bargain to Breakdown: Five Strategic Futures for the Iran War

Chase Metcalf, Michael Posey

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Wars rarely end as their participants expect. Military campaigns launched to achieve clear political objectives often produce ambiguous, incomplete, or entirely unforeseen outcomes. The outcome of the conflict involving Iran, Israel, and the United States will shape not only Iran’s nuclear ambitions but also the balance of power in the Middle East and the security of one of the world’s most vital energy corridors.

As Carl von Clausewitz reminds us, “war is ultimately a continuation of policy by other means.” Military operations may reshape the battlefield, but the outcome of war is determined by political decisions and strategic adaptation. Rather than predicting a single outcome, strategists often explore multiple plausible futures to understand the risks and opportunities that may emerge. As President Trump took office, we offered our thoughts on potential scenarios for the Russian-Ukrainian War, and we do so here again.

The Iran Imperative How America and Israel Can Shape a New Middle East

Amos Yadlin and Avner Golov

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In early 2024, the Islamic Republic of Iran was riding high. It was the dominant external actor in four Middle Eastern states: Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen. Its missiles and armed proxies menaced and coerced Arab countries. Israel, Tehran’s main enemy, had been damaged by Hamas’s October 2023 attack and was fighting a seven-front war against Iranian proxies. The Islamic Republic’s nuclear program was moving steadily closer to producing a weapon as Iranian officials enriched uranium to 60 percent and expanded their ballistic missile manufacturing. Suddenly, the regime’s long-standing calls for “death to Israel” and “death to America” seemed

The Iran Shock And the Dangerous Allure of Energy Autarky

Jason Bordoff and Meghan L. O’Sullivan

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Within days of the initial U.S. and Israeli attack on Iran on February 28, 2026, the world was plunged into an energy crisis. Tehran’s near shuttering of the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas transit each day, amounted to the largest disruption of global energy flows in history, according to the International Energy Agency. Within the first three weeks of the conflict, oil prices rose by 55 percent. Gasoline jumped by roughly a dollar a gallon, and heating oil and jet fuel soared even higher. Many countries began to ration fuel, shorten workweeks, and close factories. It quickly became clear that until the strait reopened, prices would continue to climb, boosting inflation and dampening growth.

This crisis may appear to be unprecedented, but its contours are familiar. In 1973, Arab members of OPEC embargoed oil exports to countries supporting Israel in the Arab-Israeli war, causing a dramatic price spike that traumatized American consumers and contributed to high inflation and slow growth. The 1973 crisis also inspired efforts to avoid another shock. Governments took steps to reduce their reliance on imports, build strategic stocks, and pursue greater cooperation and market integration. Over time, policymakers grew more comfortable trusting their countries’ energy security to global markets.

Europe’s Untapped Arsenal

Elina Ribakova

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Immediately after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in February 2022, Ukrainian leaders pleaded with their American and European partners to help protect the skies over their territory. NATO’s air defense systems could protect Ukraine’s civilians, troops, and infrastructure from Russian missiles, albeit with a hefty price tag and a risk of escalation. Western leaders declined.

Today, it is Ukraine’s military assistance that is in demand. In response to a joint attack by the United States and Israel in late February, Iran began firing hundreds of missiles and drones at U.S. partners across the Middle East. The

The Next Coup Attempt

Timothy Snyder

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We are seven months away from the most consequential midterm election in the history of the United States. Meanwhile, we are fighting a war. These are the structural conditions for a coup attempt in which a president tries to nullify elections and take permanent power as a dictator. If we see this, we can stop it, overcome the movement that brought us to this point, and make a turn towards something better.

President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Pete Hegseth are stuck in the logic of escalation, according to which the feeling of defeat today can be reversed by doing the first thing that comes to mind tomorrow. Trump is surrounded by people who are making money from the war; each day of war strengthens a warmongering lobby with personal access to the president. As the war lengthens, the chance that it will be exploited for a coup attempt increases.

Trump falling into Iran’s asymmetric resolve trap

Charles Walldorf

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The Iranian people have not risen up, one hard-line leader has been replaced by another, Iranian missiles and drones keep hitting targets across the Middle East, Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, driving oil and gas prices up worldwide, and in sharp contrast to Trump’s demand for “unconditional surrender,” Tehran has rejected a 15-point US plan for a ceasefire.

So how did things go so wrong?

As a scholar who researches US forever wars, I believe the answer is simple: Trump, like other US presidents before him, has fallen into what I call the trap of asymmetric resolve. In short, this occurs when a stronger power with less determination to fight starts a military conflict with a far weaker state that has near boundless determination to prevail. Victory for the strong becomes tough, even close to impossible.

In Iran, air power fails America once again

John Arquilla

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When it comes to military affairs, wars sometimes act as time portals. Waged in the present, they frequently reflect the powerful pull of the past. They may also provide glimpses of the future of conflict, but too often it is the past that dominates the present. The current war against Iran is no exception, for the long American love affair with strategic bombing – which the Israelis have eagerly imported from the US military, and which is now heavily complemented by missiles – remains on full display.

Whether the war reaches a dismal conclusion or even expands with ground operations in the next few days, its lessons are becoming clearer. It should be no surprise that bombing alone has failed to defang the Iranian military or upend the ruling regime. American strategic air campaigns have regularly failed to achieve their goals for over 75 years.

A.I. Is on Its Way to Upending Cybersecurity

Cade Metz and Kate Conger

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Anthropic said late last year that state-sponsored Chinese hackers had used its artificial intelligence technology in an effort to infiltrate the computer systems of roughly 30 companies and government agencies around the world. In a blog post, Anthropic said it was the first reported case of a cyberattack in which A.I. technologies had gathered sensitive information with limited help from human operators. Human hackers, the company said, handled about 10 to 20 percent of the work needed to conduct the attack.

Five months later, that remains the only known example of a cyberattack driven largely by an “A.I. agent” — technology that can write computer code and use software on its own. But as Anthropic and its chief rival, OpenAI, prepare to release new and more powerful A.I. systems, cybersecurity experts are increasingly vocal in their warnings that A.I. is fundamentally changing cybersecurity.

Cloud-Seeding a Revolution

MAJ Collin Hayward

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In his excellent podcast on the Pacific War, Supernova in the East, Dan Carlin referred to the Japanese attempt to use the Indian National Army to foment a broad-based anti-colonial uprising in British India as an attempt to “cloud-seed a revolution”. This is an apt description. In cloud-seeding, scientists cannot create rain but can assess favorable conditions for it and release materials into the environment to precipitate that desired outcome. Throughout history, irregular warfare practitioners have attempted to foment unrest in adversary populations. Emerging technological trends present new opportunities to subvert and destabilize adversarial regimes by exploiting rifts in their societies. This piece outlines the process through which such a campaign could be conducted, explores why states might choose this approach, identifies the relevance of this approach to the contemporary operating environment and to Special Operations Forces, and addresses the risks and limitations of this approach.

How to Cloud-Seed a Revolution

When directed by national leadership to pursue the destabilization of an adversary regime, information warfare professionals employ a phased approach. In the first phase, they characterize the information and political environment to identify rifts in civil society, susceptible demographics, key grievances, previous protest movements, and credible local voices, as well as preferred local messaging and networking platforms. With this data, they then conduct link analysis; map networks; identify narratives, themes, messages, and symbols that would resonate with the target audience; and initiate deliberate planning. After developing an operational approach, they prepare the information environment by creating and conditioning social media accounts in key demographics or identifying existing accounts they could employ for this purpose.

France’s Efforts To Strengthen Its Drone Warfare Capabilities: Focus on the 2024-2030 Military Programming Law (MPL)

Samson Roudière Aboulkheir

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Article 34 of the 1958 French Constitution establishes programming laws that set long-term policy frameworks and define multi-year budget orientations—typically spanning 4 to 7 years. The Loi de Programmation Militaire (Military Programming Law or MPL) applies this mechanism to national defense. It outlines the French armed forces’ main priorities, identifies strategic challenges, and allocates the financial resources needed to modernize the military over the designated period. The 2024–2030 MPL seeks to reinforce France’s sovereignty and strategic autonomy. Compared with the previous law, it significantly increases defense spending. 

The MPL document states that the convergence of hybrid warfare and high-intensity conflict—illustrated by Russia’s war in Ukraine—requires scaling up the French Army’s equipment and capabilities and enhancing joint operations. The document outlines a major threat: “The international jihadist movement continues to present a significant security challenge for both Western states and fragile countries across the Muslim world, from Africa to Southeast Asia.” The document presents other evolving threats, including the use of proxies by competing powers to undermine French influence; mounting pressure on French overseas territories, particularly from China; and the destabilizing effects of climate change, which aggravate crises in fragile regions.

Hegseth’s War on America’s Military

Tom Nichols

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The United States is in the middle of a major war, but that didn’t stop Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on Thursday from firing General Randy George, America’s most senior Army officer. George was the Army’s chief of staff, and he was cashiered along with another four-star general, David Hodne, and Major General William Green Jr., the top Army chaplain, in what has been a rolling purge by Hegseth of senior officers—particularly those close to the secretary of the Army, Dan Driscoll.

Why were these men fired while U.S. forces are fighting overseas? The Defense Department has given no official reason for their dismissals, but likely they are the latest victims of Hegseth’s vindictive struggles with the Army, which he feels treated him poorly—the service “spit me out,” he said in his 2024 book—as he struggles in a job for which he remains singularly unqualified.

Ousted Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George says U.S. soldiers deserve "courageous leaders of character" in outgoing email

Lucia I Suarez Sang

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Ousted Army Chief of Staff, Gen. Randy George, told Pentagon officials in an outgoing email that U.S. soldiers deserve "courageous leaders of character," after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth asked him to step down and take immediate retirement. CBS News exclusively reported earlier this week on the general's ousting, with one source saying Hegseth wants someone in the role who will implement his and President Trump's vision for the Army.

An outgoing email, attributed to George and confirmed as authentic by CBS News on Saturday, circulated online after his ousting. A U.S. official told CBS News that George sent the email to Driscoll, the undersecretary and assistant secretary of the Army, as well as to the three- and four-star generals and officers on his staff.

Inside the fall of India’s ‘Maoist capital’: How policing, politics and a secret letter ended a 45-year insurgency

Shubhranshu Choudhary

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I just returned from Kutul, the undeclared capital of the Maoists in the Abujhmad region of the Dandakaranya forests in Central India. Though places like this have recently been declared free of Maoist domination, it is important to note that Maoists controlled more than 20,000 square kilometres for over 45 years from 1980, which they referred to as a “liberated area”.

I wanted to see the change. I had gone to Kutul around 15 years ago, and we had to walk. The trip had taken more than a month. This time our four-wheeler could go up to Kutul, though the road is still under construction. Kutul got mobile connectivity last January. The weekly market was brimming with people. Along with imli and mahua, images of Jesus were also on sale.

India and a Changing Global Order: Foreign Policy in the Trump 2.0 Era

Milan Vaishnav

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Donald Trump’s return to the White House has once again altered the contours of international politics. The second Trump administration has adopted a more assertive and unpredictable approach to U.S. foreign policy—deploying tariffs and other economic tools against both rivals and partners, expressing open hostility toward multilateral institutions, and pursuing a highly transactional, personalized style of diplomacy. These developments have unfolded amid intensifying geopolitical competition and the weakening of the post-Cold War international order, contributing to a more fluid and uncertain global landscape.

For India, this evolving context raises several important questions about the viability of its foreign policy approach. Over the past three decades, Indian foreign policy has been increasingly organized around a strategy of diversification—deepening cooperation with the United States and the West while also cultivating relationships across a wide range of regions and non-U.S.-aligned institutions. This approach, often described as “multi-alignment,” aims to secure the benefits of close ties with the West without incurring the costs of estrangement from other important partners, thereby preserving India’s strategic autonomy. The return of Trump brings into focus a fundamental question: To what extent is Trump 2.0 disrupting the foundations of India’s approach to the world, and where is it instead reinforcing longer-term trends that were already underway?

Repairing the Breach

Lisa Curtis, Keerthi Martyn and Sitara Gupta

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U.S.-India relations stumbled badly during the second half of 2025. Differences between U.S. and Indian officials over how a ceasefire was reached between New Delhi and Islamabad on May 10, 2025, created a breach of trust, while President Donald Trump’s imposition of 50 percent tariffs on Indian exports in August 2025 led to a crisis in the relationship.

The February 6, 2026, announcement of the U.S.-India framework for an interim trade deal provides an opportunity for the two nations to get the relationship back on track.1 This is important because India will play a key role in shaping the future of the Indo-Pacific region and has both the ambition and political will to help the United States compete more effectively against a rising China. The reduction in U.S.-India trade tensions will help unlock progress in other areas, such as energy, defense, technology, and maritime security, on which much groundwork has already been laid. However, reestablishing Indian trust in the relationship will take time, especially given the second Trump administration’s overtures to India’s archrival, Pakistan.

China imports US oil for Asian fuel markets amid Hormuz crisis

Jeff Pao

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China is moving to resume large-scale purchases of United States liquefied natural gas (LNG) and crude oil, as supply disruptions in the Middle East and tightening fuel markets across Asia force Beijing to recalibrate its energy strategy. Some observers view the move as a significant concession by Beijing, or even a strategic reward to Washington, after China halted US LNG imports in early 2025 when trade tensions escalated under US President Donald Trump’s tariff measures.

In return, China will have sufficient fuel supply to resume gasoline exports to Asian countries, helping it maintain market share and increase political influence in the region amid tightening fuel supplies. On March 11, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) ordered a halt to exports of gasoline, diesel and aviation fuel.

Telling China's Story Well: The PRC's Strategic Narrative as an Instrument of National Power

Jo Lam

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‘Chinamaxxing’ is a 2026 viral trend where non-Chinese social media users are sharing videos of themselves “learning to be Chinese” by adopting Chinese lifestyle and wellness behaviors. This trend is a recent example of the PRC’s growing soft power and influence around the world. As the U.S.’ soft power declines, China is swiftly catching up, narrowing its gap to only 1.5 points according to BrandFinance’s 2026 Global Soft Power Index.

China’s influence has been growing due to a long-term, concerted effort to “tell the story of China well” (讲好中国古事), a phase which President Xi introduced in 2013, elevating strategic narrative to a core priority of Chinese statecraft. In 2021, he elaborated on this directive, instructing Party members to "work hard to cultivate a trustworthy, loveable, and respectable image of China" (努力塑造可信、可爱、可敬的中国形象) in order to “expand China’s circle of friends”.

As Iran War Rages, Trump’s Gutting of Voice of America Undermines U.S. Influence

Markos Kounalakis

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As American and Israeli forces attack Iran, a critical weapon in our arsenal ​is badly broken​​.​ An enemy missile or a cyberattack did not destroy it; it was dismantled from within, a victim of Donald Trump’s shortsightedness.

The gutting of America’s international broadcasting and public-diplomacy tools—specifically the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), and the Voice of America’s (VOA) Persian service—amounts to unilateral disarmament in the information war. It is a mammoth strategic blunder, the consequences of which are coming into relief. Just as the administration has spurned allies and is now begging for their help to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, it has taken a hatchet to these public diplomacy tools and is hastily trying to rebuild them.

Exclusive: US intelligence assesses Iran maintains significant missile launching capability,

Haley Britzky, Natasha Bertrand,And Jim Sciutto

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Roughly half of Iran’s missile launchers are still intact and thousands of one-way attack drones remain in Iran’s arsenal despite the daily pounding by US and Israeli strikes against military targets over the past five weeks, according to recent US intelligence assessments, three sources familiar with the intel told CNN.

“They are still very much poised to wreak absolute havoc throughout the entire region,” one of the sources said of Iran. The US intelligence assessment total may include launchers that are currently inaccessible, such as those buried underground by strikes but not destroyed.

PRC Supply Chain Ecosystem Behind Iran’s Drone Campaign

Christopher Nye And Charles Sun

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The ongoing conflict in the Persian Gulf has been characterized by massive Iranian drone deployments. When questioned specifically about these strikes in mid-March, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) officially expressed its concern, condemning indiscriminate attacks and urging all parties to return to dialogue (MFA, March 13). Beneath this diplomatic posture, the PRC’s role in Iran’s drone supply chain has been a structural one. The transfer of critical technologies, manufacturing equipment, and components has occurred through private capital acquisition, reverse engineering of foreign technologies, and the systematic exploitation of dual-use trade ambiguities. Beijing’s consistent non-enforcement against known proliferators constitutes a form of strategic permissiveness that is itself a policy choice.

A complex, decentralized ecosystem of Chinese enterprises is currently working to support Iran’s war effort against the United States and Israel. Using open-source enterprise registration data from the platform Tianyancha (天眼查) and cross-referencing it with U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designation documents, it is possible to profile sanctioned PRC entities and reveal their functional roles within this supply chain. [1][1]All enterprise registration data cited in this article—including employee headcounts, registered capital figures, business scope classifications, and registration/deregistration records—is drawn from... Together, they constitute what this article terms a manufacturing plain: a decentralized landscape of interchangeable micro-enterprises that operates differently from the identifiable defense contractors traditional sanctions are designed to target. This topographical analogy highlights a vulnerability in current Western export control enforcement mechanisms. Like radar, these mechanisms are designed to strike highly visible objects, whereas this decentralized PRC network operates entirely beneath the regulatory line of sight.

Iran Can’t Hit America—but It Can Bomb American Companies in the Middle East

Peter Suciu

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Iran has hinted it will broaden the ongoing war by striking at American commercial targets across the Gulf, rather than purely military ones. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) threatened on Wednesday to carry out attacks on more than a dozen American tech firms if the United States continued to conduct attacks on the Islamic Republic. “In the name of Allah, the Merciful, so whoever attacked you, attack him as he attacked you,” the IRGC wrote in a statement published by Iran’s state-run Tasnim news agency.

“Warning to the aggressive American ruling body and its affiliated spy companies! You ignored our repeated warnings about the need to stop terrorist operations, and today, a number of Iranian citizens were martyred in both your and your Israeli allies’ terrorist attacks; since the main element in designing and tracking terror targets are American ICT and AI companies, in response to these terrorist operations, from now on, the main institutions effective in terrorist operations will be our legitimate targets,” the IRGC statement read.

Trump Gambled by Easing Oil Sanctions on Iran and Russia. Will It Pay Off?

Roxanna Vigil

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Roxanna Vigil is an international affairs fellow in national security at the Council on Foreign Relations, sponsored by Janine and J. Tomilson Hill. Most recently, Vigil served as a senior sanctions policy advisor at the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control.

President Donald Trump’s war on Iran has triggered the largest oil supply disruption in history. Around twenty million barrels of oil normally flow through the Strait of Hormuz each day—about 20 percent of global oil supply—but this critical waterway is now effectively closed. As a result, Brent crude prices have soared from around $70 to over $120 per barrel. Additionally, Gulf producers have cut production by approximately ten million barrels of oil per day as they’ve run out of storage capacity, according to the International Energy Agency.

Tehran’s Escalation Doctrine: Why Iran Is Now Targeting the Entire Middle East

Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury

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Iran’s latest missile and drone strikes across the Gulf signal a dangerous strategic shift. What once appeared to be a confrontation primarily between Tehran, Israel, and the United States is rapidly transforming into a wider regional conflict. By conducting military assaults on Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain, the Islamic Republic has effectively widened the battlefield and placed the stability of the entire Middle East at risk.

On March 7, 2026, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian publicly apologized to Iran’s Gulf neighbors after Iranian missile and drone strikes triggered air defense alerts in those states. In a televised statement, he expressed regret for the attacks and claimed that Tehran would halt strikes on neighboring countries unless attacks against Iran originated from their territory. But even as he spoke, air defense sirens and missile interceptions were continuing across the Gulf region.

Inside the push to ‘subdue the enemy without fighting’: Pentagon readying for cognitive war

Bill Gertz

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A version of this story appeared in the daily Threat Status newsletter from The Washington Times. Click here to receive Threat Status delivered directly to your inbox each weekday. The Pentagon’s Strategic Capabilities Office is launching an initiative to wage cognitive warfare — nonkinetic military operations short of major destructive conflict. Sam Gray, chief technology officer in charge of autonomy and artificial intelligence at the office, said the goal is to “disrupt the cognition and the thinking ability of an adversary or person and influence” adversaries’ perceptions, senses and actions.

Mr. Gray discussed the activity at a recent conference hosted by the National Defense Industrial Association in Honolulu, which was first reported by National Defense Magazine. The initiative will produce new cognitive warfare capabilities within three to five years to confront high-priority challenges, he said. In the past, influence operations were “physically observable,” such as the use of inflatable tanks to fool German military leaders in World War II.

Trump doesn’t need an Iran deal

Marc A. Thiessen

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President Donald Trump pauses during his speech about the Iran war from the White House on Wednesday. (Alex Brandon/Reuters)

In his address to the nation Wednesday night, President Donald Trump said that if there is no deal with Iran’s surviving leaders in the next two to three weeks, he will “bring them back to the stone ages.” Good. Trump does not need a deal to end Operation Epic Fury. In fact, he is much better off without one.

Hegseth’s ‘paranoia’ of being replaced explains purge of top general — as ally emerges for Army secretary’s role

Steven Nelson

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WASHINGTON — Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s “paranoia” about Army Secretary Dan Driscoll taking his job fueled the firing of the Army’s top general, current and former administration officials tell The Post — as a top contender emerges to replace Driscoll if he’s canned next. Hegseth on Thursday demanded the resignation of Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George — Driscoll’s top aide — in the middle of the Iran war for reasons that were not publicly stated.

“This is all driven by the insecurity and paranoia that Pete has developed since Signalgate. Unfortunately, it is stoked by some of his closest aides who should be trying to calm the waters,” an official said, referring to Hegseth’s March 2025 group chat with national security officials that inadvertently included a reporter.

America’s War Machine Runs on Tungsten—and It Could Run Out

Christina Lu

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The barrage of munitions that U.S. forces have fired into Iran have laid bare just how reliant the U.S. war machine is on a powerful metal that you’ve likely never heard of: tungsten.

The silvery metal is known for its exceptional density and for having the highest melting point of all pure metals. Those qualities have made it essential for the U.S. defense industry, powering everything from armor-piercing munitions to rocket nozzles.

America is irreplaceable. Europe better start acting like it

Mark Sedwill

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Trump hosts European leaders including Ursula von der Leyen, Friedrich Merz and Emmanuel Macron in the Oval Office last summer Watching Donald Trump’s address about Iran while travelling in the Gulf this week, two aphorisms from another era of superpower and ideological rivalry came to mind.

The first, usually attributed to Napoleon, is: “Never interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake.” The second is ascribed to Lord Melbourne, Queen Victoria’s first Prime Minister: “What I want is men who will support me when I’m in the wrong. Any fool can support me when I’m in the right.”

Both feel uncomfortably relevant.

Start with Napoleon. The principal beneficiaries of Operation Epic Fury so far are not America, not Israel, not the Gulf states and certainly not Europe, but Russia and China. Even though Iran’s conventional military is being decimated and regional proxies defanged, both are providing intelligence for Iran’s missile and drone attacks.

Russia’s Drone Line Experiment

Rob Lee and Dmytro Putiata

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During 2025, the Russian military continued to experiment with improving its employment of uncrewed aerial systems (UAS) in support of its maneuver forces. The Russian military actively records statistics on the effectiveness and success of different types of UAS in its units and develops recommendations for improving their efficiency. One of these initiatives was titled “Drone Line” by Russia’s 2nd Combined Arms Army (2 CAA), which began last summer. It was developed in response to the rapidly expanding role of UAS in the war and to Ukraine’s own Drone Line initiative, which was scaled at the end of 2024 and beginning of 2025. 

However, these two initiatives differed despite the same title. Ukraine’s Drone Line involved the establishment of five UAS regiments and brigades, which were intended to reinforce the maneuver brigades holding the front line. These units were initially assigned to the Ukrainian Ground Forces but were later transferred to the newly formed Unmanned Systems Forces. These Drone Line units were supposed to operate further past the forward line of enemy troops (FLET) than the UAS units within a regular maneuver brigade. The goal was to extend the “kill zone” from 10 kilometers beyond the FLET to 15 kilometers.

Europe’s Untapped Arsenal Ukraine Has Forged the Defense Industry the Continent Desperately Needs

Elina Ribakova and Lucas Risinger

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Immediately after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in February 2022, Ukrainian leaders pleaded with their American and European partners to help protect the skies over their territory. NATO’s air defense systems could protect Ukraine’s civilians, troops, and infrastructure from Russian missiles, albeit with a hefty price tag and a risk of escalation. Western leaders declined.

Today, it is Ukraine’s military assistance that is in demand. In response to a joint attack by the United States and Israel in late February, Iran began firing hundreds of missiles and drones at U.S. partners across the Middle East. The

Sharpening Neptune’s Trident: How the Navy Can Navigate the Fourth Industrial Revolution

Colonel Pat Garrett

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The U.S. Navy is facing enormous changes in the strategic environment, including competition from a rising China, resource constraints, and a fragile industrial base. This combination makes closing the gap between the nation’s security needs and fleet capacity profoundly difficult.1 Externally, the future strategic environment potentially includes a wave of game-changing technologies, from AI and quantum computing to directed-energy and hypersonic weapons, unmanned systems, and biotechnology.2 Internally, the Navy faces critical questions as it evaluates the roles and limits of robotic and autonomous systems (RASs).3 Together, these technologies and challenges generate significant risks for the Navy, and the most critical lie in how it seeks to incorporate and adapt to disruptive technologies.

Fortunately, the Navy is no stranger to fielding advanced technology, having been an early innovator in aviation, submarines, nuclear power, ballistic missiles, and missile defense. As Trent Hone has noted, the U.S. Navy proved adept at examining and integrating advanced technology into the fleet in the interwar period.Today’s Navy will have to continue this impressive tradition if it is to prevail in any contest, long or short, with peer competitors. To assist naval leaders charting the path of technological change spawned by the ongoing Fourth Industrial Revolution, the following historical lessons are offered. As David McCullough has observed, “History is an aid to navigation in perilous times.”4

America Doesn’t Have a Good Answer to Iran’s MANPADS Threat

Harrison Kass

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Last week, a US Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet was nearly hit by an Iranian MANPADS near the coastal city of Chabahar. The missile detonated near the F/A-18’s tail during a low-level strafing run. The aircraft survived the incident—but the incident highlighted the vulnerability of advanced aircraft to cheap, shoulder-fired missiles at low levels, highlighting how valuable relatively primitive portable air defense systems can be even in high-tech wars.

What Exactly Is a “MANPADS” System?

MANPADS is an abbreviation for “Man-Portable Air Defense System.” There are many different MANPADS systems in existence, but each is essentially a shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile.

The first MANPADS were developed in the 1950s and 1960s, but were initially constrained by their rudimentary targeting systems. As time went on, both Western and Soviet designers improved the missiles in their arsenals, leading to deadlier and deadlier systems. Perhaps the MANPADS’ most infamous hour came during the Soviet-Afghan War of the 1980s, in which the United States illicitly supplied thousands of FIM-92 Stinger MANPADS launchers to the Afghan mujahideen rebels, leading to the destruction of hundreds of Soviet helicopters and aircraft.

Year After ‘Liberation Day,’ Experts Review the Costs of Trump’s Tariffs

Inu Manak

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President Donald Trump declared a national emergency on foreign trade on April 2, 2025. Calling it “Liberation Day,” he announced unprecedented tariff rates for every U.S. trading partner at a level not seen since 1909. The ultimate goal was to reduce the U.S. trade deficit by forcing countries to the negotiating table.

But the Trump administration has sealed an underwhelming amount of trade deals in the ensuing year, and Americans have often borne the knock-on effects. Although the U.S. Supreme Court struck down some of Trump’s tariffs in late February, it appears that the White House is gearing up to get their tariff agenda back on track by other means. Five CFR experts break down how Trump’s tariff agenda has increased geopolitical and economic uncertainty over the past year and what implications it has for Americans.

Will Operation Epic Fury Affect the Midterm Elections?

James M. Lindsay

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The midterms are now seven months away. The election basics remain the same as a month ago. Democrats look poised to retake control of the House of Representatives, while Republicans are favored to retain their majority in the Senate. The one big change since last month was the start of Operation Epic Fury. Could it scramble the conventional wisdom on what will happen in November?

The answer to that question depends on how long the fighting lasts and how it ends. As things stand now, a majority of Americans opposes Operation Epic Fury. Should the war end in two to three weeks with gas prices quickly falling to pre-war levels, as President Donald Trump predicted in his address to the nation Wednesday night, then Operation Epic Fury will likely be quickly forgotten by most voters. They care far more about what happens at home than about what happens overseas. As George H.W. Bush discovered firsthand with the Gulf War, even a decisive U.S. victory would not alter that dynamic.

The Epic after the Fury: Analyzing Alternative Futures

Col. (res.) Shay Shabtai

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The achievements of the joint American-Israeli Operation Epic Fury/Roaring Lion are already fundamentally changing Iran’s strategic posture. However, several key variables are in question and can affect the operation’s results, and therefore it is appropriate to think about the future the using the methodology of Alternative Futures, and derive some understandings. This paper analyzes Alternative futures for possible evolving scenarios, for the characteristics of a continuation of the existing regime and for a different regime in Iran. 

The main conclusions from the analysis: Preparations should be made now for the post-war period including plans for enforcement by force and creating the conditions required for another round (‘Rising Lion 3’). The international community should demand a real agreement – a ‘CNOHMP Deal’ that addresses the Chemical, Nuclear, Hormuz, Missile and Proxy issues. Efforts should be increased to find leaders who can run Iran with a different approach: a “Gorbachev” in the existing regime and/or a “King” in another.

The proliferation of AI-enabled military technology in the Middle East

Noor Hammad

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Militaries’ investments in artificial intelligence-enabled military technology highlight a requirement for further regulation to maintain the strength of international-humanitarian law and protect civilians, and the inability of existing governance frameworks to manage commercial providers.

The Israel–Hamas war of May 2021 was described in the Israeli press as ‘the world’s first AI war’, integrating a number of new artificial intelligence (AI) systems into military technologies, from new target-identification processes to enhanced weaponry. Since then, the integration of AI into military technologies has progressed in leaps and bounds, with countries across the region seeking to make AI a part of their military architecture. Much of this has involved partnerships with commercial entities, from Israeli start-ups to big-tech corporations including Amazon, Google and Microsoft. As these entities have shown a tendency to circumvent their self-professed human-rights commitments and due-diligence obligations, greater regulation will be required to protect civilian lives and infrastructure during armed conflict.

Golden Dome, out-years and lots of missiles: Details of Trump’s $1.5T defense budget request

Ashley Roque, Valerie Insinna, Theresa Hitchens, Michael Marrow, Diana Stancy and Carley Welch 

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WASHINGTON — While the Trump administration is requesting $1.5 trillion in defense spending for fiscal 2027, that number will likely to trend downwards in the coming years based on projections revealed today by the Office of Management and Budget.

As part of the Trump administration’s broader FY27 budget request roll out, OMB broadly laid out plans to hike defense spending by budgeting $1.15 trillion in the base budget request and an additional $350 billion from a forthcoming reconciliation bill. This is the first time that base budget defense spending has hit the $1 trillion mark.

However, that $1.5 trillion figure could drop to $1.28 trillion in 2028, only rising to $1.35 trillion in 2031, if no additional reconciliation or supplemental dollars are approved, according to an OMB chart. Given that mid-term elections are coming up later this year and Democrats could reclaim one chamber, prospects of future reconciliation bills are dim, meaning that FY27 could simply be a one-year surge in funding.

Beware Pakistan’s General Bearing Peace Talks

Charles Lyons Jones

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In August 1969, a secret diplomatic cable from the United States embassy in Islamabad reported on a conversation between Henry Kissinger, then National Security Advisor to President Richard Nixon, and the head of Pakistan’s air force, Air Marshal Nur Khan. According to the cable, both Kissinger and Nur Khan agreed that China’s then premier Zhou Enlai might be willing to negotiate with the United States, provided that Washington withdrew its military forces from Taiwan.

The cable gave rise to a flurry of secret diplomacy seeking to broker detente between two Cold War rivals, drawing in the White House and the highest levels of the Pakistani and Chinese governments. The thrust of this old cable has a new relevance in the Iran conflict, with Pakistan again seeking to play a mediating role in talks involving America and an adversary. There is talk that US Vice President J.D. Vance might soon travel to Pakistan for a lead role in negotiations. He should be sure to read this history.

How China Dominates the World’s Critical Minerals Production

Kyle McCollum

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Critical minerals are mined all over the world but the majority of the supply ends up passing through China. For a broad range of key metals and minerals, China is either the largest miner, the dominant refiner, or both. This is true for rare earths, lithium, cobalt, graphite, nickel, and many other metals and minerals that are essential to defense, energy and high-tech applications. It is less about where ores are dug out of the ground and more about where they are turned into usable components. In other words, Chinese processing plants are essentially the gatekeepers of global supply.

Australia and South America host much of the world’s lithium, while Congo supplies the lion’s share of cobalt and copper. But the rocks themselves can’t become a battery or magnet without intensive downstream processing and refining. China built those downstream industries at scale over decades through state support and investment. The result is clear — China has effectively monopolized refining for most critical minerals while the rest of the world depends on it for much-needed supply. China is listed as the dominant refiner for 19 of 20 minerals analyzed by the IEA in their Global Critical Minerals Outlook for 2025, making up roughly 70% of the global processing capacity overall.