Daily brief

On the twenty-fifth anniversary of September 11, a former State Department counterterrorism official argues in War on the Rocks that Washington still cannot say whether most of its strikes actually work, as Foreign Policy’s Fall survival guide tells policymakers to drop their nostalgia for the old order and Noema asks whose AI, Washington’s or Beijing’s, will end up shaping the rest of the century. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard says it targeted two US Navy vessels near Hormuz as Houthi fighters seized a Yemeni port city and oil held above $100, Israeli strikes killed a family of four in Gaza, and in Poland a Smolensk-anniversary commemoration in Warsaw ended in a scuffle as the government said it is bracing for a “critical” seven to eight months of possible Russian escalation.

Top story · Counterterrorism

Twenty-Five Years After 9/11, Washington Still Can’t Say Whether Its Strikes Work

Jim Loucks, who spent 2018 to 2025 as a programs advisor in the State Department’s Bureau of Counterterrorism overseeing roughly twenty projects worth some $80 million a year in East Africa, argues in War on the Rocks that American civilian counterterrorism assistance is held to a rigor its military strikes never face. None of the money he managed moved without a performance monitoring plan agreed in advance: baselines set before work began, indicators fixed ahead of time, independent evaluators checking implementers’ claims, and funding suspended the moment a project underperformed or reporting slipped. Military strikes against terrorist networks, he writes, are rarely subjected to anything like that discipline once the smoke clears — there is no standard framework for asking, months or years later, whether a given strike degraded a group’s capability or simply produced a body count and a press release. The gap matters most, he argues, precisely because it is invisible: a civilian aid program that fails gets flagged and cut, while a strike that fails to achieve any lasting strategic effect can go on being cited as a success indefinitely. Loucks is not arguing for less use of force, but for the same evidentiary standard his own programs were held to, arguing that a war now in its twenty-fifth year deserves an honest accounting of what has actually worked. The essay lands on the anniversary itself, a pointed reminder that the length of the war on terror has outlasted any consensus on how to measure whether it is being won.

War on the Rocks, Jim Loucks · 10.09.2026

Why it matters — A quarter-century in, the United States still lacks a reliable way to tell a counterterrorism strike that worked from one that merely happened, which means the war’s most consequential tool is also its least accountable.

01 International politics 01 / 06

Foreign Policy’s Fall Survival Guide: Stop Waiting for the Old Order to Return

Hal Brands opens Foreign Policy’s Fall 2026 print package, built around the cover theme “How to Survive in a World Without Rules,” with a blunt instruction to policymakers: retire the nostalgia for a rules-based order that is not coming back, and start planning for the world actually in front of them. His practical checklist includes pricing in permanently higher geopolitical risk premiums, rebuilding domestic defense-industrial and manufacturing capacity rather than assuming allies or markets will absorb the shock, and treating deterrence as something that has to be paid for continuously rather than inherited from a prior era. The essay is framed less as theory than as a survival manual, sitting alongside companion pieces in the same issue — including Charles Kupchan’s separate case for a modern concert of great powers — that together sketch a magazine-length argument that order without rules still needs some kind of organizing logic. Brands’s contribution is the least abstract of the set: he is less interested in designing a new global architecture than in telling readers what to do while nobody builds one.

Foreign Policy, Hal Brands · 09.09.2026

Why it matters — A survival guide that tells governments to stop waiting for the old rules to return is itself a signal that the search for a replacement order has quietly been shelved in favor of managing the disorder.

02 Geopolitics 02 / 06

A Year On, Taiwan Still Hasn’t Made the Cultural Changes Its Own Defense Needs

Michael Hunzeker and Yuster Yu return in War on the Rocks to the argument they first made in 2025: that Taiwan’s biggest obstacle to being ready for a war with China is not hardware but culture, inside both its armed forces and its broader society. Asked by the outlet to assess a year later whether any of the changes they called for have taken hold, their answer is largely no — they say they have yet to see a meaningful shift in the culture of Taiwan’s officer corps, which they had identified as the crux of the problem, even as they concede that changing an institution’s culture is inherently slow. The two authors are careful to distinguish this from Taiwan’s separate, faster-moving progress on hardware and defense spending, arguing that neither more missiles nor a bigger budget solves a readiness problem rooted in how the military trains, promotes and thinks about initiative under fire. Their update reads less as an alarm than as a patience-testing status report: the diagnosis from a year ago still holds, and the timeline for fixing it keeps getting pushed further out just as the regional threat environment keeps getting worse.

War on the Rocks, Michael Hunzeker and Yuster Yu · 04.09.2026

Why it matters — If the authors are right that culture, not equipment, is Taiwan’s binding constraint, then every new arms package bought on Taiwan’s behalf is solving a problem that was never really the hard part.

03 Tech / AI / future tech 03 / 06

Whose AI Will Shape the Century, Washington’s or Beijing’s?

Jacob Dreyer argues in Noema that the United States and China are not converging toward one shared artificial intelligence, but building two technologies that will refract each country’s own civilizational instincts into distinct futures. He likens AI to the invention of writing, a system that both extends and constrains what its users can think, and argues the two countries are the only ones with the scale to shape that system in their own image rather than simply adopting someone else’s. America’s version, in his telling, inherits the country’s restless, frontier-minded individualism, while China’s is being built as an instrument of paternalist social engineering, most visibly in a surveillance architecture meant to make Chinese society legible in real time to the state managing it. Dreyer’s point is not that one model will win and the other lose, but that AI is unlikely to homogenize the world the way earlier waves of technology optimism promised — it may instead entrench two incompatible visions of what intelligent machines are even for.

Noema, Jacob Dreyer · 10.09.2026

Why it matters — If AI ends up encoding each superpower’s own political instincts rather than converging on a shared design, the technology diplomacy debate stops being about safety standards and becomes a contest between two different ideas of what a government owes, and is owed by, its citizens.

04 Economy / markets / KYC / AML 04 / 06

India Orders Fifteen Offshore Crypto Platforms Blocked Over Money-Laundering Rules

India’s Financial Intelligence Unit issued compliance notices under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act to fifteen offshore cryptocurrency platforms, including Weex, Blofin, Bitunix, DigiFinex, Toobit, XT.com, WOO X, Pionex and WhiteBIT, and separately asked for their apps and websites to be taken down inside India. The agency’s position is that physical presence in the country is irrelevant: any platform serving Indian customers, wherever it is incorporated, falls under rules brought into force in 2023 requiring virtual-asset firms to register as reporting entities. The action echoes a 2023 precedent in which FIU-IND issued similar notices to Binance and KuCoin, both of which subsequently registered locally to keep operating, suggesting Delhi expects a similar compliance response this time rather than a genuine shutdown. It is also a reminder that some of the world’s most-used crypto exchanges continue to operate at scale in major markets with no local registration at all, relying on the gap between where their servers sit and where their customers live.

Financial Intelligence Unit-India, via CryptoTimes · 09.09.2026

Why it matters — A regulator willing to order fifteen exchanges blocked in one sweep, rather than pursuing them one at a time, is testing whether platform-level enforcement can finally close a jurisdictional loophole compliance teams have exploited for years.

05 Medicine 05 / 06

A New Flu Shot Tries to Combine Three Separate Protections Into One

CSL Seqirus published the pivotal Phase 3 results for its adjuvanted, cell-based, higher-dose quadrivalent influenza vaccine in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, the first shot to combine three previously separate approaches to boosting protection in older adults into a single formulation. The randomised, observer-blind trial enrolled 7,699 adults aged 50 and over across eight countries, including the UK, US, Germany and Canada, comparing the new vaccine against an existing adjuvanted egg-based version and a recombinant alternative. The vaccine, marketed as Aujemflu, has already been approved for that age group by the European Commission and the UK’s MHRA earlier this year on the strength of earlier data; this publication is the detailed evidence base regulators and clinicians will now pick apart. Chief medical officer Gregg Sylvester called it the product of decades of investment in flu-vaccine design, a fair description of a shot that is less a breakthrough than a consolidation of three incremental gains into one syringe.

The Lancet Infectious Diseases, CSL Seqirus · 11.09.2026

Why it matters — Older adults are exactly the group influenza kills in the largest numbers, so a single shot that stacks three previously separate protective mechanisms could measurably cut a toll that has resisted decades of incremental vaccine tweaks.

06 Intelligence / OSINT 06 / 06

Washington and London Sign Their First Joint Plan to Dismantle Scam Compounds

The US Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, Britain’s National Crime Agency and the Crown Prosecution Service for England and Wales signed a memorandum of understanding that the Justice Department called the first agreement of its kind for coordinating action against scam compounds, mostly built around Chinese organised-crime networks operating out of Southeast Asia. The pact commits both countries to run parallel investigations and share enforcement actions against operations that rely on trafficked, often coerced labour to run romance and investment fraud at industrial scale against victims worldwide. It follows last year’s record seizure of roughly $15 billion in bitcoin and sanctions against more than a hundred individuals and entities tied to Cambodia’s Prince Group and its founder Chen Zhi, a case both governments now treat as the template rather than the exception. The memorandum’s real test will be whether parallel investigations translate into faster takedowns of new compounds, which have tended to relocate and rebuild faster than any single country’s law enforcement can act alone.

US Department of Justice / UK National Crime Agency · 03.09.2026

Why it matters — Scam compounds have outrun single-country enforcement for years by simply moving across borders faster than investigations could follow them, so a standing bilateral framework is a bet that coordination, not just bigger seizures, is what finally slows them down.

News Poland

Smolensk Commemoration in Warsaw Ends in a Scuffle Involving Macierewicz

The monthly Smolensk disaster commemoration on Warsaw’s Piłsudski Square on the night of 10.09.2026 descended into a scuffle after PiS MP Antoni Macierewicz was filmed running through the crowd with a paint gun as counter-demonstrators tried to stop him; one woman fell and was taken to hospital. Police said officers intervened to protect participants and bystanders at the 195th monthly commemoration, the latest sign that the ritual gathering remains a flashpoint sixteen years after the crash. Source →

Train Drivers Stage a Nationwide Go-Slow After a Fatal Level-Crossing Crash

Poland’s train drivers’ union called for locomotives to cross all rail-road junctions at no more than 20 km/h between midnight and noon on 11.09.2026, a protest triggered by the 09.09.2026 collision between a Lublin–Szczecin PKP Intercity train and a truck at a lightly signalled crossing in Sokolniki Suche that killed one passenger and injured ten. The union is demanding government action on crossing safety after what it says is a pattern of near-identical accidents; infrastructure minister Dariusz Klimczak called the planned action “probably too radical a step.” Source →

Tusk Says CIA Warnings Point to a “Critical” Seven to Eight Months Ahead

Prime Minister Donald Tusk said Poland is in constant contact with CIA leadership and was not surprised by the substance of a Moscow visit this week by CIA director John Ratcliffe, who reportedly went to warn Russia against testing NATO. Tusk said intelligence signals point to Russia seriously preparing to escalate tensions over the coming autumn and winter, calling the next seven to eight months “critical” for the region. Source →

Tribunal Chief Submits a Revised 2027 Budget as the Funding Standoff Drags On

Constitutional Tribunal president Bogdan Święczkowski forwarded finance minister Andrzej Domański a revised 2027 budget proposal seeking over 78 million złoty, after the government’s original draft omitted the court’s finances entirely, and asked the Social Dialogue Council to back including the sum in the state budget. The Tribunal says its original submission was simply never processed in time; the finance ministry says it never received a validly adopted financial plan, leaving the standoff over who controls the court’s money unresolved ahead of budget votes. Source →

Poland Says It Is Ready to Host US Troops Permanently, Waiting on Washington

Defence Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz said Poland remains ready to permanently host American forces and that the decision now rests entirely with Washington, after a US delegation visited the defence ministry for talks this week. Warsaw formally proposed a new permanent US base in June, with Poznań and Wrocław named as leading candidate sites, on top of the roughly 10,000 US troops already rotating through the country. Source →

Kielce’s Defense Fair Closes With a Record 1,200 Exhibitors From 43 Countries

The 34th International Defence Industry Exhibition in Kielce wrapped up on 11.09.2026 after four days, drawing more than 1,200 exhibitors from 43 countries and 50 official delegations, its largest edition yet in a newly built hall, with Canada serving as lead nation. Sessions on Baltic Sea security, drone warfare and AI dominated the program, reflecting the security anxieties driving record Polish and European defense budgets this year. Source →

News Europe

ECB Raises Rates to 2.5% as the Iran War Pushes Up Eurozone Inflation

The European Central Bank lifted its deposit rate a quarter point to 2.5% on 10.09.2026, its second hike since the Iran war began, citing persistent inflation pressure from the Middle East conflict alongside surprising eurozone economic resilience. President Christine Lagarde called the move a “no brainer” but insisted the Governing Council had not discussed where rates go next, describing its approach as strictly data-dependent. Source →

Serbia’s Ruling Party Formally Names Vučić to Lead Its Election List

The Serbian Progressive Party’s main board unanimously nominated Aleksandar Vučić to top its list, branded “Aleksandar Vučić – United Serbia,” for the 25.10.2026 snap parliamentary election he called this week, confirming plans for him to step down as president and seek the premiership instead. The move follows nearly two years of anti-corruption protests triggered by a 2024 railway-canopy collapse in Novi Sad that killed sixteen people. Source →

Russia Vows a “Harsh and Painful” Response to Hungary’s Diplomat Expulsions

Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Moscow’s response to Hungary’s expulsion of ten Russian diplomats this week would be “harsh and painful,” calling the move an unfriendly step by what she termed Budapest’s “Russophobic lobby.” The expulsions were the first under Hungary’s new government since Viktor Orbán’s exit, and Budapest has stressed they do not amount to a diplomatic break with Moscow. Source →

Romania Logs More Russian Drone Incursions in 2026 Than the Previous Four Years Combined

Romanian officials say their airspace has been violated by Russian or Russian-linked drones at least 23 times so far this year, already surpassing the eighteen incidents recorded across 2022 to 2025 combined, with NATO aircraft flying at least 42 air-policing missions over Romania this year, more than in any full year since 2022. The figures underline how the Ukraine war’s drone spillover into NATO territory has accelerated well beyond its early, sporadic pattern. Source →

Canada Pledges C$350 Million in Air-Defense Aid as Zelensky Warns Interceptors Are Running Low

Prime Minister Mark Carney announced a C$350 million package of air-defense interceptors for Ukraine after meeting President Volodymyr Zelensky in Calgary on 10.09.2026, without specifying which systems or when deliveries would begin. Carney separately said Canada aims to scale domestic drone production to millions of units within two years, with a third earmarked for Ukraine, as Kyiv’s stock of Patriot interceptors runs critically low against intensifying Russian strikes. Source →

News World

Iran Says It Struck Two US Navy Vessels as Houthis Seize a Yemeni Port City

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard said its navy targeted two US Navy vessels along with eight oil tankers and ten other ships near the Strait of Hormuz on 10.09.2026, in retaliation for a US strike that hit five Iranian tankers earlier in the week, while Iran-backed Houthi fighters separately seized a key port city on Yemen’s western coast. Brent crude settled above $101 a barrel, its highest since July, as a senior Iranian official said Tehran would keep escalating for as long as the US naval blockade continues. Source →

Israeli Strike Kills a Family of Four, Including Two Children, in Northern Gaza

An Israeli strike on a house in the Beit Lahia Project area of northern Gaza on 11.09.2026 killed four members of the Ahmad family, including children aged eight and twelve, according to hospital officials; the Israeli military said it had targeted a militant. The strike was one of several reported across Gaza on 10.09.2026 that together killed at least nine people, nearly a year after a US-brokered ceasefire nominally took hold. Source →

Former OPCW Officials Say They Have Evidence Sudan’s Military Used Chemical Weapons

Two former senior officials of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, one of whom served when the body won the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize, say a new investigation has produced credible witness and video evidence that Sudan’s armed forces used chemical agents, likely chlorine, in attacks between 2024 and 2025, including one on Khartoum’s Al Jili oil refinery. They are calling on the OPCW and its member states to open a formal investigation, citing acute respiratory symptoms, unfamiliar odours and coloured explosive blasts reported by witnesses. Source →

Bangladesh’s Measles Death Toll Passes 1,000 in the World’s Worst Current Outbreak

Bangladesh’s health authorities say suspected and confirmed measles deaths have reached 1,009 since the outbreak began in March, after seven more children died in the 24 hours to 10.09.2026, with more than 166,000 suspected cases and 146,000 hospitalisations recorded nationwide. A government vaccination drive launched with the WHO, UNICEF and Gavi in March has since expanded nationwide but has not kept pace with the outbreak’s spread. Source →

Philippines’ Defense Chief Tells China “You Lost” Over the South China Sea Ruling

Philippine defense secretary Gilberto Teodoro clashed publicly with Chinese officials at the Seoul Defense Dialogue this week after Beijing again dismissed the 2016 international arbitration ruling against its South China Sea claims as “illegal, null and void,” retorting simply “of course, because you lost.” The exchange comes as China continues building out structures around Scarborough Shoal despite the ruling and Manila’s protests, with hopes for de-escalation largely evaporating over the course of 2026. Source →

Venezuela’s Assembly Hands the US Control of a Fifth of the Country’s Oil Reserves

Venezuela’s National Assembly approved a deal granting the United States one-hundred-year concessions over seventeen oil fields holding roughly 65 billion barrels of reserves, with interim president Rodríguez saying $19 of every barrel sold to the US will flow back to Caracas. The agreement, covering about a fifth of Venezuela’s proven reserves, follows Washington’s January operation that removed Nicolás Maduro from power and cements US economic leverage over the government that replaced him. Source →

Sport

Stefan Küng Wins the Vuelta’s Deciding Time Trial as Mas Holds Off Roglič

Cycling · Vuelta a España

Stefan Küng won Stage 18’s 32.1km individual time trial into Jerez de la Frontera on 10.09.2026, but the day’s real business was overall leader Enric Mas defending his red jersey against a fast-closing Primož Roglič, who gained 33 seconds but still trails by 1:37 with two stages left. Felix Gall slipped to third overall, 3:01 back, as the general classification fight came down to the wire. Source →

Rybakina Dethrones Sabalenka as World No. 1, Sets Up US Open Final Rematch

Tennis · US Open

Elena Rybakina came from a set down to beat Coco Gauff 3-6, 6-4, 6-4 in Thursday’s semifinal, a result that hands her the WTA’s world No. 1 ranking and a Saturday final against Aryna Sabalenka, who reached her third straight US Open final by routing Jessica Pegula 7-5, 6-2. Source →

Bayern Put Five Past Bodø/Glimt in a Blistering Second-Half Champions League Opener

Football · Champions League

Bayern Munich scored all five goals after halftime to beat Bodø/Glimt 5-0 on 10.09.2026, with Jamal Musiala, Harry Kane and Alphonso Davies on the scoresheet before Michael Olise added a late brace, the most emphatic result of the league phase’s opening round. Source →

Manchester United Mark Their Champions League Return With a 4-0 Win Over Debutants Sabah

Football · Champions League

Manchester United beat first-time participants Sabah FK 4-0 at Old Trafford on 10.09.2026, with Matheus Cunha opening the scoring and Benjamin Seško among the goals, a comfortable start to United’s first Champions League campaign in three years. Source →

Satire · curated

The Man Whose Job Is Feeding Antique Books to an AI, Then Burning What’s Left

McSweeney’s imagines “Book Doug,” officially a Senior Legacy Media Completion Specialist, who describes shearing rare volumes apart so a scanner can digest them for an AI platform before running the remains through an industrial shredder and a burn pit — corporate pragmatism and archival reverence colliding one antique spine at a time. Read →