An alarming time in which powder kegs abound.
The world feels dangerously on edge at this moment.
As Craig Singleton of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies observes, Japan’s new prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, has asserted that a Chinese attack or blockade of Taiwan would constitute a threat to Japan’s survival. Four days ago, China responded by having J-15 fighters from its Liaoning strike group lock radar on Japanese F-15s. Today, China has moved Liaoning group, along with joint Chinese and Russian bombers, into an area off Japan’s coast. Japan scrambled fighter jets to monitor the Russian and Chinese forces. South Korea has also scrambled fighter jets after Russian and Chinese military planes entered its airspace. Meanwhile, on Monday, a significant earthquake with a Richter reading of 7.5 struck the Pacific coast of Sanikru in northern Japan; CBS reports on fears of a subsequent even larger earthquake and deadly tsunamis (a smaller quake, measuring 5.7, occurred today).
Ukraine is conducting drone strikes in Moscow and western Russia. The Putin regime has been pulverizing Ukrainian cities and civilian infrastructure, including in Kyiv. As President Trump has tried to pressure Ukraine into a settlement, the rift between Washington and America’s European allies has widened.
A long-standing border conflict between Cambodia and Thailand appears to have exploded into full-scale war.
In Sudan, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) seized control of a key strategic petroleum facility, routing the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), some units of which fled into neighboring South Sudan, as have thousands of Sudanese civilians. The armed forces responded with a drone strike today, killing at least dozens of people, according to ABC News. The RSF has its roots in the Janjaweed jihadists who pursued genocide in Darfur at the turn of the century. The SAF is equally brutal. It is hard to estimate casualties accurately, but the current civil war, begun in 2023, has killed hundreds of thousands (as many as 150,000 in just the first year), displaced a staggering 15 million, and caused massive famine in addition to unspeakable atrocities.
Yemen’s civil war is intensifying. A separatist group, the Southern Transition Council (STC) has seized control of swaths of the country’s south and east; as the New York Times reports, it appears poised to move on the capital, Sanaa, which is controlled by the Iran-backed Houthis, rulers of Yemen’s northern half. (Yemen was two separate countries, North Yemen and South Yemen, from the late Sixties until they unified in 1990. The ongoing civil war began over a decade ago.) The STC separatists, who are backed by the United Arab Emirates, seek an independent Arab state in the south. Their current, aggressive campaign puts them in tension with the brittle coalition of Arab groups, known as the Presidential Leadership Council, supported by Saudi Arabia. The Saudis and Emiratis are oft-time allies, but there have been evident rifts, and Yemen is a flashpoint.
As President Trump explained this afternoon, U.S. forces seized a large oil tanker off Venezuela’s coast. It is believed to have been shipping Venezuelan oil to Cuba, under circumstances in which our government has imposed sanctions on such commerce. The president cryptically added that “other things are happening. So you’ll be seeing that later, and you’ll be talking about that later with some other people.” The administration has deployed a formidable force of warships, aircraft, and thousands of ground troops in the Caribbean, and there are reports that the USS Gerald R. Ford carrier group has moved into a position off Venezuela’s northern coast. On Tuesday, Trump reiterated that Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro’s “days are numbered.”
The most alarming of these crises is in Southeast Asia. But powder kegs abound.