Anthropic/Pentagon/China
(Kenton Thibaut – Atlantic Council) Chinese commentators are taking particular glee in the dispute between Anthropic and the US Department of Defense given Anthropic’s previous criticisms of China. Chinese narratives are focused on how companies such as Anthropic touted their importance to national security yet are now raising concern when the military demands access to their technologies. These narratives do reveal a contradiction that arises when US AI firms who promote trust, safety, and independence as their core advantages also work with the national security state. – Chinese narratives around Anthropic highlight contradictions for the US – Atlantic Council
Iran War
(Mona Yacoubian – CSIS) Iran’s aggressive retaliation against U.S. and Israeli strikes highlights Tehran’s war strategy: eschewing calibrated retaliation for unbridled escalation. Iran aims to restore deterrence and ensure the Islamic Republic’s place in the region’s emerging order. Iran signaled its intent to widen and deepen the conflict from day one, and its unprecedented approach could spark multiple escalation scenarios with significant regional and global impacts. By going big early, Iran appears to have absorbed the lessons from previous conflicts. Iran and Israel first crossed the Rubicon of open state-on-state conflict in 2024, with direct clashes in April and October. Then, the United States joined Israel in the June 2025 Twelve-Day War. These conflicts were marked by limited, tit-for-tat escalation, short durations, and a telegraphed and choreographed end. This time is different. Even before the outbreak of conflict, Tehran signaled that it would not repeat the Twelve-Day War. Threatened by regime change and determined to deter future attacks, Iran appears to have opted for unrestrained escalation. – Iran’s War Strategy: Don’t Calibrate—Escalate
Ireland
(Brad W. Setser – Council on Foreign Relations) Since 2014—the year Apple put on a green jersey and became a tax resident of Ireland—Ireland has had a remarkable string of luck. Since then, the OECD countries have agreed to end “double Irish” tax structures, so that an Irish-registered subsidiary could not be a tax resident of Bermuda or the Caymans. They also agreed to raise the global minimum tax rate to 15 percent—albeit with a carveout for the United States. The United States also enacted major tax reforms in 2017 (the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act) and 2025 (the One Big Beautiful Bill Act). The net result has been, well, a steady rise in the profit the world’s multinationals report in Ireland, and a steady march up in Ireland’s corporate tax take. The Irish balance of payments data now shows that foreign multinationals (almost all American headquartered multinationals) report earning over $300 billion in Ireland—a remarkable sum. – The Luck of the Irish | Council on Foreign Relations
Russia
(John C. K. Daly – The Jamestown Foundation) Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service reported on February 4 that Russia’s 2025 military spending was 66 percent higher than the Kremlin claims, accounting for half of the Kremlin’s overall budget and approximately 10 percent of Russia’s gross domestic product (GDP). Russia’s expanding war budget is colliding with falling energy revenues as sanctions and lost European gas markets shrink export profits, widening the federal deficit and forcing the government to sell gold reserves, raise taxes, and consider spending cuts. The Kremlin’s prioritization of military spending signals long-term militarization and heightened risk for Europe, with expanded Russian forces amassed near North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) borders even as inflation, debt pressures, and economic stagnation threaten Russia’s financial stability. – Military Spending Now Half of Russia’s Budget – Jamestown
(Pavel K. Baev – The Jamestown Foundation) The ongoing conflict in the Persian Gulf has not produced the benefits Moscow expected. Despite U.S. pressure on Russia to end its war against Ukraine having momentarily eased, Russia’s battlefield momentum has waned amid mounting military, economic, and diplomatic constraints. Russia’s domestic economic situation is deteriorating as war costs intensify. A growing budget deficit, weakening oil revenues due to Ukrainian strikes on energy infrastructure, disrupted sanctions-evasion supply chains, and declining investment are deepening stagnation and inflation risks. Diplomatic and geopolitical gains for Moscow remain limited despite global turmoil. Russia’s influence in the Global South and organizations such as BRICS has proven weaker than expected, while energy market volatility undermines Moscow’s strategic ambitions. – Moscow Calculates Benefits of Gulf Conflict, Coming Short – Jamestown
Russia/Ukraine
(Clara Kaluderovic – Atlantic Council) It’s May 2026 in the Kharkiv sector of Ukraine. A Ukrainian commander launches eight hundred autonomous drones—a coordinated swarm of air and ground systems programmed to suppress enemy air defenses, identify and strike artillery positions, and exploit gaps in Russian lines. The operation depends on real-time coordination: sensors feeding targeting data to strike platforms, movement algorithms synchronizing advance rates, and machine learning systems adapting to Russian countermeasures. Eighteen minutes into the mission, Russian electronic warfare assets sever the swarm’s tactical ground uplinks to Western cloud infrastructure.1 The swarm doesn’t abort—it continues operating on preprogrammed instructions. But it can’t adapt. Russian forces rapidly move their artillery and air defense systems. Ukrainian sensors detect the movement but can’t retask strike drones without cloud connectivity. The algorithms that would normally coordinate sensors with shooters can’t execute. What should have been a precisely synchronized operation devolves into hundreds of individual platforms executing obsolete instructions against targets that have already moved. This scenario hasn’t transpired yet. But the conditions that could make it inevitable are already in place. The war in Ukraine is often described in the language of weapons: air defense systems, artillery pieces, drones, and munitions. Yet a less visible element will shape the next phase of the conflict just as decisively as any piece of military hardware: the infrastructure to create and harness computational power, or compute. – The coming compute war in Ukraine – Atlantic Council
Sudan
(David J. Scheffer – Council on Foreign Relations) The specter of genocide once again has descended upon Sudan, where civil war has raged between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) since April 2023. The recent theater of atrocity crimes has been El Fasher, a city in the country’s western Darfur region. On February 19, the UN Human Rights Council’s Independent International Fact-Finding Mission for the Sudan (Fact-Finding Mission) reported that mass killings and related atrocities during the RSF’s takeover of El Fasher last October revealed “indicators of a genocidal path.” What happened there surpasses what most people can imagine and compels a reckoning with international justice – The Specter of Genocide Returns to Darfur | Council on Foreign Relations
US
(Matthew Ferren – Council on Foreign Relations) The White House’s recently released cyber strategy is strikingly short, with just four pages of substance—roughly one-seventh the length of the Biden administration’s 2023 strategy. National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross has described it as a high-level statement of intent, with action items to come. But the brevity also reflects a fraying cyber apparatus that is, at best, still finding its footing and, at worst, suffering from institutional neglect. This strategy arrives at a precarious moment. The United States faces longstanding and intensifying cyber threats—from Chinese espionage and pre-positioning on critical infrastructure to ransomware campaigns that disrupt essential services—that demand sustained attention and investment. The president’s war of choice with Iran adds new urgency. Tehran-linked groups are already threatening cyberattacks on U.S. networks, and the White House’s ability to coordinate national cyber defenses will face an immediate test. Yet the administration’s surface-level treatment of these challenges casts doubt on how seriously the administration takes the cyber threat, and whether it has the capacity to address them. Key cyber leadership posts remain vacant, and the agencies responsible for implementation have been disrupted by budget cuts and personnel turnover. – Trump’s Military Adventures Will Put His New Cyber Strategy to the Test | Council on Foreign Relations
US/China
(The Jamestown Foundation) Under General Secretary Xi Jinping, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has made technology competition the focus of its long-term struggle against the West. The 15th Five-Year Plan (2026–2030) has codified the fusion of national planning, security strategy, and technological control under Xi’s direct command. The plan, whose early chapters are dedicated to building a modern industrial system, accelerating tech self-reliance and cultivating new productive forces, and deepening informatization and intelligentization, highlights a range of priority high-tech sectors. These include artificial intelligence (AI), quantum, biotechnology, connected devices and the Internet of Things (IoT), robotics, and open-source technologies, among others. The Party believes that seizing the “commanding heights” in these areas is critical to ensuring long-term dominance (Xinhua, March 13). Xi has directed the Party-state system to advance a whole-of-nation approach to promoting strategic sectors. This is seen in the mechanisms embedded in the Party’s seven national development strategies, of which the military–civil fusion development strategy the most important, coordinating the system to diffuse innovation throughout the pillars of the Party’s power. It also involves boosting competitiveness through securing supply chains, promoting innovation, and ensuring that critical technologies remain in reliable hands. “Reverse constrainment,” or the selective weaponization of trade, has emerged as one tactic to adapt to the competitive international environment; but the Party deploys a variety of other tools in pursuit of supply chain sovereignty, technological dominance, and ultimately victory in international technological competition. Looking forward to 2030, Xi is preparing the People’s Republic of China (PRC) for sustained confrontation. State investment, flexible regulatory environments, and courting foreign capital support reliable supply chains. “Command innovation,” or state investment in targeted sectors, serves the Party’s goal of global technological dominance. The CCP hopes that these strategies, combined with its weaponization of trade dependencies, will create the conditions necessary for victory in U.S.–PRC competition. – Strategic Snapshot: U.S.–PRC Tech Rivalry – Jamestown
