Foreign Policy

Foreign policy is a collection of goals, strategies, and actions that a government uses to guide its relationships with other countries and international organizations. Such goals include national security, economic prosperity, global stability, and values promotion. China’s foreign policy seeks to advance all of these goals using the tools of diplomacy, economic measures, military power and soft power (sharing a nation’s culture, values, and media to build good will and influence opinions).

A private American mercenary company is now running a large share of Haiti’s fight against its own gangs, operating drone strikes, raids, and intelligence gathering under a contract the government has never made public.

The US war on Iran has now passed the six-month mark, negotiations have been abandoned and last week saw renewed fighting with Tehran attacking American bases across the Middle East. This came after a US strike was alleged to have hit a home hosting a wedding event, killing five people and wounding dozens. Washington  also launched a new aggressive economic pressure campaign and blockade to coerce Iran into submission. Tehran on its part is now threatening military escalation and a wider war.  The head of Iran’s National Security Council said recently that Tehran is planning to announce a maritime “exclusion zone” outside the Strait of Hormuz where it intends to stop vessels attempting to transit the waterway without Iranian permission.  The conflict currently appears to have no likely end  in sight.

The ongoing war in Ukraine seems to have slipped into the back of collective consciousness. If the war enters the news cycle it’s usually new footage of the sides trading missile and drone attacks on energy infrastructure, weapon factories, or apartment buildings.

Before its dissolution, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) was a leading actor in combating Ebola outbreaks globally. The agency established a robust infrastructure in nations such as Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, and Kenya after the deadly Ebola outbreak in 2014, in which the United States took a forefront role in responding.

China’s economic and defense systems are increasingly integrated under a unified strategy of “high-quality development” and “military-civil fusion.” In March 2026, the National People’s Congress formally adopted the 15th Five-Year Plan (2026–2030), which serves as the master blueprint for the nation’s trajectory through the end of the decade. The central pillar of this plan is the cultivation of “New Quality Productive Forces,” a term championed by the leadership to describe a shift away from traditional, labor-intensive manufacturing toward a technology-led economy driven by artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and green energy.

Recent days have seen resumed fighting between the United States and Iran. Multiple days of US airstrikes targeting Iran, following Iran’s attacks on three ships in the strait. US and Iranian officials had agreed to a preliminary memorandum of understanding to end the costly and destructive 110 day conflict. Both the US and Iran, along with their allies, agreed to declare an end to military operations on all fronts, which includes Israel’s war on Lebanon. Including Lebanon in the deal had been a hurdle in reaching the deal as Israel has refused to end its attacks and withdraw from Lebanese territory.

 An explosion lights up the sky over the city during a Russian missile and drone strike, amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine, in Kyiv, Ukraine June 2, 2026

The geography of the war has changed. Once, the war in Ukraine was measured in miles of trenches, destroyed towns, and incremental advances across the Donbas steppe. Over the past two years, however, the conflict has expanded both vertically and territorially, carried not only by missiles and aircraft but also by relatively inexpensive drones assembled in workshops across Ukraine. The battlefield no longer ends at the front line. It now stretches hundreds—and sometimes thousands—of kilometers into Russian territory, reaching oil depots, military plants, logistics hubs, and even Moscow itself.

Now three months into his Iran war, President Trump continues to spew so much contradictory nonsense on the conflict that anyone attempting to take the president at his word would be lost in the morass. One moment Trump is threatening to annihilate Iran’s civilization, hurling churlish curses at the country’s leadership for not doing what he wants, the next he’s saying a deal is nearly complete. One minute he’s claiming the goal of regime change, the next he’s abandoning it in favor or “winding down” the war. One hour he’s saying “you don’t do a ceasefire when you’re literally obliterating the other side,” the next he’s gladly accepting a ceasefire.

The war in Ukraine, which is Europe’s largest land war since 1945, has entered the peculiar phase familiar to historians and unbearable to those living through it — the phase in which catastrophe becomes routine. Loud air raid sirens still interrupt dinners in Kyiv. Young men still disappear into the trench lines of Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia. Russian drones still arrive nightly, buzzing in the dark like giant mechanical mosquitoes. As the rumble draws nearer, exhausted people rise from their beds and head into the narrow corridors of their apartments or into the basements of their houses. It happens night after night, year after year, while outside the region, the war increasingly competes with other crises for attention, just becoming a part of the atmospheric background of modern life.