Articles

In recent years, the Biden administration has promoted the need for “resilient, diverse, and secure supply chains” and urged the identification of vulnerabilities that could affect the country’s national security. Interestingly, one of the most visible components in the nation’s supply chain—ocean shipping—matches this description yet is rarely afforded the attention it deserves. That’s a costly mistake because Chinese state-owned shipping is thoroughly embedded in and integrated within the logistics infrastructure of the United States and the West more broadly. 

All eyes are now on next week’s highly-anticipated, and hotly contested, national election. In recent days, we’ve witnessed a flurry of media reports about how malign actors like Russia, China and Iran are seeking to shape U.S. political discourse ahead of that pivotal vote. 

In order for the US to proactively shape the contours of the debate within the Iranian opposition it needs to lay out what sort of government it wants in Tehran, and its expectations of the actors that will play a part in bringing about this change. And, given the growing indicators that the Islamic Republic is approaching a fundamental political and social transition, the sooner Washington does so, the better. 

At present, Chinese coercion is met largely with a playbook of defensive measures. The Chinese are able to choose the time and location of their action, and the recipient country busies itself scrambling to contain the fallout. China therefore has the initiative, while the targeted country — often in conjunction with the U.S. — mostly tries to mitigate the impact. As a result, it’s tempting to assume that China holds more cards than it actually does. And it’s equally easy for the U.S. to forget the extent of its own leverage over China in the exact same manner.

It is hard to think of a United Nations agency with a more glaring failure in its core mission than the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, more commonly known as UNIFIL — and there has certainly been no shortage of contenders this year.