WORLD ROUNDUPHow Trump Took the U.S. to War with Iran | Preventing an Iranian Bomb Is Only Getting Harder | The War Will End with a Hormuz Toll Booth, and more
· How Trump Took the U.S. to War with Iran
· Did Trump Just Threaten to Use Nuclear Weapons in Iran?
· Preventing an Iranian Bomb Is Only Getting Harder
· The Hidden System Turning Chinese Tech Companies into Military Suppliers
· The War in the Gulf Could Cause a Global Food Shock
· Germany Faces the Threat of These “Disposable Agents” Recruited by the Russians
· A Pattern Can Be Observed in the Radicalization of Asylum Seekers into Islamist Attackers
· The War Will End with a Hormuz Toll Booth
How Trump Took the U.S. to War with Iran (Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman, New York Times)
In a series of Situation Room meetings, President Trump weighed his instincts against the deep concerns of his vice president and a pessimistic intelligence assessment. Here’s the inside story of how he made the fateful decision.
Did Trump Just Threaten to Use Nuclear Weapons in Iran? (Tom Nichols, The Atlantic)
If such an order comes to pass, the military can and must refuse.
Preventing an Iranian Bomb Is Only Getting Harder (Eric Brewer, Foreign Policy)
A weaker, angrier, more suspicious regime with a less cautious supreme leader and leverage over Hormuz. What could go wrong?
The Hidden System Turning Chinese Tech Companies into Military Suppliers (Charles Sun, War on the Rocks)
In October 2022, Unitree Robotics joined Boston Dynamics, Agility Robotics, and three other firms in signing an open letter pledging not to weaponize their machines and to review customers’ intended applications. This Chinese startup based in Hangzhou had earned its place in that group. Founded in 2016 by a 26-year-old engineer named Wang Xingxing, who quit his job at the drone maker DJI during his probationary period, Unitree set out to build affordable quadruped robots. It worked. By 2023, the company held over 60 percent of the global quadruped robot market by unit sales. Its investors included Sequoia China, Meituan, and Shenzhen Capital Group. Its consumer-grade robot dogs are sold on Amazon.
Two years after the pledge, China’s state broadcaster aired footage of Unitree’s B1 quadrupeds carrying assault rifles in joint military exercises between the Chinese and Cambodian armed forces. By September 2025, robot dogs appeared in China’s largest-ever military parade on Chang’an Avenue. In July of the same year, a military training exercise at a Chongqing vocational college — jointly developed by students, faculty, and a military training team — featured Unitree machines fitted with rifles and rocket launchers. In an August 2025 statement, Unitree affirmed that it “has always been a civilian robotics company” and that all militarized modifications were made by third parties.
The interesting thing is, Unitree isn’t really lying. And that is precisely the policy problem. Unitree did not seek out the Chinese military. The Chinese Communist Party brought the military to Unitree through channels that required no direct order, no classified contract, and no corporate consent. Understanding how that system works, and why current U.S. policy does not reach it, is the most urgent analytical gap in the American response to Chinese military-civil fusion.
The War in the Gulf Could Cause a Global Food Shock (Economist)
Soaring prices for fertilizer and fuel are sowing panic among farmers.
Germany Faces the Threat of These “Disposable Agents” Recruited by the Russians (David Philippot, Le Figaro)
“Once arrested, the ‘agents’ involved in these low-cost operations are literally abandoned to their fate,” explains Hans-Jakob Schindler, Senior Director of the Counter Extremism Project. The activities of these apprentice spies have served as a workaround for Russian intelligence services following the expulsion—by European states since 2022—of hundreds of spies posing as diplomats.
A Pattern Can Be Observed in the Radicalization of Asylum Seekers into Islamist Attackers (Neue Zürcher Zeitung)
Several factors play a role in radicalization, says terrorism expert Hans-Jakob Schindler, who works for the Counter Extremism Project in Berlin and New York and also advises German ministries in this capacity. Failed ambitions and the apparent inability to integrate into a liberal Western society, which has a “completely different value system” than their Islamic homeland, create an internal conflict.
The War Will End with a Hormuz Toll Booth (Amir Handjani, Foreign Policy)
Iran will likely control the waterway. The question is whether diplomats find a way of making that workable.
