分类： politics

THE HAGUE (Rebuilt Report) — In a video press briefing from the court’s headquarters in The Hague on Wednesday, International Criminal Court (ICC) President Tomoko Akane pushed back firmly against recent U.S. sanctions targeting her, stating there is no legitimate justification for the punitive measures and urging Japan’s government to broker diplomatic action with Washington to prevent further tensions between the U.S. and the global judicial body.

Last week, Akane, a veteran Japanese jurist, became the newest ICC official added to a growing list of court personnel targeted by U.S. sanctions. The measures freeze any assets Akane holds within U.S. legal jurisdictions, bar her and her immediate family from entering the United States, and cut off her access to basic global financial services.

The U.S. has defended its punitive campaign against the ICC, claiming the court has overstepped its official mandate. The sanctions were imposed as retaliation for ICC investigations into alleged war crimes committed by Israeli officials in Gaza and U.S. military personnel in Afghanistan. To date, the Trump administration has applied sanctions to nine of the ICC’s 18 sitting judges, both of the court’s deputy prosecutors, its former chief prosecutor, and one additional member of the prosecution’s office staff.

“I insist that there is no reason I have to be sanctioned,” Akane told reporters, confirming the sanctions, which she had anticipated ahead of their announcement, have not shaken her commitment to judicial work nor hindered the court’s operations. “ICC will never be defeated. Justice will and should prevail.”

Despite acknowledging the sanctions have imposed “unreasonable inconvenience and threat” on her personal life — including the suspension of her personal credit cards — Akane said she remains fully committed to protecting the court, its judicial body and staff, and upholding the ICC’s core mandate.

As a longstanding U.S. ally that has consistently enshrined the rule of law as a central pillar of its diplomatic agenda, Japan has a critical role to play in convincing Washington to step back from further escalation, Akane argued. She also called on the Japanese government to encourage other ICC member states to resist U.S. pressure to withdraw from the court.

“The ICC is a last hope for the victims of serious international crimes,” Akane said. “I would like Japan to do everything it can to defend the ICC and the rule of law in the global society.”

The standoff has placed Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi in a delicate position, forcing her to balance Japan’s formal commitment to international rule of law with its critical security and political alliance with the U.S. under Donald Trump.

On Tuesday, Takaichi publicly acknowledged the rift, telling reporters that the U.S. sanctions against Akane are “not compatible” with Japan’s official position, and that the government “take this very seriously.” “I share the sense of crisis and concern that President Akane has faced, and we will continue to provide necessary support,” Takaichi said.

She pushed back against criticism from both opposition and ruling party lawmakers that her government has avoided tough confrontation with the Trump administration, noting that Japan has repeatedly called on Washington to reverse the sanctions against Akane.

The pressure on Takaichi’s government ramped up this week, when a cross-party bloc of ruling and opposition lawmakers adopted a formal statement denouncing the Trump administration’s sanctions against the ICC president. The group called for the U.S. to retract the measure and urged the Japanese government to take stronger action to support Akane and the court.

Japanese Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi confirmed Tuesday that the foreign ministry has dispatched a senior official to The Hague to meet directly with Akane to coordinate support options. Motegi also warned that the U.S. stance against the ICC remains “extremely severe,” and that Washington has signaled it could impose additional sanctions in the coming period.

Japan joined the International Criminal Court as its 105th member state in 2007, during the first administration of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

For generations, one unspoken assumption shaped the architecture of global politics: despite its flaws, U.S. power would remain the steady anchor holding the international system together. Even when Washington’s unilateral moves frustrated allied capitals, nations ultimately stayed aligned with the United States, convinced that a world without this anchor would carry far greater risk. Today, that decades-old foundation is being tested under the pressure of Donald Trump’s second term, and mounting evidence suggests the old consensus may not survive.
Three interconnected recent developments lay bare the accelerating global shift: a sweeping new round of U.S. tariffs imposed on most of the world, a landmark Pew Research Center survey showing China surpassing the U.S. in global public favorability, and the European Union caught between competing pressure from Washington’s trade agenda and Beijing’s economic clout. Taken together, these events reveal far more than routine diplomatic friction. They signal a fundamental, likely irreversible realignment of global power.
### The New Tariff Shock, A Consistent Pattern of Unpredictability
On July 24, the Trump administration rolled out new tariffs ranging from 10% to 12.5% on imports from 60 global trading partners, covering approximately 99% of all goods entering the U.S. The White House framed the measure as an enforcement action targeting nations that failed to block imports produced with forced labor, justifying the move under Section 301 of the 1974 U.S. Trade Act. This new regime replaces a temporary 10% global tariff implemented earlier in February, which the U.S. Supreme Court struck down, ruling Trump had overstepped his authority by imposing unilateral tariffs under a declared national emergency.
For global trade partners, the specific legal technicality matters far less than the pattern it reinforces: this is already the second sweeping tariff regime of Trump’s second term, implemented just months after the first was invalidated by the nation’s highest court. For trading partners ranging from Canada and India to the European Union, the message is clear: the United States can no longer be counted on as a predictable economic partner. A government that reimposes broad trade barriers under a new legal rationale every time the previous one fails in court is one whose long-term commitments cannot form the basis of stable planning for foreign nations.
### Pew Data Confirms a Flipping of Global Public Confidence
This growing unpredictability has directly shifted global public opinion, according to new research. A Pew Research Center report published July 15, 2026, drawn from surveys of more than 42,000 adults across 36 nations conducted between February and May 2026, finds that a majority of surveyed countries now hold more favorable views of China than of the United States. Global confidence in Chinese President Xi Jinping has also overtaken confidence in Trump, the survey confirms.
What makes this finding most notable is its geographic breadth: the shift is not limited to the Global South or nations with longstanding grievances against U.S. foreign policy. Pew data shows that even Canada and Mexico, the United States’ closest geographic neighbors, now view China more positively than the U.S. Across seven major European nations — Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom — Xi’s global approval rating outpaces Trump’s by double-digit margins.
This reversal is a recent development, driven by parallel trends: stagnant or slightly improving views of China paired with a sharp collapse in U.S. favorability since the start of Trump’s second term. Just 12 months ago, most surveyed countries still favored the United States; that is no longer the case.
As Yanzhong Huang, senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, notes: “China now outranks the United States in global favorability for the first time in nearly two decades, but the real story isn’t a Chinese soft-power surge — it’s American decline. China’s median favorability rating has barely shifted over the past 10 years; the crossover happened almost entirely because U.S. ratings plummeted.”
Scholar Maria Repnikova echoes this analysis, observing: “China is passively gaining global stature from America’s soft-power retreat, and is now seen by many as the more accessible and reliable great power partner. Beijing has not yet converted this relative advantage into a decisive shift of global public loyalty or a clear, coherent alternative global order.”
The Pew report also finds that populations in middle-income countries across Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia are now more likely to describe China as a reliable partner, and less likely to view it as prone to unwanted foreign interference, compared to the United States. This marks a complete inversion of the roles the two powers have held in global public opinion for most of the post-Cold War era.
### South Korea: A U.S. Treaty Ally Pursues Strategic Hedging
Perhaps the clearest example of this shifting alignment among formal U.S. allies is playing out in Seoul, in a development that defies longstanding expectations. On August 16, Trump announced he had spoken with South Korean President Lee Jae Myung and asked if South Korea would lend the U.S. “a little hand” with tensions surrounding Iran. When Lee declined, Trump ordered the Pentagon to “substantially reduce” the scope of the annual Ulchi Freedom Shield joint military exercises, which launched August 17 and run through August 27.
Lee’s progressive government has centered its foreign policy on what it calls “pragmatic diplomacy,” prioritizing greater strategic autonomy and national economic interest over rigid ideological alignment with Washington. The shift has been sharp enough that South Korea’s conservative opposition has accused the Lee administration of abandoning the U.S. alliance, a critique echoed by American conservative commentators in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed cited by multiple regional outlets.
The specifics of South Korea’s domestic political debate carry broader meaning. Even a treaty ally that hosts tens of thousands of U.S. troops on its territory is now recalibrating how closely it will tie its foreign policy to Washington. This recalibration is being led by a government that campaigned on hard-nosed pragmatic engagement, rather than automatic alignment with either great power — a telling indicator of how the center of gravity in South Korean politics has shifted.
### Europe Caught In a Two-Front Bind
South Korea is far from alone in this new balancing act. No region faces greater tension from competing great power pressure than Europe, which now finds itself squeezed between two competing economic forces at once.
European policymakers have grown increasingly alarmed by Chinese industrial overcapacity, particularly in the electric vehicle sector, which has contributed to an estimated 10,000 industrial job losses per month in Germany alone. This anxiety has generated loud rhetoric from Brussels and Berlin about the need to “de-risk” European supply chains from overreliance on China.
Yet as analyst James Curran recently outlined in the *East Asia Forum*, this tough rhetoric has yet to translate into a coherent, unified policy. The EU wants to raise the economic cost of overreliance on China without inflicting major damage on its own economy, and it has so far failed to build internal consensus on how to achieve that goal.
Compounding this policy paralysis is the simultaneous pressure of the new U.S. tariffs, which apply to the EU alongside 59 other global economies. European officials are now fighting a two-front economic battle: managing exposure to Chinese industrial overcapacity while absorbing new protectionist trade barriers from the United States. For now, the result is stalemate, rather than a clear pivot toward either power. But pressure on Europe is not easing, and the bloc’s eventual compromise is likely to look far less like close alignment with Washington than it would have a decade ago.
### The Data Catches Up To Shifting Rhetoric
Early this year, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney publicly articulated what new data now confirms. In a January 20, 2026 address to the World Economic Forum in Davos, delivered one day before Trump was set to speak at the event, Carney declared the world is experiencing “a rupture, not a transition.”
He argued that the rules-based international order underwritten by U.S. power — which guaranteed open sea lanes, global financial stability, and multilateral dispute resolution — will not return, and that middle powers like Canada must prioritize building their own strategic autonomy rather than waiting for the old system to be restored. Carney has repeated this framing repeatedly, including in remarks ahead of the June 2026 G7 summit. What began as one leader’s assessment is now backed by hard empirical data, and points toward a global order that is reconfiguring itself independent of any single U.S. election cycle.
Individually, none of these developments — new tariffs, shifting public opinion, South Korean hedging, European policy paralysis — is enough to trigger a permanent global realignment. Together, they describe an international system where broken trust and eroded credibility take years to rebuild, if they can be rebuilt at all. A global consensus around U.S. leadership built over a generation has eroded in just a few years. U.S. allies are quietly building alternative hedging strategies rather than waiting for U.S. policy to stabilize.
Global trading partners now treat U.S. commitments as transactional, rather than binding. Even if U.S. policy shifts again in the future, under this administration or a later one, the bilateral and multilateral relationships that have already been recalibrated across the world may not simply snap back to the old status quo. That is what makes this moment more than a temporary rough patch for U.S. foreign policy: it is a structural shift in how the rest of the world positions itself relative to American power.

BANGKOK – After a grueling, months-long deployment supporting U.S. military operations in the Middle East, the U.S. Navy aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln will dock for a scheduled rest and recovery stop in Thailand, Thai defense officials confirmed Wednesday.

The nuclear-powered carrier has made military headlines for setting an unofficial record for uninterrupted time at sea, spending more than 250 consecutive days deployed without a port call. This extended tour, carried out as part of U.S. posturing against Iran, has sparked growing public and internal concerns over the well-being of the 5,000-plus crew on board. Multiple unconfirmed reports have documented worsening mental health outcomes among sailors, as well as persistent shortages of critical daily supplies including fresh food and basic hygiene products.

A Thai government official, who requested anonymity due to not being cleared for public media statements, confirmed the carrier will make a brief stop to allow crew rest and resupply before the ship returns to U.S. home ports. A separate official statement released Tuesday by the Royal Thai Navy clarified that three vessels from the Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group are scheduled for a short recuperation stop in eastern Thailand, and no joint military exercises will be conducted during the visit.

Citing operational security protocols, the Royal Thai Navy did not release the names of the vessels, the specific port of call, or an exact arrival date. The U.S. Embassy in Bangkok has not yet responded to requests for comment on the planned stop, and U.S. Navy leadership also declined to provide additional details on the deployment or upcoming visit.

Extended carrier deployments have long been documented to take a significant toll on both personnel and hardware. Long separations from family and home erode service members’ mental stability over time, while constant operations without scheduled maintenance put excess strain on the ship’s hull, systems, and combat equipment.

While open hostilities between the U.S. and Iran have de-escalated in recent weeks, the U.S. Navy continues to enforce a reimposed naval blockade on Iranian ports along the Strait of Hormuz, a critical global chokepoint for oil trade. The Trump administration has so far offered no clear timeline or strategy for drawing down its military presence in the region and concluding the extended deployment of the strike group.

The global race to scale artificial intelligence has triggered a rush to build massive data centers across the United States, turning quiet rural farmlands into the frontline of an unusual political conflict that defies traditional partisan divisions. What was supposed to be a straightforward win for economic growth and technological competitiveness has instead emerged as a polarizing issue reshaping political rhetoric ahead of November’s midterm elections, uniting unlikely allies against a development wave many local communities see as moving too fast.

In the tiny village of Murdock, Nebraska, population just 275, the clash played out recently at the local firehouse, where conservative fifth-generation grain farmers and environmental advocates from the state Sierra Club chapter sat side-by-side to voice shared opposition to planned data center projects. For Judy Stroy, whose family has grown corn and soybeans on land outside Murdock for generations, the primary fear is the permanent loss of prime agricultural land to concrete and computing infrastructure. “With the amount of ground that’s getting gobbled up every year, our food source is in trouble,” Stroy said. “That should scare everyone.”

Cass County, where Murdock is located, has responded by approving a 12-month moratorium on new data center development, pausing potential plans from energy firm Tenaska to acquire more than 1,300 acres along Highway 75 for a project that could include a large data center and an on-site natural gas power plant. A second data center operator, CyrusOne, controls nearly 400 acres nearby in Plattsmouth, though no formal project has been announced. The region’s strategic location—with a recently widened highway connecting it to Omaha to the northeast and college-heavy Lincoln to the southwest, plus easy access to water from the nearby Missouri River—has made it a top target for developers, who often offer landowners four times the standard market rate of $10,000 per acre to sell. For many farmers struggling with rising input costs and declining soybean exports tied to ongoing trade tensions with China, the huge payouts are difficult to reject, Stroy acknowledged, even as she worries about the long-term cost to local food production.

The cross-partisan opposition playing out in Nebraska is mirrored across the country, from Republican-led Texas and Wyoming to swing-state Pennsylvania to Democratic-leaning New Mexico. In southern New Mexico, the $165 billion Project Jupiter data center complex planned by Oracle near the Mexican border has united farmers, ranchers and business owners across the political spectrum around shared fears of strain on already depleted water supplies. New Mexico is grappling with persistent, decades-level drought that has left the state’s largest reservoir at just 1.3% capacity and dried up large stretches of the Rio Grande, while a recent U.S. Supreme Court-approved water settlement requires the state to send increased water flows to Texas. Doña Ana County Commission Republican candidate Samantha Barncastle Salopek, whose family grows pecans in the region, said the issue transcends traditional political divides. “It is not about blue vs. red, or whether we’re a purple state or county,” she said. “This is about the local community coming together and saying, ‘Hold on, hold on.’ We didn’t get enough information, and now we’re very concerned because also we have to cut back our water use anyway.”

Oracle has framed Project Jupiter as a generational economic investment for New Mexico, saying it will generate $4.7 billion in tax revenue, create more than 7,000 construction jobs and 1,500 permanent positions, and include water-efficient closed-loop cooling and fuel-cell systems that will keep long-term water use low. The company has also pledged $50 million for local water infrastructure and partnered on agricultural tech initiatives to help farmers cut water consumption by an estimated 21 million gallons per year. Even so, the Center for Biological Diversity successfully petitioned the New Mexico Supreme Court to issue an emergency halt to well drilling for the project’s construction water, a win that has temporarily paused development amid ongoing legal challenges.

Supporters of expanded data center development draw backing from a bipartisan bloc as well, including former Republican President Donald Trump and many union leaders who typically align with Democratic candidates. They argue that the buildout delivers critical economic benefits for struggling small communities, creates high-quality construction and permanent jobs, helps retain young skilled workers who would otherwise leave rural states, and strengthens U.S. technological competitiveness against China in a high-stakes geopolitical race. “This problem is also a very big opportunity for some small communities,” said Mike Gage, president and secretary-treasurer of the Nebraska State AFL-CIO, noting that a decades-old data center near Omaha still employs roughly 60 local workers today. Heather McKenzie, a labor relations professional in Lincoln, added that data center development can reverse the outward migration of young Nebraska workers: “I don’t think that enough people understand that this is going to create really good jobs. I think a lot of people view it in a negative sense because it’s being sprung on them.”

Trump has framed data centers as a clear win for local communities, arguing they bring jobs, increased tax revenue and lower local tax burdens. His administration has pushed developers to build their own on-site power plants to ease concerns about rising utility costs for local residents, though he has acknowledged that tech firms could improve their public outreach to address community fears. Even so, polling from July shows broad public opposition to local data center development: a Fox News survey found 60% of Republican voters and 53% of MAGA voters oppose new construction in their areas. As a result, politicians across both parties have been forced to adapt to shifting voter sentiment, with leaders from both sides of the aisle adopting anti-development stances to court voters ahead of the midterms.

Prominent state leaders from both parties have already moved to curb rapid development: Democratic New York Governor Kathy Hochul ordered a one-year ban on large new data centers, while Democratic Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro has ended preferential permitting and tax breaks for projects that do not meet strict local standards. On the Republican side, Texas Governor Greg Abbott issued a halt on new data center approvals until full audits of their impact on the state’s electrical grid are completed, saying developers earned backlash by failing to coordinate with state and local officials. “They basically dug their own grave for the problem that’s been caused for them, and that’s why they got the backlash they deserve,” Abbott said.

Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray, a Republican running for an open House seat, has pledged to halt all new data center construction, declaring in a campaign ad: “If Silicon Valley wants to build their liberal empire, they can do it somewhere else.” That rhetoric mirrors a campaign ad from Democratic Scranton Mayor Paige Cognetti, who is challenging a first-term Republican incumbent in a battleground district, who said the city “is not for sale” to data center developers. Across rural East Texas, residents have already complained that data center development has left them living near constant fossil fuel power generation to feed the centers’ huge energy demands, with critics decrying increased air pollution, noise, rising utility costs, and contribution to the climate crisis.

For local opponents, the core grievance is not ideological, but practical: they say development is moving far faster than local regulatory frameworks can manage, leaving communities to cope with lasting impacts to their land, water, and infrastructure that were never debated or approved by the people who live there. As the midterm election season progresses, the cross-partisan backlash over data centers has proven that what was once seen as an obscure local development issue has become a national political flashpoint that could tip the balance in competitive races across the country.

A prominent 70-year-old Chinese artist known for politically provocative satirical work has been handed the maximum three-year prison sentence on charges of defaming China’s officially revered historical figures, according to multiple international human rights organizations. The guilty ruling was issued Tuesday by a court in northern China’s Hebei Province, which found Gao Zhen’s artwork violated the reputation of state-sanctioned heroes and undermined public interest.

Gao, who first rose to international acclaim alongside his brother Gao Qiang as a leading voice in Chinese contemporary art through the 1990s and 2000s, has become one of the most high-profile targets of Beijing’s expanding crackdown on dissenting artistic expression. The works at the center of the legal case date back more than 15 years, created years before the 2018 law under which he was charged. The most controversial piece, co-created with his brother, is *Execution of Christ*, a sculptural installation showing a squad of figures resembling Mao Zedong holding Jesus Christ at gunpoint. Two additional works were also cited in the prosecution: *Mao’s Guilt*, a life-sized sculpture of Mao kneeling in a pose of repentance, and *Miss Mao*, a satirical piece depicting the leader with exaggerated feminine features and a long Pinocchio-style nose.

After relocating to the United States in 2022, Gao returned to China to visit his studio on the outskirts of Beijing in August 2024, where he was taken into custody. He has already been held in detention for two years prior to the sentencing, and authorities additionally moved to seize all of his artwork and impose an exit ban on his wife and 7-year-old child, barring them from leaving the country.

The closed-door trial, held earlier this year in a single day, received almost no domestic media coverage within China, consistent with the government’s pattern of restricting public reporting on politically sensitive cases. Amnesty International confirmed Tuesday that Gao intends to file an appeal against his conviction. If the original verdict is upheld, he will complete his sentence in August 2027 after accounting for the time he has already served in detention.

International human rights bodies and political observers have widely condemned the sentencing as a significant escalation of the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to police dissenting expression, even beyond China’s borders and applying retroactively to work created decades earlier. Amnesty International’s China Director Sarah Brooks called the ruling a deliberate attack on fundamental artistic freedom. “No artist should face criminal punishment for creating work that challenges official narratives or encourages critical reflection on history,” Brooks stated Tuesday. She added that the case illustrates how vaguely worded, politically motivated legislation is weaponized—including retroactively—to silence any person who dares to hold views divergent from the ruling party.

The United Nations Human Rights Office also raised urgent red flags about the case in comments to AFP, pointing to three core concerns: the retroactive application of criminal law, the use of severe criminal penalties to punish protected artistic expression, and the punitive collective impact on Gao’s family. Gao Qiang, who remains outside of China, told the BBC earlier this year that the outcome of the case sends an unambiguous chilling message to artists globally: “Even if a work was made 15 years ago, it can still be turned into a crime if today’s political climate changes.”

China analysts note that Gao’s case fits into a broader pattern of expanding authoritarian control by the CCP, with the party extending its regulatory and punitive reach to target citizens even when they reside abroad, and enforcing political conformity retroactively on decades-old creative work. The case has drawn renewed international attention to the 2018 law that criminalizes defamation of heroes and martyrs associated with the Communist Party, a piece of legislation that rights groups say has been systematically used to erase critical discourse about modern Chinese history.