There are two ways to understand this week’s summit in Beijing between China’s leader, Xi Jinping, and U.S. President Donald Trump.

The first, and most tempting, is to see it as a meeting between two figures commonly described as the most powerful men on Earth, with all of the personal chemistry and theatrics surrounding their second-ever summit in China. The second centers on the encounter between the nations they incarnate—and although this is the harder one to parse, it is also the more important.

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U.S. President Donald Trump arrived in Beijing on Wednesday ahead of a high-stakes summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping the following day. Trump’s first visit comes at a pivotal time for U.S. economic policy. As the White House seeks new deals to reduce the country’s trade deficit, Trump is expected to downplay other concerns between the two countries.

Both sides appear interested in extending a fragile truce on China’s rare earths. In October, the White House announced that Beijing had agreed to “effectively eliminate China’s current and proposed export controls on rare earth elements.” In exchange, the United States reduced some of its highest threatened tariffs on Chinese goods. Experts expect Trump and Xi to discuss a deal on Thursday to keep the flow of rare earths going.

Artificial intelligence is also expected to be a main point of contention during Thursday’s summit. Although the United States has developed cutting-edge AI models, many of these systems remain very expensive, allowing China to take the lead in the global AI race. Trump is hoping to balance the scales by trying to convince Xi to allow major American tech companies to enter the Chinese market.

For his part, Xi is expected to press Trump about the United States’ close relationship with Taiwan. In December, Washington announced an $11.1 billion arms sale to Taipei as part of the White House’s efforts to help Taiwan outmatch China’s military capabilities. Beijing has repeatedly denounced these actions, as China does not recognize Taiwan’s sovereignty. Analysts expect Trump to possibly downplay these ties to Taiwan, including by delaying arms deliveries, in exchange for better trade deals with China.

Read more in today’s World Brief: Trump Has One Major Focus While in China: Trade.

When U.S. President Donald Trump reentered office last year, European leaders felt that familiar sense of dread. And indeed, Trump launched back into his first-term habit of harping on Europe for everything from defense spending to trade imbalances. Vice President J.D. Vance turned the knife even deeper with a speech at the 2025 Munich Security Conference, blaming Europe for its own demise for things such as government impingement upon free speech and uncontrolled immigration.

European leaders, for their part, initially responded to these provocations with a familiar mix of panic, unease, and warnings that the trans-Atlantic relationship was doomed. But Trump’s latest threats against European countries—in response to their refusal to go all in on Washington’s war with Iran—don’t seem to be eliciting the same response from the continent as before.

For example, Trump’s recently announced plan to withdraw 5,000 of the roughly 36,000 U.S. troops from Germany was met with a shrug by German leaders. Boris Pistorius, Germany’s defense minister, said the decision was “foreseeable.” Compare that to 2020, when the U.S. threat to withdraw 12,000 troops from Germany (admittedly, a higher number), caused a near-meltdown among European policymakers and analysts alike.

Even the threats to remove troops from Spain and Italy haven’t landed with the same oomph. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said it’s not a decision that she would support but didn’t seem too alarmed about it, likely because she and the U.S. president have had a relatively strong relationship thus far. And Spanish Defense Minister Margarita Robles said in response that the European pillar of NATO must be strengthened and that Spain doesn’t support illegal wars. That hardly sounds like panic.

Why does Europe suddenly seem so chill? Two things seem to be happening simultaneously. First, Trump’s threats have begun to lose their shock value. Second, European leaders have actually started bolstering their own capabilities, meaning that if nothing else, they have a plan if Trump makes good on his threats.

The first term was a real earthquake for the continent. European policymakers had spent decades operating inside the safe assumption that NATO was sacrosanct, that the United States had its own interests in keeping its high troop levels in Europe, and that the institutional foundations built since World War II would hold. During Trump’s first term, Europeans started openly questioning those assumptions, while the second term further confirmed their breakdown.

But after a decade, European leaders are now used to being on the receiving end of the United States’ ire. After all this time, Europeans certainly don’t think Trump’s threats are hollow, but they don’t necessarily expect the worst anymore, either.

On the tariff and trade front, Trump’s threats have certainly come to pass. The sweeping tariffs imposed on European goods in 2025, part of a broader global trade offensive, made clear that the administration was ready to hit Europe where it hurt. But on security and defence, Trump’s threats haven’t yet resulted in any meaningful reduction of the U.S. footprint in Europe, at least not yet. Various institutional mechanisms all work together to slow or stop the most dramatic moves. And today, instead of reacting with panic at every announcement, Europeans are sitting back to see what actually happens.

At the same time, to a degree not fully appreciated in Washington, Europe has actually launched a meaningful response to its ally’s mercurial policy. The continent is now putting its money where its mouth is in the quest for strategic autonomy. This allows it to display a degree of flexibility and sang-froid not possible during Trump’s first term.

Germany has abandoned years of fiscal restraint, suspending its constitutional debt brake to unlock hundreds of billions in defense and infrastructure spending. France and the U.K. have deepened bilateral defense cooperation. The EU launched its Readiness 2030 initiative, which commits 800 billion euros toward defense capacity. Poland is now spending more than 4 percent of its GDP on defense, and the Nordic states—notably Finland and Sweden—have joined NATO creating, with the Baltics, an arc of military coherence across Northern Europe.

None of this means that Europe is ready to go it alone. The continent is still highly dependent on American strategic enablers like intelligence and surveillance, logistics and airlift, and nuclear deterrence, to name a few. The muted responses from European leaders don’t necessarily come from a place of total confidence. Instead, they come from a place of exhaustion, a desire to avoid playing into Trump’s hope of public panic, and a belief that the continent is already taking the key practical steps necessary to respond with clear actions rather than words. As a result, Europe’s new strategy seems to be: acknowledge the threat, disagree with it, point to Europe’s growth in capabilities, then move on.

That said, there are moves that Trump could take that would still upend Europe’s composure. If the United States started reconsidering its nuclear umbrella over Europe or openly stated that it wouldn’t stand by its Article Five commitments, those decisions would send shock waves that the continent couldn’t easily absorb. Similarly, if the United States decided to begin a major troop drawdown in Europe, it would strain Europe’s logistics and command structures to a point that would leave it dangerously exposed.

Here, the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act could provide some comfort. Among other guardrails it puts around U.S. military decisions in Europe, it requires the Defense Department to consult NATO allies and submit a report to Congress before reducing troop levels on the continent below 76,000 for more than 45 days. Of course, this law does not offer an ironclad guarantee against the administration’s reckless impulses, but it could certainly help check them.

Ultimately, whether Europe can sustain its position of relative calm will depend on its ability to convert rhetorical resolve into lasting military power. It’s one thing to shrug off threats to deny Trump the reaction he’s been hoping for. It’s quite another to shrug off threats because panic is no longer necessary and Europe has the military backbone to prove it. Europe is on the right track; it just needs to make sure it keeps going in the right direction. Time will tell how this strategy plays out.

Yet such gifts have been a feature of diplomatic exchange since ancient times, as I describe in my book, Diplomatic Gifts: A History in Fifty Presents. The Amarna letters, written on clay tablets in the 14th century B.C. and discovered in the ruins of the ancient Egyptian city of Akhetaten, are full of accounts of magnificent gifts offered by one great king to another. Gift exchanges accompany the meetings of today’s leaders, even if the gifts themselves are a little more modest than the consignments of gold and slaves recorded in the Amarna letters.

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U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs just cannot catch a break in court.

Late Thursday, the U.S. Court of International Trade (CIT) struck down Trump’s latest stopgap measure, a 10 percent global tariff that he levied earlier this year after the Supreme Court struck down his prior go at it. Trump is now 0-5 in judicial rulings on his trade war.

The CIT’s ruling does not mean that Trump’s latest tariffs are dead; relief was just for the plaintiffs, and these duties on imports could last until July, when the Trump administration is expected to unveil a backup, backup plan using a different section of the same half-century-old legislation.

But the court ruling—like some of those that came before on tariffs, including the Supreme Court invalidation—did raise some interesting and big questions. Such as: Can the president, contra the U.S. Constitution, unilaterally raise taxes for almost any reason whatsoever, let alone under a statute written in the late years of the Nixon administration to address a problem that no longer exists? The court majority thought not.

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Since the U.S. Supreme Court in February ruled that President Donald Trump lacked legal authority for his sweeping “Liberation Day” tariffs, Malaysia appears to be the first—and so far only—country to formally end its trade agreement with the Trump administration. Malaysian Trade Minister Johari Abdul Ghani told reporters in March that the deal “is not on hold. It is no longer there. It’s null and void.” Although the ministry subsequently claimed that he had “misspoken,” Johari later reaffirmed his statement on canceling the deal.

For his part, Trump has cautioned nations against making any changes to existing deals while his administration is actively seeking alternative means of exerting economic pressure, including sector-specific tariffs and Section 301 investigations over allegedly unfair trade practices. Indeed, Malaysia is now one of six Southeast Asian nations (the others are Cambodia, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam) to become a target of Washington’s Section 301 investigations into alleged violations related to manufacturing overproduction and forced labor. Last week, the Trump administration additionally singled out Vietnam as a priority target for a Section 301 investigation related to the protection and enforcement of U.S. intellectual property; Indonesia has been placed on the watchlist for similar concerns. Further retaliatory measures may now follow.

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One year ago, it seemed as if the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) had hit its nadir with its globally mocked formula attempting to justify the Trump administration’s arbitrary and ultimately short-lived “Liberation Day” tariffs.

One year later, the USTR is outdoing itself.

In response to U.S. President Donald Trump’s demand for something that will justify import duties on most countries in the world—after the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this year struck down his first stab at global tariffs—the administration’s trade office has put together a doozy. 

Plan B for Trump’s war on trade relies on Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act, but the trade team has not managed to translate a 50-year-old statute meant to address specific and narrow instances of trade discrimination into a coherent or defensible template for raising trade barriers on most major economies. That may not spell a defeat in courts, as befell Trump’s prior tariff initiatives, but it has led to an avalanche of pushback against the administration’s approach.

It is easy to forget that Trump’s war on trade continues, since his war on Iran does as well, and both have the effect of raising prices for consumers and slowing economic growth. But the Trump administration’s trade agenda churns ahead, with public hearings this week and next on the new key element of his protectionist agenda. Which means that the weeks and months ahead will be critical for the future of the Trump administration’s trade policy.

Section 301 is the next big battlefield, because the temporary Band-Aid to keep tariffs in place—Section 122 of that same 1974 act—expires in July. That is why the two big administration efforts to advance trade actions under Section 301 are so important. 

Section 301 has been used many times before to redress trade wrongs, unlike the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which is what Trump tried to use last year before the Supreme Court nixed it. It is a tailored provision in U.S. trade law that allows the U.S. government to identify specific policies and practices in a trade partner that are unjustified, unreasonable, or discriminatory and that harm U.S. commerce. 

China often fits that bill, and in fact, Section 301 tariffs on China from the first Trump administration remain in place. Even today, many trade groups and academic experts argue that the administration’s renewed Section 301 push should continue to focus on China’s state-dominated economy, which distorts industry and exports through subsidies, state aid, currency manipulation, and other measures.

The problem is that the road map the USTR has presented in the most important Section 301 investigation, looking into “excess capacity” in other nations, is neither targeted nor aimed solely at abusive trade partners. It is also not based on any defensible metric that would connect a foreign country’s trade practices to explicit harm to a specific U.S. industry. 

Instead, the USTR argues that countries that produce more goods than they can consume domestically, and thus export the remainder, are by definition harming U.S. industries. 

“The result of this overproduction is large or persistent goods trade surpluses, including the expansion of exports to the United States or to third countries that, in turn, export to the United States. This displaces existing U.S. domestic production or prevents investment and expansion in U.S. manufacturing production that otherwise would have been brought online,” the USTR wrote.

If that sounds like a war on the very idea of trade rather than on bad actors, that’s because it is. 

“The notice’s definition of excess capacity, followed to its conclusion, is indistinguishable from a description of trade,” wrote several scholars from the American Enterprise Institute in public comments submitted to the USTR about this investigation. “Any country that exports anything satisfies this condition. … Taken seriously, that logic would treat trade itself, rather than foreign governments’ conduct, as the object of Section 301 scrutiny,” they concluded.

Trump’s trade team has two ways to tell when foreign countries are treating the United States badly, and both are terrible metrics. The first is how much of the country’s industrial plant is being utilized, and the second is whether it runs a trade surplus with the world, or perhaps just with the United States, or even a trade deficit with the United States. (“This can be the case even if a given economy might experience balanced trade or have an overall goods trade deficit with the United States or with the world,” the USTR expansively noted.)

The industrial utilization argument is very interesting. The USTR posits that relatively low levels of plant utilization, say between 70 percent and 75 percent of nameplate manufacturing capacity, are an indicator of discriminatory government trade policies—those governments are keeping zombie factories afloat. The USTR prefers utilization rates of 80 percent or higher, citing a single number it once cited referring to the U.S. steel industry in 2018, which was in turn based on random numbers plucked from a personal finance website. 

However, that is bad news for any economy whose manufacturing sector has plant utilization rates in the mid-70-percent range, since it indicates a deliberate government intent to promote discriminatory trade practices. The U.S. industrial capacity utilization rate has been below 80 percent for the last two decades. But that, says the USTR, is not evidence of discriminatory trade behavior as it is in every other country, but rather “further evidence that U.S. industry is not operating at its full competitive potential.”

Critics of the latest protectionist push are not amused by the sophistry of the capacity argument. 

“This is an alarming methodological oversight for U.S. government investigations that could affect hundreds of billions of dollars in annual trade and result in billions more in unilateral taxes on covered imports,” scholars from the Cato Institute wrote in submissions to the USTR.

The other smoking gun of abusive trade practices, according to the USTR, is a country’s trade balance, whether it is a surplus, or balanced, or a deficit with the United States. “The result of this overproduction is large or persistent goods trade surpluses, including the expansion of exports to the United States or to third countries that, in turn, export to the United States,” notes the USTR. 

Germany, the largest economy in the 27-nation European Union, which is a target of this Section 301 probe, thinks that is a silly argument. Making a valiant effort to explain the 19th-century principles behind global trade and comparative advantage, the German Chamber of Industry and Commerce noted that the country’s trade surplus with the United States, like that of the European Union as a whole, is because it makes things that American and global consumers want to buy.

“European—and specifically German—industrial output has evolved in response to historic global demand patterns, consistent with the principles of comparative advantage and gains from trade,” the chamber wrote in its submissions to the USTR.

German exports are not fueled by wild state subsidies; “rather, Germany’s industrial capacity is the result of market competition, as German companies strive to meet consumer demands from all over the world,” it said.

Singapore, another trade-reliant country targeted by the latest investigation, also had some thoughts. 

“As a small country with no natural resources, Singapore and its economy are necessarily externally oriented and trade dependent,” the government of Singapore began its submission to the USTR. “To the extent that Singapore has a trade surplus with other nations, it is a result of the market-driven outcomes of Singapore’s geography and open economy, rather than non-market-oriented government interventions.”

More to the point, Singapore pointed out, the tiny country has run a trade deficit with the United States for more than 20 years. What harm to U.S. commerce is the USTR talking about?

Between the low levels of industrial utilization and certain bilateral trade surpluses, the United States itself seems to be a major offender in global trade, according to the USTR’s own definitions. 

“The United States may therefore itself exhibit excess capacity under such standards through its own bilateral and global surpluses in select services and energy products,” wrote a pair of scholars at the Council on Foreign Relations in a blog post. “It also opens up the possibility that U.S. trading partners could take actions to restrict imports of American services or energy products for similar reasons using vague definitions to justify those measures.”

The language in the Section 301 statute is fairly clear, and it is meant to address country-specific trade distortions with a thorough investigation, not become a catch-all backstop for an administration determined to raise import duties under any pretext. What Section 301 is not meant to target are the normal workings of market economies that make more of some things than others, and sell the things they make the most of, or make better. 

Section 301 needs to prove a concrete link between foreign government policies and concrete harms to specific U.S. industries and workers. 

“[O]therwise USTR would merely be cherry-picking disparate, unrelated statistics to reverse-engineer new U.S. trade restrictions,” said Cato in its written submission.

Given how sloppy the Trump administration’s rationales are for the next round of tariffs, and how far they differ from the statutory requirements of Section 301, is there a chance that these tariffs, too, could face a serious legal challenge, like the ones that killed Trump’s IEEPA tariffs?

“We filed these in the hopes of a court challenge, but I think the chances of victory are low—maybe below 10 percent—unless they do something like fail to offer notice-and-comment before imposing tariffs or imposing insanely high ones,” said Scott Lincicome, the vice president of economics and trade at the Cato Institute.

“But the statute is terribly broad and discretionary, so I don’t see much of a challenge, unlike with IEEPA. I hope I am wrong.”

The biggest mistake to make about U.S. President Donald Trump’s summit with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, in Beijing next month is to expect a spectacular breakthrough. Calls from American and Chinese scholars for a grand superpower bargain will go unheeded. But the second biggest mistake would be to write off the planned meeting as meaningless theater. It will be more than Xi giving Trump the “big, fat, hug” that the latter expects.

Both readings miss what more than five decades of U.S.-China presidential summitry show. These meetings rarely transform the relationship. What they can do, when handled well, is make a potentially dangerous rivalry less volatile. That matters more than ever now, with Trump’s war with Iran driving a global energy shock and adding fresh instability to an already fracturing international order.

This conclusion comes from a database of bilateral summits, sideline meetings, and calls assembled by the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis. The data tracks 136 direct conversations between U.S. presidents and Chinese paramount leaders, from President Richard Nixon’s sit-down with Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong in February 1972 through Trump’s call with Xi in February. This historical record is a warning against both wishful thinking and cynicism.

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News this week that the Trump administration has been in secret talks with the Eritrean government to remove existing U.S. sanctions on the country is, on its surface, a head-scratcher. The removal of sanctions would normally signal the end of a path of marked reforms, such as when U.S. President Donald Trump lifted terrorism sanctions on Sudan in 2020, or acknowledge a wholescale change of regime necessitating a fresh start, as was the case in Syria last year. Eritrea has achieved neither of these benchmarks.

In fact, the internal political and human rights situation in the country remains much as it has been since President Isaias Afwerki came to power in 1993. In his more than 30 years at the head of this militarized dictatorship, Isaias has never stood for election and continues to wield absolute power absent a constitution. The national legislature has not met since 2010, and Isaias’s People’s Front for Democracy and Justice remains the only legally allowed political party, guaranteeing no formal checks on his unlimited power.

Isaias himself maintains what Human Rights Watch calls an “iron grip” over his people. Forced military conscription, coupled with a gulag system of thousands of political prisoners, has meant that as much as 1-2 percent of Eritrea’s 3.5 million people exit the country each year seeking formal asylum abroad, though even these figures underreport the true scale of the exodus. Perhaps most inexplicable, Eritrea remains one of the worst countries in the world for religious freedom and the persecution of Christians in particular, ranking fifth worst in Open Doors’ most recent World Watch List, with an outright ban on evangelical, Pentecostal, Baptist, and Adventist churches.

Since there has been no change in the fundamental nature of the Eritrean regime, one might normally imagine that a decision to provide sanctions relief comes because the justification for imposing the sanctions—Eritrea’s involvement and gross human rights abuses in the 2020-22 Tigray conflict in neighboring Ethiopia—has been addressed. But this could not be further from the truth. Four years post-conflict, Ethiopia and Eritrea are on the verge of a new catastrophic outbreak of violence. Eritrea was itself never a party to the 2022 Pretoria Agreement that ended the conflict between the Ethiopian federal government and the Tigray region. That war cost more than 600,000 lives by some estimates. Not bound by the terms of the peace deal, Eritrea has been fueling Ethiopian division for the past several years, in a bid to destabilize its larger and more powerful neighbor while also trying to undercut Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s aggressive pursuit of Red Sea access through the Eritrean port of Assab. The region is today a tinderbox that could reignite and recommence the kinds of atrocity crimes that landed Eritrea on Washington’s sanctions list in the first place.

In recent policy pronouncements, Trump appointees at the State Department’s Bureau of African Affairs have made clear their belief that engagement is a tool, “not an endorsement” of how governments came to power, and that the United States should engage governments “as they are, and not as Washington wishes them to be,” with diplomacy that “respects sovereignty” and avoids “lectures” on democracy and human rights. But to what end?

For sure, the Red Sea region has emerged in recent years as a new theater for geopolitical competition, one where Washington has a strategic interest in increasing its presence and influence. A normalized relationship with Eritrea may, on its face, create such an opportunity. But this also ignores the fundamental nature of its new partner in Eritrea and how Isaias has succeeded in maintaining his grip on the country while suffering very few real consequences.

Isaias has demonstrated his facility in managing competing external influences and adeptly switching alliances and allegiances as it suits his own strategic agenda. Washington should proceed with its eyes wide open about how it is choosing to advance its Red Sea interests.

In that context, the Trump administration has articulated no strategy for the Red Sea or the Horn of Africa, despite being engaged across multiple issues in the region. How would the decision to lift sanctions on Eritrea impact efforts to mediate a peace agreement in neighboring Sudan? The regime in Eritrea has allied itself closely to Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) in its war against the Emirati-backed Rapid Support Forces (RSF). Normalization with Asmara now would be viewed in that context as a sign of support for Sudan’s army, along with Egypt’s position on the inviolable nature of Sudan’s unity and the SAF’s position as Sudan’s last functioning state institution.

Cairo, which is reported to have brokered the rapprochement between Washington and Asmara, has its own strategy for the region and may have activated Trump as a sort of “useful idiot” in its effort to both preserve the Sudanese state under the SAF and construct a coalition to pressure Ethiopia to restart negotiations on the use and continued filling of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD). Cairo had previously convinced Trump to use his position to restart GERD talks that Ethiopia has been deeply resisting and Egypt remains desperately in search of. How does recognition of Ethiopia’s mortal enemy in neighboring Eritrea, with which Ethiopia is locked in a sort of cold war that could quickly turn hot, entice Ethiopia to join Trump’s initiative on the Nile?

Similarly, what message would a breakthrough with Eritrea send to other Gulf states active in the region? Saudi Arabia will likely interpret Washington’s move as an effort to help mitigate future conflict in the Red Sea region. But this might be misleading, given that Washington has previously shown itself to be a reluctant actor in the arena.

The United Arab Emirates, on the other hand, perhaps the most active external actor in the Horn of Africa region, will likely interpret Washington’s move as threatening to its actions in both Ethiopia and Sudan. The UAE has emerged as the largest investor and principal backer of Abiy and is using him, along with other regional leaders, to increase support to the RSF in Sudan in their bid to defeat Sudan’s army and fundamentally remake the Sudanese state. Washington has previously been accused of being too close to the Emirati position in Sudan, though this move would seem to undermine that.

In a bygone era, barely two years ago, the United States might have drawn a lesson from its current travails in the Strait of Hormuz and sought to get ahead of another global maritime shutdown by convening a diplomatic coalition of Red Sea states. This might entail drafting a declaration on Red Sea cooperation and creating technical groups on maritime security, tourism, fisheries, and more, identifying the points of common interest and building institutions and processes, based on shared interests, to help manage the growing rivalries and competing agendas that could lead to another geopolitical shock.

No more.

Instead, Washington is today just one of a dozen actors to have thrown its hat in the ring of competitive interests in the Red Sea with seemingly little care or concern for the strategic ripple effects that might emerge. If such a normalization of relations with Eritrea is to occur, Washington needs to prepare itself now for the second- and third-order effects it will have set in motion and be prepared to manage them, lest this diplomatic thaw add new, unforeseen complications in a region already beset with challenges.

Last year was supposed to have been India’s turn to host a Quadrilateral Security Dialogue summit. But 2025 came and went without such a meeting—and now, New Delhi is trying to pick up the pieces by hosting the Quad’s foreign ministers instead, possibly when U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio visits India in May. Comprising Australia, India, Japan, and the United States, the Quad is a minilateral coordination group of like-minded democratic powers that seek to counter China and collaborate on various other challenges.

During his first term, U.S. President Donald Trump quietly resurrected the grouping, originally created at Japan’s initiative in 2007, after a nearly decade-long hiatus. Yet since his return to the White House in 2025, Trump has refused to participate, leaving the Quad leaderless and degrading its geostrategic value. This spiral is likely to continue unless or until Trump decides to attend the Quad summit that Australia, as the rotating chair for 2026, may host later this year. If Trump declines again, then the Quad will be relegated to geopolitical insignificance, and it may even spell the end of the grouping entirely.

It wouldn’t be the first time the Quad died. Back in 2008, the grouping collapsed due to some of its members getting cold feet on too aggressively challenging China. Elections had brought new leaders to power with less of a hawkish bend to their China policy. This time around, the primary reason for the Quad’s demise would be more worrisome: Washington is no longer a reliable strategic partner in the international system.

Trump’s decision not to attend India’s 2025 summit appears to have had policy and personal reasons. On the policy side, he demanded that New Delhi agree to a new U.S.-India free trade agreement as a deliverable before his visit. But for whatever reason, the deal was still being negotiated. Additionally, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was battling Trump over steep new U.S. tariffs at the time; these levies were later relieved. Trump further harbored deep personal resentments toward Modi after he refused to acknowledge Trump’s role in resolving a four-day war between India and Pakistan in May. Instead, Trump reset ties with Islamabad after Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif showed no such reluctance and even called for Trump to be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.

Another Quad member frustrated with Trump is close U.S. security ally Japan. Tokyo seems to have been caught off guard by Trump’s initial imposition of a 24 percent tariff last year. Trump then threatened to increase the tariff rate another percentage point even after trade consultations in May, demonstrating the futility of negotiating with the United States even as a close friend. Only after further negotiations did the two sides agree to 15 percent. The whiplash continued in February, when the U.S. Supreme Court decided that that Trump’s tariffs were unconstitutional and he then announced a separate, across-the-board 10 percent tariff.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration originally demanded that Japan spend 3 percent of its GDP on defense. This target was subsequently increased to 3.5 percent to align with a similar NATO figure. At the time, Tokyo spent only about 1.4 percent on defense, meaning that Washington was requesting it to more than double its defense spending almost overnight. The demand was so insulting to Tokyo that then-Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba felt the need to uncharacteristically and undiplomatically push back hard against Washington. The defense budget, he said last March after 3 percent was floated, “should not be decided based on what other nations tell [Japan] to do.”

Under current Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, Japan’s security cooperation and alignment with the United States remain intact, but the vibes are concerning and suggest that less, not more, will likely be done between the two countries in the future. Trump recently criticized Tokyo, for example, for not helping to reopen the Strait of Hormuz as part of his war against Iran. Japan is also poised to unlock its arms exporting potential, which has remained dormant since World War II. While Japan’s ramping up of weapons production is applauded by Washington, it is actually largely in response to growing Japanese concerns about the U.S. preoccupation with wars in places such as the Middle East. Takaichi clearly believes that Tokyo must do more—and alone, if necessary.

Finally, Australia—as both a Quad member and U.S. treaty ally—also harbors growing concerns about America’s direction. Canberra was kept in the dark about Washington’s decision to counter-blockade Iran in the Strait of Hormuz, for instance. Similar to its interactions with Japan, the Trump administration demanded that Australia spend at least 3.5 percent of its GDP on defense, and though it initially balked, Australian Defense Minister Richard Marles announced last week that his country would spend roughly 3 percent by 2033, closer to Trump’s goal but still falling short. When asked about Australia last Thursday, Trump said, “I’m not happy,” because of its refusal to participate in his Iran war. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese hasn’t been happy with Trump of late either, especially with the latter’s threat to eliminate Iran’s civilization, which Albanese considered inappropriate and in ignorance of international law.

Meanwhile, Australian Trade Minister Don Farrell has expressed Canberra’s disappointment at Trump’s recent imposition of a 10 percent tariff, even though the United States has a trade surplus with Australia. After the Supreme Court ruling, Farrell called the tariff “unjustified.” Regardless, the damage to bilateral trust has already been done.

Compounding these fractures is Trump’s anticipated visit to China next month, which is likely to send more shockwaves through the Quad. Instead of visiting New Delhi for a Quad summit on his way to or from Beijing, he will skip India in favor of China. For Australia, India, and Japan, the core value of the grouping has always rested on a shared understanding that Washington would serve as the strategic anchor balancing Beijing. A high-profile Trump visit to Beijing—especially if it produces even the perception of a U.S.-China accommodation on trade, Taiwan, or regional security—would raise fears of a U.S.-China condominium that sidelines allied interests.

New Delhi would worry about being cut out of great-power bargaining, Tokyo would fear abandonment amid rising tensions in the East China Sea, and Canberra would see further evidence that Washington prioritizes transactional diplomacy over alliance management and long-term security. Even if no concrete concessions emerge, the optics alone risk reinforcing a narrative already taking hold across the Indo-Pacific: that U.S. commitment is conditional, episodic, and ultimately subordinate to Trump’s personal whims and arrangements, in this case with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

To be sure, the Quad may survive and muddle along—hobbled but not mortally wounded by these strains. But that seems increasingly unlikely given the steady erosion of the U.S. strategic partnerships underpinning the grouping since Trump’s return to power. It is hard to imagine the Quad enduring another two and a half years of this flavor of U.S. foreign policy without losing both credibility and purpose.

If the Quad does falter, it will not simply disappear—it will be quietly replaced. India, Japan, and Australia are already exploring alternative paths to coordinate on security, supply chains, and defense industrial cooperation, both trilaterally and through other minilateral frameworks that do not depend as heavily on Washington’s consistency. These arrangements will be narrower, more transactional, and far less ambitious than the Quad at its peak.

In that sense, the real loss is not just the Quad itself but the broader vision it once represented: a durable, values-based coalition capable of shaping the Indo-Pacific balance of power. If the grouping collapses, it will mark a decisive shift away from that model toward a more fragmented regional order—one in which U.S. allies hedge more openly, coordination becomes episodic, and collective action gives way to strategic self-help. China will undoubtedly benefit—not because it outmaneuvered the Quad but because the United States chose to disengage.

Kangxi, the great 17th-century emperor of China, owed his throne to smallpox. His father had died of the disease at just 22 years old in 1661. Kangxi, only 7 years old, had been chosen over his older brother because Kangxi had already survived smallpox—an epidemic that was cutting a scythe through the ruling elite.

Kangxi’s dynasty, the Qing, were Manchu, a steppe people who had conquered China in 1644. They had no concept of germ theory, but they could observe that the Chinese, living in far more crowded settlements than the northern nomads, often got the milder form of smallpox when young. Kangxi arranged for his whole family to be variolated, an early form of immunization in which healthy individuals were deliberately inoculated. In 1681, he ordered the same for the Manchu armies, eventually immunizing more than 4 million troops and their relatives.

Nearly 350 years later, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s grasp of science and military logistics appears considerably worse than Kangxi’s. Hegseth has just made the annual flu vaccine for U.S. soldiers no longer mandatory, claiming that the abolition of the mandate is a victory for freedom. Centuries of military history demonstrate with brutal clarity what a stupid idea this is.

Armies have carried disease with them since recorded history began. The Plague of Athens— probably typhoid fever or typhus—which wrecked the city in 430 B.C., was carried by Athenian sailors and besieging Spartan soldiers. In A.D. 165, Roman armies brought smallpox back with them from the eastern reaches of the empire, killing between 5 million and 10 million people.

At the Battle of Red Cliffs in 208, the army of the Chinese warlord Cao Cao was fatally weakened by an outbreak of fever, forcing him to retreat. Armies that took medical precautions, like the Qing troops, had an advantage over unshielded foes. When the Qing exterminated the Dzungar Mongols in 1755, two-fifths of the population had already fallen to smallpox.

The military is a fantastic vector for epidemics. Soldiers are pressed together in close quarters, often with poor sanitation. Wounded troops are more vulnerable to infection, and premodern medical treatment, with its blood-stained saws and unwashed hands, worsened their chances. Armies also travel and conquer, discovering new and exciting diseases along the way. Until the 20th century, it was routine for armies to lose more men to illness than to the enemy.

The United States was no exception. Disease was the main killer of Civil War soldiers and World War I doughboys alike. It wasn’t until World War II that the pattern was reversed. In World War I, flu was the country’s biggest killer, claiming 45,000 U.S. military dead—and another 600,000 or more civilians. The 1918 pandemic moved between Europe and the Americas on troopships, sickening between 20 and 40 percent of U.S. military personnel as it travelled. It became known as the Spanish flu because Spain, a neutral in the war, released the numbers of its dead while combatants tried to hide their figures for fear of signaling how fragile their armies had become.

Since the United States was founded, its leaders have tried to reduce the toll that disease took on armies. George Washington, like Kangxi a century earlier, ordered his troops inoculated against smallpox, reasoning that the 2 percent death rate of primitive inoculation was far better than losing a third of his men to the disease. U.S. doctors and generals turned the tide against disease in World War II thanks to vaccinations, newly developed antibiotics, and an enormous medical-military bureaucracy.

The relative lack of epidemics among militaries today is thanks to decades of work by doctors. The Republican Party’s war on vaccines, spearheaded by U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and endorsed by Hegseth, could undo that. To be sure, modern medicine makes outbreaks less dangerous, but even when it doesn’t kill soldiers, being sick makes them—like anyone else—more sluggish.

Soldiers also spread disease to local civilians, with disastrous health and public relations consequences. Take Haiti, where Nepali peacekeepers, deployed by the United Nations in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake, brought cholera back to a country that hadn’t seen the disease for a century. A single camp with poor sanitation caused an outbreak that sickened more than 800,000 people and killed nearly 10,000. The U.N. claimed the outbreak had nothing to do with its peacekeepers until 2016 and after grudgingly acknowledging responsibility botched the attempt to provide aid. It’s easy to imagine a Hegsethian army doing the same on the ground in Iran or Cuba.

The idea that compulsory vaccination limits soldiers’ freedom is at odds with the entire historical, legal, and cultural framework of the U.S. military. The lives of service members are governed by restrictions that don’t apply to civilians: on their travel, on their health, on their personal security, on their hygiene and grooming, even on their right to cheat on their spouses. Even numerous other vaccination requirements still stand—for now.

So why has Hegseth made this epochally dangerous decision? Part of the reason is the strange politics of the MAGA movement. To bring RFK Jr. and his followers on board, Donald Trump publicly disowned his own remarkably successful COVID-19 vaccine effort in favor of anti-vaccination conspiracies.

But the decision also ties into Hegseth’s own vision of the military, where white masculinity is valued above expertise or experience. Hegseth and his clique are obsessed with the idea of the warfighter, the hard man who makes hard decisions. The warfighter’s hard body will not succumb to such womanly problems as disease; his precious bodily fluids will not be polluted by the penetrating needle. These psychosocial delusions tie in with the eugenicist politics of RFK Jr., where nature will wipe out the unworthy.

The defense secretary has already attempted to illegally retitle himself as the secretary of war. Give viruses time, and another biblical horseman may be a better fit.

In recent weeks, President Donald Trump has once again put U.S. credibility under assault. His erratic aggression in Iran, unilateral decision-making, and rhetorical attacks on allies have made clear—if it wasn’t already abundantly so—that Washington is becoming a more reckless, less predictable partner.

Just how much damage has been done to U.S. credibility—and how easily can it be repaired?

Americans have slowly come to realize that rebuilding the world’s trust will be a long and arduous process. But many still hope that, after Trump, steadier leadership and more consistent foreign policy can begin to undo the damage.

But this hope does not reckon with the full extent of the challenge. As new research shows, foreign audiences respond to structural features of U.S. politics—especially polarization—and not just the characteristics of individual leaders. In short, they recognize that even if the next U.S. president proves to be more credible, this doesn’t matter so long as the system itself remains broken.

Along with my colleague Helen Webley-Brown, I study how Americans—as well as their allies and partners—assess the United States’ international reputation. In our research, we have asked more than 7,500 individuals in the United States, Australia, India, Israel, and the United Kingdom to consider various configurations of future U.S. governments and assess how trustworthy they might be.

The work shows a significant, international lack of trust in Washington—one that might stem from, but now goes far beyond, concerns about Trump himself. Indeed, it is the persistent features of the U.S. government, ones that will exist far past 2028, that seem to matter most when it comes to the U.S. reputation.

For example, our study participants were asked to consider either a highly partisan president or a moderate one. Consistently, they viewed a more ideological extreme president—regardless of their party—less favorably. This poses an enduring challenge for U.S. credibility. As gerrymandering, campaign financing, and turnout challenges in U.S. elections have grown, the electoral system itself has become skewed toward less moderate candidates, who struggle to win over foreign audiences.

Indeed, polarization itself consistently swayed attitudes against Washington. When study participants were asked to consider a highly polarized U.S. public, favorability toward the U.S. government dropped by 18 percentage points. Confidence in U.S. extended deterrence dropped by 5 percentage points.

The problem is concerning and persistent. Polarization has plagued U.S. politics for years; the Trump administration is both a product of and an exacerbator of it. And the changing composition of U.S. political demographics, electoral politics, and the media environment mean that polarization is here to stay.

As a result, which party controls the presidency or holds the majority in Congress matters far less to the U.S. reputation than how politics operate, according to our data. Instead, the evident frustration with Washington around the globe is responding to something deeper: the perception that U.S. politics have become fractured and unstable. Yes, Trump is an unprecedentedly untrustworthy president, the view goes, but whomever the American public elects next (or after that) might be as well.

Why, exactly, does polarization matter so much? The answer lies in what it portends. In the words of one study participant: Polarization means “gridlock … disarray, and infighting.” Another wrote, “With a highly polarized divide in the U.S., all they would do is argue amongst themselves and with other nations.”

After all, a highly polarized United States is less capable of sustaining coherent policies over time. Commitments made by one administration may be reversed by the next. Even the Biden administration—for all its various efforts to smooth over relations with allies—did little, in the end, to paper over the shock that the first Trump administration wrought.

The effects of polarization go further. Domestic divisions may slow decision-making or affect political messaging in moments of crisis. Political conflict may force politicians to turn inward, and it could weaken the political will needed to solve the most pressing international challenges.

This has important implications for how we ought to interpret recent events in the Middle East. The Trump administration’s actions toward Iran raise concerns about escalation and point to the persistent erosion of U.S. alliances. Even some of the closest U.S. allies have denied base access and failed to comply with Trump’s demands for support. Decoupling behavior—from new military acquisitions to a focus on artificial intelligence sovereignty—has already begun, not just in response to Trump but also in anticipation that things won’t get better, at least not soon.

While Trump, in many ways, represents a sharp departure from previous administrations, allies and partners increasingly fear that what we see today is the new “business as usual.”

This helps explain why U.S. allies and partners are increasingly hedging. In Europe, debates about “strategic autonomy” and even European nuclear capabilities have gained traction as policymakers question whether reliance on the United States remains prudent. In Asia, concerns about U.S. staying power have also sparked nuclear debates, prompted renewed emphasis on burden-sharing, and contributed to a proliferation of both intra- and interregional security arrangements. These developments are not solely reactions to any single administration. They reflect a deeper—and more long-standing—uncertainty about the United States’ place in the world.

This does not mean that Washington’s credibility is irreparably broken. But it does mean that recovery will be more difficult than many assume. Rebuilding trust will require more than a change in leadership. As long as U.S. politics remain deeply polarized, allies and partners will continue to question whether American commitments can endure. Those attempting to rebuild trust will need to grapple not only with how to make better and more consistent foreign-policy choices, but also with how to repair a deeply fractured domestic political landscape.

The video even comes with a pump-up song: a sample of 1971’s “Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress”—an odd choice given that the song is about working for the FBI.

Not everyone is buying it. For one, despite the song, there are few women in the ad. Nor do its black-and-white vintage images show many people of color—a fact that one former top diplomat called out as a return to the stereotype of the State Department as “pale, male, Yale.”

Whether or not that resonates with applicants is another matter.

In conversations with State Department applicants and university representatives, many said there is continued eagerness to join the foreign service. But agency layoffs and Trump administration policies are weighing on some applicants’ minds, potentially limiting the pool of those willing to join the ranks of U.S. diplomats—while perhaps appealing to others.

The State Department’s campaign launched April 1 with the video featuring retro images of American diplomats. It then was followed by a Substack post by Secretary of State Marco Rubio touting the work of celebrated diplomats and American revolutionaries Silas Deane and Benjamin Franklin. The State Department later released another ad focused on U.S. diplomatic history, as well as ads featuring images from the April 1 video.

The material for both campaigns draws heavily from U.S. history. Some of the images for the April 1 video are taken from a 1938 newsreel about foreign service recruitment. The audio is also from the 1938 newsreel, which features diplomat Gardiner Howland Shaw telling a group of young men that diplomats are “sample Americans.” The footage has more typically been used to highlight historical elitism in the State Department, and featured most recently in a PBS documentary on the Black diplomats who helped break down racial barriers there.

The campaign comes as the State Department enacts recruitment and training policies to align itself with the Trump administration’s agenda—including getting rid of what Rubio called “DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion] excesses.” The standard test that applicants take no longer includes questions related to a candidate’s diversity—such as how often they have “interacted with people from different cultures or backgrounds”—a feature that conservative publications have argued was akin to a “political loyalty test.”

The A-100 course, the introductory training taken by all foreign service officers, will now also include lessons on “America First” foreign policy. The course also now features teachings from Angelo Codevilla, a prominent conservative scholar whose work prefigured Trump’s populist appeal.

Separately, the State Department is working to “expand the State Department’s recruitment pipeline,” according to a post on X by Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources Michael Rigas. An accompanying photo of Rigas meeting with former foreign service officers and university representatives appears to picture Jason Bohm, dean of the evangelical Liberty University’s government program, among other attendees.

Details of the new campaign, such as how many new diplomats the State Department needs, are unclear. In response to questions from Foreign Policy, a State Department official, who was not authorized to make a public comment, stated that “the department aims to attract talent based on merit, and our efforts are aligned with that goal.”

The administration’s budget request, however, suggests that it is not planning on rapidly expanding the service, and is perhaps only focused on replacing those who leave through attrition. The State Department is pushing to finalize the layoffs of around 250 foreign service officers announced last summer as part of Rubio’s high-profile mass reorganization of the department. The department separately paused internships last summer and has “postponed” 2026 applications for the Pickering fellowship, a merit-based program traditionally geared toward minority applicants. The State Department also canceled the “diplomat in residence” program, which placed diplomats in universities across the country.

A laid-off employee fights back tears while carrying a box of office belongings as she leaves the U.S. State Department in Washington on July 11, 2025. Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

But the State Department’s foreign service union disputed that characterization, saying that the numbers for past years actually showed a decrease in applications compared to 2021.

“The process to bring in America’s diplomats has always been something that has been tweaked and altered to fit whatever the need of that generation was,” said John Dinkelman, president of the American Foreign Service Association. “While changes by any given administration are nothing new [to the recruitment and testing process], the extent and nature to which things are being altered has been alarming.”

Dinkelman, a retired longtime diplomat whose last posting was as a diplomat in residence at Howard University, a historically Black university, praised his old program, which before Rubio eliminated it focused on casting a wide net in its recruitment of new foreign service officers from outside the traditional Washington-area and East Coast Ivy League schools.

Diplomats assigned to the program typically did not teach courses at their host colleges but rather spent much of their time traveling around their assigned regions, visiting military bases, technical colleges, law enforcement academies, and medical schools to pitch the foreign service to Americans who might not otherwise have considered it a viable or attractive career option.

“Diplomats in residence were most likely targeted for elimination because many of them were based at minority-serving institutions. But this ignores the fact that we were traveling and doing DEI for everything, including looking for those Americans outside of those liberal bastions to make sure that we were fully representing all views in America,” said another former diplomat in residence, who asked not to be named for fear of professional retaliation. “I personally spent time recruiting on military bases and in conservative areas. My colleagues and I made a point to reach out to all.”

Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley smiles after then-U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced that she would be the State Department’s first chief diversity officer during a news conference in Washington on April 12, 2021. Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

The foreign service has never been demographically representative of the United States, despite modest efforts by the Biden administration to increase the recruitment and retention of minority diplomats. A 2020 study by Congress’s internal watchdog, the Government Accountability Office, found that from fiscal 2002 through fiscal 2018, the proportion of racial or ethnic minorities in the foreign service increased from 17 percent to 24 percent, still significantly trailing the rapidly diversifying picture of the United States. And Black diplomats made up only 7 percent of the foreign service, despite Black Americans constituting 13.4 percent of the U.S. population at that time.

“The department is still male, pale, and Yale. It has moved very little from that,” said a Democratic congressional aide, who was not authorized to be quoted. “The idea that a lot of progress was made in that space was not true.”

The State Department has not been forthcoming to repeated requests from Democratic lawmakers with oversight responsibilities for information about what is driving the decision to move away from the previous process for recruiting and testing foreign service applicants and why the Trump administration believes the changes will result in a more merit-focused diplomatic corps, said the staffer.

“This is basically all ideologically driven rather than data-driven. They haven’t done the homework,” said the staffer. “They believe these certain things without having any data to back it up. Merit was always there. This was always an entirely merit-based process.”

Fired U.S. State Department workers push their belongings in a shopping cart as they leave the building in Washington on July 11, 2025.Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

Students at Georgetown University, a historical feeder school for the State Department, remain interested in a career there, according to Joel Hellman, the dean of Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service. A career services advisor at another school in Washington, D.C., who was not authorized to speak publicly, agreed that student interest had not significantly decreased.

Two applicants, who requested anonymity so as not to jeopardize their application, likewise said they remained interested in the State Department despite layoffs and other changes within the agency, including the end of diversity-promotion programs.

“It’s something that I really wanted to do for a very long time,” said the first of the two applicants. “Since middle school, it’s been my dream to become a diplomat.”

“I believe the U.S. has something to offer,” said the second applicant. “Trying to seek a State Department career is putting my money where my mouth is.”

But the layoffs are still having an impact on potential applicants. “My students are extremely wary of [the State Department],” said one university professor in the Washington, D.C., area, who requested anonymity to discuss private conversations. Some students were frustrated by the cancellation of internships, the professor said, while others had attempted to make use of alumni networks only to find that those alumni had been laid off from the State Department.

“I sense particularly deep frustration and disappointment with those who chose to spend a lot of money to study so close to the Capitol, as marketing materials advertised, and then see the career paths they had been told would open for them close,” the professor said.

The layoffs likewise were a focus for both of the applicants that Foreign Policy spoke with, but they did not dissuade them. “It might just take longer to become a [foreign service officer] or get into the profession,” the second applicant said.

A man holds a sign outside the U.S. State Department in Washington on July 11, 2025.Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

The turmoil may even be encouraging to some applicants. Some student mentors at Georgetown have noted that “the opportunities within the State Department will actually increase, because there’s been such a significant sort of shift of mid- and senior-level personnel out of the State Department,” Hellman said.

The State Department’s new policies on diversity, as well as the Trump administration’s general foreign policy, likewise may influence some—but not necessarily keep them from applying.

The second applicant, who came from a minority religious and ethnic background, said the turn away from diversity policies was not a significant influence on him. In a reflection of the complexity of motivations, meanwhile, he said that his experience as a minority drew him to the noninterventionist element of the current administration.

The first applicant, likewise from a minority group, described at least some loss of motivation related to Trump administration policies, pointing to reporting on the alleged targeting of Black and female officers in the military. Again, though, they didn’t describe themselves as deterred from applying.

One unknown is how many applicants may be drawn in explicitly because of the State Department’s new policies. The Ben Franklin Fellowship, an association of current and former foreign service officers, many of whose members lean conservative, has held events for students at Notre Dame, Missouri State University, and Liberty University since the start of the Trump administration.

“These are places where you have a different kind of student who is just as smart as anybody who goes to Georgetown, but they may not have thought about the foreign service,” said Matt Boyse, a co-founder of the Ben Franklin Fellowship. Such schools lean more conservative than East Coast schools and can contribute to political diversity at the State Department, Boyse added.

While it’s unclear how many students eventually apply for the State Department, Boyse said that interest has been high. “There’s a sense of patriotism and service to the country.”

U.S. President Donald Trump’s art of the deal is, at best, usually little more than a preliminary sketch. Nowhere is this more evident than in Iran. Last week’s announcement of a U.S. and Israeli cease-fire in return for Iran reopening the Strait of Hormuz left the world holding its breath. Doubts swelled over how many ships would be able to pass through the waterway and whether Israel would end its assault on Lebanon. Questions over the fate of Iran’s nuclear program—one of the reasons that Israel and Washington gave for launching the war in the first place—loomed large. Sure enough, the collapse of weekend talks in Islamabad and a newly announced U.S. blockade of Iranian ports suggest that the ballyhooed cease-fire may not survive its planned two-week duration.

In trumpeting last week’s agreement as a “big day for World Peace,” Trump followed his usual playbook for international dealmaking, using a splashy pronouncement to obscure a failure to reach a meeting of the minds on crucial terms. This approach can achieve limited gains—including quieting fighting for a time—but leaves fundamental tensions to fester. Indeed, slapdash efforts can set the stage for explosive eruptions down the road. While everyone welcomes a cessation of hostilities, Trump’s half-baked approach to peacemaking may well be a recipe for more war in the Middle East.

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Ever since the United States and Israel eliminated Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, a little over a month ago, the question of who speaks for Iran has loomed over every aspect of the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, and especially over the question of how to achieve peace.

Usually stated much less forcefully by U.S. media is the parallel question: Who speaks for the United States? The putative successor in Iran, Mojtaba Khamenei, the previous leader’s son, is said to be recovering from injuries in the attack on his father and has not since made a public appearance. The president of the United States, Donald Trump, by contrast, is everywhere at once, both literally and figuratively.

In the space of a single recent 24-hour news cycle, Trump went from issuing threats of wholesale, indiscriminate violence against Iran unless it capitulated to his demands, to declaring a two-week cease-fire that appeared to make major concessions to Tehran while also claiming a U.S. victory.

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Hence, the United States’ massive air war—perhaps followed by a ground campaign—against Iran is an obvious case where one would expect the China calculus to play a major role. In fact, the Trump administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy highlights the U.S.-China rivalry, emphasizing the importance of balancing China in Asia and denying it access to the Western Hemisphere. Various analysts and strategists have put the Iran war in the context of pushing back against China by denying it its regional partners.

But it is difficult to see how Operation Epic Fury enhances the U.S. position relative to China.

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Wednesday night’s address to the nation by U.S. President Donald Trump felt like an occasion to draw firm and ominous conclusions.

Anxious viewers may have expected a clarifying statement of the purpose of the U.S. war against Iran, a vision of its conclusion, or at least a credible timeline for its end. Anyone old enough to remember prime-time speeches by previous presidents during wartime may have hoped for a return to some of the solemnity that has typically marked such moments.

On Wednesday, they got none of this. What national and global audiences saw instead was perhaps the clearest evidence yet that the leader of what has long been the world’s predominant superpower is an utterly chaotic thinker, whose aptitude for his job—never obvious to begin with—appears to be in accelerating decline.

Over a soporific 19 minutes, Trump repeated himself multiple times and contradicted his main points. At moments, he seemed to lose the thread altogether. He breathed oddly at the outset and then came close to mispronouncing the name of a major stake in the war, the Strait of Hormuz, which could almost be heard as the “strait of hormone.”

This has not offered humor. Nothing about it is remotely funny. Least amusing of all is that Trump seemed lost and confused throughout, especially on the questions that listeners most wanted answered: Where does this war go from here, and how can it be brought to a close in a way that delivers the world to a better place than when it began?

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The Iran war is just over a month old, and the prevailing opinion among the commentariat is that it’s already a “quagmire,” if not a “catastrophe.” Critics have compared the conflict to the United States’ invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, its intervention in the Korean War, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and, of course, the most traumatic U.S. foreign-policy debacle, Vietnam.

But the Iran war is not a debacle. It is a dilemma.

From an operational perspective, the war is going reasonably well: The United States and Israel are destroying much of what they aimed to hit at the outset. To the extent that the operation has struggled, it’s not because the United States lacks options. Rather, it’s because each pathway comes with trade-offs.

In his announcement of the attack on Iran, U.S. President Donald Trump stated four objectives for the war: To “destroy [Iran’s] missiles and raze their missile industry,” “annihilate [Iran’s] navy,” “ensure that Iran does not obtain a nuclear weapon,” and degrade Iran’s proxy network so it cannot destabilize the region. A month into the war, the United States and Israel have made significant progress toward three of those objectives.

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In early March, Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana was visited by a swarm of mysterious drones. The drones proved resistant to electronic warfare measures. They artfully evaded attempts to approach or neutralize them and lingered over the base for four hours—an astonishing display of negligence by the U.S. military.

It is obvious that they were not simply hobby drones belonging to some unusually adept pranksters. They were almost certainly the property of one of the very few countries with the motive and means to pull off this sort of operation. The top suspect would have to be China, the world’s leading producer of drones. At least one expert has suggested that the drones were satellite-controlled, which would help explain the resilience of their communications—and narrow the probable candidates down to China and Russia.

By loitering over the base, the drones likely harvested valuable intelligence about its counterdrone defenses (such as they were), including reaction times and system characteristics. And note: Barksdale is not just another military base; it’s the headquarters of the U.S. Air Force Global Strike Command, the organizational backbone of the United States’ strategic bombers. If Beijing ever finds itself confronting Washington and its allies over a grab for Taiwan, knowing how to disrupt the operations of bases like Barksdale could come in handy.

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Earlier this month, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright posted on X that the U.S. Navy had successfully escorted a tanker through the Strait of Hormuz. Within minutes, the post was deleted, and the White House soon clarified that no such escort had taken place. On its face, it was a simple case of miscommunication. In practice, it revealed more about the Trump administration’s approach to crisis management than any official briefing has.

What was remarkable was not that the post was wrong. It was that, for about 10 minutes, it worked: Crude oil futures plunged by nearly 17 percent—a false signal, accepted by markets desperate for evidence that the crisis was being resolved.

The Strait of Hormuz is not simply another site of military escalation; it is one of the world’s most consequential economic choke points, through which roughly one-fifth of global oil and liquefied natural gas normally passes. The International Energy Agency has already described the present disruption from the war on Iran as the largest oil supply shock on record, with approximately 8 million barrels per day expected to be lost this month alone. This is precisely the kind of crisis that governments try to contain quickly because the economic damage compounds in real time, long before any military or diplomatic resolution can be reached.

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The Cuban government is about to run out of oil—the supply it has left could last days or weeks. In the meantime, the humanitarian situation on the island has become dire.

The crisis is the latest turn in a history of U.S. sanctions designed to squeeze into submission the Communist government that has ruled the island since 1959. In early January, the Trump administration put an end to Venezuela’s subsidized oil shipments to Cuba, which had kept the country afloat since the early 2000s.

Weeks later, on Jan. 29, U.S. President Donald Trump announced a full-fledged oil embargo on Cuba, threatening heavy tariffs on any country that exported oil to the island. For nearly three months now, Cuba has not received any oil shipments.

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The current situation in the United States, like that of the United States in the world, is by no means normal. This should summon the American public and world opinion to take what may seem to be an unusual, even uncomfortable, position: Under the disturbing present circumstances, one should simply not wish for a U.S. victory in the country’s 3-week-old war against Iran.

So that there is no moral confusion about this statement, I must make explicit what I am not calling for: I do not wish for the death or injury of U.S. soldiers. Nor do I wish for the destruction of the state of Israel, whose right to security I have supported in column after column.

With these provisos, though, I have come to the conclusion that an outright U.S. victory over Iran would be more dangerous for the United States, Israel, and the entire world than an end to this senseless war by some other means—even if that means resorting to the classic, face-saving tactic of declaring victory and “going home” in the absence of any clear-cut political, military, or strategic triumph over the remnants of the Iranian government.

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U.S. President Donald Trump doesn’t like to lose. And as his chances of pulling off a win in the war on Iran look increasingly slim, the world may soon face the prospect of a volatile president confronting a foreign-policy dilemma that is utterly out of his control. To be sure, Trump may yet pull off a feat that is lauded by geopolitical analysts as advancing U.S. interests and justifying the human, economic, and political costs of the war. But as Trump finds himself in an increasingly tight corner, it’s time to anticipate how he might react to the specter of failure in Iran—and prepare for the possibility that his response could make the conflict even more dangerous.

The challenges of the Iran war seem to mount by the day. While the U.S. military, working together with the Israel Defense Forces, has been largely successful in destroying Iran’s air defense, naval, and ballistics capabilities, the country’s political system and sources of economic leverage have proved far less tractable. There is also the matter of Iran’s remaining fissile material and nuclear capabilities—not to mention the risk that Tehran emerges from the conflict determined that it can only properly defend itself with nukes. Hopes of either a mostly seamless Venezuela-style transition to a pliable leader or a widespread people’s revolution have faded.

Trump’s past approaches to failure may shed light on what’s to come in the Middle East. Failure is nothing new for Trump: He has suffered high-profile setbacks in business, the courtroom, and politics. A consummate survivor, he has a well-worn playbook of strategies for when he is on the ropes. These involve bullying subordinates, blame-casting, suppressing facts, and doubling down on fruitless strategies.

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It hasn’t been an easy week for U.S. President Donald Trump. NATO’s European members are refusing Washington’s calls for help in the Strait of Hormuz. Domestic U.S. support for the Iran war remains divided as U.S. military spending rises. And oil prices are hitting record highs amid an unprecedented disruption to global energy flows. But, in Trump’s telling, at least Japan has the United States’ back.

Trump hosted Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi at the White House on Thursday, during which he praised Tokyo for “really stepping up to the plate” on Iran, “unlike NATO.” Although Japan has also stopped short of deploying forces to the strait, Takaichi has doubled down on her pro-Trump rhetoric, perhaps hoping that words appease the White House as much as actions do.

In her remarks in the Oval Office, Takaichi acknowledged that the global economy will take a “huge hit” due to the war. However, she added: “Even against that backdrop, I firmly believe that it is only you, Donald, who can achieve peace across the world.” She also agreed that Iran must never be allowed to obtain a nuclear weapon, and she told Trump that Japan has “specific proposals to calm down global energy markets.”

Since taking office last October, Takaichi has walked a fine line between pleasing Trump and assuaging Japanese citizens, who largely remain opposed to the Iran war despite voting in favor of Takaichi’s shift away from Japan’s post-World War II pacifist constitution.

Just hours before departing for Washington on Wednesday, Takaichi promised Japan’s parliament that she would “do everything to maximize [Japan’s] national interest” in anticipation of a “very difficult” conversation with Trump.

Read more in today’s World Brief: Trump Praises Japan’s Takaichi for ‘Stepping Up’ in Iran War.

Last week, U.S. President Donald Trump said that there is “practically nothing left to target” in Iran and that the U.S.-Israeli war there will end “soon.” Hours later, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said that the war will continue “without any time limit, for as long as necessary, until we achieve all the objectives and decisively win the campaign.”

The gap between these two statements is not a messaging problem. It is the problem. The United States and Israel are not fighting the same war.

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All eyes are set on U.S. President Donald Trump’s escalating war against Iran, but on the home front, things are not going well. Nearly one year after he launched a barrage of steep tariffs on what he called “Liberation Day,” economists have crunched the numbers for 2025—and they are not looking good for the White House. By Trump’s own yardstick—his three goals of making foreigners pay for doing business with the United States, narrowing the U.S. trade deficit, and punishing China—tariffs have clearly failed.

Start with the question of who pays whom. While Trump’s claim that foreigners pay the tariff is obviously false—a tariff is a government tax levied on U.S. importers of foreign goods—the more relevant question is who ends up absorbing the economic cost. Do importers pass their tariff costs on to U.S. households by raising prices? Do importers keep prices steady and let the tariff eat into their profits? Do foreign exporters lower their prices to stay competitive? Or is it a combination, perhaps of all three?

One year in, and the data is unequivocal. A January paper from the Kiel Institute, which analyzed more than 25 million shipments to the United States worth nearly $4 trillion, calculates that U.S. firms and consumers absorbed 96 percent of the tariff costs. A few weeks later, both the New York Federal Reserve and the National Bureau of Economic Research similarly concluded that, on average, foreign exporters shoulder just a few cents of every tariff dollar. European, Asian, and other policymakers can breathe a sigh of relief: Despite the worldwide panic following Trump’s announcements, global exporters are not in trouble. Accordingly, the pressure for other countries to rush and cut deals with the United States may be off.

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A day after U.S.-Israeli strikes killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, launching a war in the Middle East, U.S. President Donald Trump claimed that his administration had been approached by Iranians wanting to talk. Iran has denied any such overture, but it is reasonable to assume that an opening may eventually come—already, certain Middle Eastern countries are pushing the parties to move toward some form of negotiated settlement. This raises the question of how Trump would approach such make-or-break discussions.

High-stakes diplomatic negotiations typically happen behind closed doors. Deliberating in private makes it possible to freely indulge thought experiments, contemplate concessions without losing face, and nurture delicate compromises while keeping public opprobrium at bay. The world is eventually presented with a well-packaged product, not the messy sausage-making of statecraft. U.S. President Joe Biden embraced this orthodoxy: Top officials in his administration treated media queries about ongoing talks as almost impertinent, judging the mobilization of public opinion as a lever in active negotiations to be more risk than reward.

To date, Trump has torn up this playbook with characteristic abandon. From Gaza to Ukraine to trade talks, Trump’s White House conducts diplomacy as performance art—tweeting terms, issuing and revising multipoint plans, and giving the world a ring-side seat for the dealmaking. The strategy is unconventional and, when it comes to ending wars, its results are uneven: While Trump achieved a breakthrough on a first-phase peace deal for the war in Gaza, an accord on Ukraine remains stubbornly elusive. As Russia’s war grinds through a fourth year, Trump’s vow to deliver a peace settlement upon entering office is now deep in the dustbin of broken campaign promises.

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One would expect Tino Chrupalla, the co-chair of Germany’s ascendant right-wing populist party, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), to declare his ardent support for everything that U.S. President Donald Trump is doing. After all, the AfD shares MAGA’s contempt for immigrants, “wokeness,” and the European Union.

But then came the war in Iran. In a recent TV interview, Chrupalla accused the Americans of committing “war crimes,” specifically citing alleged attacks on a girls’ school and civilian infrastructure. The AfD leader’s comments didn’t come as a complete surprise, considering his earlier criticisms of Trump’s threats to annex Greenland, when he accused the White House of “Wild West methods.”

“Donald Trump started off as a peace president,” Chrupalla said in early March. “He will end up as a president of war.”

The AfD is not just any party. It has arguably been at the forefront of Trump world’s efforts to gain an ideological foothold in Europe’s biggest democracy. In February 2025, U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance made a point of meeting with Alice Weidel, the party’s other co-chair, in the wake of his Europe-bashing speech at the Munich Security Conference. This public support of the AfD by Washington’s second-in-command scandalized German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and other mainstream German politicians, who regard the AfD and its anti-immigrant, pro-Russian ideology as beyond the pale. Elon Musk has given Weidel generous exposure on his social media platform X and even attended an AfD rally by video, calling the party “the best hope for Germany.”

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Will the Trump administration settle for a deal with Cuba that opens up key sectors of the economy to U.S. investors, including Cuban Americans? Or will it demand political concessions amounting to regime change? An economic deal is within the realm of possibility, since the Cuban government has been slowly—too slowly—moving in that direction already. But allowing the United States to dictate the shape of Cuba’s political future is almost certainly a bridge too far for Havana.

A purely economic deal would be a surprise, given the hard-line position of U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has said for years that the government in Havana must go. But recent statements by him and other Trump officials as well as reports about negotiations underway suggest that the administration might settle for something less than regime change—just as it has in Venezuela. The New York Times reported on Tuesday that Washington is pressing for the replacement of Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel with someone more open to economic reform, an essentially symbolic gesture that would leave the rest of the regime intact.

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Two weeks into the war in the Persian Gulf, BRICS has issued no joint statement on the conflict. This has disappointed many BRICS enthusiasts in both the East and the West who imagined the grouping as a credible counterweight to U.S. power and a harbinger of a multipolar order. Yet the failure should not surprise anyone. It was foretold in the very structure of the grouping.

As a collective, BRICS has done little even for Russia during its yearslong confrontation with what Moscow calls the “collective West.” Now the problem has become sharper. When the United States and Israel launched a massive military attack on Iran—another BRICS member—the forum struggled to articulate a common response. Some members are working closely with Washington’s military operations; others, such as India, have developed strong partnerships with Israel.

But the difficulty goes deeper than individual members’ ties with the United States or Israel. The problem lies within the grouping itself: the structural rivalry between Iran and the conservative Gulf monarchies such as the United Arab Emirates, which is also a BRICS member. The strategic divide between them is too deep. Iran has defined itself in opposition to the United States since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, while the UAE and its fellow monarchies have long been partners of Washington.

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The Iranian regime’s military strategy has always involved an underlying bet that it could control escalation. For the better part of half a century, this gamble mostly paid off. Whether it was taking hostages at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, bombing U.S. Marines barracks in Beirut and Air Force housing in Saudi Arabia, or funding proxies from Afghanistan to Gaza to Iraq, Iran’s actions have, until very recently, never triggered serious blowback.

This month, Iran placed its biggest bet yet on its ability to control escalation. But this time, it appears headed toward calamity.

In recent bouts with the United States, Iran sought to control escalation spirals and pursued a rather restrained tit-for-tat use of violence. After the United States killed Quds Force leader Qassem Suleimani in 2020, Iran launched a missile strike on two U.S. military bases in Iraq, which notably did not kill any Americans. Similarly, after Operation Midnight Hammer last June, in which the United States struck Iranian nuclear sites, Tehran responded with another missile strike—this time at a U.S. air base in Qatar, again choreographed to make a point but not prompt a wider conflict. During these previous iterations, Iran seemingly cared more about the public statement made by its missiles rather than any actual military effect.

This time is different. Iran has pursued what could charitably called an “escalate to de-escalate” strategy. Tehran has struck not only Israeli and U.S. targets but also other countries across the region, including those that have hitherto been relatively friendly with the regime—such as Oman, Qatar, and Turkey. Moreover, Iran has set its sights beyond military targets to strike oil infrastructure, hotels, and airports, the lifeblood of the region’s economy. Presumably, Iran assumes that by hurting U.S. allies and partners in the region—not to mention every other country that depends on the region’s oil supplies—that will turn up the pressure on the Trump administration to end the war.

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As the war against Iran being waged by the United States and Israel approaches its third week, there are far more important things to consider than most of what one can gather by following each day’s headlines.

Vastly more consequential than the status of shipping in the Strait of Hormuz or the fluctuations of oil prices and global stock markets—and more consequential even than the nominal victory, failure, or defeat of the parties at war—is the question of how events a little more than a year into U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term will alter the power and global standing of the United States.

This is a question that will affect everyone, everywhere, regardless of nation-level sympathies and alliances or how one feels about the United States. Such is the extent of Washington’s centrality to the world order in recent generations.

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A meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and several Latin American leaders over the weekend marked a shift in how Washington organizes hemispheric diplomacy. The Shield of the Americas Summit, held in Florida, suggested that Trump is shunning large multilateral forums in favor of smaller coalitions of governments aligned with U.S. security and geopolitical priorities. One might call it strategic minilateralism.

The Shield of the Americas, also known as the Americas Counter Cartel Coalition, expands security coordination among 17 countries in the region. They signed a joint declaration during the summit, agreeing to expand intelligence-sharing and maritime interdiction across the Caribbean and Pacific. The Trump administration framed the initiative as designed to confront what U.S. officials now increasingly describe as “narco-terrorist” organizations. At the summit’s conclusion, Trump signed a proclamation establishing the initiative’s framework. “We need your help,” he told participating leaders, “You have to just tell us where [the cartels] are.”

The composition of the summit made Trump’s partisan logic clear. The presidents of Argentina, Bolivia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guyana, Panama, Paraguay, and Trinidad and Tobago attended, as well as the incoming president of Chile. Most of these leaders are conservative or right-wing. Conspicuously absent were the region’s three largest powers: Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia, which are governed by leftists. The gathering was not designed to produce hemispheric consensus. It was designed to assemble a coalition.

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Following the death of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran, Russian President Vladimir Putin finds himself in a difficult position. An old ideological and geopolitical ally has been killed with the full support of another anticipated ideological and geopolitical partner: U.S. President Donald Trump.

Moscow was hardly thrilled at the beginning of this year, when U.S. forces captured and arrested Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, but Putin and the Kremlin refrained from harsh criticism at the time. In part, this was because of Washington’s framing of the attack in terms of the Trump doctrine: The Western Hemisphere belongs to the United States. Seen from the Kremlin, Trump’s actions in Latin America legitimize its own claim of a sphere of influence in Ukraine, Europe, and beyond. And after all, capture and arrest fall short of assassination.

The events in Iran, however, are taking place in what Russia considers its hemisphere and, to some extent, its sphere of influence—not only geographically, but because Iran is a member of the Russia- and China-led BRICS. This time, accordingly, there was no restraint on condemning the killing. In a message sent to Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, Putin said that the assassination of Khamenei and members of his family had been “committed in cynical violation of all norms of human morality and international law.”

Crucially, however, the message published on the Kremlin website was phrased in a way that avoided making direct accusations against Trump and the United States. Putin may flaunt his strength and play the role of a strongman who does what he likes, but in reality, he cannot even afford to verbally attack a U.S. president even as that president is destroying Putin’s allies.

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At first glance, the Israeli-U.S. attack on Iran is an uneven fight. The United States and Israel have overwhelming air superiority, precision-guided munitions, integrated intelligence, and multilayered missile defense systems against Iranian retaliatory strikes. While it’s hard to see a political theory of victory over Iran in this campaign, the operational theory of success is based on precision strikes quickly taking out Iranian air defenses, command and control, and missile launchers.

The attackers do not want to find themselves trapped in an attritional slugfest, where they burn through hundreds of millions of dollars per day, exhaust their stocks of the most advanced interceptors, and face the prospect of a prolonged war—not by losing on the battlefield but by simply exhausting their anti-air weapons in the coming days and weeks.

Running out of air defense isn’t a hypothetical scenario. It’s precisely what happened to Israel during last year’s strike campaign against Iran. The grinding logic of attrition—and the unresolved problem of using high-end, limited-availability precision weapons to generate strategic outcomes—threatened to catch up with the Americans and Israelis despite their overwhelming technological superiority. Israel’s stocks of Arrow 3 anti-ballistic missile interceptors were running critically low, prompting the United States to rush additional missile defense assets—including guided missile destroyers armed with SM-2, SM-3, and SM-6 interceptors, as well as ground-based THAAD systems—to the region. A similar situation occurred during the nine-month Battle of Mosul against the Islamic State in Iraq in 2016 and 2017.

During the June 2025 conflict, Iran reportedly launched 631 missiles, of which around 500 reached Israeli airspace. Although Israel claimed an 86 percent interception rate, achieving this required firing vast numbers of interceptors, which placed enormous strain on Israeli and U.S. stockpiles of expensive precision-guided munitions. Without the Arrow 3 system, Israel loses the ability to neutralize threats above the atmosphere, leaving less time for terminal-phase interceptions and exposing the country to far greater risk. The campaign cost Israel hundreds of millions of dollars daily and forced the nation into a wartime lockdown, an unsustainable economic strain.

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This weekend, the United States and Israel carried out a massive air campaign against Iran, taking out hundreds of targets and killing Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. This is a historic moment. A dictator who has terrorized the United States, the region, and his own citizens for almost 40 years has been eliminated. This weekend’s action is a measure of justice for his many victims.

But what comes next? To answer that question, it is important to first understand how we got here.

Iran, of course, has posed one of the greatest threats to U.S. and global security for many decades. It is the world’s leading state sponsor of terror. It possesses the largest ballistic missile program in the Middle East and has a long-standing nuclear program. It is also a card-carrying member of the “axis of aggressors,” working closely with China, Russia, and North Korea, including by supplying Moscow with drones to brutalize Ukraine.

Nevertheless, the Trump administration was ready to move on from Iran and the broader Middle East after Operation Midnight Hammer, which badly degraded Iran’s nuclear program last summer. In its National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy, released in December and January, respectively, the administration declared the Middle East largely resolved.

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Bush, mind you, was a staunch unilateralist who had little affection for the U.N., or Europe, or NATO. (“Preserve the myth, and laugh,” one Bush official said then of the trans-Atlantic alliance.) But Bush felt compelled to invoke international law and win over skeptics at home and abroad—who were strident, and often eloquent, in their opposition to his “preemptive” Iraq war.

“In this temple of the United Nations, we are the guardians of an ideal, the guardians of a conscience,” France’s foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, perorated before the invasion, calling on Washington “to give priority to peaceful disarmament” of Iraq.

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell addresses the U.N. Security Council in New York on Feb. 5, 2003, urging the council to say “enough” to what he said was Iraq’s defiance of international attempts to destroy its chemical and biological weapons. Timothy A. Clary/AFP via Getty Images

Today, U.S. President Donald Trump appears to be planning what is, if anything, an even more flimsily justified preemptive war than Bush’s invasion was, having dispatched aircraft carriers, fighter jets, and surveillance planes against Iran in the biggest display of U.S. force since the Iraq War. But the silence from across the Atlantic is nearly deafening. The Europeans seem to be so snakebit over Trump’s threats to invade Greenland and abandon Ukraine—the two issues they’ve fought Trump hardest on—that they’re fearful of voicing too many objections about Iran. European officials have urged diplomacy and restraint but have not openly condemned the possibility of a U.S. attack.

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U.S. and Iranian officials held a third round of indirect nuclear talks in Geneva on Thursday. “We’ve been exchanging creative and positive ideas,” Omani Foreign Minister Badr al-Busaidi, who is mediating the negotiations, wrote on X, adding later that “significant progress” was made. Technical-level discussions are expected to take place in Vienna next week, he said.

But as the United States ramps up its military presence in the Middle East, some analysts believe that failure to secure a diplomatic breakthrough soon could result in U.S. strikes on Iran.

U.S. President Donald Trump has repeatedly warned that Tehran must make a deal with Washington or else risk possible attack. In recent weeks, he has ordered the largest U.S. military buildup in the Middle East since its 2003 invasion of Iraq, including the deployment of two aircraft carriers, more than 50 additional fighter jets, and dozens of refueling tankers.

Experts suggest that Trump is likely considering several military options, such as limited strikes on military targets, widespread attacks on the country’s missile or nuclear facilities, or a sustained campaign designed to force the removal of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Tehran has vowed retaliation for any U.S. attack.

Beyond curbing Iran’s nuclear program, U.S. negotiators also want Tehran to accept restrictions on its missile arsenal and stop funding regional proxy groups—demands that Iran has so far rejected.

A senior Iranian official told Reuters on Thursday that a framework could be reached if Washington separates “nuclear and non-nuclear issues.” Iranian officials have also made it clear that they expect the United States to lift sanctions in exchange for possible concessions on its nuclear program.

Read more in today’s World Brief: U.S., Iran Make ‘Significant Progress’ in Nuclear Talks, Mediator Says.

Following the U.S. Supreme Court’s seismic ruling last week against U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs, there is little evidence of a Republican clamor on Capitol Hill to make those import taxes legal, even as the president claims that congressional action isn’t necessary.

It’s too early to tell if Republicans have taken to heart the admonishment they received from the high court, particularly in Justice Neil Gorsuch’s concurring opinion, for failing to offer any strong protest to the president’s usurpation of their constitutional prerogatives on trade and tariffs. But Trump’s continued search for other novel tariff authorities will eventually likely come to Congress’s doorstep, regardless of some Republican lawmakers’ preferences to not have to take a stand.

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U.S. President Donald Trump’s Donroe Doctrine is front and center at this week’s Caribbean Community leaders’ summit. The 15-nation bloc and five associate members kicked off four-day proceedings in St. Kitts and Nevis on Tuesday to discuss major pressing issues, including how U.S. policy is impacting the region. But with the arrival of U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday, Caribbean leaders are expected to also prioritize resetting relations with Washington.

Trump heralded the Donroe Doctrine during his State of the Union address late Tuesday. Although some Caribbean leaders have praised the United States’ military actions, many are concerned that continued U.S. intervention in the region could have devastating humanitarian and economic consequences.

Among the biggest concerns is Washington’s pressure campaign on Cuba. By Trump threatening to impose U.S. tariffs on any nation that supplies Havana with oil, the island has been forced to ration energy, halt surgeries, and suspend flights. The White House has also pressured other countries to reject Cuban medical missions, cutting Havana off from a key source of foreign currency. This has all contributed to a growing humanitarian crisis on the island that Caribbean leaders fear could destabilize the broader region.

However, on Wednesday, the U.S. Treasury Department posted new guidance on its website that appeared to somewhat relax the oil restrictions on Cuba, stating that it would authorize companies seeking licenses to resell Venezuelan oil to Cuba as long as such transactions “support the Cuban people, including the Cuban private sector (e.g., exports for commercial and humanitarian use in Cuba).” But, it added, “transactions involving, or for the benefit, of any persons or entities associated with the Cuban military, intelligence services, or other government institutions” would not be authorized.

Read more in today’s World Brief: Rubio Meets With Caribbean Leaders to Discuss U.S. Policy.

As recently as 2005, it was not only doable to drive from the U.S. cities of El Paso or San Diego to Mexico City—it was safe.

That’s no longer the case. Since 2006, Mexico has descended into a drug war that has made large parts of the country unsafe to travel in. That reality was on stark display on Sunday after Mexican troops killed the country’s most notorious drug boss. Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, known as “El Mencho,” commanded the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), which responded by killing government forces in attacks across Mexico. Some areas popular with tourists were impacted by roadblocks and car burnings.

Mexican forces killed El Mencho at President Claudia Sheinbaum’s orders—under U.S. pressure and with Washington’s intelligence support, but without U.S. troops. A U.S. military operation on Mexican soil is Sheinbaum’s red line in dealings with Washington, which appears to be eager to turn U.S. firepower against Mexican drug cartels.

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At his January 2025 confirmation hearing to become the U.S. secretary of state, Marco Rubio assessed that “unless something dramatic changes” in Asia’s military balance, China would attempt to invade Taiwan before the end of the decade. This view is widely shared. In May, for example, the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party warned that “the clock is ticking to stop a war in the Indo-Pacific—and this Congress may be America’s last full chance to do it.”

The good news is that the short-term likelihood of a Chinese attack on Taiwan has diminished, even as it remains too high. The cause of this development, however, is not exactly reassuring. The events of the past year give Chinese leader Xi Jinping good reason to believe that his U.S. counterpart, President Donald Trump, will facilitate his attempt to extend China’s influence over the island without having to gamble on an invasion.

Any Chinese invasion attempt would be a risky endeavor. Even though China’s military modernization is accelerating, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is in turmoil. Meanwhile, the United States and Taiwan are fielding new capabilities and deepening their security cooperation, and Washington is moving to deploy missile and unmanned systems to the Philippines and nuclear-powered submarines to Australia. Against this backdrop, Beijing surely appreciates that any “victory” that it might win could be a Pyrrhic one—especially given the potential for nuclear escalation and the likelihood that a conflict would prove to be protracted.

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Billions of dollars in funding for two of the Trump administration’s signature national security drives—the Golden Dome missile shield and a push to ramp up drone production—are not being disbursed, according to a Defense Department document received by Foreign Policy.

U.S. President Donald Trump in May hailed spending on the Golden Dome, promising that his administration would be “forever ending the missile threat to the American homeland.”

Despite the technical challenges, including putting counter-missile weapons into space, he also promised a quick turnaround of just three years, or before his second term is up. Trump has put the price tag at $175 billion, while other estimates have put it considerably higher.

To fund the program, Trump announced $25 billion in spending on the initiative as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which Congress passed last year.

The Defense Department document, however, shows that as much as $14 billion in spending for space capabilities relevant to Golden Dome are “pending approval” from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which releases federal funds.

That includes $7.2 billion for space-based sensors; $3.6 billion for military satellites and their protection; $2 billion for separate, targeting-related military satellites; $800 million for next-generation intercontinental ballistic missile defense systems; $350 million for space command-and-control systems; and $125 million for space communication systems.

The funding holdup could delay fielding Golden Dome on the ambitious schedule proposed by Trump, said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “Given that we are nearly halfway through the fiscal year, it will be difficult to use much of this money for [fiscal year] 2026, which means the allocations will carry forward to [fiscal year] 2027,” Harrison said.

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U.S. President Donald Trump doubled down on tariffs over the weekend, despite an adverse ruling by the Supreme Court on Friday, the lack of domestic political support for his trade policies, and the absence of positive economic outcomes from his trade policy so far.

After the Supreme Court struck down the main authority that Trump had used to levy tariffs, the administration turned to a never-before-used provision of a 1974 law as a temporary measure to maintain higher taxes on U.S. businesses and consumers. That measure will expire in five months, but the administration hopes to buy time to prepare sturdier and more sweeping tariff authorities later in the year.

The immediate reimposition of tariffs under a novel authority raises several questions. How do countries that negotiated trade accords with the Trump administration under the threat of now-illegal tariffs view all this? Is the Trump administration’s plan B for tariffs even legal? Are its plans C and D? Will all of this spur Congress into reclaiming its traditional control over trade policy? Why is a counterproductive policy being pursued with such vigor and so little public debate?

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It’s been roughly one year since U.S. President Donald Trump abruptly moved to shutter multiple congressionally chartered foreign aid offices, but there is still little clarity on whether his actions were legal under U.S. law—even as much of the damage is now irreversible.

The effort by Trump and his billionaire former advisor Elon Musk to unilaterally dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and fire more than 10,000 employees plus thousands more contractors prompted multiple lawsuits from the impacted employees, contractors, and aid grantees. More lawsuits related to Trump’s push to defund and shutter other smaller offices related to foreign affairs, such as the U.S. Institute of Peace, the National Endowment for Democracy, and the U.S. Agency for Global Media, are still ongoing. There are more than half a dozen related lawsuits winding their way through the judicial system.

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The U.S. Supreme Court struck down President Donald Trump’s global tariffs in a 6-3 ruling on Friday, delivering a massive blow to the White House’s trade war. “The Government thus concedes that the President enjoys no inherent authority to impose tariffs during peacetime,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the court’s opinion.

This upholds a lower court decision that argued the U.S. president does not have the authority to use the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to impose duties. More than 60 percent of total tariff revenue last year stemmed from duties imposed under the IEEPA, according to the Cato Institute. Economists told Reuters on Friday that more than $175 billion in U.S. tariff collections are at risk of being refunded due to the ruling.

The Trump administration has yet to comment on the Supreme Court’s ruling.

Read some of FP’s recent stories about the Supreme Court tariffs case here and here.

This is a developing story. Stay tuned for further updates.

No sooner had Marco Rubio, the U.S. secretary of state, concluded his speech the other day at the Munich Security Conference than pundits on both sides of the Atlantic began debating the applause that followed.

For some, the standing ovation expressed heartfelt relief that Rubio had not spoken in the threatening style of his boss, President Donald Trump, or with the insulting bluster of Vice President J.D. Vance, who had given a speech in Munich a year earlier. For others, it was no more than the polite response of a European elite that has shed its illusions about a shared vision of the world and simply wants to keep frictions with Washington to a minimum as the two sides drift apart.

For me, both responses were premature. Yes, Rubio strained to assert the survival of a common project between Europe and the United States. But because modest gestures by this administration toward what was long considered normalcy in international relations have often been followed by unprecedented breeches to the global order—such as Trump’s repeated recent threats to take over Greenland after blandly mollifying statements about NATO—I waited to see what would follow.

As it turned out, it was not Trump himself, but the widely applauded Rubio who delivered the most consequential follow-up to Munich—and although little remarked upon in the U.S. press, it was deeply alarming.

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One thing is certain about the widely anticipated U.S. war on Iran: If it happens, it won’t include an occupation of the country. The United States has been sending aircraft carriers and support equipment to the Gulf, not expeditionary ground forces for an invasion, and there has been no public evidence of any planning for a long-term presence in Iran. If U.S. President Donald Trump has been consistent about one thing in the region, it’s the need to avoid another Iraq-style occupation, which he’s described as a “big fat mistake.” As with the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolàs Maduro in January, the killing of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander Qassem Soleimani in 2020, and Israel’s decapitation strike against Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in 2024, the United States would likely target top leaders in Iran along with the regime’s repressive apparatuses, and then let the cards fall where they may.

So, where will they fall? Iran, of course, can see the same things we can and is unlikely to be taken by surprise. Tehran remembers well how the United States used scheduled negotiations as a smokescreen to entice it to lower its guard ahead of a surprise attack last June, and it is unlikely to fall for the same ruse again. It has fortified its positions in anticipation. Security forces are fully mobilized and deployed after the brutal suppression of recent protests, and they have spent months assiduously rooting out suspected Israeli intelligence assets (and no doubt sweeping up many innocents in the process). Israel’s remarkable success in targeting senior Iranian officials last June speaks to the degree that Iranian intelligence has been penetrated and suggests that the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and its senior leaders should not sleep easy. They may well be killed, but it won’t be for lack of preparation.

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U.S. President Donald Trump hosted the inaugural Board of Peace meeting in Washington on Thursday. The group, a key part of the United States’ 20-point peace plan to end the Israel-Hamas war, aims to tackle reconstruction, disarmament, and governance in Gaza. However, Trump’s vision for the body has quickly expanded into a more ambitious mandate: bringing lasting peace to not just the Middle East but the whole world.

During its first day in action, nine members of the Board of Peace agreed to pledge a total of $7 billion toward relief for Gaza. That comes on top of $10 billion pledged by the United States, though Trump has not specified what that money will be used for or where it will come from.

“The Board of Peace is showing how a better future can be built right here in this room,” Trump said. However, these commitments represent only a small fraction of the estimated $70 billion needed to rebuild the war-torn territory.

At the same time, five countries agreed on Thursday to deploy troops to Gaza as part of an international stabilization force, with two others committing to train police. The stabilization plan, which calls for 20,000 soldiers and 12,000 police officers, will initially deploy troops to Rafah to focus on reconstruction efforts. According to contracting records reviewed by the Guardian, the Trump administration plans to build a 5,000-person military base to serve as the force’s operating site.

Although Thursday’s agenda for the Board of Peace centered on restoring stability to Gaza, Trump repeatedly invoked the body’s future role as an instrument of global conflict resolution—making some experts worry that the White House seeks to use the board to rival the United Nations.

Read more in today’s World Brief: Trump’s Board of Peace Takes on Gaza.

We maintain that the best approach to understanding Trump’s diplomacy has less to do with the United States’ unique place in the world or the idiosyncrasies of Trump himself, and more to do with his populist form of governance. It has already become commonplace to compare Trump’s domestic policies to those of other populist leaders, such as Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. But it is striking how well this comparison holds in the realm of foreign policy as well. The United States is, after all, in a very different geopolitical position than Hungary, India, and Turkey. Yet under Trump, it approaches world politics in a very similar way.

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U.S. President Donald Trump knows that boards don’t do deals and mediate complex historic conflicts. Mediators do. That’s why he has turned much of U.S. diplomacy into a family business, deploying his son-in-law and one of his best friends to negotiate simultaneously conflicts such as the Russia-Ukraine war, Gaza, and Iran. But he also knows that boards can raise money, help him reprise his Apprentice role as chairman (for life), and create camera-ready moments even if serious movement toward implementing his Gaza deal isn’t on the horizon yet. On the more serious side, internationalizing the Gaza problem may actually make sense given the many hands that will be required to fix what now seems hopelessly unfixable. As the Board of Peace meets in Washington this week, reportedly to announce funding for Gaza and the contributors to the much-anticipated international stabilization force, here are some takeaways.

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On Feb. 6, U.S. President Trump declared through yet another executive order that the United States would abide by a new “America First” arms export strategy. The goal of the strategy is to “ensure that future arms sales prioritize American interests by using foreign purchases and capital to build American production and capacity.” Importantly, the Trump administration established a prioritization rubric for judging whether an ally or partner is eligible for receiving U.S.-made weapons. It states that the “United States will prioritize arms sales and transfers to partners that have invested in their own self-defense and capabilities, have a critical role or geography in United States plans and operations, or contribute to our economic security.”

Based on the above criteria, most Southeast Asian countries are likely to face greater difficulties in securing U.S. weaponry. To be sure, not every state in the region seeks Washington’s assistance—nor can every state afford it. However, those that are interested may be in for a rude awakening as they encounter a new U.S. paradigm in which they receive little to nothing from Washington.

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U.S. President Donald Trump hosted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House on Wednesday. The Israeli leader was originally scheduled to travel to Washington on Feb. 18, but renewed U.S. nuclear negotiations with Iran last week pushed up the meeting, as Netanyahu seeks to make sure that Israel’s concerns are included in any deal.

Wednesday’s conversation—the two leaders’ seventh since Trump took office in January 2025—was more low-profile than usual. Netanyahu entered the White House out of view from cameras, and he met with Trump behind closed doors, with no scheduled press conference after. However, Netanyahu made clear ahead of the meeting that he intended to encourage Trump to press for limits on Tehran’s missile arsenal as well as an end to Iranian support for its proxy groups, such as Hamas and Hezbollah, in upcoming nuclear talks.

Trump appears to be on the same page. “It’s got to be a good deal: no nuclear weapons, no missiles,” the U.S. president told Fox Business on Tuesday. He has threatened strikes on Iran if negotiators fail to reach an agreement and said such an attack could look similar to when U.S. forces targeted three Iranian nuclear facilities in June 2025.

A second round of U.S.-Iran talks is set to take place next week. But Tehran remains opposed to expanding negotiations beyond its nuclear program. “The Islamic Republic’s missile capabilities are nonnegotiable,” Ali Shamkhani, an advisor to Iran’s supreme leader, said on Wednesday.

Read more in today’s World Brief: Netanyahu Urges Trump to Include Israel’s Demands in Iran Nuclear Talks.

The Trump administration spent recent days warning markets to brace for a terrible January jobs report, which seemed plausible since the administration has deported a lot of the people who drove job creation over the past four years, and early private-sector employment data was grim.

Instead, the administration’s closely watched first jobs report of 2026 surprised very much to the upside, with a whopping 130,000 net jobs created in January. That’s better than in any month last year and almost double the consensus of economists. Stock markets rejoiced, and bond markets reveled—or they did briefly, before slipping back again into nearly neutral territory.

The preliminary January jobs numbers are so good, especially in light of the lackluster months that preceded them, as to raise eyebrows and questions.

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In 1913, Theodore Roosevelt set out on an expedition to map an uncharted tributary of the Amazon. The journey nearly killed him. Disease, hunger, and exhaustion left the former U.S. president permanently weakened. Roosevelt returned even more convinced of something he had already grasped in office: Geography disciplines power, and nations that neglect their near abroad eventually pay a strategic price.

A decade earlier, Roosevelt had translated that insight into policy through what became known as the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. His logic was blunt. Instability in the Western Hemisphere would invite outside intervention. If the United States wished to remain secure and influential on the global stage, then it could not be a passive observer in its own neighborhood.

More than a century later, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio approaches Latin America and the Caribbean with a similar instinct. Strip away the partisan framing and tactical excesses, and Rubio is right about a central proposition that Washington too often forgets: The United States cannot compete globally without first anchoring stability, integration, and resilience in the Western Hemisphere.

Rubio’s diagnosis is not wrong, nor is his instinct for action. But his theory and exercise of power are flawed. He understands where U.S. influence begins but misjudges how it works and how to wield it most effectively.

After the Cold War, Washington gradually forgot a hard truth that earlier generations of policymakers understood instinctively: A secure and stable Western Hemisphere is not a preference; it is a prerequisite for sustained U.S. power projection around the world. As a result, U.S. policy has all too often treated Latin America and the Caribbean episodically, often through the narrow lenses of migration, drugs, and crisis management. But the reality is that the United States will struggle to deploy economic, military, or diplomatic power in the Indo-Pacific or Europe if its closest neighbors are unstable, fragmented, or economically hollowed out. Hemispheric shocks translate directly into constraints on U.S. action elsewhere.

Recent policy, particularly under U.S. President Joe Biden, reflected a different reading of this history. Rather than prioritizing immediate alignment, it emphasized becoming the partner of choice by supporting democratic governments across the political spectrum and investing in regional capacity. That approach accepted that disagreement and friction were sometimes unavoidable in a region with a history of deep mistrust of U.S. intentions, but it assumed that working with increasingly capable partners would produce alignment over time. The wager was that durable convergence is built, not imposed.

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New START, the last remaining major U.S.-Russia arms control treaty, is now confirmed dead. While there has been repeated talk about extending it or negotiating some kind of stopgap deal, interest in perpetuating the treaty has cratered. This is due in part to Washington’s growing skepticism about Russian compliance and, perhaps more importantly, U.S. President Donald Trump’s stated desire to pursue a new arms control framework of his own—one that would include China.

With New START gone, there are no longer any legal constraints preventing the United States and Russia from expanding their nuclear arsenals. What such an expansion might look like remains unclear. There are, however, some material constraints, and neither the United States nor Russia is currently well positioned to exploit the removal of limits in any dramatic way.

Both countries have struggled to modernize their nuclear forces and production facilities. While each could draw from existing arsenals to increase their number of deployed missiles, neither is currently capable of engaging in a Cold War-style arms race. Even China—despite having spent the past decade modernizing every aspect of its nuclear weapons enterprise—is now facing delays. The U.S. Department of Defense’s recent China military power report, for instance, stated that China is currently struggling to build fast breeder reactors for producing plutonium.

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U.S. and Iranian officials held indirect talks in Muscat, Oman, on Friday—signaling the potential restart of nuclear negotiations amid rising tensions between the adversaries. The meeting marked the two sides’ first formal diplomatic discussions since U.S. President Donald Trump ordered strikes on Iranian nuclear sites in June 2025 during the 12-day Israel-Iran war.

The meeting was initially planned to be held in Turkey, with foreign ministers from Turkey, Egypt, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia also set to attend. But Iran successfully pushed to move the venue to Muscat and to exclude representatives from those other countries. Axios reported that, according to two unnamed sources, U.S. and Iranian officials met directly during the talks. The White House and State Department did not immediately respond to Foreign Policy’s requests for comment.

Talks are off to a “good start,” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said on Friday, adding that consultations regarding next steps must now be held in Washington and Tehran. However, Araghchi also warned that “mistrust” between the two countries is posing a “serious challenge” to negotiations.

“We did note that nuclear talks and the resolution of the main issues must take place in a calm atmosphere, without tension and without threats,” he said. “The prerequisite for any dialogue is refraining from threats and pressure.”

Restraint may be difficult to come by. For the first time, the United States brought its top military commander in the Middle East to the negotiating table. The participation of U.S. Navy Adm. Brad Cooper, the head of the U.S. Central Command, served as a stark reminder of Washington’s military presence in the region.

Read more in today’s World Brief: U.S.-Iran Indirect Nuclear Talks Fail to Make Significant Progress.

“Prioritize” has become an ever-present buzzword in U.S. security policy, featured most prominently as the dominant theme of the new National Defense Strategy (NDS). In response to the overextension of U.S. global commitments prioritization offers a clearer organization of interests from most important to least important.

However, going beyond the buzzword has been a challenge for successive administrations and U.S. Defense Department leadership from both parties. Despite recognizing that some threats are more important than others, modern defense strategies and the administrations they guide still fell prey to the temptations of overextension and parochialism.

The 2026 NDS is different. In fact, it reflects a “third way” among the Republican national security factions: prioritization.

For at least the last two decades, Republican national security thinking was dominated by an indiscriminate fixation on U.S. primacy everywhere. For these primacists, if the United States wasn’t first regionally and institutionally, then it was last.

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The last nuclear arms control treaty between Russia and the United States expired on Thursday, leaving the two countries without limits on their arsenals for the first time since 1972. U.S. President Donald Trump has insisted that a “better agreement” is needed, one that includes emerging nuclear powerhouse China. But until then, the owners of roughly 90 percent of the world’s nuclear warheads remain unchecked.

Signed in 2010, the so-called New START treaty went into force in February 2011 and was set to expire in 15 years. The agreement capped the number of nuclear warheads that each country can deploy to 1,550 and included significant mechanisms for verification and transparency.

Russian President Vladimir Putin announced in February 2023 that he was suspending his country’s participation in the treaty over Washington’s support for Ukraine, but the Russian Foreign Ministry said shortly after that Moscow would continue abiding by the agreement’s limits on the number of warheads it can deploy.

Axios reported on Thursday that U.S. and Russian officials are closing in on a deal to informally observe New START beyond its expiration but that the draft has not been finalized yet and would still need to be approved by both presidents.

Moscow is “ready for dialogue with the United States on limiting strategic offensive arms if Washington responds constructively,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said on Thursday, adding that Russia plans to continue practicing a “responsible and attentive approach” to strategic nuclear stability.

Trump, in a Truth Social post on Thursday, said, “Rather than extend ‘NEW START’ (A badly negotiated deal by the United States that, aside from everything else, is being grossly violated), we should have our Nuclear Experts work on a new, improved, and modernized Treaty that can last long into the future.”

Read more in today’s World Brief: The Death of New START.

When U.S. President Barack Obama announced a deal to normalize relations with Cuba in 2014, Republican presidential hopefuls denounced it as appeasement—but not Donald Trump. “I think it’s fine, but we should have made a better deal,” he said, “The concept of opening with Cuba is fine.” Now, he aims to prove that he alone can make a better deal. By deepening Cuba’s economic deprivation, Trump hopes to inflict enough pain on the Cuban people that the government will be forced to the bargaining table for a “deal” tantamount to surrender.

In the aftermath of the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia, observers wondered whether Cuba would be next. At first, Trump seemed reluctant. Asked by reporters if he would strike at Cuba, he replied, “It looks like it’s going down. I don’t think we need any action.” A few days later, he seemed to reject the idea of increasing pressure on Havana. “I don’t think you can have much more pressure other than going in and blasting the hell out of the place.” He predicted that Cuba would “go down … of its own volition.”

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U.S. President Donald Trump’s plans for Gaza have come into sharper focus over the past two weeks. At the World Economic Forum meetings in Davos, Switzerland, attendees were treated to a glossy presentation of “New Gaza”—a Dubai-style coastal hub. According to Trump’s plan, his Board of Peace would govern Gaza through an executive board and a recently named Palestinian technocratic committee appointed by the Trump administration, alongside several regional representatives. Optimists argue that even if the AI-generated skyscrapers remain out of reach, Trump’s new architecture could still play a constructive role in ending the war and stabilizing Gaza.

Yet this optimism obscures the devastation and humanitarian catastrophe that still define daily life in the Gaza. The cease-fire’s humanitarian provisions were not vague. They required aid at scale and a transition to recovery. This has not happened.

Four months into the cease-fire, Palestinians in Gaza remain trapped in an Israeli permissions regime that ensures deprivation while the operating space for humanitarian agencies continues to shrink. In the past week alone, violence surged to one of its highest levels since the truce began. Palestinian health authorities report that more than 500 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed by Israeli fire since the cease-fire took effect. Winter exposure has compounded the toll, with at least 10 children reportedly dying of hypothermia as shelter and aid remain severely constrained.

Phase two of the peace process envisions the demobilizing of Hamas. Yet former senior Israeli national security officials have warned that demobilization is not an overnight event. Indeed, history tells us that these processes often take years. The risk is that demobilization will become a pretext for denying lifesaving aid and early recovery for 2 million people.

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Much has been written about how U.S. President Donald Trump is pursuing an authoritarian agenda at home while embracing dictators abroad. But even this criticism does not fully capture the way he has reconfigured the global order to strengthen the logic of authoritarianism itself.

The results can be seen with regrettable clarity in Turkey, where President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is a leading beneficiary of Trump’s force-based international disorder. Erdogan has simultaneously denounced the United States and cozied up to Trump, all while personifying the national strength that Turkey relies on in an anarchic and illiberal world. Turkey’s opposition, meanwhile, is animated by an idealistic faith in the discarded liberal order and vows to abandon Erdogan’s nationalist foreign policy. Unless it reconsiders and doubles down on nationalism, Turkish voters will return to Erdogan.

Erdogan presents himself as the incarnation of Turkish aspirations for regional and global power. He has long advocated for a multipolar global order not dominated by great powers, saying, “The world is bigger than five”—a reference to the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. In pursuit of this vision, Ankara has cultivated strong relations with Venezuelan President Nicólas Maduro. When Maduro was captured by U.S. forces in January, Erdogan’s chief advisor, Mehmet Ucum, stated, “There is no option other than power-based struggle against imperialist aggression.”

At the same time, Erdogan has also acted as an acquiescent Trump ally who is keen to cooperate with the United States when it serves his purposes. Thus, as his advisor condemned imperialist aggression, Erdogan himself abstained from expressing any criticism of the Maduro raid. After a conversation with Trump on Jan. 27, Erdogan said, “We will continue to develop the cooperation between the United States and Turkey,” adding, “It’s in our common interest that the relations progress in all areas.” Turkey accepted the invitation to join Trump’s Board of Peace, while most NATO allies declined.

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According to an emerging conventional wisdom, U.S. President Donald Trump is seeking to work with autocratic great powers to carve up the world into “spheres of influence.” For example, Anne Applebaum writes, “That vision, of a world divided into three spheres of influence, run by three great powers … influences some in the Trump administration.” A headline in Time magazine warns of “Trump and the Dangers of Spheres of Influence.”

Even social media influencers seem drawn to this idea, with a widely circulating  online map showing the world divided into three, with equal parts going to Trump, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

But is this the right way to think about Trump’s foreign policy?

To be sure, Trump wants an American sphere of influence in the Western Hemisphere. But he is also fiercely competitive, and he is unwilling to grant similar dominions to Putin and Xi. In this way, he is more like traditional American presidents, advancing American security close to home while also working to prevent adversaries from dominating important geopolitical regions.

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In a test of competing ideologies, U.S. President Donald Trump hosted Colombian President Gustavo Petro at the White House on Tuesday. Tensions were high ahead of the closed-door meeting—already a rarity in Trump’s TV presidency—as experts wondered whether the two leaders would be able to stabilize their volatile relationship or revert back to months of diplomatic fighting.

Little information has emerged from the summit, with Petro expected to make a public announcement at 4 p.m. local time and Trump surprisingly silent on Truth Social.

According to one Colombian advisor, though, Petro was cautioned to avoid topics that could lead to a diplomatic blowup. Instead, Colombian officials reportedly planned to use Tuesday’s meeting to deliver a detailed presentation on their anti-drug achievements in a bid to appease the White House; Colombia is the world’s top producer of coca, the main ingredient in cocaine.

Petro is a leftist former guerrilla and a frequent, vocal critic of the Trump administration, especially Trump’s efforts to establish U.S. dominance in Latin America. Growing hostility appeared to come to a head in December, when Trump warned Petro that “he better wise up, or he’ll be next,” appearing to allude to U.S. actions against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. But just a few days later, a private phone call between the two leaders seemed to calm things down somewhat, with Trump later telling reporters that “somehow, after the Venezuelan raid, [Petro] became very nice.”

It is unclear just how “nice” Petro was during Tuesday’s meeting, but initial statements appear optimistic. Petro posted a photo of himself and Trump on X on Tuesday alongside a note signed by Trump that says, “Gustavo—a great honor. I love Colombia.”

Read more in today’s World Brief: Trump vs. Petro: A Thaw in Relations or Return to Diplomatic War?