WORLD ROUNDUPThe Slow Death of the Global Commons | Ukraine’s Dr. Strangelove | Why China’s Air Defenses Failed Over Beijing, and more

The Slow Death of the Global Commons  (Robert A. Manning, Foreign Policy)
Hormuz is a sign of worse things to come.

This Tiny Missile Could Solve Europe’s Defense Crisis  (James Rothwell, Telegraph)
£8k Kreuger interceptor dubbed ‘a flying cellphone with a warhead’ tested at secret Swedish location - and could save Nato from Russia.

Ukraine’s Dr. Strangelove  (Simon Shuster, The Atlantic)
A rocket designer with a dubious past sets out to build a missile shield with Europe—and without America.

Ukraine’s Top General Could Be on the Way Out  (Economist)
Firing the reformist defense minister has plunged Volodymyr Zelensky’s government into crisis.

China’s Questionable Tech Strategy  (Michael Schuman, The Atlantic)
Keeping out the world’s best tools promises to stymie innovation.

U.S.-China Relations Are More Volatile Than Ever  (Andrew Scobell and Andrea Ghiselli, Foreign Policy)
Trump and Xi have brutally undermined the institutions and personnel responsible for safeguarding diplomacy.

Why Do We Keep Ignoring the Large Quantity of Plutonium at Iran’s Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant?  (Gregory Jones, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists)
Key to this effort is obtaining the nuclear material required to produce nuclear weapons. This material could be either highly enriched uranium (HEU) or plutonium. The 2015 “Iran nuclear deal”—formally, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA—placed temporary limits on Iran’s centrifuge enrichment program, which could be used to produce HEU. The Iran deal also limited the plutonium production rate of Iran’s heavy water-moderated plutonium production reactor (euphemistically called a research reactor).
However, the Iran nuclear deal completely failed to address the large quantities of plutonium produced by Iran’s nuclear power reactor at Bushehr, which started commercial operation in 2013. If the reactor had operated as expected, it would have produced about 240 kilograms of plutonium per year, sufficient for somewhere between 24 and 40 nuclear weapons per year. Several analysts and experts, including the author, raised these concerns in the few months after the deal was signed, but no action was taken to strengthen the Iran deal.
In the aftermath of the US and Israeli attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities in June 2025, the Trump administration has been attempting to negotiate limits on Iran’s nuclear program. This effort has focused mainly on Iran’s centrifuge enrichment program and, as in 2015, appears to be ignoring the large quantity of mostly reactor-grade plutonium that is stored in the spent fuel at Bushehr.

Why China’s Air Defenses Failed Over Beijing  (Christopher Nye, National Interest)
The June 26 crash of a light aircraft into Beijing’s tallest building revealed a command paralysis rooted in Xi Jinping’s military purges.