The new “America First” arms‑transfer strategy is not a bureaucratic tweak. It is a fundamental reordering of how Washington decides who gets weapons, when, and why. By ranking partners based on defense spending, geographic utility, and economic benefit to the U.S., the administration has replaced alliance‑building with transactional filtering.
The newest research from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York confirms what every serious economist already knew: tariffs function as a domestic tax, and American households and businesses pay almost all of it. Between early 2024 and late 2025, roughly 90% of tariff costs stayed inside the United States, mirroring the pattern from the 2018–2019 trade war.
The global economy is now fully multipolar in production and consumption, yet its financial backbone still runs through a single national currency. That mismatch — a 21st‑century world running on 1944 plumbing — is what BRICS is trying to correct. Not by dethroning the dollar with the renminbi, but by building a neutral clearing system that avoids the trap of replacing one hegemon with another.
The revival of the India–Arab Foreign Ministers’ Meeting after a decade isn’t just a diplomatic reunion. It’s a sign that both India and the Arab world are trying to position themselves in a world where the Western-led order is cracking from within — and where Washington’s reliability can no longer be assumed.
China is no longer treating Israeli covert operations inside Iran as a distant regional issue. For Beijing, the recent wave of sabotage, assassinations, and radar penetrations has revealed a new model of warfare — one that blends cyber infiltration, internal disruption, and precision strikes. And because Iran sits at the heart of China’s Belt and Road energy corridor, Beijing now sees Iranian vulnerability as Chinese vulnerability.
In early 2026, the structural logic of regional hegemony has moved from theoretical debate to high-stakes reality. While major powers (the U.S., China, and Russia) are doubling down on their geographic cores, the “exhaustion of expansion” is becoming the defining theme of the year.
The end of New START has opened the door to unconstrained U.S.–Russia nuclear expansion just as China accelerates its own buildup, creating a volatile three‑way arms race with no verification, no guardrails, and rising risks of miscalculation.
The collapse of New START and China’s rapid nuclear buildup have ended decades of structured restraint, creating an unstable three‑way arms race with no treaties, no verification, and rising risks of miscalculation in a multipolar nuclear world.
Muscat’s talks revealed a fragile diplomatic opening overshadowed by military brinkmanship, deep mistrust, and clashing agendas, leaving the US‑Iran channel open but far from any path toward a real nuclear agreement.
Middle powers are accelerating diversification and flexible coalitions as U.S. unilateralism erodes old alliances, pushing Brazil, Canada, and South Korea to pursue cooperative multipolarity and institutional reform to preserve autonomy in a rapidly shifting global order.
The global AI landscape in 2026 is defined by a massive divergence in how the world’s three largest tech powers deploy capital and enforce rules. As the market moves toward an estimated $1.81 trillion to $2.4 trillion valuation by 2030, Washington, Beijing, and New Delhi have institutionalized three distinct “stacks” for the future of intelligence.
This analysis examines how a trilateral, sea-based missile defense architecture between the U.S., Japan, and South Korea could neutralize the evolving North Korean Submarine-Launched Ballistic Missile (SLBM) threat. By moving away from the “sole defender” model depicted in the 2025 thriller A House of Dynamite, the alliance can leverage forward-deployed Aegis assets to create a layered, multi-azimuth defense that buys critical decision-making time.
