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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says it’s now a war goal to return residents evacuated from Israel’s north due to cross-border fighting with Hezbollah.
… Meta is banning Russian state media outlets over “foreign interference.”
… Extremists in Mali carried out a major attack in the African nation that for years has battled armed groups, including some allied with the Islamic State and al Qaeda.
… Lawyers for China-owned TikTok are pushing a First Amendment argument in U.S. federal court.
… The Washington Times’ Stephen Dinan reports that the Biden administration has allowed a former Cuban military colonel who helped shoot down humanitarian airplanes to enter the U.S.
… David Maxwell says the “next U.S. president needs a new North Korea policy.”
… U.N. rights experts say Venezuela’s government has intensified the use of the “harshest and most violent” tools of repression.
… And European Union chief Ursula von der Leyen is putting women in many of the top roles on her new right-leaning European Commission.
Shortly after taking office in 2017, then-President Trump moved to end — for the first time in decades — the identification of the communist regime in Beijing as a friend and trading partner and instead labeled China a strategic rival. If he wins the election in November, Mr. Trump appears determined to instill new vigor into that and other policies he implemented during his first term.
National Security Correspondent Bill Gertz offers an in-depth analysis, comparing how Mr. Trump’s China policy would differ from that of Vice President Kamala Harris if she becomes president. While Ms. Harris’ presidential campaign motto is “A New Way Forward,” her proposed policies toward China on her campaign website closely follow President Biden’s, Mr. Gertz reports.
The Biden approach has been to both engage and confront China, building alliances to counter Beijing while seeking accommodation on issues such as climate change. Mr. Biden and his aides have labored to repair bilateral ties and reestablish direct contacts with President Xi Jinping’s government after a visit by then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan and the notorious Chinese surveillance balloon incident in early 2023 that sent relations plummeting.
Ukraine’s top military intelligence officer says Russia considers 2025 a pivotal year because a failure to secure a victory in Ukraine by 2026 would undermine the Kremlin’s goal of remaining a global superpower.
Moscow aims to secure a decisive victory next year before looming economic and manpower restraints “significantly degrade” its ability to sustain the war effort, Lt. Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, head of Ukraine’s Main Military Intelligence Directorate, said during the latest Yalta European Strategy meeting in Kyiv.
“These are Russia’s calculations. If they do not come out of this war as self-professed winners by this time, then in the near future — about 30 years — they will lose the opportunity to be a superpower,” Lt. Gen. Budanov said in a Sunday statement. “Then, two countries will remain — the United States and China — and the most that Russia can count on is regional leadership, which does not suit it.”
The U.S. and other NATO countries are wrapping up joint naval drills off the coast of Norway aimed at testing and refining their capabilities to rescue submarines that are lost or in danger.
Pentagon Correspondent Mike Glenn offers a look into the 10-day Dynamic Monarch exercises, which are held every three years and bring together naval forces from across NATO, including from the United Kingdom, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland and Turkey. A NATO statement noted that Sweden also participated. Sweden joined NATO this year in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The navies practiced coordinating efforts to rescue personnel trapped inside submarines at risk. NATO officials said that Norway, Sweden and Turkey brought state-of-the-art rescue ships to participate and that the drills demonstrated the effectiveness of NATO’s “Submarine Rescue System,” jointly owned by France, Norway and the U.K.
The Department of Homeland Security is reporting its best border numbers since just after Mr. Biden took office after being forced to limit a fraud-filled “parole” program that had been admitting as many as 30,000 people a month.
The department said Monday it detected 158,988 unauthorized entries in August, down from about 170,000 in July and the best numbers since February 2021, when it recorded about 101,000. At the southern border, the Border Patrol actually saw arrests increase. But entries at the nation’s interior — airports and seaports — plunged as the parole program was paused.
Mr. Dinan reports that the number of unaccompanied alien children nabbed at the southern border ticked up in August, however, as did the number of migrants traveling as families. But both are well below their peak rates from December.
Gerard Leval offers a sobering comparison of the Israel-Hamas war and Sudan’s civil war, and puts a spotlight on the lack of global media attention given to the latter. “The clear difference in the dimensions of these conflicts would strongly suggest that the world’s attention should be focused on the brutal fratricidal conflict in Sudan. But that is assuredly not the case,” writes Mr. Leval.
“As we stand poised to witness a likely recurrence of the left-wing violence on college campuses and in our urban areas protesting against the very existence of Israel and vilifying its supporters, we will undoubtedly also be witness to a complete absence of concern for the people of color who are being massacred in Sudan,” he writes. “Of course, most of the perpetrators and victims in Sudan are Muslims, and they are, self-evidently, virtually all people of color.”
“Those who would declaim their anger and resentment against the West at the perception of the slightest form of anti-Muslim or anti-Black prejudice in Israel or the United States do not seem to care in the least that Muslims are slaughtering Black people in far greater numbers in Sudan than those who are dying in Gaza.”
After 20 years of fighting in Afghanistan, the Biden administration handed the country back to Taliban leaders that Americans had worked so hard to keep out of power. So it’s “no surprise,” according to Brandon J. Weichert, that Afghanistan is now “rapidly becoming a nexus of global jihadism as it had been in the decade preceding the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.”
Mr. Weichert, a national security analyst at The National Interest and the author of “The Shadow War: Iran’s Quest for Supremacy,” writes that “former CIA targeting analyst and counterterrorism expert Sarah Adams has uncovered evidence showing that the United States government has been gifting anywhere between $43 million-$87 million to the Taliban per week, essentially since the shambolic American pullout from Afghanistan.
“That money, according to the leader of the anti-Taliban resistance, is certainly being used to fund terrorism and prepare for wider strikes against the West.”
• Oct. 2 — 2024 Veterans Advanced Energy Summit, Atlantic Council
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