Is this a 'very Chinese time in your life'? The trend boosting China's soft power

Koh Ewe

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Ni hao, we're all Chinese now.

Or at least that's what they claim on TikTok, where a trend called "Chinamaxxing" has taken off in the West.

Chinese wellness practices, once associated with the tacky and geriatric, have suddenly found themselves in vogue, largely among Americans.

From warm apple-boiled water to indoor slippers and longevity exercises, people are sharing videos of themselves "learning to be Chinese". Many come with the Fight Club-inspired caption "you met me at a very Chinese time in my life", or the hashtag #newlychinese.

As Donald Trump shakes up the world order, the Chinese Communist Party has welcomed this boost to the country's image.

How Would a US Strike on Iran Play Out?

Harrison Kass

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US carrier strike groups (CSGs) have surged into the Middle East as tensions with Iran increase. As Washington threatens action over Iranian internal repressions, the question becomes: what would a carrier-led strike against Iran actually look like?

A carrier campaign against Iran would likely be limited, precision-focused, and integrated with long-range assets—not a full-scale invasion, but a calibrated coercive strike roughly akin to the mission that captured Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro in early January.

The US Has Been Fighting Wars Off of Aircraft Carriers for Decades

US carrier operations in the Middle East have precedent. Operation Praying Mantis in 1988 featured naval and air strikes against Iranian assets in retaliation for the mining of US warships. During the Iraq War, carrier air wings provided sustained strike tempo. And during the campaign against ISIS, carriers operated in the Persian Gulf, launching sorties daily. The historical takeaway is that carriers can serve as mobile, sovereign airbases, reducing dependence on regional bases and providing persistent strike capability.

Iranian Minister: Here’s How Iran Sees the U.S.

Ahmad Meidari

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Robert Reich’s recent Guardian essay, titled “Donald Trump poses a threat to civilization,” raises an alarm that deserves to be heard well beyond the borders of the United States. His argument is not narrowly partisan; it is civilizational. At its core lies a question confronting all societies today: whether power will continue to abandon moral restraint, or whether humanity can still arrest the slide toward "de-civilization.”

On this point, I find myself in deep agreement with Mr. Reich.

In our ethical and religious tradition, defending the oppressed against the oppressor is not a slogan but a duty. An old maxim, familiar to many Iranians, captures this plainly: Be a pillar of support for the downtrodden. Civilizations are not judged by the reach of their power, but by how that power is exercised.

The End of a Lie

ANTARA HALDAR

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In his now-famous speech to this year's gathering of global elites in Davos, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney rightly drew on a key insight from the late Václav Havel. Institutions fall first in the realm of belief, when people begin abandoning their assigned roles in legitimizing rituals.

When the late playwright Tom Stoppard’s Rock ‘n’ Roll first opened 20 years ago, it was deeply personal for me as a student at Cambridge studying film in Prague. A meditation on the clash between communism and capitalism in Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic and Slovakia), it dwelt on the confrontation between high theory and lived reality in a way that moved me profoundly. Two decades later, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s recent speech in Davos felt like the sequel.

Continental Drying: A Threat to Our Common Future

Zhang, Fan, Christian Borja-Vega, Hrishikesh Arvind Chandanpurkar,

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Grounded in new evidence from satellite data, “Continental Drying: A Threat to Our Common Future” presents the first global assessment of freshwater reserves over the past two decades. The findings expose an alarming trend of “continental drying,” a persistent long-term decline in freshwater availability across vast landmasses. Not only are droughts and deluges becoming more unpredictable, but the total amount of freshwater available for use has also significantly declined. Continental drying, driven by global warming, worsening droughts, and unsustainable water and land use, is a silent but accelerating crisis—largely unknown to the public—that reshapes the global water narrative. Continental drying raises profound risks. This report reveals new empirical evidence showing how freshwater depletion leads to major job losses, reduced incomes, wildfires, and biodiversity threats. In the long term, the combined effects of drying and warming could push societies toward a tipping point where damage accelerates rapidly and adaptation becomes increasingly difficult.

Missing the Mark: Why Golden Dome is Bad for American Taxpayers

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Golden Dome rests on a promise it cannot deliver—reliably defending the United States from the threat of nuclear weapons. Since the 1960s, the United States has spent more than $450 billion trying to develop missile defense systems capable of reliably defending the U.S. from intercontinental ballistic missile threats.[i] No system to date has demonstrated that capability. Despite this history of costly failure, President Donald Trump has proposed building a “Golden Dome” missile defense system with that same goal in mind.[ii]

Originally labelled “Iron Dome for America,” the program draws its inspiration from Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system. However, the comparison masks critical differences in the challenges facing these systems—Israel’s missile defenses are designed to defend against short- and medium-range missiles and rockets armed with conventional bombs, while Golden Dome aims to protect the entire United States, a far larger area, against nuclear-armed, intercontinental-range weapons. The viability challenges associated with Golden Dome are thus vastly greater than those facing Israel’s missile defense systems, as are the likely costs.

Yemen: Conflict, Red Sea Security, And U.S. Policy

Christopher M. Blanchard

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Yemen is a conflict-afflicted nation along the strategic Bab al Mandab Strait, one of the world’s most active shipping lanes. Since 2015, a civil war has pitted the Iran-backed Houthi movement against Yemen’s internationally recognized government, the government’s foreign backers, and other anti-Houthi forces. The Houthis control most of northwestern Yemen, including the capital, Sana’a (Figure 1). Foreign intervention complicates the conflict, which has contributed to a longstanding and ongoing humanitarian crisis. An uneasy truce has frozen conflict lines since 2022.

The Iran-backed Houthis launched numerous attacks on international shipping from October 2023 (after Hamas-led attacks on Israel sparked the war in Gaza) to December 2024, before pausing these attacks in early 2025. From March to May 2025, U.S. forces expanded strikes against the Houthis seeking to compel a lasting end to Houthi maritime attacks. The U.S. campaign ended under an agreement brokered by neighboring Oman in which the Houthis agreed to cease targeting U.S. vessels and the United States agreed to halt strikes on the Houthis. The Houthis renewed attacks on some non-U.S. ships in July 2025 and continued to launch long-range strikes against targets in Israel, ostensibly to compel Israel to end its war with Hamas. The Houthis suspended their attacks after the October 2025 Israel-Hamas ceasefire, but have signaled their willingness to relaunch attacks if war resumes in Gaza.

Breaking China’s Hold on Critical Minerals Requires More than Tariffs

Elaine Dezenski, and Daniel Swift

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The Trump administration has unveiled two new initiatives to break China’s grip on critical minerals. One has a high likelihood of success. The other needs a strong dose of enforcement to work.

At a ministerial meeting in Washington this month, the administration introduced the Forum on Resource Geostrategic Engagement (FORGE). The initiative seeks to establish price floors for critical minerals through coordinating tariffs with partner countries, preventing China from undercutting competitors through subsidies and dumping. Vice President JD Vance described it as a way to stabilize markets and blunt Beijing’s ability to weaponize price volatility.

A day earlier, the administration announced Project Vault, a public-private partnership that would secure advance purchase commitments from US manufactures for critical minerals at defined prices. The two initiatives reflect very different theories of change, but both initiatives start with a realistic diagnosis.

Why Donald Trump Is Right to Intervene in the UK’s Chagos Islands Deal

Azeem Ibrahim

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The US and the UK have shared a military base on Diego Garcia, the largest island in the Chagos Islands, since the 1970s. As I previously argued in the Washington Examiner, Diego Garcia is not an obscure colonial relic but a cornerstone of Western power projection in the Indo-Pacific and Middle East.

The proposed agreement would see the United Kingdom transfer sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius while leasing back the base for nearly a century at a cost reportedly running into the billions. This is being framed in London as a legal tidy-up, a necessary act of post-colonial housekeeping. In reality, it is a profound strategic surrender dressed up as moral rectitude.

Trump is correct to oppose it for three core reasons: deterrence credibility, alliance coherence, and systemic competition with China.

Europe Must Make AI Firms Pay for Training Data

ANYA SCHIFFRIN and ROBERTA CARLINI

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AI summaries and chatbots are siphoning traffic from news sites, but the current process for demanding compensation – suing tech firms – is slow, expensive, and unfair. The European Union must act now to implement a fixed payment scale, before more media outlets go under and tech firms become too powerful to regulate.

Media outlets worldwide are dying. On top of a persistent lack of funding, they must now contend with AI summaries and chatbots, which are siphoning away audiences. A recent study found that in 2025, online traffic to news sites fell by one-third. This problem should concern everyone, not just journalists and media executives, because democratic societies cannot function without quality information. At a time of polarization, fragmentation, and democratic backsliding, news outlets that provide quality journalism are more necessary than ever.

Europe’s Next War

Samuel Charap and Hiski Haukkala

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For the last four years, policymakers in Washington and European capitals have been consumed by a single question: how to respond to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Their focus is understandable. Russia’s attack on its neighbor is the greatest threat to European security since U.S. and Soviet tanks stood off in Berlin over 60 years earlier. As a result, NATO allies have sent Ukraine hundreds of billions of dollars in military, economic, and humanitarian assistance to prevent it from losing the war and collapsing. The Europeans have received waves of refugees and, together with the Americans, enacted tough sanctions against Russia. Facing pressure from U.S. President Donald Trump, leaders across the alliance have held a series of summits to try to end the fighting.

But the resolution of the conflict, whatever its contours, will not put an end to the forces it has unleashed. Indeed, a cease-fire could mark the start of an even more dangerous era. Once the guns fall silent, Russia and Ukraine will still be locked in a tense confrontation. Moscow will rearm and likely increase its destabilizing activities across the continent. Europe will keep spending more on defense, disavowing the integration it once pursued with Russia and adopting a more hawkish posture. The United States might try to disentangle itself from the standoff, but its economic and political stakes in Europe will make a full withdrawal impossible. There will, in short, be little communication and much suspicion between NATO and Russia.

Tariffs ruling is major blow to Trump's second-term agenda

Anthony Zurcher

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Donald Trump had been warning for months that a Supreme Court decision like this would be catastrophic.

If the court curtailed his ability to impose these tariffs, he had said, it would be an "economic and national security disaster".

A six-justice majority of the Supreme Court, in ruling against the president on Friday, didn't care much about his concerns.

Congress, not the president, has the power to impose tariffs, the justices ruled. And nothing in the law that the president based his tariffs on, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977, delegated such sweeping powers to Trump.

The signal and the noise: How media fragmentation is changing politics and what governments need to do to adapt

Sam Freedman

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Blaming “comms” for an organisation’s struggles is always a misdiagnosis. It’s impossible to resolve fundamental contradictions in strategy, or cover up the inadequacy of a product, by writing a better press release. The same is true of government. Keir Starmer isn’t in trouble because he can’t find the right Director of Communications but because he isn’t clear on what he wants to do or why.

But even when the government does have something to say it can’t get anyone to pay attention. Many of their policies, from a higher minimum wage to improved employee rights and rail nationalisation, poll well individually but few voters give the government any credit for doing them, if they’ve noticed at all.

Musk cuts Starlink access for Russian forces - giving Ukraine an edge at the front

Paul Adams

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Evidence is mounting that Elon Musk's decision to deny Russian forces access to his Starlink satellite-based internet service has blunted Moscow's advance, caused confusion among Russian soldiers and handed an advantage to Ukraine's defenders.

But for how long? And what can Ukraine's military achieve in the meantime?

"The Russians… lost their ability to control the field," a Ukrainian drone operator who goes by the callsign Giovanni told us.

"I think they lost 50% of their capacity for offence," he said. "That's what the numbers show. Fewer assaults, fewer enemy drones, fewer everything."

It's still early to assess the impact of a change that only came into effect at the beginning of the month, after Ukraine's defence minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, asked Elon Musk's SpaceX company to block Russian access to Starlink.

US is withdrawing all 1,000 troops from Syria: WSJ report

Elizabeth Melimopoulos

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The United States is preparing to pull back the nearly 1,000 troops from its military that remain in Syria, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing three US officials.

Al Jazeera was not immediately able to independently verify the report on Wednesday.

Last week, the US military confirmed it was withdrawing from the al-Tanf base, located in southern Syria near borders with Iraq and Jordan.

The base served as a ‌key hub for operations for the global coalition against ISIL (ISIS), which at the time controlled large areas of Syria and Iraq until sustaining critical losses in 2017.

The Diego Garcia Mistake Donald Trump Must Fix

Michael Rubin

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On February 18, 2026, President Trump publicly warned British PM Keir Starmer that entering a 100-year lease for Diego Garcia with Mauritius is a “big mistake.”

-Contradicting previous State Department backing, Trump argued that the base’s sovereignty is non-negotiable, particularly as tensions with Iran reach a breaking point.

-With the Starmer government already reeling from the Peter Mandelson/Epstein scandal, Trump’s escalation highlights the base’s role as a vital launchpad for long-range bombers.

-Critics argue that ceding sovereignty to a Beijing-aligned Mauritius creates a strategic vulnerability that the “Donroe Doctrine” will not tolerate.

A year of failure: Trump’s attempt to end the Russia-Ukraine war

Steven Pifer

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President Trump returned to the White House in 2025 claiming he would quickly end the Russia-Ukraine war. But the sides today remain far apart on key issues while the war rages on.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has successfully strung Trump along to buy time to continue to fight. Trump’s bid to settle the conflict will fail unless he backs his diplomacy with pressure on Russia.

One year ago, Trump launched his effort to end the war. He got off to a bad start. In February 2025, he said Ukraine could not expect to recover all its territory or join NATO, a major tilt toward the Russian position before the warring sides had even agreed to engage. Then came the Oval Office ambush of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Five Key Takeaways From Trump’s First Gaza Board of Peace Meeting

Tiago Ventura

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President Donald Trump convened the inaugural meeting of his newly formed Board of Peace at the United States Institute of Peace headquarters on Thursday, unveiling funding pledges and outlining plans for Gaza’s reconstruction.

Trump first announced the initiative at the World Economic Forum in Davos last month, presenting it as part of Phase Two of his U.N.-endorsed 20-point peace plan for Gaza. He invited dozens of countries to join the board.

But several close U.S. allies have hesitated to participate or refused to do so, amid concerns that the structure could sideline the United Nations. Reports that permanent membership would be granted to countries that contribute $1 billion in cash within the first year have also raised questions about whether authoritarian governments could gain influence within the body.

Washington offers US$200 million to boost American smartphone industry in Indo-Pacific

Xinmei Shen

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The US State Department will subsidise companies to roll out cheap smartphones running American software in the Indo-Pacific region, part of its “Pax Silica” initiative that seeks to shore up the resilience of the US artificial intelligence supply chain and win the AI race with China.

The US has launched the Edge AI Package, which provides up to US$200 million of funding for mobile network operators and smartphone vendors to deploy “low-cost, high-performance” handsets in some partner nations in the Indo-Pacific, the Department of State said on Thursday.

These smartphones should run on “trusted” American mobile operating systems (OS), such as Android and iOS, and fully support the US software and AI ecosystem, the State Department said.

China, Afghanistan, and Critical Minerals: Options for U.S. Strategic Competition Below the Threshold of War

Sean Ryan, Adib Farhadi

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Why Afghanistan matters for the U.S. military today is no longer a question of counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, or nation-building. Instead, Afghanistan has reemerged as a permissive or semi-permissive arena for strategic competition below the threshold of war, where influence is exercised primarily through economic statecraft, infrastructure investment, access to critical minerals, and selective security cooperation. Following the U.S. withdrawal in 2021, the absence of sustained Western engagement created political and economic space for competitors—most notably the People’s Republic of China (PRC)—to expand influence without assuming the costs and risks associated with overt military intervention. This environment highlights a central feature of contemporary great power competition: strategic outcomes are increasingly shaped through non-kinetic means in fragile states rather than decisive battlefield engagements.

For the U.S. military, Afghanistan remains relevant not as a battlefield but as a case study in contemporary campaigning. China’s engagement intersects with three issues central to U.S. military’s relevance in great power competition: persistent competition short of armed conflict, resilience of defense-critical supply chains, and the growing importance of non-military instruments in shaping strategic environments. RAND research emphasizes that future competition will hinge less on episodic combat operations and more on shaping activities conducted over time through diplomatic, economic, informational, and limited security tools. Afghanistan illustrates how competitors exploit governance vacuums, economic distress, and infrastructure deficits to secure strategic advantages without provoking direct confrontation.

Surveying Duality in Space - Volume I

Anca Agachi, Krista Langeland, Amal Altwaijri, Mélusine Lebret

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In early 2025, RAND launched a three-year effort to examine dual-use space systems — those capable of performing both civilian and military operations. The project began with a baseline report analyzing national approaches to developing, deploying, and governing these systems, followed by three regional workshops in the Americas, Europe-Eurasia, and the Indo-Pacific to fill gaps and further contextualize findings. These proceedings focus solely on the Americas workshop, which was held virtually on May 28, 2025, and convened 14 participants from the United States, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, and Costa Rica across government, private, and research sectors.

These proceedings articulate key themes summarizing participant insights, emphasizing the lack of shared definitions, varied investment drivers, unequal access to technologies, and differing perspectives on preferred governance mechanisms. Findings from the baseline report and workshops will inform recommendations to the international community for establishing a global governance regime for dual-use space systems.

The Weapons of Mass Destruction AI Security Gap

Rebecca Hersman and Cassidy Nelson

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In 2023, former UN weapons inspector and scientist Rocco Casagrande arrived at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next to the West Wing of the White House, carrying a small, sealed container. Inside were a dozen test tubes containing ingredients that, if properly assembled, could cause a deadly pandemic.

According to Casagrande, an AI chatbot had not only provided him with the lethal recipe; it also offered ideas about how to pick the best weather conditions and targets for an attack. There to brief government officials on AI-enabled pandemic risks, Casagrande’s prop sent a powerful message to security officials about how rapidly AI had collapsed the barriers to engineering devastating bioweapons.

Advanced AI Models Refuse Military Queries at Alarming Rates, New Report Finds

Josh Luckenbaugh

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Many large language models built by U.S. artificial intelligence companies struggle to handle military-related queries, limiting their warfighting utility, according to a study conducted by EdgeRunner AI.

For the study, EdgeRunner tested how 24 leading frontier large language models handled legitimate military-use queries authored by Army and special operations subject matter experts. The company found the models refused — meaning they stated that they could not provide a response for reasons of safety or policy — up to 98 percent of the operationally relevant military questions.

These models are “not fine-tuned on military data and doctrine; they're trained on all of the internet,” which contains a “lot of bad data,” EdgeRunner CEO Tyler Saltsman said in an interview.

From words and phrases like “kill chain,” “assault the objective,” “warfighter” and “moving of ammo” to questions about weapon systems, the models don’t “like any of it,” Saltsman said. “They're so overly sensitive that they just won't be helpful.”

Digitizing the Front Lines

Gidget Fuentes

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SAN DIEGO — From massive formations to four Marines in a dunebuggy, the Marine Corps is working with the joint force to craft a single network to prepare the service for a digitized battlefield.

That effort, Project Dyanmis, recently connected live, decentralized networks to support fire missions – a first in the service’s effort to connect with the joint force into a single network with artificial intelligence, automation and cloud environments.

“It was actually unbelievable to see Marines and soldiers sitting side-by-side with world-class software engineers from across industry,” Col. Arlon Smith, the Project Dynamis director, said Wednesday while speaking on a panel at WEST 2026 about Project Dynamis.

WHEN STRATEGY LEAVES THE PAGE

Wes Daugherty 

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In seminar, a student delivered a masterful written analysis of a regional conflict. The logic was tight. The prose was polished. It was the kind of work that earns an easy “A.” When he attempted to apply that same academic logic in a subsequent wargame, however, the limits of his written work became clear. The living, breathing adversary—another student—did not behave like a paragraph on a page. Instead, the adversary adapted, exploited vulnerabilities, and introduced friction that the student had not anticipated while writing. Within minutes, the clean structure that worked so well on paper buckled under the weight of a thinking opponent operating under a different set of assumptions.

After the turn ended, the student admitted quietly, “I thought I understood this problem when I wrote it. I didn’t.” There was no embarrassment, only clarity. The paper had rewarded explanation. The wargame demanded execution: decisions with consequences against an adversary that pushed back.

When the Fiction Ends: Lessons from “Maneuver Under a Lying Sky”

James J. Torrence

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“Maneuver Under a Lying Sky” is a work of fiction. But the details the story weaves together are not. FICINT—fictional intelligence—offers a powerful means of anticipating and understanding threats because it blends imagination and reality. It secures our understanding of potential threats to ground truths while simultaneously freeing us to consider how those threats might present themselves before we face them in the real world. So what lessons emerge from the story?

1. Russia’s Existing Theater PNT Campaign

The pattern of Russian activity “Maneuver Under a Lying Sky” portrays is already visible in open sources. In April 2024, Finnair temporarily suspended flights to Tartu, Estonia after repeated GPS interference prevented safe landings, prompting Estonian officials to blame deliberate jamming from Russia. Later that year and into 2025, Baltic and Nordic authorities continued to report widespread disturbances to satellite navigation, particularly near Kaliningrad and the Gulf of Finland. A Ryanair flight to Vilnius, Lithuania was diverted to Poland in January 2025 because of GPS interference on approach, underscoring how safety margins for civil aviation can erode when position, navigation, and timing (PNT) are contested in peacetime.

The Institutional Battlefield: Why Irregular Warfare Must Contemplate Path Dependence

Ian Murphy

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This commentary argues that the field of irregular warfare must expand its focus beyond operational and tactical dimensions to include the institutional battlefield. The ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war serves as a case study in which Russia has systematically imposed new governance, economic, and educational institutions in the occupied Donbas region. This institutional imposition is not a byproduct of occupation, but a calculated strategy designed to create a new long-term reality by permanently altering the adversary’s political and social equilibrium. Drawing on the concept of path dependence from economic development, this analysis demonstrates how deliberate institutional changes—such as forced passportization and Russification—produce a new equilibrium from which there is no return, regardless of the military outcome of the war. This commentary urges the irregular warfare community to integrate the study of institutional path dependence into its analysis to better understand how states use institutions as instruments of irregular warfare in modern conflict.

The ‘Discombobulator’ arms race has begun

David Ignatius
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As the United States moves toward possible military conflict with Iran, the White House and the Pentagon have been boasting about an exotic arsenal of directed-energy weapons that could signal a new era of lethality in warfare.

Can India Power the AI Dream?

Manoj Pant and M Rahul

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India is hosting a massive global AI Impact Summit between February 16-20, with over 20 heads of state, 60 ministers, and around 500 global technology leaders attending. There is huge optimism, driven by the government, about India being at the forefront of the defining technology of this century. Many view artificial intelligence (AI) as the 21st century’s equivalent of the steamship or the airplane in the 20th. However, it is worth examining what AI actually entails and the less visible costs associated with it.

Early last year, the southern states of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh competed to host global technology giant Google’s AI processing center. The $15 billion project eventually went to Andhra. Telangana soon entered the race after Microsoft committed $17.5 billion to establish a similar center in Hyderabad. These investment promises quickly became political talking points. At the national level, the Union government announced a major push for artificial intelligence through its IndiaAI Mission in 2024.

Financing the Global South’s Infrastructure Boom

RAKESH MOHAN and DIVYA SRINIVASAN

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NEW DELHI – With infrastructure now seen as the leading engine of growth across the Global South, governments are under pressure to build – and fast. But for most, fiscal space is limited; development aid is thinning; and long-promised climate financing remains elusive. As a result, countries are turning to private capital and reviving an old idea with renewed urgency: public-private partnerships (PPPs).

According to the World Bank, in 2024, low- and middle-income countries received $100 billion in private participation in infrastructure (PPI) investment, an impressive 20% increase from the five-year (2019-23) annual average of $83.7 billion. Yet history recommends caution. While the logic of mobilizing private finance is often compelling, the record is mixed. Too often, emerging markets have relied on models proselytized by global development finance institutions without paying adequate attention to local institutional constraints.

Pakistan’s Engagement Is Unlikely To Fundamentally Redirect Dhaka’s Long-Standing Cooperation With India

A. Jathindra

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Zillur Rahman is the President of the Center for Governance Studies in Bangladesh. Zillur a leading journalist, broadcaster and media consultant is considered to be one of the most successful television program anchors of the country. He is a definite “trend setter” in the history of television channel programs in Bangladesh. He is the founder, director and host of the widely popular daily television talk show “Tritiyo Matra” (The 3rd Dimension) for which he has produced more than 8000 episodes, over the last 23 years since July 2003.

With Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League out of power, the BNP-led coalition has claimed a historic victory, while Jamaat-e-Islami has emerged as the main opposition with 68 seats. How do you interpret this outcome for Bangladesh’s political future?

The election marks a historic moment in Bangladesh’s political trajectory. The BNP-led coalition’s landslide, coupled with Jamaat-e-Islami’s emergence as a strong parliamentary opposition, signals both continuity and change. On one hand, it reflects a decisive shift in voter sentiment and a desire for new leadership. On the other, it highlights that opposition forces remain significant players in shaping parliamentary debate and public discourse. 

China’s consumption problem

Erik Green

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The Chinese Communist Party has made increasing domestic consumption a priority to ensure economic growth. Ahead of the next Five-Year Plan being announced in March, the Party’s current macroeconomic strategy is likely to significantly limit the effectiveness of their policy solutions however.

As China’s rate of economic growth slows, the country’s leaders have become increasingly concerned that the economy remains overly dependent on investment- and export-driven growth. Since then-premier Wen Jiabao said in 2007 that China needs to ‘adjust the balance between investment and consumption’, policymakers have repeatedly emphasised the need to boost consumption to fix this imbalance. In December 2025, the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) theoretical journal Qiushi published a compilation of remarks made by President Xi Jinping since 2015 on the importance of consumption to China’s economy. The piece declared ‘expanding domestic demand is a strategic move’ and emphasised a decision at last December’s Central Economic Work Conference (CEWC) to make boosting consumption the number one economic priority for 2026. Doing so will support the overall objective of increasing domestic demand.

US thwarted near-catastrophic prison break of 6,000 ISIS fighters in Syria

Efrat Lachter , Trey Yingst

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EXCLUSIVE: This was the kind of prison break officials say could have changed the region, and perhaps even the world, overnight. Nearly 6,000 ISIS detainees, described by a senior U.S. intelligence official as "the worst of the worst," were being held in northern Syria as clashes and instability threatened the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, the guards responsible for keeping the militants locked away and preventing a feared ISIS resurgence. U.S. officials believed that if the prisons collapsed in the chaos, the consequences would have been immediate.

"If these 6,000 or so got out and returned to the battlefield, that would basically be the instant reconstitution of ISIS," the senior intelligence official told Fox News Digital. In an exclusive interview, the official walked Fox News Digital step by step through the behind-the-scenes operation that moved thousands of ISIS detainees out of Syria and into Iraqi custody, describing a multi-agency scramble that unfolded over weeks, with intelligence warnings, rapid diplomacy and a swift military lift.

Why Iran Isn’t Supporting ISIS-K

Ali Rizk

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In a recent article published in The National Interest, Joseph Epstein suggests that Iran may be using ISIS-Khorasan (ISIS-K) as a proxy to destabilise Azerbaijan. Epstein refers to the arrest last month of three individuals accused of plotting an attack on the Israeli embassy in Baku, after which it was revealed that the would-be perpetrators had conspired with ISIS-K to carry out the attack.

The Islamic Republic, the author argues, has good reason to support such acts of terrorism in Azerbaijan, owing to Baku’s close ties with Israel and the United States. While there is no denying the fact that ties between Tehran and Baku hit rock bottom over Iranian suspicions of Israel using Azeri airspace during the 12-Day War, Epstein omits some important facts that seriously undermine his case.

Why Venezuela, Iran, and the Digital Battlefield May Be Reframing Global Statecraft

Emilio Iasiello

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In early January 2026, the United States carried out Operation Absolute Resolve, combining combined elite airborne forces, covert intelligence, and, reportedly, cyber effects that plunged portions of Venezuela’s capital into darkness. President Donald Trump’s comments suggested that “certain expertise” had been used to disrupt Venezuelan infrastructure during the raid, fueling speculation about the deployment of offensive cyber capabilities alongside traditional military tools. This event was not just an example of integrated cyber operations, or even a cyber warfare event unfolding in the public spotlight. What was witnessed in Venezuela was cyber-enabled statecraft in action, a fusion of digital effects, kinetic force, and strategic signaling. Perhaps more importantly, it raised a significant question for modern diplomacy: Has the use of cyber strikes matured enough to be a viable tool of diplomacy rather than just conflict?

One thing is clear: cyber effects are not longer a shadow domain. Long considered a tool for espionage and technical disruption, cyber capabilities have ripened into full-spectrum instruments of state power. The clandestine Operation Olympic Games, which deployed Stuxnet against Iran’s uranium enrichment infrastructure more than a decade ago, signaled the first era of purposeful state-driven digital disruption. At the time, it was aimed at slowing Tehran’s nuclear drive without triggering open war.