分类： politics

China’s Ministry of Public Security confirmed on Wednesday that a high-profile key figure connected to a large transnational criminal network focused on illegal gambling and telecom fraud has been successfully sent back to Chinese territory from Cambodia. The suspect, identified as Li Xiong, is considered a core member of the operation that victimized countless individuals through illegal financial scams and unregulated gambling activities, according to official statements.

This repatriation marks a significant milestone in China’s ongoing coordinated crackdown on cross-border organized crime, which has increasingly targeted criminal syndicates that operate across international borders to avoid domestic law enforcement. Criminal networks involved in transnational fraud and illegal gambling have long posed major threats to public safety and financial stability both in China and neighboring Southeast Asian nations, prompting bilateral law enforcement cooperation to dismantle these operations and bring fugitive suspects to justice.

The handover of Li Xiong underscores the growing collaborative relationship between Chinese and Cambodian law enforcement agencies in addressing shared transnational security challenges. For years, these criminal syndicates have exploited gaps in cross-border regulation to run large-scale scams that steal billions of yuan from Chinese residents and global victims annually, making coordinated repatriation efforts a critical component of regional anti-crime initiatives.

This operation aligns with China’s broader national strategy to combat transnational telecommunications fraud, online gambling, and other cross-border criminal activities that harm public interests. Chinese law enforcement officials have repeatedly emphasized that the country will continue to work with international partners to track down fugitive criminal suspects operating overseas, ensuring that no offenders can evade justice by fleeing beyond national borders.

One month into the military conflict launched by the United States and Israel against Iran, the two nations have yet to articulate a clear, coherent justification for their offensive, outline measurable strategic objectives, or lay out a viable exit strategy—even as they continue to claim steady military progress on the battlefield. What was supposed to be a quick, decisive campaign has instead dragged the entire Middle East into an avoidable, open-ended confrontation, after Iran mounted a far stronger coordinated response than Washington and Tel Aviv ever anticipated.

When former U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu greenlit the offensive, they fundamentally misjudged both the ideological cohesion of Iran’s ruling system and its decades-built defensive capacity. They never expected Tehran to respond with a level of preparedness unmatched in the regime’s modern history: launching coordinated strikes against U.S. military installations across the Persian Gulf, dealing heavy blows to Israeli civilian and military infrastructure, and partially or fully closing the Strait of Hormuz—triggering global oil and gas shortages that have already sent shockwaves through the world economy.

Driven by an overreliance on overwhelming military superiority, the U.S. and Israeli leadership bet that air and sea power would force Iran’s Islamic government to surrender quickly, clearing the way for a pro-Western regime change led by the Iranian people. That outcome has not materialized, and now a clear military victory grows more out of reach by the day. For Trump, the only viable path forward is a sharp pivot to diplomacy—and pressure on Netanyahu to follow suit.

### The Roots of Iran’s Unexpected Resilience

Before the outbreak of war, Iran’s ruling regime faced steep headwinds: intense domestic pressure and widespread international condemnation following its violent crackdown on mass public protests that left thousands of Iranians dead. It was also reeling from Israel’s systematic weakening of its key regional proxies, particularly Hamas and Hezbollah, and the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s long-standing allied regime in Syria.

Even as Tehran remained distrustful of Trump’s administration, it had agreed to re-enter negotiations over its contentious nuclear program, with a widely reported breakthrough on the horizon. Omani mediators announced in late February that a final deal was within reach, before the U.S.-Israeli offensive derailed the process. Far from crippling the regime, the unprovoked invasion gave Iran’s government an opening to showcase the defensive resilience it had spent 40 years building.

Iran’s governing, security, and command structures were explicitly designed to withstand the loss of top leaders and commanders. The regime proved this endurance during the 1980s, when it survived internal dissent, an eight-year full-scale war with Iraq, decades of U.S. containment, and open hostility from most of its regional neighbors. It has outlasted widespread public discontent, theocratic governance frictions, and repeated policy failures, thanks to three core structural strengths: deep ideological commitment to revolutionary Islamism among Iran’s large Shia population, a rare combination of ideological rigidity and pragmatic policy flexibility, and a deeply entrenched, dedicated security, intelligence, and administrative bureaucracy whose own survival is tied directly to the regime’s survival.

While many Iranians have long pushed for political change at home, the vast majority remain deeply proud of their nation’s millennia-old cultural and civilizational heritage, and uniformly reject foreign aggression, occupation, and humiliation of their country. This nationalist sentiment is what has driven widespread popular rallying around the regime, a pattern that repeats throughout Iranian history when the nation faces external attack.

### A War of Attrition No Side Can Win Quickly

Fully aware it cannot match the conventional firepower of the U.S. and Israeli militaries, Iran has deployed a creative, asymmetrical “mosaic defense” strategy tailored to exploit the weaknesses of its adversaries. This approach includes targeting vulnerable U.S. bases across the Persian Gulf with precision drones and missiles, and decentralizing command structures to ensure leadership can be quickly replaced if top officials are killed in strikes.

Tehran has also received critical external support: Russia and China have supplied dual-use technologies and maintained oil import revenues to keep Iran’s economy functioning, and multiple intelligence reports confirm Russia has shared real-time intelligence on the location of U.S. assets in the region. Even with their capabilities degraded, Iran’s regional proxies remain active and capable of opening new fronts: Hezbollah has launched sustained attacks on northern Israel, while Yemeni Houthis have joined the conflict and are preparing to disrupt commercial shipping through the Red Sea.

Taken together, these factors add up to a clear reality: the Iranian government is committed to denying the U.S. and Israel any form of victory, at any cost. What began as a planned quick strike has devolved into a prolonged war of endurance with no clear military end in sight.

### Negotiated Settlement is the Only Path Forward

It remains impossible to predict how long all three parties will sustain the conflict, but current conditions have drastically narrowed the window for a diplomatic resolution. Iran has shown no willingness to surrender core demands, and the U.S. and Israel remain deeply divided over their end goals for the war.

For Trump, domestic political pressure may force a shift toward compromise: with war mounting economic and human costs, and his poll numbers sliding ahead of critical midterm elections, he may well settle for a deal that freezes Iran’s nuclear program and reopens the Strait of Hormuz to global shipping. Netanyahu, by contrast, remains unflinching in his maximalist goals: he is determined to destroy the Islamic government and permanently cripple Iran’s status as a regional power.

What has become increasingly clear after a month of fighting is that a military conclusion to the conflict is effectively impossible. The only sustainable path forward is a negotiated settlement. The responsibility to force Netanyahu into line and lead diplomatic efforts will fall to Trump, and many analysts already agree that no matter how the war ultimately ends, Iran has already emerged as the de facto winner in the conflict.

Against a backdrop of growing global instability triggered by the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, South Korea and Indonesia have committed to elevating their bilateral strategic partnership, announcing a sweeping set of agreements to deepen collaboration across defense manufacturing, advanced technology, and critical supply chains during a Wednesday summit in Seoul, South Korea’s presidential administration confirmed.

The high-level meeting brought together South Korean President Lee Jae Myung and Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto in the South Korean capital, where the two leaders put their signature to a joint communiqué outlining plans for expanded economic integration and continued joint work on major defense development initiatives. These collaborative projects span multiple high-priority defense sectors, including the co-development of fighter jets, training aircraft platforms, and advanced anti-tank missile systems.

Beyond defense cooperation, the two nations have also moved to strengthen coordination around energy, critical minerals, and key resource supply chains. President Lee emphasized that Indonesia has emerged as an irreplaceable partner for South Korea in securing stable energy supplies at a time when global energy markets face widespread disruption from the Middle East conflict. Indonesia serves as a critical source of natural gas and coal for South Korea’s energy network, and under the new agreement, South Korean importers will take delivery of approximately 820,000 tons of liquefied natural gas (LNG) from Indonesia this year alone. This volume of LNG is sufficient to operate all of South Korea’s gas-fired power generation facilities at full capacity for roughly 12 days, providing a substantial buffer against potential market volatility.

Both leaders also voiced their satisfaction with the progress of the KF-21 supersonic fighter jet program, South Korea’s flagship indigenous defense development project. Launched in 2015, the initiative has counted Indonesia as a core international partner from its earliest stages. Last week marked a major milestone for the program, with the first completed KF-21 aircraft officially rolled off the production line. Multiple industry reports indicate that South Korea has plans to export 16 of the completed fighter jets to Indonesia once full production scales up, cementing the long-term collaborative framework for the project.

NEW DELHI – Nearly three years after its originally scheduled launch, India has kicked off the world’s most extensive national population enumeration exercise, a sweeping data-gathering effort that stands to reshape everything from targeted social welfare programming to legislative representation across the South Asian nation.

The 2011 national census pegged India’s population at 1.21 billion. Updated demographic estimates now place the country’s total population above 1.4 billion, confirming India as the world’s most populous nation, a title held by China for decades. Planners initially scheduled the new enumeration for 2021, but public health risks from the COVID-19 pandemic and unforeseen logistical hurdles forced a multi-year postponement.

The massive counting effort is being rolled out in two distinct phases across India’s diverse 28 states and eight union territories. The first phase, which launched this week, will run through September, with field enumerators spending roughly four weeks in every local administrative area to document housing infrastructure, residential conditions and access to basic public utilities. Unlike past paper-only censuses, this year’s exercise combines traditional door-to-door in-person surveys with a new digital self-reporting option: residents can submit their information via a multilingual smartphone app that integrates satellite mapping technology to improve geographic accuracy.

The second phase, scheduled to run from September through the first of April next year, will collect far more granular demographic and socioeconomic data, including religious affiliation and caste identity. In total, more than 3 million trained government workers will be deployed across the country over the 12-month enumeration period. For comparison, the 2011 census relied on roughly 2.7 million enumerators to collect data from more than 240 million households nationwide.

A defining and highly anticipated feature of this new census is the expanded caste enumeration planned for the second phase. For the first time in independent India’s history, the government will attempt to count all caste groups across the country, going far beyond the limited enumeration of historically marginalized communities that has been standard since 1951.

Caste, an ancient hierarchical social system deeply rooted across much of Indian society, particularly within Hindu communities, continues to shape social standing, access to education, economic opportunity, and eligibility for government-mandated affirmative action programs today. Hundreds of distinct caste groups are defined by traditional occupation and socioeconomic status across the country, but modern India has never held a full national enumeration of these groups, leaving policymakers working with outdated, incomplete data. The last full national caste count conducted through a census took place in 1931, when India was still under British colonial rule. Since India’s first post-independence census in 1951, national enumerators have only counted Dalits (Scheduled Castes) and Adivasis (Scheduled Tribes), the two most disadvantaged groups that are legally entitled to targeted government welfare and reservation benefits.

Successive national governments have resisted calls for a full caste enumeration for decades, with opponents arguing that a full count could exacerbate existing social divisions and fuel inter-caste unrest. But growing grassroots pressure from lower-caste advocacy groups pushed the current government to approve the expanded count for the 2021 (now 2024) enumeration.

Beyond caste data, the aggregate population numbers collected through the census carry far-reaching implications for India’s political landscape. Census data forms the foundational dataset for distributing national funding for welfare programs and designing a wide range of public policies, from infrastructure development to public health planning. It will also almost certainly trigger a nationwide redrawing of India’s legislative electoral map, as the number of seats allocated to each state in the lower house of Parliament and state legislative assemblies is adjusted to reflect recent population growth. This redistricting will intersect with a 2023 national law that reserves one-third of all legislative seats for women, meaning any expansion in total seats will directly increase the number of positions reserved for female representatives across all levels of government.

The ongoing US-Israeli military campaign against Iran has opened a deep and widening breach between the United States and its longstanding NATO allies, with multiple member states rejecting American requests for military access, basing rights, and defensive assets even as the Trump administration casts new uncertainty over its commitment to the alliance’s core mutual defense pledge.

Multiple European capitals have now publicly pushed back against Washington’s demands. Spain has barred US military aircraft bound for Iran-related operations from entering its airspace, according to official statements. Leading Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera also reported that Rome has denied landing access to US military aircraft en route to the Middle East at a key Sicilian base, a striking move given Italy’s right-leaning government under Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, traditionally aligned with US foreign policy goals.

Poland, a central European nation that has stood as one of Washington’s most reliable NATO allies since the end of the Cold War and where former President Trump retains broad popular support amid the country’s powerful right-wing populist movement, also issued a public denial on Tuesday. Warsaw rejected claims it had agreed to redeploy its Patriot air defense systems to the Middle East, confirming it turned down an informal request from the Trump administration for the assets.

While Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, a leftist leader, publicly opposed the US-Israeli war from its earliest days, the scope of refusals spanning ideologically diverse governments makes clear that Washington’s diplomatic isolation on the conflict is accelerating.

Trump amplified transatlantic tensions in a post on the social platform X on Tuesday, calling out major European powers for their refusal to back the campaign. He revealed that France, which has long maintained an independent foreign policy agenda in the Middle East, has also denied US aircraft carrying military equipment to Israel permission to transit its airspace. He also publicly criticized the United Kingdom for declining to join the war effort, ending his post with a blunt warning: “The USA will remember !!!”

The combative posture has been echoed across the Trump administration. When asked about growing alliance tensions, US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth declined to explicitly commit to NATO’s Article 5, the foundational clause that states an armed attack against one member is considered an attack against all, instead deferring any judgment on the commitment to Trump.

Hegseth defended the US-led campaign against Iran, arguing the operation was launched “on behalf of the free world” and allies whose missile capabilities faced threats from Tehran. “When we ask for additional assistance or simple access, basing and overflight, we get questions or roadblocks or hesitations,” he told reporters.

But that framing stands in stark contrast to how NATO allies view the conflict, according to Ian Lesser, vice president of the German Marshall Fund in the United States, who spoke to Middle East Eye. “There is a basic concern that Europe is being asked to contribute to and approve of operations they had no role in shaping and a strategy they had no role in shaping,” Lesser explained.

“This war is both unpopular among the public and, in some cases, the elite, and it could take a direction that European allies can’t shape. That’s not a good recipe for cooperation,” he added.

Tehran has responded to the US-Israeli offensive with a large-scale retaliatory campaign, launching thousands of missiles and drones targeting Israel and Arab Gulf states. While Iranian strikes on Gulf territory have specifically targeted US military bases with precision, Tehran has also attacked civilian infrastructure and energy facilities in the region in retaliation for similar Israeli strikes on Iranian targets.

Washington has pushed Gulf Arab states to join the offensive against Iran, and Middle East Eye was first to report that the US has secured access to King Fahd Air Base in western Saudi Arabia after Iranian drone and missile strikes damaged facilities at US bases closer to the Gulf. To bolster its Iran deployment, the Trump administration has also reallocated critical military resources, including marines and air defense systems, away from East Asia.

For NATO allies, the conflict has already carried a steep economic cost. After Iran seized effective control of the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s most critical energy chokepoint, and implemented a new system for approving safe passage for vessels, global oil and gas prices have surged, hitting European economies particularly hard. Roughly 20 percent of the world’s total energy supplies pass through the strait, and NATO countries, which have already cut most imports of Russian energy following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, are facing unprecedented energy market volatility as a result.

Iran’s consolidation of control over the strait has emerged as a major strategic embarrassment for the Trump administration, which has built its global superpower legitimacy on two core foundations: unwavering commitment to the NATO alliance, and guaranteed security for global energy flows out of the Persian Gulf. Tehran is now working to establish an alternative transit framework that prioritizes non-Western aligned vessels, including ships flagged by neutral countries like Pakistan and cargo carrying energy priced in Chinese renminbi instead of the US dollar, a direct challenge to Washington’s global financial and energy dominance.

Trump has dramatically shifted his public posture on the crisis in recent days, moving from threatening to “obliterate” Iran’s entire energy grid if Tehran refused to surrender control of the strait, to stepping back and shifting responsibility to US allies. In a social media post directed at Washington’s uncooperative allies including the UK on Tuesday, Trump wrote: “Just TAKE IT. You’ll have to start learning how to fight for yourself, the USA won’t be there to help you anymore, just like you weren’t there for us. Iran has been, essentially, decimated. The hard part is done. Go get your own oil!”

Analysts warn Trump’s threat to cede control of the strait to Iran is self-defeating if he eventually seeks NATO support to reimpose Western oversight of the waterway. If Tehran retains de facto control over the strait, Lesser said European allies will be forced to reconsider their entire regional security framework, and have little incentive to back the US war effort in the meantime.

“Why would Nato countries make themselves more exposed by assisting the US war on Iran? They can probably imagine this going in a direction that allows certain traffic through Hormuz, but not all,” Lesser said, adding that European capitals also do not want to be publicly associated with a war that is deeply unpopular at home.

In a sign that Tehran is actively encouraging NATO allies to break with Washington, Iran has publicly signaled it will reward countries that refuse to back the US campaign. The Iranian embassy in Spain said Thursday that Tehran would accommodate any request from Madrid for Spanish-flagged vessels to receive guaranteed safe passage through the strait. While Spain’s commercial shipping fleet is relatively small, the gesture carries clear symbolic weight for transatlantic relations.

WASHINGTON — Five weeks into active hostilities between the United States and Iran, the Biden administration (correction: current Trump administration) has moved to frame skyrocketing national gasoline prices as a temporary side effect of the conflict, while top defense officials have refused to take any military option — including a full ground deployment of U.S. troops — off the table.

In his first public briefing at the Pentagon since mid-March, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters Tuesday that the timeline for concluding combat operations and achieving U.S. war aims rests solely with President Donald Trump, warning that the coming days will prove decisive for the conflict. He also confirmed that diplomatic negotiations between the two nations remain active, and suggested the talks have gained momentum in recent days.

The prolonged conflict has already sent shockwaves through both global and domestic U.S. economies, with new data from automotive group AAA showing the national average price for regular gasoline in the U.S. has crossed the $4 per gallon threshold for the first time in four years. Photographic documentation from a Providence, Rhode Island gas station taken March 31, 2026 shows regular fuel priced at $3.89 per gallon, just shy of the national benchmark.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt pushed back against growing public frustration over fuel costs in an official statement, arguing that once the administration’s Operation Epic Fury concludes, gas prices will fall sharply back to the multi-year lows U.S. drivers saw before the current market disruption. She added that President Trump remains dedicated to expanding American energy production to achieve long-term energy dominance, cut household costs, and put more disposable income back into the budgets of working American families.

Within hours of the White House’s statement, Iran’s parliamentary speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf seized on the price surge to criticize U.S. policy, sharing a link to a U.S. news report on soaring gas prices to the social platform X with the caption: “Sad, but this is what happens when your leaders put others ahead of hard-working and ordinary Americans.”

The primary driver of the global energy price spike is Iran’s ongoing blockade of commercial and military vessels from the U.S. and its allies at the Strait of Hormuz, a critical chokepoint that carries a large share of the world’s petroleum and liquefied natural gas exports. As of 12:45 p.m. Eastern Time Tuesday, Brent crude, the global benchmark for oil pricing, was trading at just over $119 per barrel. Open source data from MarineTraffic and United Nations estimates show between 2,000 and 3,000 cargo vessels and oil tankers, carrying roughly 20,000 crew members, remain stranded in the Persian Gulf due to the blockade.

President Trump has claimed in recent public comments that Iran has agreed to allow a small number of third-party oil tankers to pass through the strait, first saying eight to 10 Pakistani tankers would be permitted during a cabinet meeting Thursday, then raising that number to 20 during comments Sunday. But data from the Joint Maritime Information Center contradicts those claims, showing only four large, location-transmitting tankers crossed the strait on Friday and Saturday combined.

When asked about potential ground operations, Hegseth said the administration would not foreclose any military response to Iranian aggression, but declined to share specific operational details during his public briefing. “You can’t fight and win a war if you tell your adversary what you are willing to do, or what you are not willing to do — to include boots on the ground,” Hegseth said. “Our adversary right now thinks there are 15 different ways we could come at them with boots on the ground. And guess what? There are. So if we needed to, we could execute those options on behalf of the president of the United States and this department, or maybe we don’t have to use them at all. Maybe negotiations work.”

Trump echoed Hegseth’s comments on diplomatic progress during remarks to reporters aboard Air Force One Sunday, saying talks with Iran are ongoing both directly and indirectly, and that the discussions are “very good.” “We’re doing extremely well,” the president said. “But you never know with Iran because we negotiate with them, and then we always have to blow ‘em up.”

The president has repeatedly issued public threats to bomb Iran’s critical energy infrastructure, and has set a self-imposed deadline of April 6 for Iran to meet all U.S. demands before launching new strikes. On Monday night, Trump shared video of a recent U.S. strike on an Iranian ammunition depot in the central province of Isfahan to his Truth Social platform. But Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baqaei denied any diplomatic talks are taking place with the U.S., according to Iranian state news outlet Tasmin News Agency.

U.S. military buildup in the region continues: U.S. Central Command confirmed that up to 3,500 U.S. Marines and sailors arrived in the Persian Gulf region Saturday, bringing total U.S. troop levels in the area to roughly 50,000 — an increase of 10,000 from the standard peacetime deployment of 40,000. Ghalibaf warned Sunday that any U.S. ground offensive into Iran would be met with “severe punishment,” per Iranian state media. For context, the 2003 U.S. ground invasion of Iraq saw more than 300,000 American troops deployed to the region, according to historical archives from the Council on Foreign Relations.