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Ukraine’s foreign minister on a visit to Beijing says he’s seeking “common ground” with China with the goal of ending the war with Russia.
…German authorities just raided and banned an organization accused of being an “outpost” of Iran’s theocracy and that reportedly has ties to Hezbollah.
…The Pentagon’s plan to counter China and Russia in the Arctic includes new facilities at the Space Force’s Pituffik Space Base on the northwest coast of Greenland.
…Sudan’s paramilitary leader says he’ll participate in cease-fire talks that U.S. and Saudi officials are holding in Switzerland.
…And U.S. federal regulators are hurriedly working to set regulatory rules for the artificial intelligence industry before President Biden leaves office.
Republicans are largely united in support of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but Democrats are sharply divided, with a growing pro-Palestinian faction challenging the party’s longtime support of Israel — divisions that are expected to be on display as Mr. Netanyahu addresses Congress on Wednesday.
His visit to Washington has sparked street protests, with some demonstrators condemning Israel while others express support while pressuring Mr. Netanyahu to strike a cease-fire deal and bring home the hostages still being held by Palestinian Hamas militants.
The Netanyahu visit comes amid ongoing Mideast shuttle diplomacy by top U.S. officials aimed at preventing a wider war in the region. Gen. Michael Erik Kurilla, who heads the Pentagon’s Central Command, just held a meeting at al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar, as part of a multiday trip to the region that included a stop in Bahrain. Centcom officials said in a statement that Gen. Kurilla and Bahraini leaders discussed “the regional security situation and the strong [military-to-military] relationship between Bahrain and the U.S.”
The U.S. buildup in the hotly contested frozen north includes new military facilities at the Space Force’s Pituffik Space Base, 947 miles from the North Pole on the northwest coast of Greenland, according to National Security Correspondent Bill Gertz, who reports that the Army has also activated the 11th Airborne Division, known as the Arctic Angels in Alaska.
In announcing the new strategy blueprint this week, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks said Russia poses “an acute threat to security and stability” in the resource-rich region. “More troubling, we’ve seen growing cooperation between the PRC and Russia in the Arctic,” she said, noting Chinese funding for Russian energy exploitation in the Arctic and joint China-Russia military exercises off the coast of Alaska.
More than 80% of Russian natural gas production and nearly 20% of its oil production comes from the Arctic. U.S. officials recently announced a plan to work with NATO allies Finland and Canada to build about 80 icebreaker ships in the coming years for Arctic operations.
U.S. federal regulators are hurriedly working to set regulatory constraints for the booming artificial intelligence industry before Mr. Biden leaves office, teaming up with foreign governments and issuing demands to U.S. companies over their AI usage.
Federal Trade Commission Chairwoman Lina Khan and Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter joined regulators from Europe and the U.K. to announce plans on Tuesday to coordinate oversight of the rapidly growing AI industry. Ms. Khan also revealed plans to investigate eight U.S. businesses’ use of AI in pricing strategies, despite no evidence of criminal activity.
Precisely who is in charge of the cadre of international regulators is not fully clear, but the officials said their work would be independent. Ms. Khan and Mr. Kanter issued a joint statement with the European Commission Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager and Sarah Caldwell, the U.K.’s top competition official, pledging collective action.
The U.S. military’s goal is “not to get into a conflict” with Iran-backed Houthi militants in Yemen, according to Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder, the Pentagon press secretary, who tells the Threat Status podcast in an exclusive interview that the goal is to “degrade and disrupt” the Houthis’ ability to conduct strikes against commercial shipping vessels in the Red Sea.
“The Houthis have attempted to try to close off this waterway. We’ve deterred them from doing that [so] we can continue, and you continue to see commercial traffic going through this waterway,” Gen. Ryder said in the interview, which also delves into a wide range of other topics, including the war in Ukraine, the U.S. troop withdrawal from Niger, China-Russia military cooperation and the Pentagon’s “over-the-horizon” approach to counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan.
Gen. Ryder’s comments on the Houthis contrast with those of former CIA official Norm Roule, who outlined the depths of damage being inflicted on the global economy by the Iran-backed militants in a recent Threat Status exclusive video interview.
Threat Status opinion contributor Clifford D. May writes about the U.S. government’s failure in the case of Wall Street Journal correspondent Evan Gershkovich, a U.S. citizen now sentenced to 16 years in a high-security Russian penal colony on charges of espionage, even though “Russian authorities have produced not a shred of evidence against him.”
“What comes next is ‘hostage diplomacy,’ an Orwellian term, an admission of American weakness, an acknowledgment that the U.S. has no intention of punishing anyone for imprisoning an innocent American, nor any plan to deter those who will do so in the future,” writes Mr. May, who goes on to put the following “idea on the table.”
“A little skillful diplomacy,” he writes, “could result in a kind of NATO Article 5 on hostage-taking: an agreement among America’s allies that, any time one of their citizens is ‘wrongfully detained,’ they will expel the ambassadors of the criminal regime, recall their own ambassadors and coordinate sanctions tough enough to seriously damage the economy of the offending regime.”
The debate over Washington’s Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) platform isn’t just about the F-35 or even air doctrine, writes Kenneth M. Rapoza, who argues that the debate “touches on the posture of the U.S. defense establishment and whether American air power will focus on expensive crewed vehicles or cheaper drones like the RQ-11 Raven.”
“If the U.S. cannot embrace the lower-cost methods of fighting future wars to counter enemies that openly hope to financially outmaneuver us, then we are heading for defeat,” writes Mr. Rapoza. “That will require embracing future systems such as NGAD and drone-centric projects and admitting that, without them, further funding the F-35 may be throwing good money after bad.”
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