Today In Issues:
FDD Research & Analysis
The Must-Reads
US provides $206 million for Gaza force despite deadlocked peace plan JPost Editorial: Israel must investigate itself: IDF accountability strengthens the country Trump’s Plan to Squeeze Iran’s Economy Will Live or Die in Dubai Trump threatens Iran with ‘economic D-Day’ Zelensky’s leadership comes under biggest threat since war began Israel’s military opens rare criminal probes into attacks on Gaza civilians WSJ Editorial: Ending the Syrian nuclear saga North Korea rejects Trump’s drills-cut overture as an empty gesture Former White House national security adviser John Bolton: Pyongyang’s threat rises, with an assist from Trump Chinese start-up lands reusable rocket for the first time US could cut key tariffs as part of proposed Canada deal New drone unit to be phased out as Hegseth’s army pick makes his markIn The News
Israel
The Israeli military said it was launching criminal investigations into two attacks by its soldiers on Palestinians during the Gaza war, one that killed a young girl named Hind Rajab and another that took the lives of 15 medical responders. – Wall Street Journal
An Israeli airstrike killed nine Palestinians at a police station in Gaza on Wednesday, medics said, two days after U.S. envoy Jared Kushner ended a trip to the region that failed to push forward Donald Trump’s plan to end the war in the enclave. – Reuters
President Donald Trump’s administration has told Congress it is sending more than $206 million for a proposed Gaza peacekeeping force, the first significant funding for the stalled U.S. plan to rebuild the devastated enclave. – Reuters
Former Israel Navy commander V.-Adm. (ret.) Eliezer “Chiney” Marom said in a Wednesday 103FM interview that Israel’s strike in Syria was intended to prevent Turkey from establishing itself in the country, but assessed that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was unlikely to go to war with Israel. – Jerusalem Post
The Arab-majority Hadash, Ta’al and Balad parties announced on Wednesday that they have agreed to run on a joint slate in the upcoming Knesset election, apparently resurrecting the Joint List slate. – Times of Israel
Former prime minister Naftali Bennett and Opposition Leader Yair Lapid said on Wednesday that, if they form the next government, they will push for a hardline deterrence policy against Iran while seeking to rebuild frayed ties with American liberals and the European Union. – Times of Israel
Iran
President Trump’s effort to squeeze Iran into submission will depend heavily on curbing one of the country’s biggest economic lifelines: Dubai. The United Arab Emirates said late Tuesday that it has suspended financial and economic transactions with Iran, potentially threatening Tehran’s access to a major source of imports and a financial back door to the world. – Wall Street Journal
President Trump vowed to unleash what he called “ECONOMIC D-DAY” on Iran as frustrations mount over lack of progress on reopening the Strait of Hormuz or reaching a deal to end the nearly six-month war. – Wall Street Journal
The United Arab Emirates said it would suspend all trade and financial transactions with Iran, in a move that stands to add fresh economic pressure on Tehran as Washington seeks a path to end its war. – Washington Post
Shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz on Wednesday was unchanged from the day before as discussions to end the war between the United States and Iran remained deadlocked, according to the latest shipping data. – Reuters
U.S. President Donald Trump said Tuesday the U.S. has no talks planned with Iran but insisted the Strait of Hormuz remains “open and operating,” despite limited traffic and a reported strike on a ship exiting the waterway. – Associated Press
U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to bomb Oman because he is unhappy the country is close to a deal with Iran to manage ship traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, two regional officials said on Tuesday, a day after Trump leveled the threat. – Associated Press
Victor Cha writes: Nonproliferation policy is often a choice between bad and worse, and it’s an inconvenient truth that one size will never fit all situations. An irony is that Trump’s hard-line approach to Iran may demonstrate an “or else” resolve that strengthens his diplomatic hand with North Korea, while success in that diplomacy could strengthen Iran’s determination to hold out against the U.S. onslaught. When nuclear disaster forever lurks around the next bend, the absolutist and pragmatic roads have a way of converging. – Washington Post
Javier Blas writes: Iran is a huge country, with nearly 90 million people who’ve endured decades of hardship. On a per-capita basis, it’s poorer than it was 40 years ago. Unsurprisingly, the population has revolved against its leaders multiple times over the years. The best hope for Trump is that the economic pressure creates fear in Tehran that domestic social unrest is approaching the melting point once again. Hope, though, rarely works as a strategy. – Bloomberg
Alex Kolbin writes: Short of being resolved in the traditional sense, wars now persist as systems of managed instability — never fully escalating, never fully settled — at least until broader frameworks of global power struggle are settled too. This does not mean all future conflicts will necessarily follow this pattern, for specific mechanisms must be used for the war to transfer from the military area to the broader geopolitical factors. Importantly, this form of conflict also does not mean that wars like those in Ukraine and Iran will never end. But the conditions that produce this pattern — ongoing global political fragmentation, still existing economic interdependence, and clear escalation limits — will become more common and inseparable from their resolution. The Iran war may be becoming another Ukraine war, but the real challenge now is to make sure it does not become another managed instability arena everyone learns to live with, and no one knows how to end. Unless the international community rejects being imposed managed instability, the next war involving a large power might produce a similar pattern in yet another region of the world. – War on the Rocks
Russia and Ukraine
Ukraine’s ousted defense minister has triggered the biggest challenge to Volodymyr Zelensky’s hold on the presidency since Russia’s full-scale invasion, calling for wartime elections and warning that Ukrainian democracy is imperiled. – Wall Street Journal
A Russian drone strike on a minibus in Ukraine’s southern city of Kherson killed four people on Wednesday, Ukrainian authorities said, in what President Volodymyr Zelenskiy described as a “vicious” attack. – Reuters
North Korea’s Kim Yo Jong, sister of leader Kim Jong Un, on Wednesday denied Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s claim that Pyongyang plans to send up to 50,000 more troops to Russia to fight for its ally. – Reuters
Russian ballistic missiles killed 12 people and injured more than 30 in Kyiv early on Thursday, authorities said, damaging buildings and severing power supply to some parts of the Ukrainian capital. – Reuters
The Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine has switched to emergency diesel generators after damage to a high-voltage line caused the facility to lose external power, the plant management said on Thursday. – Reuters
The intensifying use of drones against civilians and humanitarian workers is a dangerous obstacle for aid operations in Ukraine, the U.N.’s humanitarian chief, Tom Fletcher, said on Wednesday. – Associated Press
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy fired one of his most senior officials Wednesday as corruption investigators named a deputy head of the presidential office among the suspects in a money-laundering case. – Associated Press
Waves of Ukrainian drones targeted the massive logistics center outside Moscow overnight. The next morning, it was still ablaze, dark smoke rising into the sky from what was one of Russia’s largest retail warehouses. Hundreds of miles away, Ukrainian drone crews had barely paused after the night’s work before starting to prepare for another attack. – Associated Press
Marc Champion writes: The same wartime imperative that makes Fedorov’s call for elections so wrong also argues for Zelenskyy find a way to bring him back into government, even at defense, putting his own political interests aside despite his rival’s now public presidential ambitions. As long as the country is at war, it would be inexcusable not to. Fedorov has proved effective, innovative, untainted by scandal and trusted by the public. That combination is rare in Ukraine or, for that matter, anywhere else. – Bloomberg
Syria
The head of Israel’s spy agency held a phone call with Syria’s foreign minister last week during which they discussed Turkey’s military presence in Syria, three people familiar with the matter said, just days before Israel bombed a Syrian airbase. – Reuters
Syrian security forces have arrested a former Assad-era security officer who fled Austria after being sentenced to eight years in prison for abusing detainees and returned to his hometown in southern Syria, state news agency SANA said on Tuesday night. – Reuters
Editorial: Had Turkey been allowed to break the status quo by installing its air defenses in Syria, that could have brought Ankara into direct conflict with Jerusalem. Syria is no place for a nuclear program of any kind. The country no longer has any reactor that its natural uranium metal could fuel, so it might as well hand over the material and ship it out. Mr. Trump wants nuclear nonproliferation to be his legacy, and here’s an opening. – Wall Street Journal
Turkey
Turkey is ready to work with Damascus to look for oil and gas in Syria, Turkish Energy Minister Alparslan Bayraktar said on Wednesday. – Reuters
Turkey firmly rejected on Wednesday what it called “untenable allegations” by Israel regarding its military position in Syria, after Israel bombed a Syrian air base near the Turkish border and said Syria was on the verge of permitting Turkish troops to deploy there. – Reuters
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was “dragging Turkey into dangerous adventures in Syria”, Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz said on Thursday, following an attack on a Syrian airbase earlier this week. – Reuters
Korean Peninsula
North Korea gave an icy response to President Trump’s decision to end joint Washington-Seoul military exercises early, calling it an ineffectual goodwill gesture toward the Kim Jong Un regime. In Pyongyang’s first public comments on the drill reductions, North Korea said the annual Ulchi Freedom Shield exercises remained provocative and hostile despite their scaled-down scope. The Kim regime considers the drills to be dress rehearsals for war. – Wall Street Journal
South Korea will flag off on Saturday a container ship bound for Europe via the Arctic, testing whether a route opened by melting sea ice can be commercially viable, but risking friction with Western allies, as the voyage requires Russian cooperation. – Reuters
South Korea estimates North Korea possesses between 80 and 120 nuclear warheads, its defence minister said on Thursday, citing a range significantly higher than U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent assertion that Pyongyang has 57 nuclear weapons. – Reuters
U.S. President Donald Trump said on Wednesday he plans to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un later this year, and said the Asian nation held 57 “very powerful” nuclear weapons. – Reuters
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi arrived in Seoul on Wednesday for talks with South Korean officials, media reported, after Seoul and Washington scaled back joint military drills with U.S. President Donald Trump saying he wanted to revive diplomacy with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. – Reuters
John Bolton writes: Mr. Trump’s criticism of Seoul’s reluctance to take a role in the Gulf crisis, plus continuing disputes about tariffs and Seoul’s investment commitments, will only complicate the relationship further. We should hope that something else diverts White House attention from North Korea. If not, Mr. Trump’s next social-media post could announce that he is flying to Pyongyang to resume his bromance with the world’s only hereditary communist dictator. – Wall Street Journal
China
For the first time, a Chinese aerospace company landed the bottom part of a rocket that went to space, state media reported on Wednesday, marking an advance for the country in its ability to partly reuse rockets for future missions. – New York Times
China has completed the first phase of construction on Antelope Reef in the Paracels archipelago, building a man-made island in the hotly-disputed South China Sea that analysts say will form part of its largest military base. – Reuters
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said on Wednesday that Beijing was “actively considering” a summit between the leaders of South Korea and China at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Shenzhen in November, Seoul’s Foreign Ministry said. – Reuters
The Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court sentenced Hui Ka Yan, the founder of China’s Evergrande real estate group, to life in prison Thursday for large-scale fraud. It also fined Evergrande Group 8.82 billion yuan ($1.31 billion) and Evergrande Real Estate 7 billion yuan ($1.04 billion), according to a statement issued by the court. – Associated Press
Jaehwan Lim writes: The tighter the political control that makes honest reporting dangerous, the poorer the data on which military AI depends. The poorer the data, the less AI can deliver the compensation Xi appears to be seeking. The purges and China’s turn toward AI are therefore not separate developments. The former reflects distrust of human commanders. The latter reflects hope that machines can compensate for what those purges have removed. AI may ultimately be Xi’s wager: a bet that technology can offset the institutional damage produced by his own system of political control. – War on the Rocks
South Asia
A storied Indian conglomerate that owns the country’s biggest outsourcing firm and makes millions of iPhones for Apple is in the middle of a leadership shake-up that has highlighted the challenges facing India’s family-founded behemoths. – Wall Street Journal
The Pakistani government challenged on Wednesday a Supreme Court order to move jailed former Prime Minister Imran Khan to a private hospital, a petition filed with the court showed. – Reuters
Pakistan condemned a statement by the American ambassador in New Delhi that referred to a disputed territory as an “important part of India,” underscoring tensions between the nations over Jammu and Kashmir. – Bloomberg
Asia
A New Zealand party that could hold the balance of power after this year’s election wants to bring in a basic income for almost all residents that will be funded by a new land tax, with its leader saying on Thursday that the policy would also curb runaway house prices. – Reuters
Taiwan’s government on Thursday proposed an 18% rise in defence spending for next year, including for drones and missiles, taking it above T1trillion(31.41 billion) for the first time as Taipei bolsters its military to ward off China. – Reuters
Vietnam’s government has proposed abolishing the death penalty for six offences, including drug trafficking and the rape of minors, as part of a revision of the country’s criminal code presented to parliament on Thursday, state media reported. – Reuters
Australia summoned Israel’s ambassador on Thursday and expressed outrage at a decision by its military not to pursue criminal proceedings over the death of an Australian aid worker in a 2024 airstrike in Gaza. – Reuters
Hong Kong conglomerate CK Hutchison said Thursday it was seeking more than $1.5 billion in damages from Panama after the country seized two canal ports caught in the crosshairs of U.S.-China tensions. – Associated Press
Gearoid Reidy writes: Abe’s skill was in understanding that personal relations could create room for Japan where it might be militarily outmatched. But his mistake was sometimes to confuse relationships with actual results. Takaichi needs to know the difference. Indeed, it’s important to know when to change tactics when needed. That’s what Abe, at his best, would have done. – Bloomberg
Europe
German prosecutors said on Wednesday a second Ukrainian suspect they allege was involved in the 2022 Nord Stream pipeline blasts has been arrested in Croatia and will be extradited to Germany. – Reuters
UK Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband said the government would prepare new targeted sanctions against Israelis participating in “illegal settlement expansion” in Gaza and the West Bank, in the latest sign of Labour’s hardening stance toward the Middle East nation. – Bloomberg
Norway is bracing for more tariffs from the Trump administration after talks on trade in Washington, the top civil servant at the Nordic country’s Foreign Ministry said. – Bloomberg
Abdulla Ibrahim writes: It seems unlikely that the Swiss Federal Assembly will fund the capability gap either promptly or adequately, or that industry will be pushed to solve its bottlenecks, before the threat intensifies enough to make the urgency undeniable. The same is probably true of militia reform: proposals serious enough to matter—longer service, a larger professional core, a different balance between citizen and state—are easier for the public to accept once the threat feels concrete rather than hypothetical. None of this makes early action less necessary. It only means the price of preparing now, while the threat is still acceptable enough to argue over, is smaller than the price of preparing later, once it is not. – The National Interest
Africa
Seven people, including five Americans, were killed in a helicopter crash in Kenya Wednesday, according to the State Department and local officials. The aircraft went down in Samburu County, Kenya, about eight hours north of Nairobi, a State Department spokesperson said. Seven people were aboard the helicopter, which crashed around 9:13 a.m. local time, according to Kenya’s Civil Aviation Authority. – Wall Street Journal
The collapse of a gold mine in the Central African Republic on Tuesday left many people dead, injured and unaccounted for, a local public prosecutor said in a statement. No death toll was specified in the statement, which said rescue efforts were still underway in Zamboye, the village in the country’s west where the gold mine collapsed. – New York Times
Ugandan diplomat Olara Otunnu, one of eight candidates seeking to succeed Antonio Guterres as U.N. secretary-general next year, on Wednesday called for continued reform of the world body and the restoration of its moral authority. – Reuters
Liberia has charged former Vice President Jewel Howard-Taylor with drug trafficking, money laundering and other offenses as part of an investigation of a transnational narcotics network, the West African nation’s attorney general said in a statement on Wednesday. – Reuters
The Ebola outbreak in Congo has reached 5,000 cases, government data showed Wednesday, as responders warn it is spreading at an unprecedented speed outpacing efforts to slow it in one of the country’s remotest regions. – Associated Press
Zambian police said a former transport minister was killed in a raid at the main opposition leader’s house last week, a day after elections that were tainted by claims of irregularities. – Bloomberg
Ebola is spreading rapidly beyond the main epicenter of Democratic Republic of Congo’s outbreak, overwhelming treatment capacity in some areas and putting mounting pressure on efforts to trace and contain infections. – Bloomberg
The Americas
The U.S. and Canada are closing in on a trade deal in which Washington could cut some contentious tariff rates on Canadian-built cars and trucks, and key metals, a source familiar with the matter said on Wednesday. – Reuters
Brazil’s Supreme Court ruled unanimously on Wednesday to significantly expand the scope of the country’s landmark law to protect women from violence. Legislation that was for two decades applied to domestic incidents, as in many other nations including the United States, can now be triggered outdoors. – Associated Press
Editorial: The good news is that a failure to renew by Mr. Trump doesn’t terminate the USMCA. Instead it moves to a series of annual reviews and negotiations, the kind of perpetual bargaining that Mr. Trump sees as leverage. But uncertainty is bad for business. Can companies count on stable supply-chains in North America? For CEOs trying to make investments and create jobs, it isn’t an idle question. – Wall Street Journal
United States
Four Senate Democrats asked Kevin Warsh in a letter Wednesday to publicly disclose his conversations with President Trump, after The Wall Street Journal reported this month that the two have spoken repeatedly since he became Federal Reserve chairman, and Warsh’s appointment calendars showed no such calls. – Wall Street Journal
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has shown he’ll do unconventional things to get markets moving his way. His latest maneuver is his most radical yet. Facing an uncomfortable rise in longer-term interest rates, Bessent took action early Wednesday when the agency he leads announced that it would significantly step up purchases of government bonds as part of its existing buyback program. – Wall Street Journal
Total U.S. debt has topped $40 trillion for the first time, the Treasury Department said on Wednesday, drawing fresh warnings that a fiscal crisis is brewing as ballooning costs for social safety-net programs and interest payments far outstrip revenues held back by tax cuts. – Reuters
The International Criminal Court on Wednesday slammed the latest U.S. sanctions targeting senior ICC staff, including its president, as a “flagrant attack” on the global tribunal’s independence and vowed to continue seeking justice for atrocities around the world. – Associated Press
Mohamed A. El-Erian writes: Hopefully, the investment in artificial intelligence will deliver higher productivity that generates significant income growth; and at some point, the administration and Congress may agree to reform a budgetary process that results in too high a deficit and too much debt, which on Wednesday crossed the $40 trillion milestone. Until then, the bond markets will offer both enormous upside and considerable risks to our well-being. – New York Times
Cybersecurity
Joe Romello and Jeff Harris were two of those people. Working for what was known as the CIA’s “Program B,” a classified initiative to develop satellite reconnaissance, they believed Jobs, who had formed his new company in 1985 after being pushed out of Apple, could help supply crucial technology for the intelligence community. – Wall Street Journal
A notorious cybercrime group has once again exploited a critical zero-day vulnerability on a large scale, claiming it stole data from dozens of organizations, including some of the world’s largest publicly traded companies. – Cyberscoop
Hackers are targeting water, food, energy, chemical, manufacturing and commercial facilities by taking aim at Siemens S7 Series programmable logic controllers (PLCs) and making use of artificial intelligence in the attacks, U.S. government agencies warned Wednesday. – Cyberscoop
Clint Curtis, the registrar for voters in Shasta County, Calif. said he plans to hire convicted felon and election denialist Tina Peters as one of his top deputies. – Cyberscoop
The Justice Department accused hackers connected to Iran’s military of breaching employee email accounts connected to the Department of Labor, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and multiple United Nations organizations. – The Record
Mark Daley writes: The lesson for AI is that verification is continuous with security engineering, but cannot be reduced to it. A well-specified zero-knowledge protocol can bound what its transcript reveals under stated assumptions. It cannot decide what residual risk Washington, Beijing, or any other capital should accept, who is trusted to adjudicate ambiguous evidence, nor what coalition will sustain restraint when accessible advantage tantalizingly appears. We will not prove the negative. We need to make consequential cheating detectable early enough to answer, monitoring safe enough to accept, and residual uncertainty explicit enough that the finish line becomes harder to move opportunistically. This complexity is a necessary cost of AI arms control. If we design only the sensor, the feedback loop will design the agreement. – War on the Rocks
Defense
The elimination of a futuristic drone battalion is part of a broader “back-to-basics” approach ordered up by Gen. Christopher LaNeve, the acting chief of staff of the Army who is closely aligned with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. The battalion was a signature initiative of LaNeve’s predecessor, Gen. Randy George, whom Hegseth ousted in April. – Wall Street Journal
The Navy has charged a sailor with murder and involuntary manslaughter in the death of another sailor aboard aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy (CVN-79). Aviation Boatswain’s Mate – Aircraft Handling Airman Apprentice Jayjrion Rodriguez is charged with murder while engaging in an act inherently dangerous to another, involuntary manslaughter and three specifications of simple assault with a loaded firearm and three specifications of reckless endangerment, according to the charge sheet. – USNI News
The Marine Corps on Friday wrapped up the inaugural Marine Corps Attack Drone Competition at Marine Corps Base (MCB) Quantico, Va., capping a summer of drone firsts for the service. Drones also played a part in Marine Corps exercises in Korea and Australia and new counter-small unmanned aerial systems (C-sUAS) training lanes opened at Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, Twentynine Palms, Calif. – USNI News
A US Air Force flight bound for Antarctica returned to New Zealand after a warning about “potentially hazardous” space activity, according to New Zealand authorities. A spokesperson for New Zealand’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) said the agency was aware the US Air Force flight from Christchurch turned around following a warning it issued, known as a NOTAM (Notice to Airmen). – CNN
Bryan Clark writes: Steam power was cutting-edge technology in the 19th century. It is the wrong choice for a Pentagon that is leaning into artificial intelligence and autonomous systems. The Navy should stay the course with electromagnetic catapults to keep the carrier fleet strong and deliver more firepower. It could use the savings to help refill the fleet’s weapons magazines. – Washington Post
Emelia S. Probasco writes: Avoiding Terminator-like dystopias requires maintaining control not just of AI, but of human behavior. That need will chafe against Washington’s current impulses to buy and deploy AI tools rapidly, because it takes time to prepare individuals and a large bureaucracy to exercise good judgment over these massively capable algorithms. But if it wants to get AI right, the Pentagon must mitigate the risks of AI undermining human control. Pentagon officials, in other words, need to focus on reworking how the military trains, deploys, and enables AI systems—and not just on engineering or buying them. – Foreign Affairs