Indian Strategic Studies: 05/12/26

12 May 2026

Why Did Beijing Kill a $2 Billion AI Deal?

Lizzi C. Lee

Tech advocates and analysts once imagined a world in which talent, capital, and ideas would flow freely between China and California. The blocked acquisition of Chinese artificial intelligence firm Manus by U.S. giant Meta is another moment when the fantasy of seamless globalization smashes into the hard wall of national security politics.

On April 27, the office coordinating China’s foreign investment security review mechanism, housed under the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), retroactively prohibited Meta’s acquisition of the Singapore-based Manus in December and ordered the parties to unwind the transaction. It’s a frustrating moment for the Chinese tech sector, despite it being used to taking hard blows from the government. Chinese AI start-ups have long aspired to “go global” to the United States. For AI companies, the global market, with its high-paying customers, looks more attractive than China’s crowded domestic battlefield. Global capital markets are deeper and more abundant.

Why Trump’s China Trip Is Set Up to Fail

Charlie Campbell

This is how things will go down. U.S. President Donald Trump will arrive in Beijing next Thursday to be serenaded with gushing pageantry. There’s the obligatory photo op at the Great Hall of the People before closed-door talks with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping. Both leaders will emerge to a fanfare of superficial deals that each can claim as a win: the sale of American soybeans and perhaps jet engines that China desperately needs. They release statements pledging cooperation. Wheels up.

Of course, with Trump’s fragile cease-fire with Iran already cracking in the Strait of Hormuz, significant uncertainty clouds whether his China trip will happen at all. U.S. commanders-in-chief don’t typically gladhand their chief adversary while ensnared in a costly and floundering war. Trump is, however, no slave to convention, especially considering the ugly optics of postponing the trip a second time. What is much more certain is that nothing substantive will materialize from the summit.

China and the war in Iran: pragmatism and national resilience

Charting China

The US–Israel war against Iran has had a measured impact on China. China’s economy has weathered supply-chain shortages better than those of other Asian and European countries, and American interventionism has benefitted its efforts to promote an alternative world order. In addition, the war in Iran has diverted some American assets from the Pacific and contributed to the depletion of ‘finite levels’ of munitions in the United States.

Nevertheless, analysis of Chinese scholarship and the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) official response to the conflict identifies key areas of concern that are likely under discussion internally, including China’s vulnerability to global supply chains, the impact of the war on China’s ability to project itself as a neutral leader of the ‘Global South’ and how US actions may coerce middle powers away from China.

China has played key role in Iran war and will continue to do so

Tom Harper

Donald Trump has paused “Project Freedom”, the US operation aimed at restoring commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. In a post on social media just days after the operation was first announced, Trump said he had made the decision to give US negotiators time to reach an agreement with Iran to end the war.

Iranian state media framed the suspension as a US failure. Iran had warned that it would target vessels attempting to enter the waterway and subsequently launched missiles and drones at civilian ships and the United Arab Emirates. It is unclear where the conflict will go from here. But whatever happens next, the role of China will be crucial.

Trump's hopes for an Iran peace deal come with caveats

Bernd Debusmann Jr

Donald Trump's pause on a short-lived "Project Freedom" to guide ships through the Strait of Hormuz, as he claimed progress had been made towards clinching a "Complete and Final Agreement" with Iran, soothed oil markets and sent hopes soaring of a breakthrough.

But expectations were soon tempered by the US president himself.

Iran said on Wednesday it was reviewing a new proposal from Washington, after US media cited unnamed American officials as saying that the two sides were closing in on a one-page memorandum to end the war in the Gulf. A source close to mediators in Pakistan told Reuters news agency: "We will close this very soon. We are getting close."

Iran Wants to Make Sure it Can ‘Close’ the Strait of Hormuz Anytime It Wants

Andrew Latham

“Project Freedom” lasted 48 hours. The U.S. military launched escort operations through the Strait of Hormuz on May 5, sank six Iranian small boats, and guided two American-flagged merchant ships through the corridor. By Tuesday evening, President Trump had suspended the operation — citing diplomatic progress, deferring to Pakistan, announcing a pause to let negotiations breathe.

Secretary Rubio declared the combat operation against Iran over on Tuesday — the same day Project Freedom launched. Trump suspended the escort mission that evening. Two ships transited in forty-eight hours. Washington called that diplomatic progress. The operational record frames it differently.

The cold, hard realism of Saudi hedging

Leon Hadar

When the missiles began arcing across the Persian Gulf in late February, falling on Riyadh’s Eastern Province as well as on American bases in Bahrain, Qatar, and the UAE, the editorial pages in Washington reached for a familiar refrain: now, surely, the Saudis would have to choose.

The Iran war, we were told, would clarify what years of frustration with the kingdom’s “drift” toward Beijing and Moscow had not—that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s flirtations with multipolarity had been a luxury the Gulf could afford only in peacetime, and that the iron logic of deterrence would soon restore the old American-led order.

Why Iran Isn’t Blinking Yet

Keith Johnson

In a way, the impasse between the United States and Iran over the still-closed Strait of Hormuz boils down to storage.

The Trump administration believes that the two-week-old, semi-porous U.S. blockade of Iranian shipping will soon bring Tehran to its knees by forcing it to shut down oil wells as it runs out of storage space for crude it can no longer ship. That looming production shutdown, the administration believes, threatens Iran with permanent, severe damage to a major part of its economy, and explains why Washington appears content to wait for an Iranian surrender that has yet to materialize in the eight-week war.

A new Middle Eastern quadrilateral is taking shape

A group of four regional powers – Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Türkiye – are closing ranks at a time when the Middle East’s security landscape is being transformed beyond recognition. The new Middle Eastern quadrilateral appears to be an attempt to counterbalance Israel’s designs to ‘redraw’ the map of the Middle East and to address shared security concerns, most notably the United States–Israeli war with Iran. Although the bloc is unlikely to evolve into a defence alliance, it could nevertheless crystallise into a concert of powers that plays a significant role in managing shared security concerns.

The first meeting of the foreign ministers of Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Türkiye took place on 19 March 2026 in the Saudi capital Riyadh. The meeting was held on the sidelines of a wider consultative gathering of the foreign ministers of Arab and Islamic countries that condemned Iran’s attacks on the Arab Gulf states. Two subsequent meetings between the four countries’ foreign ministers were held on 29 March in Islamabad, Pakistan and 18 April in Antalya, Türkiye. During both meetings, the ministers expressed support for Pakistan’s mediation effort between the US and Iran. The quadrilateral also held a meeting of senior officials at deputy foreign ministers level in Islamabad ahead of the group’s third ministerial meeting in Antalya, indicating a desire to build a more institutionalised consultative mechanism.

Why Trump Might Come to Regret the Iran War

Aaron David Miller

The U.S.-Israeli war against Iran is now entering its third month. The average length of an interstate conflict in the past 200 years is three to four months, though many wars last far longer. This one shows little sign of abating.

But the war may be entering a new phase where prospects for a transformational change on the battlefield or at the negotiating table are receding. We need to adjust our frame of reference accordingly. Instead of looking for a determinative ending, a final resolution, or a negotiated agreement, this war may end up as just another round in an ongoing, half-century confrontation between the United States and Iran. Five politically inconvenient realities now define where we are.

The Hormuz Inferno: Naval Clashes and the Limits of American Power

Navroop Singh and Himja Parekh

In the early hours of May 8, 2026, the uneasy ceasefire between the United States and Iran began to fracture under the pressure of direct confrontation in the Persian Gulf. What had been marketed only weeks earlier as a fragile but functional pause after the April 7 truce rapidly devolved into a new phase of brinkmanship marked by naval clashes, missile interceptions, drone warfare, diplomatic strain among Gulf allies, and mounting evidence that the conflict was evolving into a prolonged war of endurance rather than a short campaign of coercion.

The strikes launched by American forces against Iranian targets near Qeshm Port, Bandar Abbas, and reportedly Minab were presented by Washington as calibrated defensive actions rather than the reopening of total hostilities. Yet beneath the careful language of de-escalation, the reality unfolding across the Strait of Hormuz suggested something far more dangerous: a contest over maritime control, alliance credibility, and the limits of blockade warfare in one of the world’s most strategically vital waterways.

Trump’s Gyrations on the War Leave Even Rubio Out of Sync

Erica L. Green

When Secretary of State Marco Rubio took to the lectern of the White House press briefing room on Tuesday, he seemed to revel in serving as the administration’s chief spokesman of the day. He smiled, joked and jabbed gently at reporters, calling on them by the color of their blazers. He took on a range of questions on topics from rising gas prices to Cuba to his upcoming visit with the pope. He invoked the lyrics of ’90s hip-hop songs to describe U.S. adversaries.

And when it came to the war in Iran, or Operation Epic Fury as President Trump branded it in February when the United States joined Israel in striking the country, Mr. Rubio confidently described the state of play in a conflict whose status has been increasingly muddy.

The Tragic Decline of the American Navy

Robert D. Kaplan

Alfred Thayer Mahan, a 19th-century naval officer and pre-eminent military strategist, believed his young country was destined to be great because of its Navy. Toward the end of his service, Mahan, then a U.S. Navy captain, wrote a landmark book about the age of sailing ships. Read avidly by kings, prime ministers and presidents — including Theodore Roosevelt, Kaiser Wilhelm II and the young Winston Churchill — the book posited the idea of a free world anchored by American sea power.

Mahan believed America needed a large number of ships to fight decisive battles and to keep sea lanes open and international commerce flowing. This vision, which was both humanitarian and self-serving, soon came to pass, starting with the Spanish-American War of 1898, which Mahan avidly supported. After World War II, the U.S. Navy possessed some 7,000 vessels that went on to dominate the oceans for the next half century. The United States, with its blessed geography fronting two oceans, had embarked upon its imperial destiny, with the naval power to back up its values.

This Is Not the World Russia Wants

Hanna Notte

The 2022 invasion of Ukraine marked only the peak of Russia’s long turn toward revisionism. Since the Cold War ended, Russia has sought to shape Europe’s security architecture and impose its will on smaller neighbors. The Kremlin has also clashed with the United States and Europe at the United Nations and in other multilateral bodies. Its leaders condemned the concept of a rules-based international order as a Western invention meant to cement U.S. hegemony. Styling itself as a vanguard promoting a more multipolar order, Russia sought to increase its own global clout, unencumbered by restraints and rules.

But now it finds itself in the curious position of watching the United States behave more like Russia. On the surface, this may seem a boon for Russian President Vladimir Putin. Instead of contending with a Washington that resists his land grabs and tussles with him in multilateral forums, he has a simpatico U.S. president who appears to ascribe to his might-makes-right worldview. Donald Trump has bashed international institutions in language reminiscent of Russian broadsides, withdrawing the United States from dozens of UN agencies and stripping them of funding while launching a rival conflict-settlement body, the Board of Peace. And he has asserted a right to coerce, even attack, smaller countries in the style of Russia’s bullying.

Robot wars - what an operation in Ukraine tells us about the battlefield of the near future

Joe Tidy

The battlefield in Ukraine could soon feature more robot than human soldiers - that is the startling claim made by a Ukrainian-British military start-up. The BBC visited UFORCE at its London premises, which are unbranded and discreet, a measure the company says is intended to protect it from potential Russian sabotage.

I wanted to know more about the company because of its involvement in what Ukraine says was an unprecedented military operation: enemy territory being seized using only robots and drones. The claim was made by Ukraine's President Zelensky in a video last month highlighting Ukraine's newly developed robotic weapons.

Rethinking the Theory of Victory for the “Next War”

Col. Takayasu Iwakami

War ought never to occur. However, despite this widely held belief, the use of force continues to shape international politics across Europe, the Middle East, and beyond. Even when one side renounces the intention to employ force, an adversary may still retain—and ultimately use—it, rendering national security unattainable through restraint alone. Thus, while preventing war remains paramount, responsible defense planning requires anticipating unforeseen contingencies and ensuring the ability to prevail should deterrence fail. This raises a fundamental question for any state seeking credible deterrence: What level of relative combat power must be sustained during peacetime to ensure reliable success in wartime?

Nowhere is this challenge more acute than in the Indo-Pacific. Japan confronts a rapidly evolving security environment marked by limited topographical depth, demographic constraints, and increasingly capable adversaries. For a nation that must deter aggression under such structural limitations, the question of force ratios is not abstract but existential. It directly shapes how Japan—and by extension, the US–Japan alliance—must prepare for deterrence and defense in a region where the balance of power is shifting.

BBC traces how 10 minutes of Israeli bombing brought devastation to Lebanon

In the southern suburbs of Beirut, the neighbourhood of Hay el Sellom is barely recognisable.

What was once a densely populated, lively community is now a landscape of collapsed concrete, twisted metal and exposed wires. Homes have been reduced to layers of rubble. Staircases lead nowhere. The sounds of everyday life have been replaced by silence.

Despite repeated Israeli attacks since the start of the Iran war on other parts of Beirut's southern suburbs, where Hezbollah holds sway, residents say this neighbourhood remained calm until the afternoon of 8 April.

Beirut's southern suburbs had faced repeated Israeli evacuation orders and air strikes since the start of the war, but residents told us few people left Hay El Sellom, as they had nowhere to go. They also said that this neighbourhood had remained relatively calm.

The Lessons of the Long Confucian Peace

Michael J. Gigante, Joshua Stone, Daniel Druckman, and Ming Wan

For decades, scholars and politicians have marveled at the fact that democracies do not fight one another. “The absence of war between democracies comes as close as anything we have to an empirical law in international relations,” wrote the political scientist Jack Levy in 1988. “Democracies don’t attack each other. They make better trading partners and partners in diplomacy,” U.S. President Bill Clinton declared in 1994. “There are no clear-cut cases of one democracy going to war against another,” the political scientist Michael Doyle wrote in 2024, “nor do any seem forthcoming.”

The lack of war among the world’s many democracies is, indeed, impressive. But it is not the first time a group of like-minded countries have been at peace for an extended period. From 1598 to 1894, most of East Asia—China, Japan, Korea, the Ryukyu Kingdom (now part of Japan), and Vietnam—was largely devoid of internal fighting. According to research we recently published in The Journal of Conflict Resolution, these states fought one another only 22 times over this 300-year era—or just four percent of the nearly 200 wars and conflicts they engaged in over the course of that period. And the key to this peace, we argue, was a shared ideology: Confucianism.

The Plow and the Well: Conflict Is Moving to Systems

Russell D. Howard, Alicia Ellis, Sarah Shoer

Control over water, food, and supply chains is increasingly shaping how power operates in modern conflict with non-state armed groups. When these systems fail, recruitment rises; when they are controlled, they become tools of governance; and when they are deliberately disrupted, they can generate effects far beyond the point of impact. This framework shifts counterterrorism analysis from an actor-centric to a systems-centric approach.

Counterterrorism efforts have long been focused on tracking networks, targeting leadership, and disrupting ideology. While attention remains fixed on communications, financing, and battlefield activity, a more fundamental driver of instability is unfolding in plain sight. The next front line of conflict is less about hidden compounds or urban battlefields and more about the systems people rely on in everyday life: water, food, and the infrastructure that moves them. Where wells run dry, crops fail, or supply chains fracture, instability takes root well before violence becomes visible. Understanding future conflict requires looking past ideology and focusing instead on what populations depend on to survive.

The End of Khomeinism and the Future of Shiism

Ayaan Karan

Since 1979, the Iranian regime has invested heavily in molding the Shia political identity around Khomeinism, reaching Shias from Bahrain to the United States. Drawing from non-Twelver Shia sources, Khomeini was decisive in transforming a historically quietist community into a politically revolutionary one. But the fall of Iran’s regional empire and the death of Khamenei begs the question: What is next for Shiism? Do Shias revert to a more politically quietist mindset, or will a far more radical movement follow the Axis’s collapse? The answer is both.

Traditionally, Twelver Shiism was never a politically savvy religion. Awaiting the arrival of the twelfth Imam (Messiah), Twelver Shias tended to be politically quietist and pragmatic. However, heretical extremism is not a stranger to the Shia faith. For most of early Islamic history, the majority of Shia were not Twelvers, the dominant branch today. The religion was a web of different sects, many of which were known as the Ghulat (Exaggerators). Ghulat sects differed on a bevy of issues, but common traits included apocalypticism, militancy, and messianism centered on a charismatic leader.

How America’s Adversaries Learned to Weaponize Reality

Irina Tsukerman

Who is actually winning the wars in Ukraine and Iran, and what would victory even look like if neither battlefield momentum nor economic punishment produces political collapse? How much territory would Ukraine have to recover before Russia could be said to have lost? How much damage would Iran have to suffer before its regional position is truly weakened? If both regimes continue to function, mobilize support, and persuade their populations that the struggle remains necessary, then the more uncomfortable question will begin to surface: whether the real contest has already shifted away from terrain and toward something far less visible but ultimately more decisive.

Wars today increasingly turn on whether governments can control how reality itself is interpreted. Military force can destroy infrastructure, impose casualties, and degrade capabilities, yet political outcomes depend on whether societies interpret those losses as defeat or as sacrifice. Economic pressure can shrink output and isolate financial systems, yet it only produces strategic results when populations or target audiences in the regime begin to see hardship as pointless rather than necessary. Narrative therefore does not sit beside military conflict as a communications tool.

AI Is Entering Defense Workflows. Now the Pentagon Needs a Way to Evaluate It.

Jim Allen

When I ran joint operations centers at U.S. European Command and U.S. Army Pacific, new officers regularly rotated onto the watch floor to brief senior leaders. I would never allow a new officer to brief a four-star commander without first watching them work. I need to know how clear they speak, how well they understand the material, and how they respond when challenged. Trust must be built.

Artificial intelligence deserves the same treatment.

AI tools are rapidly entering Defense Department workflows through initiatives such as GenAI.mil and other experimentation programs. The debate is no longer whether AI can generate useful outputs. The question is whether the department can trust, understand, and control how those systems behave in real operational environments.

Cyberattacks are now part of US counterterrorism strategy

DAVID DIMOLFETTA

Offensive cyber operations may be used against groups deemed threats to U.S. interests, the Trump administration says in its new counterterrorism strategy. Counter-terror activities against state actors “include offensive cyber operations against those planning to kill Americans or who support those plotting to do so,” says the strategy, which was released on Wednesday.

Groups who present threats include narcoterrorists and transnational gangs, Islamic terrorist groups, and “violent left-wing extremists, including anarchists and anti-fascists,” the document says. Diplomatic, financial, cyber, and covert actions may be used to deter or otherwise hinder state actors from helping foreign terrorist organizations, the strategy says. Cybe

Spectrum, 6G, and the Future of AI Leadership

Taylar Rajic and Matt Pearl

As AI continues to proliferate from autonomous systems to industrial automation, so too will the demand for quick, reliable, low-latency connectivity. This evolution will place spectrum policy as a central pillar for AI advancement, underpinning the key infrastructure needed for these systems to deploy. The advancements of 6G technology—the sixth generation of mobile communication technology set to surpass 5G in speed, connectivity, and AI integration—will also accelerate the demand for broader spectrum.

As 6G is being developed with AI integration, the capability of this technology will depend on access to midband spectrum, further integrating the importance of spectrum, AI, and telecommunications policy as interdependent. The United States will need to expand the spectrum pipeline to meet the demand of AI, 5G, and 6G, which is increasingly reliant on high-speed, low-latency connectivity for training, inference, and edge computing. Given this convergence of factors, spectrum policy is increasingly resembling AI policy, and the failure to adapt to the needs of the present moment ultimately risks U.S. competitiveness against China.

That's a nice Think Tank you have there... ...be a shame if someone were to automate it.

Kenneth Payne

I’m sure many think tankers are steadfastly resisting AI prose. But one blue chip institution has recently been called out for publishing bad AI writing. And I know of one very high-profile pundit who uses agents to produce their high-demand assessments. I won’t embarrass anyone, or their lawyers, by naming and shaming. There will be much, much more of this stuff. It’s not just think tanks: AI content is sweeping through intellectual life - including journalism, consulting and even, whisper it, academia. Talk is cheap, and it’s getting ever cheaper.

Well, surely we can do better than just whacking a prompt into ChatGPT and filling out an expenses invoice. We’ve just entered the era of agentic AI, where the bots are capable of heading out into the world and doing their own thing. So, I thought I’d create a virtual think tank staffed by said bots. If you’ve got a policy problem, if no one else can help you, and if you can find us, then boy do we have a policy paper for you.

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