Suddenly, it seems, nuclear weapons are back on the agenda in Seoul.

In a Gallup Korea poll released Friday, nearly two-thirds of South Koreans (65%) said their country should develop an independent nuclear capability, while less than one-third (30%) opposed the idea. Moreover, the survey of more than 1,000 adults, which was conducted in late August, found that the impulse ran across party lines and political affiliations.

That isn’t a significant reversal. Majority support for an independent nuclear capability has been very much the norm in the Republic of Korea (ROK) for years, though waxing and waning depending on the prevailing government attitudes toward their menacing northern neighbor. The new Gallup results are consistent with the multi-year average of various polls (including by groups like the Asan Institute and Hankook Research), which show that a healthy majority of Koreans consistently backs the idea of nuclearization.

What’s different now, though, is the apparent fraying of the strategic partnership that has long held those impulses in check: the one with Washington.

Over the past couple of weeks, President Trump has played up his warm personal ties to North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, and tried to restart some sort of strategic dialogue with the DPRK. In the process, he has announced a scaling back of joint military drills with South Korea, on the grounds that they send a “totally inappropriate and hostile” message to Pyongyang.

That’s a real problem for the ROK, since for decades Seoul’s answer to North Korea’s belligerence was extended deterrence – that is, the U.S. nuclear umbrella, the presence of American forces on the peninsula, and a packed schedule of joint exercises that were designed to communicate both interoperability and close coordination.

Those assurances seem decidedly less ironclad now, amid the Trump administration’s reinvigorated – though as yet not requited – outreach to the North. And because they do, they’re likely to result in a greater focus on nukes on the part of South Koreans themselves. So, unless Washington does some serious damage-control in the days ahead, I fully expect the numbers cited by Gallup to increase – and perhaps do so significantly – the next time they are tallied.

Everyone who watches Asian politics knows that Taiwan represents a cardinal strategic priority for China’s Communist Party in general, and for its leader Xi Jinping in particular. We’ve become accustomed, though, to assuming that the “reintegration” China seeks will most likely be accomplished by force. (To be fair, that belief has been buttressed more than a little bit by reports that Xi has ordered the country’s military to be ready to take the island by as early as next year.)

As a result, we’ve paid far less attention than we should to the ways in which Beijing is trying to subvert and undermine the island’s independence via non-kinetic means. Those methods, however, are extensive. They include “united front” work, economic inducements and information operations. (I wrote about that final component back in November for the Jerusalem Strategic Tribune. You can read the article here).

It’s an effort that is focused in particular on Taiwanese youth… because Beijing is aware that cohort can be a swing constituency in terms of successfully hollowing out national identity and ultimately convincing the island’s 23 million residents that their future lies in absorption rather than independence. The goal, as Taiwanese analysts put it, is to “govern Taiwan before unification” – that is, to weaken the island’s political and psychological defenses sufficient to make it pliable to manipulation from the mainland.

That’s the proper lens through which to see the launch, earlier this summer, of “Taiwan Youth e-Home.” The digital portal, spearheaded by China’s Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO), aggregates job listings, internships, and university applications – and is aimed squarely at Taiwanese students and young professionals. According to the TAO, nearly 2,000 mainland companies had already posted some 6,000 vacancies for Taiwanese applicants. The not-so-subtle message is that the mainland represents a trove of prosperity and opportunity… provided Taiwanese are willing to give up their pesky ideas about political autonomy.

Taipei, though, is on the case – at least in this instance. Earlier this month, the island’s Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) banned the platform, declaring it an illegal recruitment operation that violates the Cross-Strait Act and accusing Beijing of using it for psychological warfare purposes.

Indeed, by dangling employment and educational pathways, the PRC is clearly hoping to draw Taiwan’s next generation into its orbit. Taipei’s decision to shut the portal down is therefore a necessary defensive step, even though it has drawn all the predictable condemnations from China. Still, it’s also only a tactical win in a much larger strategic contest of wills — one in which Beijing continues to probe the island for internal weaknesses.

Whatever else might have worried them, Western officials have operated under at least one comforting assumption in the context of the Ukraine war: that Russian President Vladimir Putin would be reluctant to directly challenge NATO while his military was still bogged down in Ukraine. Now, though, officials in Washington are beginning to rethink that premise. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that, according to new assessments, America’s intelligence agencies now believe Moscow might imminently attempt a limited test of NATO’s resolve… that is, at any point between this Fall and 2029.

Why is such a scenario increasingly plausible? Quite simply, because Russia has steadily pushed the envelope vis-à-vis the Alliance, and learned all the wrong lessons in the process. Since the start of the Ukraine war, Russian cruise missiles have landed on Polish territory. Its fighter jets have flown over parts of Estonia. Its drones have repeatedly penetrated the airspace of countries like Romania and Denmark. The list goes on.

All this is, to put it mildly, extremely concerning. But beyond the predictable hand-wringing in European capitals, none of those incidents have triggered a forceful NATO response – and that failure has effectively normalized future Russian aggression.

So, what might a future Russian test look like? It wouldn’t necessarily entail a conventional military attack. Russia’s probe is more likely to come in the form of a cyberattack against an Alliance member or some other form of hybrid aggression. The goal would be to carry out a limited provocation that’s serious enough to demand a response, but not so blatant that NATO members automatically agree on one.

Which would be precisely the point. Russia doesn’t need to invade Poland or roll tanks into the Baltics in order to undermine NATO’s credibility. It just needs to create a crisis in which Alliance members hesitate and bicker over what actually happened. If and when that comes to pass, the Kremlin will learn something enormously important: that NATO’s red lines aren’t quite as red as advertised. And once Putin does, you can bet that he’ll test them again and again.

In the early days after Hamas’ terror attacks on October 7, 2023, Israel witnessed something unique: thousands of Israelis abroad rushed home to make themselves available for military service or help the country in other ways.

Nearly three years later, however, the larger trendline is clearly headed in the other direction. As The Financial Times recently reported, Israel is experiencing a significant population outflow, with 150,000 Israelis leaving the country since 2023. In its coverage, the British paper framed the matter as “the exodus from Israel.” Although that depiction is a bit overwrought, there’s no question that the issue is concerning—albeit not for the reasons most casual observers think.

The dominant cause is often depicted as war fatigue (as it largely is in The Financial Times’ framing). After more than 1,000 days, the country’s multi-front war against Iran and its proxies is taking a clear toll in terms of morale, and Israelis are increasingly voting with their feet.

There is a measure of truth to that observation, certainly. Still, Israel simultaneously ranks as one of the happiest countries on the planet, coming in eighth in the world in the latest global ranking notwithstanding nearly three years of war. Israelis, in other words, are quintessentially happy warriors.

So, what explains the current demographic shift? The old trope that “all politics is local” applies here, because Israel’s population outflow has its roots in multiple domestic causes.

The first is a persistent lack of accountability. Many Israelis I’ve spoken with are thoroughly frustrated by the ongoing refusal of Israel’s ruling coalition to claim meaningful responsibility for the institutional failures that led to the October 7, 2023 attacks, which saw the single largest killing of Jews since the Holocaust. That state of affairs represents a historical aberration.

When the government of former Prime Minister Golda Meir failed to properly anticipate the 1973 Yom Kippur War, for example, the post-conflict reckoning (in the form of the Agranat Commission, an independent national inquiry) saw her government collapse. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has led the country for a generation, refuses to submit to a similar independent state commission; instead, he is advancing a politically appointed alternative so his government can better manage the potential fallout.

The second involves uneven military participation. When David Ben-Gurion, the father of modern Israel, formulated Israel’s foundational civic compact in 1948, he explicitly included a carve-out for ultra-Orthodox students to ensure buy-in from the larger Haredi community in the new national project. Back then, the cohort in question was tiny, numbering in the hundreds. In the decades since, however, that broader community has ballooned and now the ultra-Orthodox represent more than 14 percent of Israel’s population of nearly 10 million.

That growth has made the extremely low rate of military participation among young Haredim impossible to ignore. The ultra-Orthodox community is increasingly resented by other segments of Israeli society, who are painfully aware from their personal experiences that the burden of extended military service is shared unevenly at present. Meanwhile, religious parties currently have a stranglehold on national politics, to the point that they have managed to scupper repeated attempts to widen military and national service requirements for the country’s ultra-Orthodox.

The third is the need for a new warfighting approach. Historically, Israel’s military has sought to wage short, sharp conflicts that took the fight to its enemies and onto their territory as quickly as possible, to compensate for the country’s lack of strategic depth. This approach proved effective in the 1956 Sinai Campaign, the 1967 Six-Day War, and many smaller conflicts.

But that approach doesn’t apply to Gaza, where Israel is now involved in what is basically a protracted irregular warfare mission. At the same time, its expeditionary warfare against Iran, Hezbollah in Lebanon and other targets, like Yemen’s Houthis, has locked the country into a perpetual campaign footing that is challenging for the country’s standing military and even more so for its reserve force. This is the reason why knowledgeable strategists, including my colleague Eran Ortal, increasingly question the current “total war” mindset.

These pressures make clear that Israel’s population outflow is about much more than war fatigue. It’s also a barometer of confidence—both in the country’s political leadership and in the social compact underpinning Israeli society. The real question, then, isn’t simply how many Israelis are leaving, but whether the conditions prompting them to do so can be resolved.

That question will loom exceedingly large when Israelis head to the polls this October.

Ilan Berman is Senior Vice President of the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington, DC.

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/middle-east-watch/whats-driving-israels-new-exodus

As this Fall’s State Duma elections approach, the domestic jockeying for power is heating up in Russia. The latest political salvo came earlier this month, when the nationalist Rodina party filed a lawsuit with Russia’s Supreme Court to disqualify the Yabloko faction from eligibility in the political contest.

Its argument? That Russia’s oldest liberal party was effectively a seditious foreign agent. “The Yabloko party is full of traitors. These are people who work for the West and hold Western values,” Rodina leader Alexei Zhuravlyov told reporters.

Kremlin authorities seem to concur. Just days later, on August 10th, Russia’s Supreme Court took Rodina’s suggestion and formally barred Yabloko from participating in next month’s elections.

The episode is deeply telling. After all, elections in Russia have become decidedly pro forma affairs in recent years, carefully stage-managed to deliver the results the Kremlin wants while preserving a veneer of political pluralism. Moreover, Yabloko has been a marginal political force for years, and is hardly in a position to pose a serious challenge to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ruling United Russia party. So why the ban?

In a word, the answer is Ukraine. Russia’s full-scale invasion of its western neighbor, now in its fifth year, is increasingly coming home to ordinary Russians in a number of key ways.

Most directly, Ukrainian long-range drone strike capabilities have brought the war deep into Russian territory. In recent weeks, Kyiv has intensified its attacks on refineries, pipelines, storage facilities and other key infrastructure nodes. This has wreaked havoc on the country’s energy sector and disrupted the oil and gas revenues that serve as the lifeblood of the Kremlin’s war effort. The situation has become so bad that Russia – normally one of the world’s leading energy exporters – is now facing severe nationwide gas shortages, leading to rationing in its assorted regions and mounting local discontent.

Economically, too, President Vladimir Putin’s war of choice has put the country on a path of protracted decline. To be sure, following the February 2022 invasion, Russia proved considerably more economically resilient than many in the West had predicted. But the Kremlin’s progressive embrace of a wartime economy has nonetheless led to major distortions, including rising inflation acute labor shortages, leaving the country in an increasingly precarious fiscal state.

Nor can Russians count on a “rainy day” fund the way they once could. Moscow has progressively drawn down the readily-fungible assets of its National Wealth Fund to cover wartime expenses and ballooning budget deficits. As a result, “Russia’s war chest, if it ever existed, has long been empty,” a study by the Bank of Finland concluded earlier this year. Because of this state of affairs, Russia’s Central Bank has been forced to increasingly sell off the country’s gold reserves in order to plug widening holes in the federal budget.

Then there is the question of manpower. To date, Moscow has relied on troops from foreign locales (like Africa and North Korea), loath to repeat the experience of its last military mobilization – which, when it took place in late 2022, caused the largest exodus of Russians from the country since the Bolshevik Revolution. But rumors now abound that the Kremlin is mulling another mass mobilization later this year, when the elections are safely in the rearview mirror, and that possibility is sure to be causing consternation among many.

Cumulatively, these trends have increasingly threatened the quiet compact that has helped sustain the conflict, and Putin’s popularity, thus far: that the Russian president’s war of choice would remain a distant affair that wouldn’t affect the daily lives of ordinary citizens. More and more, Russians are understanding this is simply not the case.

As such, September’s election is shaping up to be at least a symbolic referendum on the war – and on Putin’s leadership. Indeed, as the Washington Post lays out, “Yabloko [had] campaigned under the slogan ‘For Peace and Freedom,’ a clear counter to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s push for conquest in Ukraine.”

That, in turn, made Russia’s remaining liberals a domestic political target, because as the consequences of its adventurism increasingly come home, even the potential for limited dissent has become a threat to the Kremlin’s preferred worldview.

Ilan Berman is Senior Vice President of the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington, DC.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ilanberman/2026/08/17/putin-is-afraid-of-an-election-he-cant-lose/

Washington’s rehabilitation of Syria has proceeded at remarkable speed. Over the past several months, the United States has dismantled much of the sanctions architecture that isolated the country for years, restored diplomatic engagement with Damascus and begun exploring new avenues of security cooperation with the fledgling government of Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa.

The logic is understandable. The fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in December 2024 at the hands of opposition forces spearheaded by Sharaa’s Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham presented the U.S. with an irresistible opportunity. It created an opening to pull Syria out of Iran’s orbit, where it had been nestled for decades under the rule of first Hafez al-Assad and then his son Bashar. It also held out the potential for a stabilization of the deeply fractured state, if a more pragmatic government was to truly take hold.

That wager may yet pay off. Indeed, recent days have seen new signs of cooperation between Syria and the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog. Still, it is becoming increasingly clear that, at least at the moment, Washington is making its bet based more on hope than hard evidence.

Developments inside Syria suggest the ideological makeup of the country’s new rulers has not changed nearly as much as Western officials might wish to believe. Instead, beneath the new government’s more polished diplomatic messaging lies an Islamist movement that continues to promote many of the same ideas that defined its origins as an al-Qaeda affiliate.

Take education. A new study by the Israeli Alma Research and Education Center think tank details the curriculum of the Dar al-Wahi al-Sharif school network, an educational system affiliated with the ruling HTS. The findings are troubling. According to the report, jihadist ideology and political indoctrination begin as early as kindergarten in schools run by the network, which “now operate in major provinces throughout Syria, including Aleppo, Hama, Damascus, Latakia, and Deraa.” Israel is systematically erased from classroom maps and replaced by “Palestine.” Jews and Christians are portrayed as perennial enemies of Islam, and armed jihad against them is presented as a religious obligation.

These are more than isolated examples of intolerance. They reflect an officially sanctioned effort to shape Syria’s next generation according to a radical, rejectionist worldview.

At the same time, Damascus is struggling with another unresolved problem that likewise speaks volumes about the character of Syria’s new order: the disposition of foreign fighters.

The Syrian military now contains roughly 5,000 extremists who fought alongside HTS during its successful campaign to topple Assad. Many of them have been accused of abuses against Syria’s minority communities, including extrajudicial killings and instances of sectarian violence. Naturally, the continued presence of these elements on Syrian soil has alarmed neighbors such as Israel and Lebanon, and raised serious questions from the international community about the reliability of Syria’s security apparatus.

The issue, moreover, was supposed to already have been settled. Removing foreign jihadist fighters from Syria’s armed forces was a central American condition for sanctions relief after Assad’s fall. Yet despite major U.S. concessions — including the repeal of the extensive architecture of economic pressure imposed by Congress under the 2019 Caesar Act — Sharaa’s government has made only limited progress in doing so. To the contrary, it has become painfully clear that these fighters remain indispensable to the new Syrian regime’s hold on power precisely because they constitute some of its most loyal and battle-hardened supporters.

These facts are presenting American policymakers with an uncomfortable reality. The central premise of the Trump administration’s current approach is that engagement will gradually moderate the Syrian government. But moderation is difficult to achieve when a regime’s political survival depends on the support of militants and the dissemination of extreme ideology.

None of this means that the U.S. should abandon engagement altogether. A stable Syria — one independent of Iran, contributing meaningfully to the fight against regional terrorism and protecting its minorities — would advance Washington’s interests in the Middle East. But such normalization needs to be earned, rather than assumed.

Fortunately, Washington and its partners still have considerable leverage over Damascus in the form of economic assistance, defense cooperation, diplomatic recognition and international financial support. These tools should be employed deliberately, with measurable benchmarks tied to genuine reform. Things like the removal of foreign fighters from Syria’s security forces, meaningful protection of religious and ethnic minorities and comprehensive revision of extremist educational materials shouldn’t be aspirational goals. They should be minimum requirements for deeper partnership.

Until they are, Washington needs to proceed with considerably more caution than is currently in evidence.

Ilan Berman is Senior Vice President of the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington, DC.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/08/13/syria-still-shows-troubling-signs-islamic-radicalism/

Amid the ongoing churn of the on-again, off-again U.S. war with Iran last month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced a different—and surprising—foreign policy objective: dismantling the International CriminalCourt (ICC). His initiative envisions a “whole of government” effort to “systematically disable the ICC’s ability to operate, target American servicemen or officials, or otherwise threaten American sovereignty,” the State Department officially announced on July 13.

The goal is undeniably ambitious. It’s also understandable, given the persistent concerns about the ICC. For years, U.S. policymakers on both sides of the political aisle have worried over the potential exposure of servicemen and officials to politicized prosecution—and the inevitable chilling effect this could have on American foreign policy.

Of course, the United States isn’t a signatory to the Rome Statute, the court’s foundational document, and so isn’t bound by its terms. But many of the countries where U.S. forces are deployed in significant numbers—including Japan, South Korea, and Italy—are signatories. The enduring concern has been that fast-moving politics and shifting international priorities could leave deployed American servicemen and servicewomen at the mercy of “transnational justice” meted out by the court.

All this had already made the court a significant priority for the Trump administration. In February 2025, President Donald Trump issued an executive order sanctioning the court over its politicized behavior, and over the past year the U.S. government has progressively sanctioned key personnel as well. Now it is trying something more ambitious: dismantling the ICC altogether.

The outcry has been predictable. Defenders of the ICC (and critics of the administration more broadly) argue that the court represents an indispensable mechanism for advancing international justice and ensuring accountability among global leaders. However, their case rests on the assumption that the ICC functions as an impartial arbiter, and the evidence suggests otherwise.

The problems start with the selective application of the court’s mandate. The ICC’s founding statute lays out that it is responsible for addressing “the most serious crimes of international concern,” such as genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression (that is, “the use of armed force by a State against the sovereignty, integrity or independence of another State”). In principle, egregious cases of state abuse—like China’s extensive persecution of its Uyghur minority—fall squarely within this definition.

In practice, however, the court depends on state cooperation. Its mandate is therefore enforceable only against countries that are unable or unwilling to resist. So as a practical matter, the ICC has turned a blind eye to some of the world’s worst offenders in favor of other, easier targets. In the process, the ICC has become an institution of selective justice.

The court’s performance, moreover, doesn’t justify its far-reaching authority. After more than two decades in operation, the ICC has achieved fewer than 15 convictions, several of which were subsequently overturned or reduced on appeal. And throughout much of its history, the overwhelming majority of individuals indicted by the court were African, opening the court up to charges of neocolonialism from countries on the continent. For an institution designed to embody universal justice, that constitutes a deeply problematic record.

Those shortcomings have been compounded by the conduct of the court’s leadership. Most prominent, of course, is Karim Khan, the prosecutor who in November 2024 famously issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant over the Gaza war, thereby creating a false equivalence between Israel’s democratically elected government and the Hamas terrorist organization. Indeed, the Biden administration condemned the Israeli warrants at the time, and even threatened legislative retaliation in response. But the warrants remain in force, contributing mightily to the false narrative that Israel is perpetrating “genocide” against the Palestinians.

Nor is Khan an isolated case. His predecessor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, also attracted criticism during his tenure from 2003 to 2012, particularly over the ICC’s investigation into Kenya’s 2007-08 post-election violence. The charges against Uhuru Kenyatta were ultimately withdrawn, while those against William Ruto were vacated. A subsequent external review reportedly criticized aspects of Ocampo’s leadership and prosecutorial approach.

Ocampo has continued to court controversy since leaving the ICC. In August 2023, he published an expert opinion arguing that Azerbaijan’s blockade of the Lachin Corridor constituted an ongoing genocide against Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh. That assessment was challenged by British lawyer and international law expert Rodney Dixon, who argued there was “no evidence” to support the claim. More recently, Azerbaijani media published recordings purportedly showing Ocampo and his son discussing a political influence campaign aimed at removing Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan from power.

Taken together, these deformities paint a troubling picture. The ICC has demonstrated selective enforcement, boasts a decidedly modest record of successful prosecutions, has repeatedly politicized its mandate, and raises persistent questions about the judgment of its leadership. That’s the backdrop against which the Trump administration’s new initiative should be understood.

Writing recently in The Wall Street Journal, Secretary Rubio argued that “the ICC and its allies seek a standing world tribunal with near-unlimited reach, empowered to override the courts and constitutions of the U.S. and other sovereign states.”

The court’s own track record helps explain why the White House has come to see it as a growing threat to American sovereignty and to the interests of democratic allies. The ICC, in other words, has done a great deal to undermine confidence in its own mission—and to make Rubio’s case far more persuasive than its detractors would care to admit.

Ilan Berman is senior vice president of the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington, DC.

https://www.newsweek.com/rubio-is-right-the-icc-is-dangerously-flawed-opinion-12308277

Among experts focused on China and the Indo-Pacific, TaiwanPlus is a familiar name. Beyond those circles, though, the English-language broadcaster that serves as Taiwan’s main international messaging outlet remains relatively obscure.

It shouldn’t be. Over the past several years, the platform has become the island’s principal vehicle for presenting an authoritative Taiwanese perspective on history and current events – subjects Beijing is increasingly seeking to shape to its own ends.

That mission has become progressively more important as China’s informational capabilities have expanded in their scope and sophistication. The PRC hasn’t developed those in isolation; it has drawn lessons from the influence operations of its strategic partner, Russia, while increasingly coordinating narratives with Moscow as well as Tehran on a range of geopolitical issues. The result is an emerging authoritarian information ecosystem in which all three amplify one another’s messaging, reinforce shared strategic objectives, and work collectively to erode confidence in the West.

Taiwan has become one of the principal testing grounds for that strategy. During a visit to Taipei last autumn, senior government officials described to me an information environment that is growing steadily more hostile, as Beijing moves beyond traditional propaganda toward increasingly sophisticated efforts to shape public opinion both on and about the island.

The takeaway was unmistakable: China’s campaign against Taiwan is no longer confined to military coercion or economic pressure. It has increasingly become a contest over narrative as well.

That is precisely where TaiwanPlus has a role to play. Though vastly outspent by the Chinese Communist Party’s sprawling global media apparatus (the budget of which has been estimated to be at least $10 billion annually), the broadcaster has nevertheless established itself as a credible international platform capable of presenting Taiwan’s perspective to audiences that might otherwise only encounter Beijing’s version of events.

But that capability is now at risk. Last week, opposition lawmakers in Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan proposed sweeping cuts to the budget of the Public Television Service (PTS), the state broadcaster that oversees TaiwanPlus. If fully enacted, the cuts would amount to as much as 30% of PTS’s budget, and strip almost all operational funding from TaiwanPlus, thereby neutering the broadcaster.

The battle is about much more than a single media outlet. It represents a proxy fight over Taiwan’s larger strategic orientation.

For years, legislators from the opposition Kuomintang (KMT) have leveled criticism at Taiwan’s public broadcasting system and sought to disrupt its funding. Their objections are hard to reconcile with the service’s public standing, since according to the Reuters Institute 2026 Digital News Report the PTS ranks among Taiwan’s most trusted news organizations. Rather, the dispute reflects a broader political disagreement over Taiwan’s identity, its relationship with Beijing, and the role that publicly-funded media should play in shaping domestic and international perceptions of the island.

That debate has acquired new urgency as the KMT gains momentum after a decade of political control by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Under the leadership of its chairwoman, the U.S.- and UK-educated former parliamentarian Cheng Li-wun, the KMT has of late advanced a considerably more accommodating approach to Beijing than the one embraced by the government of current President Lai Ching-te.

Seen from that perspective, an influential broadcaster that consistently highlights Chinese coercion, and which emphasizes the island’s democratic resilience and the distinctness of Taiwanese identity, is not merely a budgetary expense. It also represents a significant political impediment.

That matters a great deal, because the contest between Taipei and Beijing has never been solely about military capabilities or diplomatic recognition. It is a struggle over legitimacy, perception, and narrative. Beijing understands this very well, which is why it continues to devote enormous resources to information operations that are designed to isolate Taiwan internationally and sow discord on the island itself.

All of which makes the current fight over TaiwanPlus deeply consequential. It represents a bellwether for how Taiwan will fare in the larger battle for international opinion – a contest that has become almost as vital as the military balance in the Taiwan Strait itself.

Ilan Berman is Senior Vice President of the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington, DC.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ilanberman/2026/08/10/taiwans-information-war-comes-home/

Although you might not have noticed, North Korea’s role in Russia’s war on Ukraine is poised to get bigger. A lot bigger.

The Kremlin is reportedly preparing to deploy another 30,000 North Korean troops to the battlefield, while also taking delivery of more North Korean missile launchers and other military equipment. If this new tranche of assistance from the Kim regime materializes, as Ukrainian officials believe it will, the move would represent a significant expansion of Pyongyang’s involvement in Europe’s biggest conflict since World War II.

The timing isn’t coincidental. It follows a four-day visit to Moscow last month by North Korean Foreign Minister Choe Son-hui, in which she held talks with both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Those meetings underscored just how far the relationship between Moscow and Pyongyang has evolved and strengthened in recent years.

As part of these blossoming ties, North Korea already dispatched an estimated 20,000 troops and military engineers in support of Russia’s war effort. A new deployment of 30,000 more would truly make the DPRK an essential ally in sustaining Russia’s aggression.

It would also help the Kremlin with its vexing manpower problem, at least temporarily. That dynamic has plagued Putin’s war of choice since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and has now reached a point where Russia’s government has no choice but to implement large-scale conscription this Fall to maintain battlefield pressure on Ukrainian defenses. (I wrote about this recently for Newsweek here). The infusion of North Korean troops means that pressure to take such a step—which is sure to be deeply unpopular at home—is somewhat allayed, at least for a little while.

So, what’s in it for the DPRK? The Kim regime potentially stands to gain hard currency, advanced military technology, and combat experience for its forces—those that manage to survive, that is. Chances are, not many will. Infantry troops on the Russian front lines are said to have a notoriously short life expectancy (something like 20 to 30 minutes).

Still, North Korea is clearly betting that Russia’s president plans to stay the course in Ukraine—and that supporting him in doing so will end up paying strategic dividends for the “Hermit Kingdom.”

Back in January, at the height of Iran’s most recent round of anti-regime protests, President Donald Trump weighed in in support of the Iranian people. “Iranian Patriots, KEEP PROTESTING – TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!!… HELP IS ON ITS WAY,” he proclaimed in a post on Truth Social on January 13. As a result, the US-Israeli military campaign launched a little over a month later was naturally seen by many as intended, at least in part, to punish Iran’s clerical rulers for their repression—and perhaps even to set the stage for some sort of fundamental change of the regime in Tehran.

Fast forward five months, however, and the results have been very different. Since this spring, American diplomacy has focused overwhelmingly on pressuring the Iranian regime back to the negotiating table—at the outset, to barter over its nuclear program, and more recently to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. In the process, the idea of assisting the Iranian people seems to have fallen by the wayside.

So, what do Iranians think about the conflict, and the current state of their country after nearly half a year of war? A new internet-based survey conducted by GAMAAN, a Netherlands-based polling group focused on assessing attitudes within Iran, offers some surprising—and significant—revelations.

The first is that the January 2026 protests against the Islamic Republic were far, far broader in scope than has been commonly understood in the West. Of the more than 31,000 respondents surveyed by GAMAAN using VPN and other circumvention technology, a quarter “reported having participated in the January 2026 street protests.” That percentage, GAMAAN extrapolates, corresponds “to an estimated 14 million literate people aged 15 and above” taking part, in one way or another, in Iran’s latest opposition wave.

It’s worth noting that, since the survey relied on VPNs and internet circumvention methods, its findings may naturally skew toward younger, more educated and more urban Iranians. Still, if they are anything close to representative, the findings reflect a mass protest wave far more extensive than has been appreciated so far.

That, in turn, helps explain the extreme lengths to which the Iranian regime went to put down the protests—from launching the longest internet blackout in history to killing more than 36,000 opposition activists. It also underscores the logic behind the repression now being waged by Iran’s remaining leaders, from renewed pressure on religious minorities like the Baha’i to persistent efforts to choke off the flow of information within the Islamic Republic to a renewed clampdown on things like compulsory wearing of the hijab for women.

The second is that, despite the hardships they have endured over the past half-year, many Iranians see the US-Israeli war on the Islamic Republic in a positive light. “About 40 percent viewed the US and Israeli military operation as a form of ‘humanitarian intervention,’” the GAMAAN study notes. That figure is a reflection of the fact that ordinary Iranians understand full well that they are captives of the Islamic Republic, and continue to hold out hope that the West will somehow free them.

Attitudes toward President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reflect that reality: the two leaders remain at least somewhat popular in Iran—Trump still garners 44 percent approval in the GAMAAN poll, while Netanyahu gets 51 percent. That suggests a generally benign view of American and Israeli intentions, despite the hardships that have been visited on the Iranian people in the past half-year.

All this should be consequential for the Trump administration, because it reflects a domestic reality that simply isn’t captured by the current negotiations between Washington and Tehran. Moreover, as the latest GAMAAN results underscore, the potential for meaningful political change within Iran persists, despite the country’s new military-dominated order. The only question now is whether the United States is prepared to do more to ensure that, when Iranians inevitably take to the streets once again, they are better prepared and more capable than they were back in January.

The Iranians still appear hopeful that they will. Washington shouldn’t disappoint them.

Ilan Berman is Senior Vice President of the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington, DC.

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/middle-east-watch/what-iranians-really-think-about-the-war-and-their-regime

For much of the past two years, conventional wisdom has held that Russia would be one of the biggest losers of the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria. After investing heavily for decades in military, political and economic terms in order to preserve Assad’s hold on power, the Kremlin seemed destined to see that influence evaporate when former Al-Qaeda affiliate Hayat Tahrir al-Sham swept to power in Damascus in December 2024.

The corresponding assumption in many Western capitals was that Russia would gradually be forced to relinquish the strategic foothold it had painstakingly built in the Levant over the previous decade. That assumption, however, increasingly looks to have been misplaced.

Earlier this year, a study by the Institute for National Security Studies, Israel’s premier think tank, detailed that Moscow was tightening ties to Damascus—and meeting with some notable successes in doing so.

The new warmth is the product of systematic—and successful—Russian diplomacy. “Confidence-building steps were taken from the early months of [Ahmed] al-Sharaa’s rule, including shipments of wheat and fuel; diplomatic outreach and high-level delegations (including a senior delegation from the Foreign Ministry, letters, and phone calls from President Vladimir Putin),” the INSS study noted. “These overtures included proposals for economic and humanitarian cooperation, such as rehabilitating Syrian energy infrastructure, increasing material and food assistance, and even the idea of turning Khmeimim and Tartus into humanitarian aid ‘hubs.’”

Most significantly, it laid out, Russia has positioned itself “to offer Damascus solutions to its military distress.” These range from “support services” for Syria’s army, such as training and arms procurement, to the potential for limited military deployments to serve as a backstop for Syrian forces—much like the role that Moscow played for years for the Assad regime.

Now, Russia’s efforts are becoming more ambitious still. Reports indicate the Kremlin is preparing to establish a major commercial logistics hub at the Russian-leased port facilities in Tartus, transforming what has long served primarily as a military asset into the centerpiece of a broader economic strategy. According to Syrian officials, Moscow intends to move roughly 250,000 tons of Russian goods through the port each month, beginning with substantial grain shipments and eventually linking Tartus directly to the Russian Black Sea port of Novorossiysk.

The plan is ambitious—and significant. Rather than merely preserving its naval presence in the eastern Mediterranean, Moscow appears to be building the infrastructure for a long-term commercial corridor intended to bind Syria’s economy ever more closely to its own.

This represents an evolution in Russia’s regional strategy. For years, Russian influence in (and over) Syria rested overwhelmingly on military assistance. Russian airpower helped save the Assad regime from collapse back in 2015, while its naval facilities at Tartus and air base at Khmeimim gave Moscow its first sustained military presence in the Mediterranean since the Cold War. Those assets were valuable, but they were also vulnerable—because their viability depended upon the survival of a single regime.

The current approach is markedly different. By inserting itself as a key player in Syria’s larger economic recovery, Russia is creating relationships that are likely to endure regardless of who happens to be in charge in Damascus.

That new strategy is already paying dividends. Syria now imports approximately 85 percent of its wheat from Russia, giving Moscow significant leverage over one of the country’s most basic staples. Its energy dependence is growing as well, with Damascus vastly increasing imports of Russian crude in the wake of Assad’s ouster. (When tallied in May, Russia—which replaced Iran as Syria’s main oil supplier after the fall of Assad—was providing the new regime in Damascus with some 60,000 barrels per day, roughly half its total energy consumption.)

The planned logistics hub would institutionalize these dependencies by making Russian goods the backbone of Syria’s reconstruction and commercial activity.

For the United States and its allies, the implications are potentially significant. Over the past year, the Trump administration has made a major effort to bring Syria’s new leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, in from the diplomatic cold. Congress has followed suit, removing key sanctions (like the 2019 Caesar Act) in order to enable Sharaa to better consolidate power and stabilize the war-torn state. All these overtures are underpinned by the desire to nudge Syria’s new order in a Western-oriented direction, and thereby make it a reliable strategic partner for the United States.

Russia, however, clearly has other ideas. By making itself a key player in Syria’s reconstruction, food security, energy supplies, and commerce, Moscow is positioning itself to shape Syria’s future according to its own preferences. If history is any judge, chances are high those won’t end up being at all what Washington has in mind.

Ilan Berman is senior vice president of the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington, DC.

https://www.newsweek.com/americas-syria-strategy-has-a-russia-problem-opinion-12264193

The Ukraine war has evolved into an innovation contest since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. Faced with a larger adversary that it can’t match tank for tank or aircraft for aircraft, Kyiv has compensated with ingenuity—adapting commercial tech for military purposes, pioneering new applications for drones, and refining battlefield tactics for maximum effect. The result has been a conflict in which information is as crucial as firepower.

This summer, President Volodymyr Zelensky launched an online platform called TrophyLab, a digital repository devoted to the analysis of captured Russian military equipment. According to its official website, the portal is a “shared space for enemy weapons research” that provides researchers, governments and defense firms with the specifications of Russian capacity.

TrophyLab undermines one of the Kremlin’s most valuable strategic assets: its reputation as a first-rate military power. Moscow has spent decades cultivating that image. During the Cold War, advanced weaponry was paraded through Red Square. These displays telegraphed to the West that the Soviet Union was a formidable military force and shaped the contours of the “twilight struggle.” (Those parades are now augmented by marketing campaigns through which the Kremlin, via Russian arms exporter Rosoboronexport, markets its wares to weapons-hungry client states in Africa and the Middle East.)

That campaign has paid major dividends for Moscow. For years before Russia escalated its war on Ukraine in February 2022, the specter of confrontation deterred European defense planners and stymied strategy by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. It also played a big part in shaping Europe’s diplomatic approach to the Russian Federation, as successive governments in Berlin, Paris and elsewhere sought to engage and accommodate Moscow.

Not so now. The Ukrainian battlefield has become an equalizer, both in military ingenuity (in which Kyiv has far outpaced Moscow) and the ability to evaluate the Russian military hardware that the world has long feared. Thousands of Russian vehicles have been destroyed or captured on the battlefield. Sophisticated electronic warfare technology has fallen into Ukrainian hands, and communications equipment assessed for vulnerabilities. Drones have been downed and their capabilities documented. The list goes on.

Each battlefield event provides Ukraine with technical knowledge, which Kyiv now shares with the world. That information is reshaping how countries think about Russian capabilities.

This is true in the commercial sense. Consumers of Russian arms in the developing world have long relied mostly on official spec sheets and the Kremlin’s triumphalist narrative rather than real-world trials of battlefield systems. TrophyLab lets Russia’s prospective arms clients get a better sense of the systems they are buying. This could lead them to drive harder bargains in their dealings with Moscow—or to walk away from deals entirely.

It is also militarily significant. TrophyLab could provide NATO nations with vital data. Across Europe, NATO members are increasing their defense spending, spurred by Russian aggression against Ukraine and the potential for further incursions into NATO’s “eastern flank.” Ukraine’s new information platform reveals the limits and vulnerabilities of the military systems NATO nations may confront someday.

All of which makes TrophyLab a potent strategic tool, and a way for Kyiv to attack what the Kremlin can ill-afford to lose: its military mystique.

Ilan Berman is senior vice president of the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington, DC.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/ukrainian-trophylab-widens-the-cracks-in-russias-military-facade-86e728ca

Iran may at war with the United States at the moment, but – as every proper Iran-watcher knows all too well – the regime in Tehran sees its fight as being with the broader West, for both ideological and practical reasons. In fact, there’s a veritable mountain of evidence of Iranian attempts to infiltrate and destabilize countries like Germany and France as part of its decidedly hostile foreign policy vis-à-vis democratic societies.

Here’s another example to add to the list. A new expose from London’s Telegraph newspaper maps out that decades-old smuggling routes from the Middle East have expanded in recent years, extending into Europe and carrying everything from guns to drugs to covert operatives. The Iranian regime is a big part of this network, owing to its reliance on covert and substate activity to advance its strategic interests. And the UK has become a key target of Iranian efforts.

The investigation makes the case that, increasingly, the Iranian regime sees such routes as a weapon in their own right - and that it has made infiltrating operatives into Britain a major focus of its efforts. Here’s the key quote (attributed to an anonymous Iranian official):

“At the moment we have people right there in London, revolutionary people who care about the world and the lives of children – they wait for us to tell them what to do.

We have not done that yet but can easily make London unsafe for you if we want. These smuggling routes are more important and useful than the missiles for us. We do not need a missile to target London. It’s easier than that.”

British officials should be treating all this as a real problem, for a couple of reasons.

First, because the UK has just finally designated (or, to use the British terminology, “proscribed”) Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a national security threat using authorities enumerated in the recently passed National Security (State Threats) Act. (My friend Roger Macmillan, a British counterterrorism expert, has a terrific breakdown of that decision and its significance here.) That, in and of itself, makes the UK a heightened target for Iran’s covert activities, which – as the Telegraph article makes clear – are being spearheaded by a division of the IRGC known as Unit 700.

Second, because it’s pretty apparent that Iran has had a great deal of success in leveraging Britain’s ballooning Muslim community, which now accounts for roughly 7 percent of the national population, in its efforts to penetrate the country. Which makes the Iranian infiltration question not simply a foreign policy issue, but a distinctly domestic political one - and raises all sorts of uncomfortable conversations about the soundness of the UK’s current immigration and vetting policies. They are discussions that the British government desperately needs to have… but the ruling Labour government (now under the newly-minted premiership of Andy Burnham) doesn’t seem remotely ready to do so.

How durable is the strategic alliance between Russia and China, really? Over the past few years, a great deal has been made about the so-called “no limits” partnership that Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping have forged against the West. There’s a lot of “there” there, so to speak – including cooperation on military affairs, expanding energy ties, ballooning trade, a meeting of the minds on propaganda and disinformation, and a bunch of other things besides.

Still, there are areas of clear distrust between Moscow and Beijing, and those are going to have a pretty significant impact on the durability of the partnership in the years ahead. I write about this in the current issue of Statecraft & Strategy, and I’ll send around that article in a couple of weeks (or, if you are interested, you can read it right now by clicking here). For the moment, though, it’s worth highlighting just one example of a topic on which Russia and China’s stances are competitive rather than complimentary: North Korea.

Over the past few days, we’ve gotten news that Chinese trade with the DPRK has been surging. According to Bloomberg, bilateral commerce between Beijing and Pyongyang is now at its highest point in nearly a decade, expanding by nearly a fifth this year alone in a clear sign of a thaw in the long-running and decidedly complicated relationship between the two sides.

The reason this is happening, and happening now, has everything to do with Russia. Over the past couple of years, North Korea has waded to the Ukraine war in support of the Kremlin in a substantial way. It has provided manpower to beef up Moscow’s flagging front lines and battlefield “kit” that has helped outfit Russia’s notoriously ill-resourced troops. All of that, though, is part of a balancing strategy on the part of the DPRK.

I’m far from a North Korea expert, so don’t take it from me. Here’s Rachel Minyoung Lee of the Stimson Center:

“North Korea’s expanded relations with Russia give Pyongyang greater flexibility and leverage, including in its ties with China. The future of North Korea-China relations will therefore be affected by Pyongyang’s relations with Moscow.”

Her broader study on current North Korean strategic thinking is here, and it’s well worth a read. It makes the case that the DPRK sees ties with Moscow and Beijing as something resembling a zero-sum game, and is working hard to play one side off against the other. This seems to be something that officials in Beijing understand, too, which helps explain China’s recent efforts to boost trade as a way of reconnecting with the North Korean regime… and outflanking the Kremlin in the process.

You might have missed it, but last week American policy toward the Western Balkans took a meaningful step forward. On July 17th, Serbian Foreign Minister Marko Djuric and Secretary of State Marco Rubio formally launched a strategic dialogue between their two countries. The initiative has been more than a year in the making, and while details remain scant, the potential stakes for the Trump administration are significant—for at least four reasons.

The first is energy security. The Trump administration has rightly made Western Balkan energy diversification a priority. Building on last Fall’s Partnership for Transatlantic Energy Cooperation Ministerial in Athens, the U.S. has joined Bulgaria, Greece, Moldova, Romania, and Ukraine in advancing the Vertical Gas Corridor — a north-south route designed to bring U.S. LNG and Azerbaijani gas into Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans, thereby reducing the continent’s lingering dependence on Russian energy. Serbia has a major part to play in these plans, because it sits along the route and already has the infrastructure to become a key energy transit hub. Moreover, Belgrade is now building gas interconnectors to Romania and North Macedonia that will enable greater imports of non-Russian supplies.

That’s a decidedly big deal, since Russia’s state-owned GAZPROM energy conglomerate currently holds a controlling stake in NIS, Serbia’s national oil company. In recent years, Russia has used NIS as a geopolitical tool to fund a range of malign influence operations in Serbia, from fomenting protests to fueling anti-American propaganda. As part of broader measures targeting Russia’s energy sector, the Trump administration imposed sanctions on NIS last October, and that pressure has produced results: in January, Hungarian energy firm MOL stepped in and inked an agreement to acquire the Russian stake, although that deal has faced delays since. Still, the Serbian government seems serious about breaking this dependency; its 2026 budget, adopted back in December, allocates 164 billion dinars (approximately $1.6 billion) for energy security — funds that could be used to nationalize NIS if the Russians end up refusing to sell.

Stepped up strategic dialogue with Washington can help accelerate this transition and lock Serbia into U.S. and Western energy supply chains, thereby stripping Moscow of one of its most effective remaining geopolitical levers in the Balkans.

The second is strategic minerals. Although it’s not widely known, Serbia possesses Europe’s largest lithium reserves. The Jadar deposit in western Serbia, for instance, ranks among the most significant in the world,estimated to be capable of meeting as much as 90% of Europe’s current lithium needs. Serbia has committed to developing these reserves with Europe rather than with China, formalizing a strategic partnership with the EU on raw materials and battery value chains in 2024 and thereafter securing Jadar’s inclusion as a key site in the EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act.

These steps reflect deliberate choices by the Serbian government to anchor its most valuable strategic resource in the Western supply chain, rather than in China’s. It’s a trend that should be encouraged, because Washington has a direct interest in making sure global lithium supply is diversified away from Beijing.

The third is defense modernization. Serbia is actively modernizing its military, acquiring fighter jets from France, transport aircraft from Spain, helicopters from Germany, and a range of systems from Israel. Yet successive administrations in Washington have historically been cautious about selling American arms to Belgrade, partly due to objections from regional neighbors. Increasingly, though, this caution is counterproductive, since a Serbian military equipped with U.S. systems would be more interoperable with NATO, more transparent, and more oriented toward Western standards rather than Russian ones.

Finally, there is Serbia’s growing value as a Middle East partner. Belgrade has emerged as a reliable friend to two key U.S. allies: Israel and the UAE. Serbia was one of the only European countries to provide Israel with meaningful military support after October 7, 2023, and that policy has continued despite pressure from other European states. As a result, ties between the two countries have blossomed, with concrete dividends for both. For instance, Israeli defense contractor Elbit Systems is now building a $2 billion drone manufacturing facility in Serbia — one of its only such facilities outside of Israel.

The Emirates, meanwhile, has become one of Serbia’s most important non-European partners. Over the past decade-and-a-half, it has poured substantial investments into the country, kick-starting projects ranging from renewable energy to digital infrastructure. This cooperation has delivered clear benefits for Belgrade, while giving Abu Dhabi a strategic foothold in the Balkans to better counter regional rivals such as Turkey.

All of which makes Serbia a useful force multiplier for U.S. priorities in the Middle East at a time when the Trump administration is actively questioning the commitment of many of its other continental partners.

Last week’s launch of the strategic dialogue between Washington and Belgrade helps to advance all four fronts. What comes next, in terms of concrete deliverables on energy, strategic minerals, defense and regional partnerships, will determine whether the current opening translates into lasting strategic gains for the United States in the Western Balkans.

Ilan Berman is Senior Vice President of the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington, DC.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ilanberman/2026/07/20/the-strategic-logic-of-engaging-serbia/

It seems like ages ago, but there was a time when a diplomatic détente between Israel and Saudi Arabia looked like it was right around the corner. Before the Hamas terror attacks of October 7, 2023, Riyadh and Jerusalem appeared to be just weeks away from a historic political normalization, and perhaps even the Kingdom’s entry into the Abraham Accords. (Indeed, there’s plenty of circumstantial evidence to suggest that Hamas’ terror campaign was driven at least in part by a desire - one shared in Tehran - to derail the budding Saudi-Israeli rapprochement).

These days, though, ties between the two countries are decidedly frosty. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman has staked out a maximalist position since the start of the Gaza war, insisting that any further progress on the political track with Israel was conditioned on “near term” prospects for a Palestinian state – an idea that’s simply dead on arrival in post-October 7th Israel, no matter who happens to be Prime Minister. Meanwhile, Israel’s ruling coalition includes ideological bomb-throwers like National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Betzalel Smotrich, who seem downright eager for a more adversarial relationship with the Arab world.

Now, Riyadh looks like it’s taking the decoupling a step further. In response to the vulnerabilities exposed by the on-again, off-again Iran war, the Kingdom is moving to invest more deeply in regional connectivity. But it’s doing so apart from the Israelis, rather than in tandem with them – as might once have been the case. The new project, unveiled in recent days, is a regional rail link connecting Saudi Arabia with Turkey via Jordan and Syria… and bypassing Israel altogether.

That makes it a clear competitor and alternative to IMEC, the nascent India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor that officials in Jerusalem have been focused on developing for years. The inclusion of Turkey as a key player is sure to be worrisome to Israel, too, because that country is quickly eclipsing Iran as a strategic threat on account of both its virulently anti-Israeli rhetoric and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s entirely too cozy relationship with the Trump White House.

To be sure, the new rail project, which is being billed as a revival of the historic Hejaz Railway, is only in its planning stages. It doesn’t even have a formal name yet. And even the rosiest projections estimate it will take three to four years to build the 3,000-kilometer route, if it even gets off the ground at all.

Still, it serves as a timely reminder that regional development can proceed in more than one direction – and that different plans have the potentially to lead to very different versions of the Middle East.

Is Russia on the cusp of another military draft? Just a few weeks ago, the idea was pretty much unthinkable, and for good reason.

Back in September of 2022, when the Kremlin launched its first “partial mobilization” with the goal of beefing up its front line forces in their assault on Ukraine, the results were nothing short of ruinous. Ordinary Russians voted with their feet, and the country experienced a historic exodus of some 800,000 to one million people—the largest outflow from the country since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Moreover, that out-migration didn’t just strip Russia of military manpower; according to various surveys and reports, it was disproportionately made up of young, urban, highly educated professionals, resulting in a serious brain drain in critical sectors like science, technology and higher education.

Given those results, it’s no wonder Russian officials have been loath to repeat the experience. Since then, the Kremlin has diligently avoided resorting to a general call-up of the Russian population to feed its war on Ukraine. Instead, it has relied on foreign troops from allies like North Korea and on contract soldiers from the “Global South,” including thousands of Africans (who are often recruited under false pretenses), to bolster the Ukrainian front.

These days, however, it’s becoming more and more difficult for Moscow to avoid the specter of another military call-up.

For one thing, Russia is burning through its fighting forces at an astounding clip. The Russian government is recruiting, on average, some 30,000 conscripts a month—largely because of outsized signing bonuses (ranging as high as $80,000 per recruit, by some estimates). But those soldiers-for-hire don’t survive long. The historian Peter Frankopan has estimated, based on his analysis of chatter from Russian military bloggers, that the average life expectancy of a conscript these days is approximately three weeks—and that, on average, those soldiers last just 20 to 35 minutes once contact with Ukrainian defenders and their drone swarms is made.

For another, Russia needs to muster some sort of response to Ukraine’s long-range strike capabilities. In recent weeks, Ukrainian drone attacks have wreaked havoc on Russian energy infrastructure, pipelines and refineries. As a result, a significant portion (40 percent or more) of Russia’s oil export capacity is now estimated to be offline, leading to domestic fuel shortages, rationing in many regions, and export restrictions (such as a ban on jet fuel export). The Russian government has responded by beefing up its air defenses around Moscow, but that alone is hardly the triumphalist signal that President Vladimir Putin and company are hoping to send to the world.

As a result, the Kremlin is increasingly thinking the previously unthinkable. “In October 2026, immediately after the elections to the State Duma, Russia may announce a new mobilization for war against Ukraine,” reported RFE/RL’s Current Time channel, citing Russian sources and opposition investigative outlets.

The issue is said to still be under consideration, and Putin himself hasn’t yet made a decision. Nevertheless, Russian authorities “are actively preparing” for the eventuality, Current Time details. Specifically, Russia’s Defense Ministry “says that they have training grounds where they are ready to train several tens of thousands of people at a time and do it in batches. And in general, the infrastructure for mobilization has already been created.” These measures ostensibly include a digital register for sending out electronic summons and a travel ban prohibiting those who are to be called up from leaving the country.

All of which is a testament to Russia’s current difficulties, as Ukraine increasingly gains the upper hand in Putin’s war of choice. But it is also a reflection of Russia’s ongoing resolve—and to the lengths the Kremlin will go to in order to persevere, no matter the cost to the country or the Russian people.

Ilan Berman is senior vice president of the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington, DC.

https://www.newsweek.com/why-putin-may-be-eyeing-another-mobilization-opinion-12165070

Last month, a critical geopolitical contest took place in the South Caucasus, when voters in Armenia went to the polls to appoint a new government. The June 7th parliamentary election was about far more than the composition of that country’s legislature. Rather, it constituted a referendum of sorts on its economic and political future.

For most of the post-Cold War era, Armenia had stayed deeply dependent on Russia, both politically and strategically. But over the past several years, under Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s leadership, it has undertaken a more independent, sovereign course. This has included a long-overdue mending of fences with regional rival Azerbaijan, involvement in critical connectivity projects like the “Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity” (TRIPP) and the Middle Corridor, and deepening ties with both Europe and the United States.

These shifts have drawn Yerevan closer to the West. They have also challenged the influence of Russia and China, both of which have sought in recent years to dominate and direct Eurasian connectivity and trade.

All that helps explain the extraordinary scale of Russia’s efforts to undermine the June vote. Investigations and leaked documents have exposed a broad, coordinated attempt by Moscow to manipulate the Armenian election via information warfare and propaganda. It also weaponized a network of Russian-Armenian oligarchs – whose fortunes are tied to the Russian-dominated regional system – to try and reshape the country’s political landscape. (Most prominently, this has included Samvel Karapetyan, a construction and real estate magnate with close ties to Russian business and politics, who positioned himself as a leader of the anti-Pashinyan opposition despite lacking the constitutional standing to do so on account of his dual Armenian-Russian citizenship.)

The objective was clear: not simply to oust Prime Minister Pashinyan, but to reverse the broader reorientation that the country has pursued in recent years under his guidance. To no avail, however. Pashinyan’s “Civil Contract” Party persevered in the polls, securing a renewed mandate to continue its political course. The question now becomes how best to do so.

Here, Armenia’s constitution should naturally take center stage. In its present form, the country’s foundational document still rests on language that incorporates territorial claims to Azerbaijani land – specifically, a Declaration of independence that references the priority of Armenia’s reunification with the enclave of Karabakh, which is internationally recognized as territory belonging to Baku.

Notably, Pashinyan himself doesn’t seem to hold to this formulation, and the August 2025 framework deal he signed in Washington with Azerbaijan’s President, Ilham Aliyev, codifies an end to the broader conflict between the two countries. But that document alone can’t obviate constitutional provisions a future government might invoke to return to an earlier status quo that’s more favorable to Moscow (and by extension Beijing), and adversarial to everyone else.

Logically, then, the next phase to lock in Armenia’s evolution is a constitutional referendum that resets the terms of its foreign policy, including abandoning claims to territory that have already been settled. One is now being considered for the 2027 timeframe, and the stakes promise to be high. Moreover, passage of such a new compact is far from assured, particularly if the country’s nationalist opposition manages to mobilize effectively.

As long as Armenia’s constitution is still based on territorial claims that conflict with its neighbors, Yerevan’s recent strategic gains can still be reversed. Without that change, the current peace in the South Caucasus might last only as long as the current government remains in power in Yerevan. The United States and Armenia’s allies in the West have a stake in it lasting much longer.

Ilan Berman is Senior Vice President of the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington, DC.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ilanberman/2026/07/07/a-constitutional-change-needs-to-be-armenias-next-evolution/

There’s no shortage of criticism these days of the way the Trump administration chose to end the conflict with Iran – via a fourteen-point Memorandum of Understanding that has left the Iranian regime standing, hardened internally and strengthened in terms of its regional political position. Still, to hear the White House tell it, the process will be a strategic victory in the longer run, because it paves the way for a lasting solution to Tehran’s persistent nuclear ambitions.

Here, though, there’s reason for worry, since the Trump administration’s approach at present only offers a partial solution.

So far, at least, U.S. engagement has focused overwhelmingly on the most visible and widely-discussed way by which Iran might develop a nuclear weapon – by enriching uranium. It overlooks a second, equally potent route: plutonium reprocessing. Notably, Iran’s regime has demonstrated the technical capability to do both, as well as a long track record of deception on the nuclear front that suggests it will pursue that pathway as well if given the chance.

At the heart of Iran’s plutonium option is the nuclear power plant situated in the southern port city of Bushehr. Beginning in the mid-1990s, Rosatom, Russia’s state nuclear agency, helped build the facility, subsequently administering it for years before turning over control to the Iranian regime. In the process, Moscow provided Tehran with the technical foundation to jumpstart its atomic advances – and a veneer of legitimacy for its persistent will to nuclear power.

Now, after three decades of operation, Bushehr has generated a substantial stockpile of spent nuclear fuel. Henry Sokolski, a leading nuclear expert who runs the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, has estimated that today Iran “probably has roughly 2,100 kilograms of weapons-usable plutonium” at Bushehr, which is enough material “to make more than 200 bombs.”

The Iranian regime, moreover, is exceedingly capable of doing so. As Sokolski explains, the technical steps needed to convert plutonium into bomb cores are not fundamentally more difficult than those involved in weaponizing uranium. Both involve turning the material into metal, casting it, and machining it into a usable core. The key difference lies in the process for converting the fissile material to be bomb usable (chemical reprocessing in the case of plutonium, rather than enrichment, which can be done covertly and in small batches). Moreover, the timeline for doing all this is roughly analogous as well – a matter of weeks, once the fissile material is in hand.

The key difference, then, lies in accessibility. A great deal of Iran’s stockpile of highly-enriched uranium – most directly, the much-discussed 440 kilograms of near-weapons grade “nuclear dust” – is now deeply buried, dispersed or destroyed as a result of U.S. and Israeli air strikes on key regime facilities last year. By contrast, Iran’s plutonium stockpile is situated in spent-fuel pools at Bushehr, making it far easier to divert on short notice.

This isn’t a hypothetical concern. It represents a structural weakness of the current Memorandum, which risks fixating on uranium enrichment while leaving other development pathways open, much like the Obama administration’s 2015 nuclear deal did. Put another way, no matter how fruitful the coming negotiations between Washington and Tehran turn out to be, Bushehr’s plutonium leaves the Iranian regime with the means to build a potential “bomb in the basement,” if it decides to do so.

Preventing that from occurring is going to require concrete action. Sokolski makes the case that Iran’s plutonium pathway needs to be closely monitored via “near real time” surveillance instead of the current, comparatively limited approach employed by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN’s nuclear watchdog. He also argues that Iran’s spent fuel needs to be removed from Iranian custody, so the regime’s nuclear specialists simply don’t have the raw material needed to activate a plutonium route. Finally, he says, current plans for additional construction at Bushehr should be derailed, so the stockpile the U.S. still needs to address doesn’t grow bigger still.

It’s advice well worth heeding. The Iranian regime has made its atomic ambitions abundantly clear, and has funneled enormous resources into this project over the past several decades. Logic therefore dictates that American policy needs to deny it every pathway for turning those aspirations into a weapon – not simply the most obvious one.

Ilan Berman is Senior Vice President at the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington, DC.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ilanberman/2026/07/02/iran-has-another-path-to-the-bomb-trump-needs-to-close-it-off/

When I was traveling across Europe earlier this month, I found myself struck anew by the rhetorical mismatch regarding Russia that still persists across the continent. To be sure, support for Ukraine, and opposition to Vladimir Putin’s war of aggression against it, remains a broad constant in most places. Still, the threat posed by Moscow’s imperial ambitions in many ways remains an abstract concept for “Old Europe” – where there’s a great deal of general talk about the need for stepped-up defense spending to deal with the Russian threat, but far less concrete understanding of what the alternative might mean.

That’s decidedly not the case on NATO’s eastern flank. Just listen to Pawel Zlota. In a recent interview, Poland’s intelligence chief warned that the danger was both real and growing, and that his country needs to operate as if conflict with the Kremlin is a “near term prospect.”

“Today, taking into account the full spectrum of threats from the Kremlin, we must shape our mindset accordingly and in our day-to-day operations act as if an armed conflict with Russia were a near-term prospect,” Zlota, who heads Poland’s Foreign Intelligence Agency, known as the AW, told the Rzeczpospolita daily. “The level of Russian aggression is very high, and the risk of military confrontation is real.”

Zlota’s views are increasingly shared across Eastern Europe, where countries simply don’t have the luxury of distance from Putin’s predatory regime, the way states like France and Spain do. That’s why the three Baltic countries (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) are jointly investing in a “Baltic Defense Line” consisting of some 600 concrete bunkers – which, presumably, will provide emplaced local forces cover to fend off invading Russian troops. It’s why Estonia is training students to use drones; Sweden is fielding a “total defence” doctrine that includes mass emergency preparedness; and Finland has fielded a high-tech barrier (complete with fencing, cameras and sensors) along its 830-mile border with Russia. Regional governments have even put together a cooperative evacuation plan if they turn out to be unable to hold the line against Russian aggression, when it comes.

The responses may vary, in other words, but the sense of danger is very clearly shared. It’s driven by Moscow’s consistent imperial drive, the country’s growing militarization, and statements from leading officials that make clear that Russia’s ambitions extend far beyond Ukraine. So, like Poland, Eastern European governments are increasingly of the mind that what is happening in Ukraine today could happen to them tomorrow – particularly if the West doesn’t manage to sufficiently deter Russia from its current, revisionist course.