The EU’s Digital Markets Act is a Gift to China | Why Russia’s Vast Security Services Fell Short on Deadly Attack | U.S. Support for Israel’s War Has Become Indefensible, and more

This is not the first time conflict between Israelis and Palestinians has reverberated on Britain’s streets. Weeks after Khan took up her role as social cohesion adviser in early 2021, tasked with examining extremism across the UK and drawing up plans to combat it, violence broke out in Jerusalem and spiraled into a war between Israel and Hamas.

World’s Best Fighter Jet Gets an Upgrade for War Against China  (David Axe, The Telegraph)
The US Air Force’s Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor stealth fighter has gotten a major upgrade as the iconic warplane nears its third decade of front-line service and retirement.
The F-22 is the most powerful and sophisticated fighter in the world, but it has its weaknesses. Keenly aware of the F-22’s limitations – especially with regard to range – the Air Force is hastening the twin-engine, single-seat jet to an early demise. At the same time, the flying branch is spending billions of dollars to ensure that once the Raptor bows out, something even better – a radar-evading jet without the F-22’s main problems – is ready to take its place.
Despite its futuristic, hard-to-detect shape and blistering performance – unusually, it can “super cruise” at twice the speed of sound without igniting its fuel-thirsty afterburners – in its bones, the F-22 is a Cold War jet. Lockheed designed it to battle the Soviet Union from bases in Europe, meaning poor endurance wasn’t really an issue. An F-22 can range just 600 miles or so on internal fuel: plenty far enough to fight over Germany and Poland.

U.S. Support for Israel’s War Has Become Indefensible  (Phil Klay, The Atlantic)
In principle, Israel has a case for military action in Gaza, and it goes something like this. Across its border sat an army of tens of thousands of men intent on massacring civilians. Ghazi Hamad, from Hamas’s political bureau, declared that the atrocities of October 7 were “just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth.” Yes, rooting out Hamas would be brutal—the group welcomes civilian collateral damage and has entrenched itself in hundreds of miles of tunnels honeycombed through civilian infrastructure. But peace is illusory as long as Hamas remains in power.
Perhaps, in an alternate world, Israel could have fought such a war with restraint, in order to degrade Hamas’s military power without playing into its hands by causing unnecessary civilian suffering. Israel would have helped, rather than hindered, the efforts of outside states to funnel humanitarian aid into Gaza—showing that it distinguished the Palestinian people from Hamas battalions and valued their lives. If Israel had very different internal politics, it might even have signaled a positive vision for the war’s end—one premised on rebuilding a Gazan government led by Palestinians not committed to Israel’s destruction but to a fair-minded two-state solution that would ensure full political rights for Gazans. But this is not the war that Israel has fought.

A Family Feud in the Philippines Has Beijing and Washington on Edge  (Nick Aspinwall, Foreign Policy)
When Rodrigo Duterte left the Philippine presidency and returned to private life in 2022, public life seemed suddenly quiet. Duterte’s brash statements, late-night rants, and off-the-cuff threats directed at his enemies were replaced with the caution of his successor—and then ally—the mild-mannered President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.
The two remained uneasy political allies, however, until a rally in January during which Duterte called Marcos a “drug addict” and suggested the idea of a military coup to unseat the president. The next week, Duterte called for the independence of his home region of Mindanao through a signature-gathering campaign.
Marcos has responded with relative calm. He quipped that Duterte’s drug accusations could result from a dependence on fentanyl, which the former president admitted in 2016 to using after a motorcycle accident. Marcos’s national security advisor, meanwhile, has said that any attempt at secession by Mindanao—an idea widely dismissed as unrealistic bluster—would be met with force.
It was a spectacular break that surprised many in the Philippines. Marcos ran in 2022 on a joint ticket with Duterte’s daughter, Sara Duterte-Carpio, and won in a landslide; Duterte-Carpio is now the vice president. Both president and vice president have said they remain aligned. But the elder Duterte has publicly lamented that his daughter didn’t run for the presidency, and he called Marcos “weak” and a “spoiled child” prior to his inauguration.
Marcos has also reoriented Manila away from Duterte’s policy of seeking closer ties with Beijing, instead reaffirming the deep alliance with Washington that solidified during the rule of his father, the dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr.
The split between Marcos and Duterte also reverberated in Washington and Beijing, both of which “are watching the developments closely,” said Jeffrey Ordaniel, an assistant professor of international security studies at Tokyo International University and the director for maritime security at Pacific Forum International. “The different approaches and convictions of [Marcos and Duterte] have a real impact on their own foreign policy agenda.”

The EU’s Digital Markets Act is a Gift to China  (Robert C. O’Brien and Shigeru Kitamura, National Interest)
 If responsible and robust tech competition and innovation are the goal, then the EU’s DMA is most certainly not the solution. It would create an unworkable regulatory environment that stifles innovation in the digital market and cedes the future of human technological development to the CCP.