On Monday, the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement did something a defense treaty is not usually built to do. Its members went to Tehran to talk. Saudi Defense Minister Prince Khalid bin Salman, Pakistan’s Field Marshal Asim Munir and Turkey’s intelligence chief Ibrahim Kalın met President Masoud Pezeshkian and Supreme National Security Council Secretary Mohsen Rezaei. […]

The post The Mecca pact goes to Tehran. Can it keep the region out of another war? appeared first on Asia Times.

Battlefield robots were once thought of as the stuff of science fiction. But the Ukraine war has put paid to that view, with uncrewed ground vehicles (UGVs) – or ground robots – taking on an increasingly visible role. In September 2026, Mykhailo Fedorov, the former defense minister of Ukraine – who is generally credited with […]

The post Could humanoid robots soon replace soldiers on the battlefield? appeared first on Asia Times.

Israelis turned out in numbers not seen in a generation, and handed both of their would-be prime ministers the same verdict: not enough. On the partial count this morning, neither Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloc nor Gadi Eisenkot’s reaches the 61 seats needed to govern. Both men have nonetheless claimed the night. Eisenkot told supporters the old […]

The post Israel’s inconclusive election reveals a sharply divided nation appeared first on Asia Times.

Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee released in July an interim staff report accusing South Korea of “discriminatory attacks on American-owned businesses.” Seoul’s “practices include coercive investigation tactics, overly burdensome regulatory requirements, and massive fines and penalties intended to punish American businesses and make it harder for them to effectively compete against Korean companies,” the […]

The post South Korea’s rich lobbying spree isn’t paying off in DC appeared first on Asia Times.

This article first appeared on Pacific Forum and is republished with kind permission. Read the original here. With so much media focus in recent months on the war in Iran, it’s no surprise that Under Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby’s speech in Manila received so little coverage. That means very few know what […]

The post Deeper India-Philippines ties boost US aims in South China Sea appeared first on Asia Times.

Vladimir Putin has a theory of victory in Ukraine. It’s not the Russian president’s first theory – that was a quick, dayslong campaign – nor his second or third, which involved different land offensives in the east that quickly petered out. Instead, Putin’s latest hypothesis is that the relentless bombing of Ukrainian cities will impose […]

The post Polling: scorched earth isn’t driving Ukrainians to sue for peace appeared first on Asia Times.

Russia is courting the Taliban with one hand and arming the Taliban’s neighbor with the other. Moscow was the first country to recognize the Taliban, a diplomatic coup it has since tried to turn to its advantage. Now it is rushing weapons and border equipment to Tajikistan to guard against threats from Afghan soil. The […]

The post Russia torn between wooing Taliban and protecting Central Asia appeared first on Asia Times.

Anthropic, developer of AI chatbot Claude, has filed its prospectus and is expected to go public on Wall Street in November at a valuation of up to US$2 trillion. That would make it the highest-valued initial public offering (IPO) ever, ahead of SpaceX’s $1.77 trillion listing in June. OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, is expected […]

The post Anthropic’s record $2tn IPO could bring global risks to a head appeared first on Asia Times.

A leader who stood up to US President Donald Trump just won an election in Latin America’s biggest country, reversing a trend of new right-wing governments in the region over the past two years. Incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, having narrowly lost to Flavio Bolsonaro in the first round of voting on October 5, […]

The post How Lula turned the tables on Brazil’s Trump-inspired right appeared first on Asia Times.

In 1996, Israel’s then-Prime Minister Simon Peres appeared to be on his way to victory in parliamentary elections that would keep him and his center-left Labor Party in power. On the key issue of peace, he had pledged to provide West Bank and Gaza Strip territory to the Palestinians for a sovereign state. The “land […]

The post Netanyahu hopes voters forget October 7, 2023 appeared first on Asia Times.

On the eve of a party plenum that has purged 45 of 376 members, China faces its most pressing question: is the model it has adopted right for its historical phase? Beijing is uncertain. Domestically, it faces many problems, and foreign examples offer little reassurance. If the US offers a positive model, Beijing might reconsider, […]

The post The right cat for China? appeared first on Asia Times.

Three weeks ago, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s political obituaries had all been written. The far-right presidential candidate, Flavio Bolsonaro, son of the jailed former President Jair Bolsonaro, had come out of the first round of the presidential election with a lead that looked impossible to overcome. At 80 years old, Lula seemed […]

The post Why Lula’s ‘miracle’ win matters well beyond Brazil appeared first on Asia Times.

Japan’s debate over nuclear-powered submarines is gaining momentum, but political deliberation should not be mistaken for a done deal. As Tokyo prepares to revise its three principal national security documents by the end of 2026, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi has opened the door to a long-politically sensitive capability. On October 14, she told parliament that […]

The post Does Japan need nuclear subs? The debate is bigger than China appeared first on Asia Times.

On October 22, the US Treasury proposed adding biotechnology to the list of Chinese sectors that American capital may no longer finance. A week earlier, China’s Ministry of Commerce had proposed barring the foreign sale of five biomedical technologies, including cell and gene therapy platforms. Two governments that agree on almost nothing moved in the […]

The post The US-China biotech trade war that isn’t appeared first on Asia Times.

Two years ago, every argument about AI was about quality. The machines hallucinated court cases, absorbed biases from their training data, misspelled words in their own images, drew hands with six fingers, and couldn’t count the letters in strawberry. The confident claims that biases and hallucination errors were inherent to machines already sound quaint. Those […]

The post From slop to non-slop: The new big AI theme is quantity appeared first on Asia Times.

On October 20, 2026, a week before Israel’s elections, dozens of men were detained on suspicion of evading the draft – arrests that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called “unacceptable.” The young men attend ultra-Orthodox, or Haredi, religious schools, whose students were long exempt from the military service mandatory for most Israelis. A 2024 court ruling […]

The post Why ultra‑Orthodox parties will decide Netanyahu’s electoral fate appeared first on Asia Times.

Recent midlife upgrades to China’s older surface combatants highlight an ongoing debate over whether preserving naval fleet mass provides an operational edge over purely qualitative technological modernization in naval warfare. This month, the South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported that the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) has carried out an extensive midlife refit of its […]

The post China bets refitted destroyers can hold line in US numbers race appeared first on Asia Times.

Russian hostile activity costs the UK at least £2 billion (US$2.7 billion) annually, according to a recent report by Scottish MP Graeme Downie, who has called on the government to measure what these actions cost Britain. But this figure is just the baseline. In reality, a profound shift in Moscow’s approach to sabotage means the […]

The post Russian espionage evolves from elite spies to gig operatives appeared first on Asia Times.

TOKYO – When Chinese stocks lose a South Korea-sized sum in five months, Beijing has a problem. The US$2.4 trillion plunge in market value since May sits between Korea’s $2.25 trillion GDP and Canada’s $2.49 trillion. Many factors could explain Chinese shares entering bear market territory, but a major one is a protracted slump in […]

The post Why China’s AI triumphs aren’t saving its flagging stock market appeared first on Asia Times.

Iran’s rapid post-strike recovery of its Eagle 44 airbase proves that hardened mountain shelters remain a decisive shield against precision firepower, transforming how inferior air forces survive and deter superior adversaries. This month, The War Zone (TWZ) reported that Iran is actively repairing and expanding its subterranean Eagle 44 airbase in Hormozgan province, despite having […]

The post Iran’s mountain shelters offer Taiwan a China survival playbook appeared first on Asia Times.