“US Navy warships have twice been called upon to defend Israel from massive Iranian ballistic missile attacks and have used SM-3 interceptors to defeat the incoming threats.
The Standard Missile-3 (SM-3), a key air-defense interceptor made by RTX and, for some variants, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, was first used in combat in April to shield Israel from an unprecedented attack, and then it saw combat again in October when Iran attacked a second time. The weapons, which can cost between $10 million and almost $30 million depending on the variant, were fired by American destroyers in the area.
Navy leadership has said that it needs many more SM-3s to counter threats in the Pacific, like China, but it’s burning through these weapons in conflicts in the Middle East without sufficient plans to replace them.
Archer Macy, a retired Navy admiral, told Business Insider that the SM-3 is particularly important in a fight with China because the interceptor is designed to counter China’s “apparent preference for long-range theater weapons.””
Sanctions against Russia made their ability to wage war weaker than it otherwise would have been, but only had limited effectiveness due to poor execution and other powers not going along.
The U.S. needs to pull together its different resources in different domains to successfully compete against China, including not just militarily, but taking an active diplomatic and economic role in Asia.
“Ukraine has said it will not extend the transit agreement with Russian state-owned Gazprom in order to deprive Russia of profits that Kyiv says help to finance the war against it.
Moscow’s suspension of gas for Austria, the main receiver of gas via Ukraine, means Russia will now only supply significant gas volumes to Hungary and Slovakia, in Hungary’s case via a pipeline running mostly through Turkey. In contrast, Russia met 40% of the European Union’s gas needs before Moscow’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.”
“Stefanik is a onetime moderate Republican who has transformed herself into a pro-Trump loyalist. She stood up for Trump relentlessly when he faced impeachment.”
“China has published baselines for a contested shoal in the South China Sea it had seized from the Philippines, a move that’s likely to increase tensions over overlapping territorial claims.
The Foreign Ministry on Sunday posted online geographic coordinates for the baselines around Scarborough Shoal. A nation’s territorial waters and exclusive economic zone are typically defined as the distance from the baselines.
Both China and the Philippines claim Scarborough Shoal and other outcroppings in the South China Sea. China seized the shoal, which lies west of the main Philippine island of Luzon, in 2012 and has since restricted access to Filipino fishermen there. A 2016 ruling by an international arbitration court found that most Chinese claims in the South China Sea were invalid but Beijing refuses to abide by it.
Ships from China and the Philippines have collided several times as part of increased confrontations, and the Chinese coast guard has blasted Philippine vessels with water cannons.
China’s move came two days after Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. signed two laws demarcating the government’s claims in the disputed waters.”
“The resulting pier mission did not go well.
It involved 1,000 U.S. troops, delivered only a fraction of the promised aid at a cost of nearly $230 million, and was from the start beset by bad luck and miscalculations, including fire, bad weather and dangers on shore from the fighting between Israel and Hamas.”
…
“The U.S. military aimed to ramp up to as many as 150 trucks a day of aid coming off the pier.
But because the pier was only operational for a total of 20 days, the military says it moved a total of only 19.4 million pounds of aid into Gaza. That would be about 480 trucks of aid delivered in total from the pier, based on estimates by the World Food Programme from earlier this year of weight carried by a truck.
The United Nations says about 500 truckloads of aid are needed daily to address the needs of Palestinians in Gaza.
Just days after the first shipments of aid rolled off the pier in Gaza, crowds overwhelmed trucks and took some of it.
Israel’s killings of seven World Central Kitchen workers in April and its use of an area near the pier as it staged a hostage rescue recovery mission in June also dented the confidence of aid organizations, on whom the U.S. was relying to carry the supplies from the shore and distribute to residents.
A senior U.S. defense official acknowledged that aid delivery “proved to be perhaps more challenging than the planners anticipated.”
One former official said Kurilla had raised distribution as a concern early on.
“General Kurilla was also very clear about that: ‘I can do my piece of this, and I can do distribution if you task me to do it,'” the former official said.
“But that was explicitly scoped out of what the task was. And so we were reliant on these international organizations.”
Current and former U.S. officials told Reuters that the United Nations and aid organizations themselves were always cool to the pier.
At a closed-door meeting of U.S. officials and aid organizations in Cyprus in March, Sigrid Kaag, the U.N. humanitarian and reconstruction coordinator for Gaza, offered tacit support for Biden’s pier project.
But Kaag stressed the UN preference was for “land, land, land,” according to two people familiar with the discussions.
The United Nations declined to comment on the meeting. It referred to a briefing on Monday where a spokesperson for the organization said that the U.N. appreciated every way of getting aid into Gaza, including the pier, but more access through land routes is needed.
The underlying concern for aid organizations was that Biden, under pressure from fellow Democrats over Israel’s killing of civilians in Gaza, was pushing a solution that would at best be a temporary fix and at worst would take pressure off Netanyahu’s government to open up land routes into Gaza.
Dave Harden, a former USAID mission director to the West Bank and Gaza, described the pier project as “humanitarian theater.”
“It did relieve the pressure, unfortunately, on having the (land border) crossings work more effectively.””
https://www.reuters.com/world/how-bidens-gaza-pier-project-unraveled-2024-07-25/
“Qatar agreed in recent weeks to kick Hamas out of its country following a request from the US to do so, capping off months of failed attempts to try to get the militant group – whose top leaders reside in the Qatari capital of Doha – to accept a ceasefire and hostage release deal in the Israel-Hamas war, US and Qatari sources told CNN.
With efforts to pause the war – which has been a top priority for President Joe Biden – firmly stalled, US officials informed their Qatari counterparts about two weeks ago that they must stop giving Hamas refuge in their capital; Qatar agreed and gave Hamas notice about a week ago, sources said.
“Hamas is a terrorist group that has killed Americans and continues to hold Americans hostage,” a senior administration official told CNN. “After rejecting repeated proposals to release hostages, its leaders should no longer be welcome in the capitals of any American partner.”
Throughout the course of the war and negotiations to bring the hostages home, US officials have asked Qatar to use the threat of expulsion as leverage in their talks with Hamas. The final impetus for Qatar agreeing to kick Hamas out came recently after the death of American-Israeli hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin and Hamas’ rejection of yet another ceasefire proposal.
Qatar has been a major player in efforts over the past year to try to secure a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war, in no small part because senior members of the militant group are based in Doha. Major negotiations have taken place in the Qatari capital for that reason.
Exactly when Hamas operatives would be exiled out of Qatar – and where they would go – are unclear.”
“Figures close to the Trump campaign like Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk have openly endorsed the view that Crimea is rightfully Russian.
Trump overturned decades of US policy and international consensus by recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which he has described as a snap decision made after a quick history lesson from his ambassador to Israel and his son-in-law Jared Kushner. He did the same for Morocco’s claims over the disputed region of Western Sahara, in return for Morocco recognizing Israel. (In fairness, the Biden administration hasn’t reversed either of these moves — once the taboo is broken, it’s hard to reestablish.)”