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[Excerpt from essay by Daniel Byman, professor in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and Director of the Warfare, Irregular Threats, and Terrorism Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.]

Twenty-five years ago, members of the jihadi group al-Qaeda hijacked four American airplanes, flying two of them into the World Trade Center towers in New York City and one into the Pentagon, in Washington, D.C. Passengers attempted to seize control of the fourth plane, and it crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, killing everyone aboard. The hijackers killed 2,977 people in total—by far the deadliest single terrorist attack in history. To many Americans, the events of September 11, 2001, seemed to come out of nowhere. Few had even heard of al-Qaeda before the attacks. Yet by September 12, the United States had plunged into what President George W. Bush called “a war against terrorism,” a fight that would persist for decades, ensnare multiple jihadi groups, and extend to all corners of the earth.

The United States had many setbacks in this war. The ways in which it attempted to prevent another 9/11, or an even larger-scale attack, entailed massive, often inefficient investments as well as troop losses. Some of its efforts, such as the full-scale wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, were brutally destructive. The 2003 invasion of Iraq, in particular, drove a surge in jihadi recruitment. In the years since 2001, various new jihadi groups—some of them connected to al-Qaeda, some opposed to it—have set up shop in the Middle East and across East and West Africa, where they have fueled bloody civil wars, shattered local communities, and launched terrorist attacks both in the region and outside it.

[Excerpt from essay by Amos Harel, Defense Analyst for Haaretz and the author of Anatomy of a Failure: The Road to October 7, which will be published in English in 2027.]

As he prepares to face Israeli voters next month after three years of incessant war, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has formulated a new strategy. Ignoring the huge costs in blood and treasure, let alone in support for Israel in the United States and elsewhere, he now publicly and explicitly supports waging wars without end. As a lesson of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, massacre, he asserts that Israel needs to take preemptive military action against every potential security threat it faces, regardless of the consequences. This has left many wondering how much of this hard-line approach might change if Gadi Eisenkot, the veteran military official who is running ahead of Netanyahu in the polls, manages to defeat him.

Thus far, Eisenkot, a classic centrist, has been blunt and sometimes caustic in making the case against the prime minister. But apart from vague statements about ending the longest war in Israeli history, he has generally avoided going into detail about his own national security strategy. On some issues, such as dealing with Hamas in Gaza, he has sounded more hawkish than Netanyahu. And when he is asked about the future of the conflict with the Palestinians—Israel’s most politically explosive issue—he has been extremely careful to avoid binding commitments. In a rare statement on such matters in August, Eisenkot said he was opposed to a Palestinian state, endorsing what is by now a consensus position across Israel’s political center and even parts of the center left as well as the right.

[Excerpt from essay by Adam Y. Liu, Assistant Professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore.]

In July, the Pew Research Center found that for the first time in roughly two decades of global polling, the world now views China more favorably than the United States. The sentiment was not universal, but in 25 of the 36 countries surveyed this year, the percentage of respondents who gave favorable marks to China exceeded that for the United States, including several close U.S. allies. Some analysts have taken these findings as confirmation that the golden era of American soft power is over and China is ascendant. According to them, Trump’s policies on tariffs, aid, and allies have eroded the United States’ standing, opening the door for people across the world to switch their allegiance to China.

But this interpretation, convenient as it may be, deserves more scrutiny. A closer examination of the data reveals that although global opinion of the United States has indeed plummeted and opinion of China has risen since 2022, most of the world still prefers the United States as an economic partner—including most of the countries that now view China in a more positive light. This is a critical distinction, since economic partnerships and interests tend to drive national policies. Indeed, it signals something more nuanced is happening than simply the end of American hegemony and an imminent age of Chinese global supremacy.

[Excerpt from essay by Chad P. Bown, Reginald Jones Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and a co-author of How to Win a Trade War: An Optimistic Guide to an Anxious Global Economy.]

In late October 2025, the automaker Honda had to indefinitely shutter a Mexican plant that manufactures its SUVs, thanks to an unanticipated shortage of parts. More than 2,000 miles away, in Canada, it had to slash the production of its popular Civic model in half. The shortage panicked companies across North America. Stellantis created a war room to monitor the availability of critical components, and Ford began to track the run-out dates for its inventory. Hundreds of thousands of Mexican and Canadian jobs were at risk if the impact of the parts shortage spread across supply chains that were highly integrated with those in the United States. Honda would later report production-related losses of roughly $300 million from the incident.

The cause was a simple but deliberate Chinese policy. Beijing had suddenly banned global exports of semiconductors made by Nexperia, a little-known Chinese company whose parts go into airbags, braking systems, and other automotive essentials. Chinese President Xi Jinping made the move as retaliation against actions taken by the Dutch government and by U.S. President Donald Trump. Xi reversed the throttling of Nexperia’s exports only when Trump agreed, later that month, to delay the implementation of a new U.S. export control regime.

[Excerpt from essay by Jesse Marks, Research Scholar at the Center for Arab and Islamic Studies at the Australian National University, and Nicholas Lyall, senior Researcher and Policy Analyst at Trends Group in Abu Dhabi.]

In early April, a convoy of 299 Iraqi fuel tankers crossed into Syria on its way to the Mediterranean port of Baniyas, one of the few remaining paths to international markets amid the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. It was the first time Iraqi oil had crossed through Syria legally since 2003, when the U.S. invasion of Iraq effectively shuttered the cross-border flow of oil from Iraq to Syria. In late April, Iraq expanded the route, reopening its northern Rabia crossing with Syria, a crossing that had been closed for more than a decade during Syria’s civil war. Between April and late July, more than 2.1 million metric tons of Iraqi fuel moved to the Syrian coast.

Before Syria’s civil war began, in 2011, the country had served as a commercial crossroads between Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, and the Mediterranean, connecting Gulf states to European markets. But after 2011, Syria turned into a different kind of transit hub. Trade became dominated by Iranian weapons and logistics support on their way to Hezbollah in Lebanon, as well as fuel, narcotics, and other illicit trade that filled the coffers of the country’s dictator, Bashar al-Assad, but provided few benefits for Syrians.