Why China Won’t Help Iran Beijing Cares About the Oil, Not the Regime

Yun Sun

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China is watching carefully as the United States and Israel bombard Iran. Beijing is, after all, Tehran’s most important partner. The two countries grew close over shared history and goals: both trace their roots to leading ancient non-Western civilizations, and both oppose a Western-dominated global order today. China’s energy security is also connected to its relationship with Iran. More than 55 percent of China’s total oil imports in 2025 came from the Middle East (approximately 13 percent from Iran itself), most of which must pass through the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway bordered by Iran. Because the recent bombing

The Iran War’s Hidden Front: Food, Water, and Fertilizer

Michael Werz

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The consequences of the Iran conflict, which are already being felt in the region, will reverberate globally as an exacerbated food crisis swells. The normally bustling Gulf is not only a regular channel for crude oil but for food and crucial agriculture fertilizers as well. But with the war at risk of expanding and the Strait of Hormuz shuttered, the effect on these states and the role they are unable to play in global food markets will prove significant.

The countries in the region—which boast over 60 million people—are particularly exposed to food shocks. They are almost entirely import-dependent when it comes to rice (77 percent), corn (89 percent), soybeans (95 percent) and vegetable oils (91 percent), according to Institute for Public Policy Research. Any disruption of supply chains will quickly have significant consequences. In Iran, food price inflation has risen 40 percent in the past year, prices for rice have increased sevenfold, green lentils and vegetable oil threefold. It is likely that new overland transport corridors will open, putting Russia, Turkey, and Syria in a position of strategic control over vital supplies. Saudi Arabia traditionally imports through its Red Sea ports which have been massively affected because of attacks by Iran-aligned Houthi rebels.

Iran’s Navy Is Largely Gone, But The Threat To The Strait Of Hormuz Is Not

Kian Sharifi

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The United States and Israel have largely destroyed Iran’s conventional naval fleet in a massive bombing campaign since February 28. But Tehran’s threat to the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s most important shipping routes, has not diminished. Iran has effectively closed the narrow waterway, through which 20 percent of the world’s oil supplies flow, by using asymmetric warfare tactics.

Besides Iran’s conventional navy, the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the elite branch of the country’s armed forces, has its own naval units that continue to hound and attack shipping in the Persian Gulf. “While I think the Iranian Navy is largely combat ineffective at this point, the IRGC navy remains able to harass shipping,” said Sascha Bruchmann, a military and security affairs analyst at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies.

How to Lose a Navy in 10 Days

Benjamin Jensen

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While air strikes in Iran have captured the headlines, the naval campaign offers a harbinger of future battles likely to unfold at sea. Iran lost the majority of its naval capability in less than 10 days, as pulsed operations in the first 48 hours disrupted Tehran’s ability to disperse its submarines and ships to wage the asymmetric maritime campaign it had planned for decades. As of March 11, the United States and Israel had hit and taken out more than 60 Iranian ships, according to U.S. Central Command (USCENTCOM) Commander Admiral Brad Cooper. As a result, Iran can still threaten commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz but will struggle to counter U.S. convoys in the weeks ahead. Looking further ahead, the campaign carries a cautionary tale for Taiwan, the United States, and Japan about how to survive the initial salvo likely in any Pacific war.

What We Know About the Naval Campaign

Based on open-source reporting and official announcements, the United States appears to have prioritized destroying Iran’s ability to counterattack by sea in the opening hours of its combined strikes with Israel. With sorties by both states averaging more than 1,000 a day—combined with information warfare commingling effects in space, cyberspace, and the electromagnetic spectrum—Washington and Tel Aviv struck command-and-control systems, degraded air defenses, and targeted Iran’s ballistic missiles. These dramatic attacks, which included an opening decapitation strike, set conditions for an equally audacious series of naval strikes. As shown in the table below, the strikes reflect a distinct targeting logic indicative of a clear campaign: a sequence of tactical actions designed to disrupt Tehran’s plan and deny the regime the ability to launch a coordinated naval campaign in the Persian Gulf.

What on earth is going on with the oil price?

Jemma Crew

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The price of oil rarely makes it into dinner table conversation.

But over the last two weeks it has dominated headlines, with huge and unusual rises and falls starting to feel like the new norm. It is currently trading over a third higher than before the conflict began, pushed up by air strikes on shipping and energy infrastructure and the effective closure of the key Strait of Hormuz, a vital waterway that carries a fifth of global oil supplies.

There were wild swings in the price on Monday, which was described by the BBC's economics editor Faisal Islam as the most volatile day of oil trading in history. Most of the talk around prices concerns the cost of Brent crude - a widely-used international benchmark for oil. Contracts to buy and sell oil will often use Brent as a reference point, so it has significant influence on global energy costs. The vast majority of oil is traded for delivery at a future date, says Lindsay James, investment strategist at Quilter, and prices are rising now due to concerns about supplies in the months ahead.

Iran’s Drone Advantage The Pentagon Copied Tehran’s Technology but Is Still Struggling to Keep Up

Michael C. Horowitz and Lauren A. Kahn

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When the United States launched airstrikes on Iran on February 28, 2026, it marked the combat debut of the U.S. military’s newest drone, the Low-Cost Unmanned Combat Attack System. U.S. Central Command confirmed that the new LUCAS drones were used in the strikes and has said more of them “remain ready for employment” in Iran. The great irony, however, is that the LUCAS drone is based on Iran’s own low-cost one-way attack drone, the Shahed-136. In May 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump publicly praised the Iranian drones as cheap to produce, as well as “very good … and fast and deadly.” And when the Pentagon released the LUCAS in December, astute observers were quick to notice its similarities to the Shahed-136.

The idea that the United States, the world’s preeminent military power, would copy Iranian technology would have seemed fantastical just a few years ago. And yet, the Shahed-136, after being sold to Russia for use against Ukraine, was captured and studied by the U.S. military, improved on and produced by a small company in Arizona, and is now being used against Iranian targets. For its part, Tehran has unleashed a wave of Shahed-136 drones across the Middle East as part of its response to Washington’s Operation Epic Fury. The drones have struck buildings in Bahrain, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates, and even the U.S. embassy in Saudi Arabia. Although the size of Tehran’s remaining stockpile of drones is unclear, their sweeping deployment has become a critical element of the Iranian strategy for retaliation and proves that the character of war has changed.

The Other Global Crisis Stemming From the Strait of Hormuz’s Blockage

Noah Gordon and Lucy Corthell

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The war in Iran has already claimed many direct victims, from the more than 100 children killed in a U.S. strike on an Iranian elementary school, to the Iranians inhaling toxic substances released by Israeli strikes on oil facilities in and around Tehran, to those soldiers and civilians killed and wounded across the region by the conflict. And no matter how quickly the fighting ends—wars often resist one protagonist’s desire to end them—its indirect victims could include billions of people hoping for good harvests and affordable meals in the coming year.

The Gulf region is a key producer not only of liquified natural gas (LNG) and oil products but also of fertilizer. About one-third of global seaborne trade in fertilizers typically passes through the Strait of Hormuz, which has been nearly entirely closed since the United States and Israel attacked Iran on February 28. In particular, Gulf countries are important producers of nitrogen fertilizers, which depend primarily on natural gas burned at high pressure in the presence of hydrogen to synthesize ammonia. (The hydrogen usually comes from natural gas as well.)

The world doesn’t have enough ammo for the Iran war

Joshua Keating

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President Donald Trump has suggested that the US-Israeli air campaign in Iran will continue until “they cry uncle, or when they can’t fight any longer.” Iran’s foreign minister has said their own military will fight “as long as it takes” and that they have little interest in negotiating a ceasefire.

But continuing the war isn’t just a question of will; it’s a question of means. And one key constraint on how long the conflict might rage is how much ammunition each side has to continue it. Currently, it’s an arms race between Iranian missiles and drones and US, Israeli, and Gulf State countermeasures to shoot them down. And while the answers to questions about their capacity are closely guarded, there are signs of strain on both sides. With its conventional military overmatched and its network of regional allies badly degraded, Iran’s main remaining means of “fighting” is its missile and drone stockpile.

The war on Iran is already upending the Middle East. Look to the Gulf states to see how

Nesrine Malik

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There is a tendency to think of the Gulf powers as static and unchanging. They are, after all, fortified by massive wealth and absolute monarchical rule, and secured with deep economic and military relationships with the US. The past week of US and Israeli airstrikes on Iran, and Iran’s retaliations, have brought into focus what these countries export (oil and gas) and what they import (tax avoiders and labour). But beyond thinking about energy-supply challenges to the global economy and engaging in the cheap and popular sport of smirking at influencers in war zones, we must remember that the current conflagration will have profound consequences for the entire region. This is not just about the US, Israel and Iran; it is about a complex, overlapping political order in the Middle East that is much more fragile than it looks.

Amid all the ways the region has been changing over the past few years, the low-key evolution of three Gulf countries in particular has been the most significant. Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates have been rapidly making changes, the effects of which have been felt from Libya to Palestine. The 7 October attacks, which arguably set off the chain of events that led to this moment, were partly inspired by Hamas’s desire to stop the normalisation process that Saudi Arabia was undertaking with Israel; this was following the UAE and others signing the 2020 Abraham accords with Israel. The three countries have been pursuing in different ways, often at odds with each other, ambitious global and regional agendas. And they are also much more unsteady than their decades-long familial rule suggests.

The New Khamenei How America and Israel Solved Iran’s Succession Problem

Akbar Ganji

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Israel and the United States’ targeted assassination of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei—and subsequent strikes on a gathering of the Islamic Republic’s Assembly of Experts—turned long-standing deliberations over who should succeed Khamenei into an opaque emergency process. The assembly’s decision to choose Khamenei’s son Mojtaba was thus made as much out of necessity as it was out of merit. It reflected an effort to preserve a degree of continuity at the top of the regime after the U.S.-Israeli operations killed much of the regime’s military and clerical leadership.

But neither the urgency of the moment nor the desire for continuity fully explains Mojtaba’s rise. The most significant factor in his selection was U.S. President Donald Trump. The president’s expressed desire to help select Iran’s next supreme leader, along with Israeli assassination threats, made Mojtaba the only viable option for regime survival. With its sovereignty undermined and its leadership humiliated, Iran opted to elevate a figure representing resistance to foreign pressure—even as that choice contradicted the regime’s ideological principles and constitutional norms.

The War Over Iran Is Really About China

Dinesh T. Chawla

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The conflict unfolding in Iran may be only one theater in a much larger strategic struggle between Washington and Beijing. Despite recent military successes, Americans remain deeply anxious about the escalating conflict. Tensions with Iran began in 1979 with the international spectacle of the hostage crisis. But even that pales in comparison with the risks at hand. The cauldron of troubling interactions has reached its boiling point.

The prospect of boots on the ground terrifies Americans and has created a fracture within Trump‘s support base because of his repeated and demonstrative criticism of foreign intervention. His vice president, J.D. Vance, was even more critical of foreign interventionist policies prior to joining the Trump administration.

GPS jamming: The invisible battle in the Middle East

Chris Baraniuk

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Hundreds and hundreds of ships. But they're all in the wrong place. "Oh my goodness," says Michelle Wiese Bockmann, senior maritime intelligence analyst at Windward, a maritime AI company, as she checks the live positions broadcast by commercial vessels in waters off Iran, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar.

"I'm up to… 35 different clusters," she says, looking at a map of the Strait of Hormuz and surrounding areas. The clusters she mentions are weird circles of icons layered over the map, with each icon representing a real ship. But ships don't bunch together in tight, unnaturally perfect circles. And they also don't hover over land – which is where some of the clusters appear. No, their GPS coordinates have been disrupted, obfuscating their true location.

Can Iran’s asymmetric warfare hold US-Israeli military power at bay?

Priyanka Shankar

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Despite United States President Donald Trump’s repeated declarations of victory in the US-Israeli war on Iran, Tehran’s retaliatory strikes on Israel and US military assets in the region have continued, upending global financial and energy markets.

“We’ve had two decades to study defeats of the US military to our immediate east and west. We’ve incorporated lessons accordingly,” Iranian Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi wrote in a post on X on March 1, the day after US and Israeli strikes on Tehran killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other senior Iranian officials.

How Hegseth Came to See Moral Purpose in War as Weakness

Greg Jaffe

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Long before President Trump chose him to lead the U.S. military, Pete Hegseth described the moral calling that had compelled him to volunteer to serve in Iraq. He was working on Wall Street in the summer of 2005 and had read an article about an insurgent who blew himself up, killing 18 Iraqi children. “To me, that was the face of evil,” Mr. Hegseth told The Princeton Alumni Weekly, adding, “That sent to me a signal that I need to do my part not to let that ideology win in Iraq.”

He deployed to the war-torn city of Samarra a short time later.

Today, Mr. Hegseth describes the mission and moral purpose animating the war in Iran, now in its second week, in starkly different terms. The goal, he said recently, is to unleash “death and destruction from the sky all day long.” Instead of seeking justice, U.S. forces are pursuing vengeance against an implacable foe.

US allies near China on edge as weapons shift from Asia to Iran

ALASTAIR GALE, PHILIP J. HEIJMANS AND YIAN LEE BLOOMBERG

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TOKYO — When the United States pulled its only aircraft carrier based in Asia to support the military surge in Afghanistan back in 2010, allies in the region had little concern that China or North Korea might look to take advantage. Today things are different. As the U.S. continues to pour weapons into the Middle East for military operations against Iran, current and former defense officials in Asia are growing concerned that more American firepower will be shifted over time if the war drags on. And even if fighting wraps up soon, they warned that depleted stockpiles of munitions could also take years to replace, leaving Taiwan and other places vulnerable. 

In a Cabinet meeting this week, South Korean President Lee Jae Myung confirmed the U.S. may need to relocate air defense assets to the Middle East and subsequent reports said that multiple launchers of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, system were spotted moving out of a southern base.

Palantir Demos Show How the Military Could Use AI Chatbots to Generate War Plans

Caroline Haskins

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An ongoing and heated dispute between the Pentagon and Anthropic is raising new questions about how the startup’s technology is actually used inside the US military. In late February, Anthropic refused to grant the government unconditional access to its Claude AI models, insisting the systems should not be used for mass surveillance of Americans or fully autonomous weapons. The Pentagon responded by labeling Anthropic's products a “supply-chain risk,” prompting the startup to file two lawsuits this week alleging illegal retaliation by the Trump administration and seeking to overturn the designation.

The clash, along with the rapidly escalating war in Iran, has drawn attention to Anthropic’s partnership with the military contractor Palantir, which announced in November 2024 that it would integrate Claude into the software it sells to US intelligence and defense agencies. Palantir says the Claude integration can help analysts uncover “data-driven insights,” identify patterns, and support making “informed decisions in time-sensitive situations.”

U.S. Military Operations Against Iran: Munitions And Missile Defense

Hannah D. Dennis and Daniel M. Gettinger

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Congress has expressed interest in the status of the U.S. military’s inventories of munitions (e.g., ammunition, bombs, missiles, torpedoes, anti-aircraft weapons, missile interceptors). Since the United States and Israel launched military operations against Iran on February 28, 2026, some Members of Congress have sought information on the stockpiles and availability of U.S. weapons from the Department of Defense (DOD, which is “using a secondary Department of War designation,” under Executive Order 14347 dated September 5, 2025).

Some Members have raised concerns about potential shortfalls in munitions, while other Members have said munitions are not an immediate concern. President Donald J. Trump has said U.S. munitions are “virtually unlimited.” DOD officials have said sufficient munitions are available, while maintaining that the status of U.S. stocks is considered “an operational security matter.” In these comments, officials have not differentiated between stocks of air-to-ground and air-to-air munitions versus missiles and missile interceptors.

Nepal’s Election Marks a Generational Break—and a New Strategic Moment in the Himalayas

Anjali Kaur

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Nepal’s latest election has produced something the country has not seen in decades: a genuine generational rupture with its political past. But the significance extends well beyond Kathmandu. As a younger political figure rises to national leadership, Nepal is entering a new strategic moment—shaped by intensifying geopolitical competition, shifting development partnerships, and a generation of voters who have run out of patience with institutions that promise reforms but rarely deliver.

The victory of former Kathmandu mayor Balendra “Balen” Shah places a leader at the helm who sits outside Nepal’s traditional political establishment. At 35, Shah represents a stark contrast to the governing class that has defined Nepal’s politics since the end of the monarchy—a small circle of senior party figures, many now in their 70s and 80s, whose influence has survived coalition after coalition with remarkably little accountability. His election signals that a growing share of Nepali voters, particularly younger ones, are no longer willing to accept political recycling as a governing philosophy.

Why Donald Trump’s Tariff Wars Are Far from Over

Milton Ezrati

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The Supreme Court made media waves with its decision last month that struck down most of President Donald Trump’s tariffs on foreign trade. Trump showed considerable anger initially, but immediately also made clear that this court’s action would not stop his trade agenda.

In any case, the court did not rule against the presidential authority to levy tariffs generally. It only decided that, contrary to White House claims, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) specifically does not give the president power to impose or modify tariffs.

The Iran War will no doubt consume the White House’s focus in the coming weeks, but in truth, Trump has at least four options available to him that do not require a congressional vote. Besides, Trump’s agenda never saw tariffs as an end in themselves. Rather, it sees them as purely instrumental leverage to exact more favorable trade deals. This White House will certainly continue to pursue this strategy.

The US and Israel Don’t Share the Same Iran War Aims. Here’s How They Differ

Leon Hadar

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The conventional wisdom in Washington holds that the United States and Israel share a unified strategic interest in confronting Iran. Politicians on both sides of the aisle recite it like a catechism. The think tanks reinforce it. The defense establishment operationalizes it. But conventional wisdom, particularly in the Middle East, has a remarkable track record of being wrong—and this case is no exception.

Let us be precise about what each party actually wants, because imprecision in foreign policy is not only the cause of intellectual failure but also the expense of blood and treasure.

What Israel wants is the elimination—not the containment, not the negotiated limitation—of Iran’s nuclear program and, increasingly, the weakening or collapse of the Islamic Republic itself. For Israel, this is existential calculus. A nuclear-armed Iran, in the Israeli strategic mind, represents an intolerable threat to its physical survival. Israeli leaders have said this clearly and repeatedly, and there is no reason to doubt their sincerity. They want the United States to fight this war fully, decisively, and at whatever cost is required to finish the job.

Why Escalation Favors Iran America and Israel May Have Bitten Off More Than They Can Chew

Robert A. Pape

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The first hours of Operation Epic Fury—the joint U.S.-Israeli military offensive against Iran, launched on February 28—demonstrated the extraordinary reach of modern precision warfare. U.S. and Israeli strikes killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, along with senior commanders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and key intelligence officials, in what Washington and Jerusalem described as a decisive blow intended to cripple Tehran’s command structure and destabilize the regime.

Yet within hours, any hope that the precise decapitation strikes would limit the scope of the war was dashed. Iran launched hundreds of ballistic missiles

A Marine Corps general led a fictional Iran against the US military—and won It took the Marine 10 minutes to beat the Navy.

Blake Stilwell

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In 2002, the U.S. military tapped Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper to lead the opposing forces in the most expensive and expansive military exercise in history up until that point. He was put in command of an inferior Middle Eastern-inspired military force—essentially a fictional Iran—and his mission was to go against the full might of the American armed forces.

In the first two days, he sank an entire carrier battle group. In fact, he had achieved such great success so fast that it prompted the U.S. military brass to cry foul. The exercise, called Millennium Challenge 2002, wasn’t just big. It was huge. It was designed by the Joint Forces Command over the course of two years to include 13,500 participants and numerous live and simulated training sites.

America and Israel’s War to Remake the Middle East

Dana Stroul

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The United States and Israel may have different names for their latest military campaigns in Iran—Epic Fury and Rising Lion—but there is nothing separate about them. They constitute the first truly combined U.S.-Israeli military operation—and it is hard to overstate how groundbreaking the partnership is. Normally, the U.S. military works in broad coalitions, designing the operation, commanding it, and doing most of the fighting. In the U.S.-NATO engagement in Afghanistan that began in 2002, the United States conducted most airstrikes and deployed the bulk of ground forces; the United States conducted the vast

Why Americans and Israelis See the Iran War Differently In the U.S. Trump critics oppose the war. In Israel, even Netanyahu's foes support it.

Frida Ghitis

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There is something remarkable about the politics surrounding the U.S. and Israel’s war against Iran. The war was launched by two unpopular leaders of two deeply divided countries. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have been the main drivers of deep polarization in their countries. They have both been reviled by critics and idolized by supporters, and they have both faced accusations of corruption and misconduct.

And yet, when the two countries joined forces against the regime that rules Iran, a regime that majorities in both the U.S. and Israel see as a dangerous enemy, popular opinion in the two countries moved in opposite directions.

Governing Cognitive Warfare at Ecosystem Speed: Why America Can’t Organize for Influence—and What It Takes to Compete

John Wilcox, Ryan Walters

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In the time it takes Washington to schedule an interagency meeting, an adversary can frame an incident for half the world. That is the central problem of cognitive warfare. Meaning now hardens into public and elite “reality” at a speed our institutions were never designed to match.

The United States does not lack tools, talent, or awareness in this space. It has world‑class intelligence agencies, public diplomacy professionals, military information forces, and technology partners. What it lacks is governance that can align those assets quickly enough to matter, without breaking faith with democratic norms. Until the United States builds a way to govern this fight at “ecosystem speed,” it will keep losing contests of perception even as it wins the resourcing debate.

For more than a century, Washington has tried to solve this problem with new labels and new offices. It has experimented with “psychological warfare,” “political warfare,” “information operations,” “strategic communication,” “information warfare,” and now “cognitive warfare,” each time promising that this rebrand would finally catch up to how adversaries use information. The results have been the same: impressive capabilities on paper, uneven performance in practice, and a persistent gap between what senior leaders say they want and what the system can actually deliver.

Active Cyber Defense in the Korean Context

James Andrew Lewis

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The Republic of Korea (ROK) faces a uniquely volatile situation in defending its networks, data, and digital infrastructure. Nuclear-armed North Korea (DPRK), unlike other leading state cyberattackers such as Russia, China, and Iran, poses a direct military threat to the ROK and makes use of missile launches, artillery fire, and (in the past) naval activity to threaten, warn, and manipulate ROK and global opinion. Drawing on one example among many, in January 2024, Kim Yo-jong, the sister of North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un, threatened an “immediate military strike” against South Korea in response to any “slight provocation.” While there is a considerable degree of bluster in statements like these, the risks of taking retaliatory action against the DPRK is higher than in any other cyber conflict. This shapes any calculation of active cyber defense, defined as taking action against opponents rather than relying on attempting to deny them access to networks and data.

The international landscape for cyber defense is complicated, as all major cyberattackers are currently insulated from punitive responses—particularly from democracies, given their fear of escalation. For the ROK, however, cyber defense against the DPRK adds the risk of armed conflict—unconventional, conventional, even nuclear—to the equation. While this risk should not be exaggerated, it means that while the ROK needs a general cybersecurity strategy focused on resilience, it must also have a strategy specific to the DPRK based on active defense.

6G Is Coming. Here’s What to Expect From the Next Generation of Cellular Tech

Julian Chokkattu

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The networking tech brought real benefits to the world, from improved latency—reducing the time it takes for data to travel from one point to another—to broader and faster coverage in dense urban areas. But most people likely won't point to 5G delivering a meaningful change in their lives like many carriers suggested as they tried to justify mass spending on their infrastructure build-outs.

Well, get ready to hear that aspirational, forward-looking, and sometimes maybe deluded language again—this time in the lead-up to 6G, which is being paired with “AI” to create a marketing bingo bonanza. Even if the tech won't deliver a night-and-day difference to average folks like us, the industry is moving the goalposts.

The Growing Cyber Risk to Supply Chains

Marko Kovacevic and Sasha Pailet Koff

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NEW YORK – As the current war in the Middle East intensifies, governments and security experts have warned that the conflict could spill into cyberspace. Businesses and supply chains, particularly those in the United States and its allies, may face retaliatory or asymmetric cyber attacks from Iran or affiliated groups seeking to exert pressure beyond the battlefield. Against this backdrop, the cyber resilience of global supply networks is no longer a theoretical concern but an urgent operational priority.

For decades, supply chains were engineered primarily to minimize cost and maximize speed and scale. Cybersecurity was often treated as an afterthought – a technical safeguard with no bearing on operational decisions. But in today’s AI-enabled, data-driven economy, that is no longer true. Cyber readiness and supply-chain operations are now deeply interconnected.

Stryker Cyber Attack: Iranian Threat Actor Claims Revenge

Rithula Nisha

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Iranian threat group Handala Hack has claimed a cyber attack on US medical technology giant Stryker as retaliation for missile strike on Iranian school On Day 12 of the US-Israeli war on Iran, the looming threat of an Iranian cyber attack materialised and claimed its first major victim – Stryker. The global medical technology supplier, headquartered in Michigan, US, was subject to a severe cyber attack which left thousands of employees locked out of accessing critical systems. “Stryker is experiencing a global network disruption to our Microsoft environment as a result of a cyber attack,” the company said in a statement.

What happened?

Past midnight on Wednesday, outages struck Stryker, as its devices were wiped clean and the company login page was reportedly defaced with the logo of Tehran-linked cyber persona Handala. Early investigations into the cyber attack linearly point to the attackers gaining access to the company’s Microsoft Intune management console.

The Combat Power of Simplicity

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Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.’s Breaking Defense report “‘Simple plans, violently executed’: One Army unit’s old-school counter to high-tech chaos” examines how the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment approaches modern warfare at the National Training Center. Despite operating drones, jammers, and advanced sensors, the unit stresses that combat plans and organizations must stay simple enough to function under stress. Too many systems and data streams can overwhelm soldiers and slow decisions when speed matters most.

Decision Points Tactics

The unit draws inspiration from Decision Point Tactics, a doctrinal pamphlet first published in 1997. The concept focuses on intensive rehearsals and preplanned responses to likely battlefield scenarios. Once a fight begins, junior leaders can act immediately against high-priority targets without waiting for detailed instructions. The goal is to seize opportunities quickly and keep the enemy reacting.

Simulating Southeast Asia’s Nuclear-security Crisis Responses

Morgan Michaels, Daniel Salisbury, Evan A. Laksmana

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This research paper reports on the insights and lessons learned from an IISS-organised two-day diplomatic crisis-simulation exercise held in Singapore on 24 and 25 November 2025. The exercise brought together 30 participants from Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam, comprising leading experts as well as government and security officials all attending in their private capacity. IISS experts also participated as ‘control teams’ playing the role of Australia, China, the United Kingdom and the United States.

The exercise centred on a hypothetical scenario involving a missing nuclear-armed submarine in Indonesian waters in 2031 and how it sparked broader military tensions between China and the Australia–UK–US (AUKUS) partnership. The exercise was designed to stress test how key Southeast Asian states could leverage the ASEAN Defence Ministers’ Meeting (ADMM) and ASEAN Defence Ministers’ Meeting Plus (ADMM-Plus) as a conflict-prevention and crisis-response mechanism.

As the submarine disaster occurred in Indonesian waters, the other Southeast Asian teams largely deferred to Indonesia to manage the crisis, while expressing support through and for the ADMM. Their focus tended to be on areas of particular national concern or where they believed they could contribute most effectively. A recurring theme throughout the simulation was the issue of strategic bandwidth, and the limited diplomatic capacity of ASEAN member states (AMS) to respond to a major nuclear-security crisis.

Nepal’s Election Marks a Generational Break—and a New Strategic Moment in the Himalayas

Anjali Kaur

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Nepal’s latest election has produced something the country has not seen in decades: a genuine generational rupture with its political past. But the significance extends well beyond Kathmandu. As a younger political figure rises to national leadership, Nepal is entering a new strategic moment—shaped by intensifying geopolitical competition, shifting development partnerships, and a generation of voters who have run out of patience with institutions that promise reforms but rarely deliver.

The victory of former Kathmandu mayor Balendra “Balen” Shah places a leader at the helm who sits outside Nepal’s traditional political establishment. At 35, Shah represents a stark contrast to the governing class that has defined Nepal’s politics since the end of the monarchy—a small circle of senior party figures, many now in their 70s and 80s, whose influence has survived coalition after coalition with remarkably little accountability. His election signals that a growing share of Nepali voters, particularly younger ones, are no longer willing to accept political recycling as a governing philosophy.

War in Iran and Afghanistan Threatens Central Asia’s Gateway to Global Markets

James Durso

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The U.S.–Israel attacks on Iran and the Afghanistan–Pakistan conflict threaten Central Asia’s plans to establish southbound trade routes to markets in Asia and Africa.

Military escalation between Afghanistan’s Taliban-led government and Pakistan threatens several emerging trade, transport, and energy corridors linking Central Asia to South Asia, the Persian Gulf, and global markets. Risks are both direct (insecurity along routes) and indirect (border closures, investor withdrawal, and partner-state reluctance).

Pakistan previously moved goods through Afghanistan to Central Asian markets, accounting for significant export volumes (bilateral trade was USD2.4 billion in 2025). That corridor is effectively closed, with border crossings, supply chains, and customs operations stalled. The loss of reliable land access undermines Afghanistan’s (food, fuel, industrial inputs) and Central Asian access southward toward Pakistan’s seaports.

New PRC Cybercrime Law Heralds Digital Iron Curtain

Youlun Nie

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Digital governance in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is poised to enter a new phase. On January 31, the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) released the Cybercrime Prevention and Control Law (Draft) (网络犯罪防治法 (征求意见稿)) for public comment (MPS, January 31). [1] Recognizing that technical blockades are no longer sufficient, Beijing is building a robust legal framework to expand and codify its digital control apparatus. For over two decades, the Great Firewall (GFW)—an umbrella term for the PRC’s Internet censorship systems—has served as the primary instrument of digital control. [2] The draft law shifts the regulatory focus from technical censorship operations to substantive legal sanctions.

According to the “explanation” (说明) that accompanied the MPS’s draft law, the rapid development of the Internet has facilitated the migration of traditional crimes online, forming “massive and deeply entrenched black and grey industrial chains” (体系庞大、盘根错节的黑灰产业链条) (MPS, January 31). The authorities concede that reactive enforcement for individual cases cannot halt increasing cybercrime. In response, the proposed legislation establishes an operational doctrine based on the principles of “combining crackdowns with prevention, prioritizing prevention, governing the ecology, and collaborative linkage” (坚持“打防结合、防范为先、生态治理、协同联动”的原则).

How the War in Iran Could Help China and Change Asia

Damien Cave, Choe Sang-Hun, Javier C. Hernández and Eric Schmitt

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Before the war with Iran started, American military commanders redirected a carrier strike group from the South China Sea to the Middle East. This week, the Pentagon has been moving sophisticated air defenses from Asia to bolster protection against Iran’s drones and rockets.

The redirected weapons include Patriot missiles and interceptors from the THAAD system in South Korea — the only Asian ally hosting the advanced missile defense system, deployed by the Pentagon to counter North Korea’s growing missile threat. Now, for the first time, its interceptors are being moved away, followed by launchers if the diplomatic and logistical details can be worked out, according to American officials.

The war in Iran — barely two weeks old — is already straining America’s promise of security in a region that U.S. military leaders have called “our priority theater.” Longer term, officials and analysts suggest the war will weaken American influence, aid Chinese arguments about American decline and accelerate a middle-power arms race.