South Africa’s long-dominant African National Congress party is projected to fall short of a majority in the country’s parliamentary elections. Late Thursday night, with more than one-fifth of the votes counted, projections put the party at no more than 45%, which would give it 180 of the 400 seats in Parliament.

In a dispatch from Johannesburg, Threats Status Special Correspondent Geoff Hill reflects that when the ANC was at its zenith, achieving nearly 70% of the vote in 2005, supporters had a bumper sticker with the party logo that read, “We will rule forever.”

South Africa’s next president will be chosen from the parties elected to Parliament.

The ANC, the party of national hero Nelson Mandela, which has ruled since the end of the apartheid era, faces the prospect of sharing power in a coalition government or even going into opposition if its surging rivals can put together a government majority.

China’s recent military exercises encircling Taiwan appeared to be practice for a future invasion, according to Navy Adm. Samuel Paparo, the head of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, who asserts that the drills, which included scores of aircraft and more than a dozen warships deployed around the island, also provided intelligence that can be used to deter Beijing and defend Taipei.

The Chinese exercises, dubbed Joint Sword 2024A, “looked like a rehearsal” for a future assault, the four-star admiral said in an interview with Japan’s Nikkei newspaper. They were held May 23 and 24 and followed the inauguration of Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te three days earlier.

China’s military declared the exercises were meant as “punishment” for Taiwan’s new leader, who announced in his inaugural speech the island is an independent sovereign state. Adm. Paparo said China’s military forces are building up at “an alarming rate” and that a key to assessing any future action is China’s calculus on whether an attack across the 100-mile-wide Taiwan Strait would succeed.

Argentina’s President Javier Milei spent this week traveling through California’s Silicon Valley, eager to grow connectivity between his country and some of the United States’ top tech leaders, researchers and companies.

The eccentric libertarian leader’s agenda has included meetings with Apple’s Tim Cook, Google’s Sundar Pichai, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, director of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, a think tank focused on limited government and free market economics.

Mr. Milei also appeared before the Bay Area Council, a business association in San Francisco, delivering remarks on the importance of connections between Argentina and the Bay Area’s tech and innovation sector.

The Air Force this week made public the first photos of its new sixth-generation strategic bomber, the B-21 Raider, and military planners are divided over how best to use what will be one of America’s most powerful warplanes.

Two Air Force bomber experts, Air Force Lt. Col. Shane Praiswater and retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Paula Thornhill, are warning that the B-21’s full capabilities for use in non-nuclear military operations are not well understood and may be limited by bureaucratic tensions within the service.

“Combat air forces tacticians and operational planners have yet to understand the B-21 Raider’s potential capability,” the two wrote in a May 7 report in the Air Force journal Air and Space Operations Review. “Leadership’s vision is clear, but service-level parochial interests, insular platform cultures and competition for resources are creating unhealthy tensions within the combat air forces, [the] Department of the Air Force, and across the joint force.”

China’s preparatory efforts to invade Taiwan are accelerating, write James E. Fanell and Bradley A. Thayer, the co-authors of the 2024 book “Embracing Communist China: America’s Greatest Strategic Failure.”

In light of the quickened pace toward war, America must move more U.S. forces into the Pacific, they write, asserting that “we should move at least two carriers west of the international date line, in order to have at least two of three carrier strike groups in continuous operations at sea within the first and second Island chains.”

“Beijing must understand just how serious the U.S. and the world take [its] aggression and that we will not allow such an invasion to occur without great cost to China,” write Mr. Fanell and Mr. Thayer. “It is time for America to stand up and lead the fight against the illegitimate communist regime in China.”

The U.S.-Mexico border is wide open, our law enforcement personnel are overrun, and America has never been more vulnerable than it is at this very moment, writes former Vice President Mike Pence.

“That is the urgent message I heard directly from Border Patrol agents and local sheriffs at recent events organized by the advocacy group Advancing American Freedom in Texas and New Mexico,” writes Mr. Pence, who argues that “President Biden inherited the most secure border in American history — yet in less than four years, he has singlehandedly created the worst border crisis in history.”

“President Biden and the Democrats could end this crisis just as fast as they created it. All the president has to do is reinstate the commonsense border enforcement policies he inherited and repealed,” Mr. Pence writes. “He has the power. All he needs is the will to act. And if Mr. Biden continues to fail to secure our southern border, the next Republican president and Republican Congress must.”

• May 31-June 2 — Shangri-La Dialogue: Asia’s Premier Defense Summit, International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS).

• June 4 — Collisions: The War in Ukraine and the Origins of the New Global Instability, Wilson Center.

• June 4 — The Book Launch | “The Melting Point: High Command and War in the 21st Century,” Middle East Institute.

• June 4 — Supreme Allied Commanders on the Past, Present, and Future of NATO, Hudson Institute.

• June 4 — Flashpoints and High Stakes: America’s Blueprint to Counter China, Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD).

• June 5 — The Crisis in Georgia and Its Implications for the Black Sea Region, Hudson Institute.