Washington’s national security machinery is being asked to do more than at any point in a decade, with an active war in the Gulf, a Russia policy pulling in two directions and a Taiwan question that won’t sit still. It’s being asked to do it with fewer people, fewer allies sharing in full, and less money from Congress. CrossGov.com, a site that covers US government with a federal focus, has been documenting that gap piece by piece.

Chokepoint leverage looks permanent right up to the moment it isn’t. That’s the pattern across a century of resource coercion, and it applies to China’s position in rare earth processing exactly as it applied to everyone who held a similar position before. The mechanics are consistent. A state controls a stage of production that everyone needs and nobody can replace quickly. It uses that control, either openly or through licensing friction.

The serious criticism of any voluntary international framework is that it has no teeth. No enforcement, no penalties, no court. Governments sign, praise it, and go home. The criticism is accurate and mostly beside the point, because binding treaties have become close to impossible to conclude among the states that matter, and the soft instruments that replaced them turn out to do a surprising amount of governing. Look at what’s happened to ratification.

De Nederlandsche Bank shifted more than a quarter of its gold out of American vaults and into London between March and August. The bank confirmed it this week and gave a reason: rising geopolitical unrest. The official justification is that Bank of England bullion is the most tradable in the world and therefore the most readily available if a crisis breaks. That reason is true and also incomplete, which is normal for central bank communication.

G20 governments met in Chapel Hill this month and endorsed a set of AI policy principles backed by Washington. They’re non-binding. They favour rules written for particular uses over rules written for the technology itself, and they lean on cooperation between governments and industry. The name attached to them is the Carolina Principles. What they don’t do is create a universal regulatory regime, and that omission is the substance of the agreement.

Russia has charged Pavel Durov with facilitating terrorist activity, alleging that Telegram was used by Ukrainian intelligence to organize attacks inside Russia. The charge places the founder of the most operationally significant messaging platform in the conflict under criminal jurisdiction in the country he left in 2014 after refusing to hand user data to Russian authorities. Telegram’s dual status is the whole problem No platform occupies a stranger position in this war.

China held $1.04 trillion in U.S. Treasury securities as of December 2021. By December 2025, that position had declined to $683.5 billion — a reduction of roughly $357 billion, or 34%, over four years. China remains the third-largest foreign holder of U.S. federal debt, but its share of total foreign holdings fell from 13.4% to 7.4% over the same period. The trajectory is unambiguous and sustained. The decline has been both nominal and relative.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine did something to European identity that decades of integration summits could not: it made the identity felt. Geopolitical pressure is, historically, the most reliable accelerant of collective identity formation. Europe had been drifting toward comfortable ambiguity about what it stood for. Russia’s decision to wage a full-scale territorial war on a European neighbor clarified the question with brutal efficiency. The response was not uniform. Hungary maintained its equivocal position, demonstrating that the pressure was not absolute.

A system does not collapse the moment it is attacked from the outside. It collapses when it can no longer agree with itself on how to survive. What is now emerging inside Iran looks dangerously close to that threshold. Reports from Iran International describe a deepening confrontation between Masoud Pezeshkian and Ahmad Vahidi over the conduct of the war and its economic consequences. According to sources, the president has openly warned that without a ceasefire, Iran’s economy could collapse within weeks—three to four at most.

Opinion.org Explores the Phenomenon of Westophobia: Unveiling Diverse Perspectives on Cultural Aversion San Francisco, 23.11.26 – Opinion.org, a leading platform for diverse viewpoints and insightful analyses, delves into the multifaceted concept of Westophobia in its latest exploration of global societal attitudes. Defined as an aversion or fear of Western culture, ideologies, or influence, Westophobia has become a subject of intense scrutiny within contemporary society. Opinion.org, known for its commitment to fostering understanding and dialogue on complex societal issues, has embarked on a comprehensive examination of this phenomenon.

Iran has proposed amendments to a draft resolution on dark shipping that is due to be discussed at the upcoming meeting of the International Maritime Organization (IMO) Assembly. The proposed amendments would strip out all mention of illicit operations, dark fleets, and maritime fraud, and would instead only refer to “substandard ship-to-ship transfers.” Iran relies on a so-called “dark fleet” of tankers that operate outside of mainstream tanker markets because of US sanctions.

Look at each and every one of their faces. These are the babies, toddlers and children being held hostage by Hamas terrorists in Gaza. They should be with their families. Not in a dark room somewhere in Gaza. BRING THEM HOME! #WorldChildrensDay #ForEveryChild pic.twitter.com/xxCXJkTaxU — Israel Foreign Ministry (@IsraelMFA) November 20, 2023 Source: Israel Foreign Ministry Image Credits: Israel News