A Chinese Embassy official recently wrote to Congress to lobby against legislation requiring Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines to produce a report on corruption and hidden wealth held by Chinese leaders through their relatives, including President Xi Jinping.

Wang Xijun, a counselor at the Chinese Embassy in Washington, wrote to the office of Rep. Andy Ogles, Tennessee Republican, criticizing legislation mandating the DNI report, which was due to Congress in December under a defense bill signed into law in late 2022. A DNI spokesman has said intelligence analysts are still working on the report.

In his letter, Mr. Wang said U.S. efforts to undermine the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party would produce “a mistaken policy” and sour U.S.-China relations. “We hereby urge Congressman Ogles to stop pushing forward this act,” he wrote.

Outgoing Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte has a reputation as a political consensus-builder who regularly rides his bicycle to work from his home in The Hague where he has lived for 30 years, but he is also known as a fierce critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and has pushed his country to increase its military support to Kyiv.

Pentagon Correspondent Mike Glenn writes that the pairing proved attractive for the 32-member NATO alliance, which formally named Mr. Rutte, 57, as secretary-general this week after a lengthy and, at times, divisive search. Jens Stoltenberg, a former Norwegian prime minister, held the post for a full decade. He stayed on far longer than scheduled as the alliance dealt with the crisis in Ukraine and struggled to coalesce around a successor.

Romanian President Klaus Iohannis announced last week that he was dropping out of the contest for the five-year appointment. Mr. Rutte will formally take over from Mr. Stoltenberg on Oct. 1.

Japanese prosecutors have indicted a U.S. serviceman in Okinawa on charges he kidnapped and sexually assaulted a Japanese minor, a crime that looks set to reignite Okinawan grievances against both the American presence on the strategic island and the central government in Tokyo.

Washington Times Asia Editor Andrew Salmon reports from the region that while the alleged crime took place in December, U.S. Airman Brennon Washington was not indicted until March 27 and Okinawa Prefecture was only notified of the indictment on June 26, when Japan’s media reported the incident.

Okinawa’s governor, a longtime opponent of the U.S. base presence, has questioned both the reported crime and the delay from Japan’s Foreign Ministry in communicating it to local officials. Sexual crimes by G.I.s against Japanese minors in Okinawa in 1995 and 2008 generated major public outrage.

Days before news of the airman’s case broke, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida — a staunch American ally — had visited Okinawa and admitted that Okinawans “bear a heavy burden” in hosting the largest contingent of U.S. troops in Japan.

U.S. intelligence agencies are guilty of multiple failures to address threats posed by China over the past 40 years, resulting in current existential dangers to American security, a former Navy intelligence director told Congress on Wednesday.

Retired Navy Capt. James Fanell testified that China had employed strategic deception and political warfare to fool both U.S. intelligence officials and executive branch policymakers into falsely assuming it posed no threat.

“Over the course of decades, [China] effectively misled our executive branch to ignore the PRC as a rising existential threat,” said Capt. Fanell, former director of intelligence and information operations for the Pacific Fleet. “In particular, the Department of Defense and the intelligence community were deceived by the [ruling Communist Party’s] skillful use of elite capture, deception, disinformation and propaganda programs.”

The lowest-ranking enlisted members of the U.S. military are paid less than fast-food workers and many other entry-level employees in the private sector, and often must turn to federal subsidies and local donations to feed their families, a House panel has reported.

The bipartisan group of 13 House Armed Services Committee members investigated military compensation and living standards for about a year and developed recommendations to improve service members’ quality of life, calling for increases in pay and supplemental benefits, expanded access to quality housing, child care and health care, and assistance for military spouses looking for jobs outside the service.

The lawmakers said such changes would help the military recruit and retain troops. “I got tired of going to bases and being shown the food pantry,” Rep. Jennifer Kiggans, Virginia Republican and a former Navy pilot, told The Times. “We can do better than that.”

Mr. Scalise is sounding the alarm about the threat of Chinese humanoid robots arriving in America and jeopardizing national security.

The Louisiana Republican shared his concern about Chinese communist robots in an address to the Reindustrialize Conference in Detroit this week, where he detailed the national security threat posed by imported robots.

“It sounds like sci-fi, but humanoid robots are real and very concerning coming from China,” Mr. Scalise said. “It’s the latest in many examples of national security threats coming from technology with ties to China.” 

With Julian Assange now free in Australia, columnist Andrew P. Napolitano argues that the U.S. government’s case against the WikiLeaks founder was a “sham” motivated by the U.S. intelligence community and its allies in the Department of Justice. 

“It is a sham because the First Amendment protects the freedom of speech of all persons, not just Americans,” Mr. Napolitano writes, asserting that, even though the materials Mr. Assange and WikiLeaks received had been stolen by then-Army intelligence specialist Bradley Manning, now Chelsea Manning, the media was “free to reveal them.”

The reason, Mr. Napolitano argues, is that the materials “were and are of profound interest to the public — American drones targeting civilians, secret U.S. military actions in countries with which the U.S. was not at war, and government lying to the public on a grand scale.”

Former Rep. Robert Pittenger looks at the ongoing Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) review of a deal involving Vista Outdoors, the major U.S. sporting equipment manufacturer that owns Remington Ammunition. 

“This past spring, Vista entered an agreement to sell its ammunition manufacturing division to the Czechoslovak Group. Since that company, known as CSG, is headquartered in Prague, the proposed deal triggered a CFIUS review,” writes Mr. Pittenger. CSG, he notes, “is a top supplier of weapons and ammunition to Ukraine in its fight against Russian aggression and that the company also works closely with major U.S. defense contractors.”

The North Carolina Republican also writes that “CSG passed a CFIUS review in 2022 to acquire ammunition plants in Arkansas and Missouri, which is a positive basis to begin a thorough review.”

• June 27 — Swarms over the Strait: Drone Warfare in a Future Fight to Defend Taiwan, Center for a New American Security

• June 28 — Germany and the World: A Foreign Policy Conversation with State Secretary Thomas Bagger, Hudson Institute

• July 1 — America’s foreign policy: A conversation with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, The Brookings Institution

• July 1 — Cyber Scams and Human Trafficking in Cambodia and Vietnam, U.S. Institute of Peace

• July 2 — Force Design: A conversation with Gen. Eric Smith, 39th commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps, Brookings Institution

• July 8 — The U.S. Vision for AI Safety: A Conversation with Elizabeth Kelly, Director of the U.S. AI Safety Institute, Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)

• July 11 — Supercharging the Development Finance Corporation: Opportunities and Pathways for Development, Infrastructure, and Investment, Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD)