🇺🇸🤝🇮🇶 All remaining U.S. troops deployed in Iraq will leave the country by September 30th ending a 23 year old mission

U.S. president Donald Trump presented this decision as a sign that the Iraqi state has "become strong enough to stand on its own" and is no longer vulnerable to Iranian influence.

Iraqi prime-minister, Ali al-Zaidi, echoed this vision, declaring that the Iran-backed Shia militias who refused to disarm last month would no longer have an excuse (the U.S. military presence) to remain as separate entities from Iraq's security apparatus.

Trump said the U.S. partnership with Iraq would shift away from military cooperation toward investment and energy development, while al-Zaidi said: "The 30th of September, the U.S. forces would be out of Iraq. While U.S. companies will be inside Iraq."

"We don't think we need the military there anymore," Trump said. "We're there to help them. We're there to protect them if need be. But we don't think that's going to be necessary."

He argued Iraq's security environment had fundamentally changed because Iran had been "very much destabilized" and its military was now "just a tiny fraction" of what it had been four months ago.

About 2,500 U.S. troops remained in Iraq prior to the beginning of the drawdown in September 2025, down from a peak of about 170,000 during 2007 at the height of the Iraq war. Nearly all U.S. forces departed in 2011 before about 5,000 returned in 2014 to fight ISIS.

U.S. troops in Iraq were the most exposed out of all U.S. garrisons to Iranian and Iraqi Shiite attacks during the 3rd Gulf War.

🔗 https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-reveals-when-us-military-leave-iraq-after-23-year-mission

🇺🇸⚡️ — Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has pursued sweeping efforts to dismantle decades of U.S. vaccine policy, including proposing $5 billion for research into a "vaccine-autism link" and privately considering eliminating the entire federal childhood immunization schedule, Reuters reports.

Kennedy ultimately reduced the recommended schedule by removing vaccines for six of 17 diseases, though a federal judge later blocked the changes. He has also ended some mRNA vaccine programs and altered CDC language on vaccines and autism.

Officials said Kennedy relied heavily on longtime allies Stefanie Spear and vaccine litigator Aaron Siri, often sidelining established government experts.

🇦🇷 Argentina is preparing to scrap restrictions on foreigners buying rural land, with President Javier Milei arguing the reforms will attract investment, create jobs and accelerate economic growth.

Israelis have been caught multiple times in the past years setting fire to forests in Patagonia in what appears to be a deliberate land clearing attempt in preparation for the building of future settlements.

In November 2025, Javier Milei and Benjamin Netanyahu opened direct flights between Buenos Aires and Tel Aviv, a sign of the good relations between the two leaders and their respective countries, as part of the Isaac Accords, the Latin American version of the Abraham Accords, meant to increase Israel's diplomatic outreach and reduce its international isolation in the wake of the Gaza Genocide.

The direct flights came as a result of most EU countries announcing they would enforce the ICC war crime related arrest warrants on Israeli politicians who wanted to access Argentina without the risk of being detained when changing flights at a European airport.

Argentina is home to a 300k strong Jewish community, the largest Jewish community in Latin America. In recent years there has been a massive influx of Israeli "tourists" to Patagonia which coincided with the worst wildfires the region has seen in its entire history. Local Argentinians blamed the Israeli "tourists" for the wildfires. The wildfires of January 2026 destroyed 77,000 hectares (190,000 acres) of land. Argentine authorities arrested an Israeli citizen in relation to the wildfires.

In the late 19th century, there was a plan by Zionist leaders to establish a Jewish state in Patagonia as an alternative to Theodore Herzl's plan to colonize Palestine. The plan was created by Jewish-German banker, Maurice de Hirsch who founded the Jewish Colonization Association and was the biggest sponsor of Jewish emigration to Argentina. This colonization attempt came to be known in Argentina as "Plan Andinia" and is labelled by the ADL as an "antisemitic conspiracy theory".

While the Jewish state in Patagonia never came to fruition, without Maurice de Hirsch's activism, Argentina would not have had its Jewish community

🔗 Europa.com (@europa)

🇨🇳⚔️🇯🇵🇺🇸 China Is Ready to Get Tough

Beijing’s diplomatic retaliation has limits—but fewer than before.

In recent years, although China has vigorously promoted the idea of a community with a shared future for mankind and global governance, it has become increasingly unforgiving toward countries it believes have offended it. The latest example is Beijing’s announcement last month that it would prohibit exports of dual-use items to 10 U.S. companies, in retaliation for Washington’s inclusion of several leading Chinese companies on its newly expanded list of military-linked enterprises.

In the past, the core task of Chinese diplomacy was to secure external space for domestic development. Today, Chinese diplomacy seeks to use the strength accumulated at home to transform the country’s external environment.

Until the last couple of years, when Beijing believed that countries—mostly Western powers—infringed on its interests, its usual response was to issue strong protests, lodge solemn representations, and reserve the right to take further measures.

Of late, though, China has been more willing to bare its fangs. It no longer limits itself to verbal protests without taking action. This has been especially true toward the United States: If you sanction my companies, I sanction yours; if you restrict my access to technology, I restrict your access to rare earths.

Beijing can easily reconcile this with what it sees as its moral high ground in international relations. In its own rhetorical phrasing, China does not proactively stir up trouble, but it will never passively take a beating; it seeks to stop war through struggle.

In recent years, China’s responses to the United States have included diplomatic countermeasures and export controls; the Unreliable Entity List and controls on critical minerals; and sanctions on defense contractors as well as on U.S. members of Congress, think tanks, and related institutions. The scope of sanctions and restrictions the United States has faced from China is unprecedented.

Beijing has also acted with increasing decisiveness toward smaller powers. Take Japan. Since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi suggested last November that Japan might come to Taiwan’s defense in the event of an invasion, Beijing has viewed Japan as having offended China’s core interests. It first lodged diplomatic protests and then imposed travel restrictions. After Takaichi refused to retract her remarks or apologize, Beijing continued to escalate its countermeasures. It has imposed nearly comprehensive sanctions, frozen official exchanges with Japan, and shown no regard for diplomatic niceties.

https://archive.fo/20260714192313/https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/07/14/china-diplomacy-retaliation-sanctions/

🌐 NATO Is Still a Sick Puppy

The 2026 NATO summit is now history, though it wasn’t exactly historic. If you were hoping for a rekindling of common purpose and a renewed sense of trans-Atlantic solidarity, you have my sympathies. If you thought the meeting in Ankara would mark NATO’s death knell, perhaps sparked by a typical Trumpian temper tantrum, you didn’t get that either. Instead, what transpired was a deliberate and mostly successful effort to ignore the obvious tensions, avoid big headlines, and kick the can down the road.

But nobody should be under any illusions: The alliance is a sick puppy. When every NATO summit convenes amid fears that its strongest member will blow it all up and withdraw and then ends with a collective sigh of relief that this outcome was averted, it’s hardly a reassuring sign of strategic alignment or shared values.

It’s tempting to blame trans-Atlantic tensions solely on U.S. President Donald Trump (more on that below), but NATO’s core problem is structural. Military alliances are not ends in themselves; they are simply a means by which states seek to make themselves more secure in the face of a common threat. And no matter your view of Russia today, NATO’s members do not face the same clarifying, focus-the-mind threat environment that existed when the alliance formed back in 1949. Russia is a worrisome neighbor, to be sure, but it is not a global superpower like the old Soviet Union; concerns that it poses a serious hegemonic threat to Europe are risible. NATO’s European members do not fully agree on how dangerous Moscow really is, and it is not clear whether the Trump administration thinks of Russia as a threat at all. The rise of China has been drawing U.S. strategic attention away from Europe for some time now because China is a genuine peer competitor—and Russia isn’t—and because Asia is now a bigger economic arena.

Given the above, it has been obvious that NATO needed a new division of labor, with its European members gradually assuming primary responsibility for their own defense and Washington focusing more resources and attention on Asia. Ideally, this shift would have occurred over a decade or so and without rancor, the United States helping its allies to rebuild their own forces and working with them to adapt to changing battlefield requirements. A rebalanced NATO would still have been a major asset for the United States and the other members, in part by helping to keep Europe quiet—which benefits everyone—and because there are many scenarios (including conflicts in Africa and the Middle East) where working together with partners is more effective than going it alone.

Unfortunately, the possibility of a smooth and amicable adjustment was precluded when Trump got reelected in 2024 and then adopted an explicitly predatory approach toward the United States’ European allies. Trump’s disdain for Europe has a long history, as evidenced by his false claims that the European Union was created to “screw the United States” and by his contemptuous treatment of European officials, including those he once supported, such as Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. His repeated threats to seize Greenland, imposition of arbitrary and punitive tariffs, and recurring flirtations with Russian President Vladimir Putin all underscore Trump’s paper-thin commitment to European security and well-being.

To be fair, Trump and his predecessors were right to complain about Europe’s previously inadequate defense efforts, and one can even argue that his bull-in-a-china-shop approach helped overcome decades of European complacency. Europe has now embarked on its most significant armament effort since World War II—an effort that would be more likely to succeed if the United States had not declared economic war on its allies and started an actual war with Iran. In addition to costing U.S. taxpayers a bundle, these blunders hurt Europe’s economies at precisely the moment when they were trying to replace the U.S. role.

https://archive.fo/20260713130037/https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/07/13/nato-trump-europe-summit-ankara-alliance-russia-defense-geopolitics/