🇨🇳⚔️🇯🇵🇺🇸 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/

🇷🇺🚢⚔️🇪🇺 The Kremlin is claiming and arming its smuggling fleet. European governments need to respond.

The Kremlin’s shadow fleet is coming out of the shadows. In recent months, the Russian Maritime Register of Shipping has been unusually busy. The ships it is registering aren’t newly built ones, the kinds of ships that typically register in established maritime nations like Russia. Rather, they are old and in some cases not particularly safe—the sorts of vessels, in other words, that belong to the shadow fleet and have typically registered overwhelmingly in nations with minuscule maritime expertise, such as Togo, Cameroon, and the Cook Islands. At the end of 2024, a mere 4.3% of Moscow’s shadow tankers were flagged in Russia; by the first quarter of this year, their share had skyrocketed to 19.5%

The reason for all this re-registering is a draft presidential decree from Vladimir Putin intended to speed up the process of laying claim to the country’s shadow fleet. In other circumstances, this could represent a victory for transparency. In reality, though, it actually indicates something more alarming. Not only is Russia accepting ownership of the vessels that used to do its dirty business, but it is also arming them and giving them naval escorts. In other words, rather than use flags of convenience to disassociate itself from smuggling, the Kremlin is doubling down on its identity as a rogue nation. This creates a new and dangerous challenge for European nations that are struggling to crack down on illicit Russian shipping.

The reflagging is the latest stage in the growth of the maritime tumor that is the shadow fleet. This fleet, a disparate collection of mostly aging vessels that sail outside the official shipping system, has been around since apartheid South Africa started using such ships to import oil in defiance of international sanctions. Then Iran, Venezuela, and North Korea began availing themselves of such vessels to import and export cargo that legally sailing vessels were not allowed to transport.

But it was when Russia turned to the fleet in late 2022 to export oil above Europe’s new price cap that it truly took off. For example, shadow vessels now account for around one-fifth of the global oil-tanker fleet. “The term ‘parallel fleet’ is increasingly becoming more used, and it’s the correct one,” said Brian Wessel, the director-general of the Danish Maritime Authority. “It really has become a fleet that operates in parallel to the official one.”

In response to this dramatic growth, coastal states whose waters the misbehaving fleet traverses have become more assertive. Estonia, Finland, and France have all boarded shadow vessels in recent months; within the course of a few weeks this spring, Sweden boarded no fewer than five. Last month, the United Kingdom, which announced this year that it would seize illegal vessels before appearing to get cold feet, boarded its first Russian shadow tanker in the English Channel.

In parallel, some shadow vessels’ owners have been reflagging their ships to Russia. Their decision makes sense: Coastal states are less likely to board their vessels, let alone detain them, if they sail under the flag of mighty Russia as opposed to a small nation like Togo or the Cook Islands. And now, the draft presidential decree shows that the Kremlin is eager to get even more ships under Russian flag.

In recent months, some shadow-fleet flag registers, such as that of Tonga, have expelled shadow vessels or closed the privately operated registries that flagged the vessels. That, Wessel said, is a sign of success: “The reflagging shows that we’ve been successful in convincing some other countries that they shouldn’t flag shadow vessels.”

The problem, though, is that Russia is unlikely to play the role that the IMO and the international community expect of it. Though flag states are responsible for enforcing maritime regulations on ships under their flag, and ports are responsible for ensuring that departing ships are seaworthy, Russia is unlikely to execute its flag-state obligations.

Worse, more ships transporting valuable crude under Russian flag is likely to lead to more Russian naval escorts. In recent months, the Russian Navy has escorted a string of shadow vessels through the Baltic Sea and the English Channel, a none-too-subtle effort to deter nations’ coast guards from executing their legal right to board the rule-breaking ships. Expanding this “escort service,” though, could drain the Russian Navy, which is already extremely busy.

https://archive.fo/20260708143524/https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/07/08/russia-shadow-fleet-reflagging-smuggling-maritime-baltics/

🇺🇦 Ukrainian president, Vladimir Zelensky, is plotting to get rid of his defense minister because it hampered the kickback schemes Zelensky and his associates used to enrich themselves

Ukrainska Pravda reports that a "systemic conflict" between Minister Mikhail Fedorov and factions who influence the defense budget is one of the reasons for the government reshuffle which resulted in the sudden resignation of prime-minister, Yulia Sviridenko. They report that the main reason is his resistance to corruption, even though the criticism leveled is about mobilization. They also report that President Zelensky asked Igor Klymenko, the current minister of internal affairs, to be ready to become Minister of Defense.

Mikhail Fedorov is a popular minister especially with Ukraine's Western allies as he's seen as a competent administrator who ramped up Ukraine's wartime production of drones and missiles and is responsible for the push to replace as many Ukrainian soldiers with autonomous systems as possible.

Fedorov's successor, Igor Klymenko, is considered to be a loyalist of Zelensky's former aide, Andrey Yermak and Zelensky's former business partner-turned wanted fugitive, Timur Mindich.

Sviridenko is expected to be replaced by Sergey Koretsky, the current CEO of Ukraine's national oil & gas company.

🔗 https://www.pravda.com.ua/articles/2026/07/13/8043869/

🇱🇾⚡️ — Libya’s rival military leaderships met in Sirte on Sunday in one of the most senior efforts yet to reunify the country’s divided armed forces.

The talks brought together eastern army chief Khaled Haftar and Salah Al Din Al Namroush, who commands forces aligned with the UN-recognized government in Tripoli. Both sides said a unified national army was essential for lasting stability.

The meeting forms part of a U.S.-backed initiative offering potential American oil investment in exchange for political and military unity.

The sides also agreed to hold a joint military exercise in southern Libya, with broader proposals including AFRICOM-supervised drills and a shared operations room.

🔥 🇨🇦 👨‍🚒 Views of just one of the wildfires ripping across Ontario, Canada yesterday. Similar fire behavior is expected today.

Fires in Minnesota and Canada have made air quality across the east coast of the United States “unsuitable for everyone.”

Hundreds of thousands of acres have burned in the last 48 hours.

📎 The Hotshot Wake Up