The Supreme Court Strikes Down IEEPA Tariffs

Congratulations to both the Women’s and Men’s hockey teams for their Gold Medal victories over Team Canada! I know our neighbors to the north are feeling glum, but there is always 2030 in the French Alps.

Congratulations to both the Women’s and Men’s hockey teams for their Gold Medal victories over Team Canada! I know our neighbors to the north are feeling glum, but there is always 2030 in the French Alps. I don’t have good song to connect to the Supreme Court’s tariff decision… so instead I’m going to recommend an album I use to focus the mind. It is from the Danish modern jazz duo, Svaneborg Kardyb (yeah, don’t ask me to pronounce that… I had to open Google Translate and hear the pronunciation and still can’t do it).

Nikolaj Svaneborg and Jonas Kardyb (you see where the name originates…) formed their group in 2018 and won some of Denmark’s top music awards the next year. I’m a fan of their latest album, released in 2024, titled Superkilen. Named for an eclectic public park in Copenhagen, the album is perfect for playing in the background as you work (something I’m doing right now). It is the kind of album that you should buy on vinyl for a high-end stereo system… or just listen to it on Spotify like everyone else.

Their second song off that album is “Cycles” and probably my favorite of theirs, but really all their stuff is excellent. On Friday, the Supreme Court announced its decision in the case against President Trump for using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to impose global reciprocal tariffs and tariffs on fentanyl smuggling. In a 6-3 ruling, the court found that the President did not have the authority under IEEPA to impose tariffs.

The court’s decision did not address how entities that have paid the tariffs over the past nine months will get compensated, or even whether they will be compensated. I don’t expect that to get resolved before the end of President Trump’s term. Within hours, the President denounced the court’s decision and announced that he would use Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 to reconstitute the global reciprocal tariffs he had imposed under the IEEPA authority, this time at the maximum rate allowed under Section 122.

Section 122 grants the President the authority to impose tariffs on imports up to 15% for a limited period of 150 days. In 1974, Congress granted the President this authority to address the potential for significant balance-of-trade deficits (which certainly exists) or to prevent significant currency depreciation. The former has been happening, so the President likely stands on solid legal ground to use this authority.

One might ask: if this is such a solid legal authority, then why didn’t the President use that authority on April 2, 2025, to set his global reciprocal tariffs, instead of IEEPA? Well, I suspect that decision centered on the temporary nature of Section 122’s authority. Had he employed Section 122 on April 2, then other countries would have done what we all did on Friday: google Section 122 and see that it is a temporary authority.

They would have then simply waited him out on negotiations knowing that the tariffs would disappear in September 2025. IEEPA does not have a time limit on the President’s authority to take “emergency” actions. This makes Section 122 less effective as a negotiating tool. By late July the tariffs imposed under Section 122 will go away, but in the interim the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative will begin a global Section 301 investigation and the Commerce Department will expand the number of Section 232 investigations.

Section 301 is another part of the Trade Act of 1974 and it grants the President the authority to impose tariffs once an investigation has been conducted and there has been a finding that a foreign government has taken actions that are “unfair, unreasonable, or discriminatory.” Once the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) completes their investigation and releases their report with a finding that a foreign government is harming U.S.

interests or violating a trade agreement, the President then has the authority to impose broad tariffs on that country’s imports for four years. At the end of those four years, USTR must conduct a re-investigation before the President can extend those tariffs. The Section 301 authority has been widely used by the Trump Administration against the PRC (namely the Section 301 investigation initiated in August 2017 and completed in March 2018) and likely will stand up to legal scrutiny if USTR conducts the investigations well.

The Biden Administration did the re-investigation of the Section 301 on the PRC during the last term and kept those tariffs in place. The Biden Administration also initiated its own Section 301 investigations on the PRC, which can be used as well. The tough part will be doing all the countries covered by the global reciprocal tariffs simultaneously. Presumably USTR has been working on this already… this ruling by the Supreme Court shouldn’t have surprised anyone.

It is also difficult to see how countries that have a trade surplus with the United States could be judged in a serious investigation as having taken actions that are “unfair, unreasonable, or discriminatory.” Perhaps, a Section 232 will be used to cover those instances. Section 232 does not emanate from the same Trade Act of 1974, but from the Trade Expansion Act of 1962. This provision grants the President the authority to impose broad and nearly unlimited tariffs on imports that threaten national security.

How is “national security” defined you might ask? Well, it is very broad. During the first Trump Administration, the Commerce Department conducted seven Section 232 investigations (aluminum, steel, automobile and automobile parts, uranium, titanium sponge, transformers and transformer components, and vanadium). In all but the last one (vanadium), the Commerce Department found a threat to national security.

Of the other six, President Trump imposed tariffs on aluminum and steel (which U.S. allies howled about). On uranium, President Trump rejected the Commerce Department’s findings and set up a working group to monitor the problem. On all the others, including aluminum and steel, President Trump used the Section 232 finding to force other countries to the negotiating table to make concessions to the United States.

I expect that both USTR and Commerce will kick into high gear initiating and conducting various investigations under the Section 301 and Section 232 authorities (respectively). The one drawback, is that the Section 232 authority is executed by the Bureau of Industry and Security at the Commerce Department. This Bureau is also responsible for administering the country’s dual-use export control regime and it is woefully undermanned to do that job, so adding a bunch of new Section 232 investigations will likely come at the cost of managing dual-use export controls.

Congress has been unwilling to significantly expand the resources available to the Bureau of Industry and Security both during the Biden Administration and the Trump Administration. This is a mistake and should be corrected. For the most part, the Supreme Court’s ruling does not do anything to the tariffs Washington has imposed on Beijing, but there is bound to be a perception that the President is now on the back foot, making it more difficult for him as he travels to Beijing in April.

This likely explains why the President came out so forcefully on Friday denouncing the Supreme Court’s decision and immediately announcing alternative methods to keep the tariffs in place. The President had wanted to settle a bunch of trade disputes with other countries, re-negotiate agreements with them, and get those countries to accept provisions that block Chinese transshipment into the U.S., as well as other provisions that disadvantage Beijing.

However, the court’s decision to overturn the President’s leverage *might* encourage third countries to reopen their negotiations and/or provide Beijing with confidence that they can hold out for a better deal. I think this is a bad outcome for the United States. It seems clear to me that the Supreme Court’s decision will have significant second and third order consequences on U.S. foreign policy, national security, and trade policy.

I suspect the Justices knew that would happen, yet a majority of them decided to rule against the President’s actions. On the one hand, the justices in the majority have a point. IEEPA includes the words “regulate” and “importation,” but those words are separated by 16 other words and IEEPA does not grant the President the explicit authority to impose taxes (aka tariffs) under an emergency.

Under the court’s majority interpretation, the authority to tax (tariffs are a tax on imports) is an authority that belongs to Congress, and Congress alone. From a Constitutional sense, I get that and support it. The idea that the Executive Branch can just declare an emergency and then impose their own taxes strikes me as something all Americans should reject… it would be taxation without representation (I live in DC and get the irony).

On the other hand, Congress over the past several decades has granted the President the authority on multiple occasions to impose tariffs without explicit Congressional approval, albeit with certain constraints and limitations. In a broader reading of the statutes passed by Congress, the President DOES have the authority to impose tariffs quite broadly. What the President desired was a tool with flexibility and broad scope to impose costs rapidly on our trading partners to force them to the negotiating table.

This was successful… Ambassador Jamieson Greer at USTR has renegotiated and signed more trade agreements in the last 12 months than his predecessors have over the last few administrations. Without a tool like the IEEPA tariffs, countries would simply sit back and avoid negotiations since they were generally happy with the status quo. They had market access to the United States at low or no tariffs and didn’t want to grant anything else to the United States, which means that they are happy to draw out negotiations and play for time.

The IEEPA tariffs changed the negotiating dynamics. It put our trading partners, who have had a very generous trade arrangement with the United States for decades, in the position where that trade arrangement was threatened and they were forced to come to the negotiating table to make concessions in order to ensure that their exports could maintain access to the world’s largest and wealthiest consumer market.

For example, check out these provisions that my good friend Justin Bassi pointed out in the U.S.-Indonesia trade agreement signed last week… for years we have been told over and over that we could never make Southeast Asian nations pick between the U.S. and the PRC… well this is what picking a side looks like: Why would the Indonesians agree to this? Well because the choice between access to the U.S.

consumer market or keeping Beijing happy isn’t really a tough choice for Jakarta. While the PRC purchases raw materials from Indonesia, the Chinese market is NOT open to manufactured goods from Indonesia (or anywhere else). Indonesian leaders want their citizens to move up the value chain of manufacturing so that Indonesians can get better paying jobs. The only path to that is through access to the U.S.

market (Chinese consumers can’t consume all of what China makes, how on earth would they consume what Indonesians make, as well?). If the price of access to the U.S. market is actions by Jakarta that harms the PRC, well Indonesian leaders will pay that price. As an American, I want my government to have the flexibility to address significant and persistent problems and to use our economic power in such a way as to address our national interests.

The IEEPA tariffs gave the President that kind of flexibility, I think the Administration can piece together a similar tool, but it will be more difficult and will open up more problems. We often hear how tariffs only hurt Americans and that companies in foreign countries don’t pay tariffs, but if that were true, then why did so many national leaders rush to negotiate with Washington to lower those tariffs?

If companies in foreign countries really didn’t take a hit on these tariffs and simply passed everything on to American consumers, then one would assume that foreign leaders wouldn’t even bother picking up the phone to negotiate lowering them. Does anyone think that Karin Keller-Sutter, the President of the Swiss Confederation last summer, enjoyed those negotiations? Foreign leaders came to the negotiating table and made concessions BECAUSE these tariffs were mostly paid by their own companies and impacted jobs and profits in their own countries.

If these companies simply passed the cost of the tariffs on to American consumers, then their products would be relatively more expensive than alternative products, either made in the United States or made in a country that did negotiate certain concessions with Washington. As their products became more expensive, many Americans would shift their purchasing habits to the less expensive products and away from the products from countries that refused to negotiate.

This is what foreign leaders, as well as companies with foreign manufacturing, knew to be true AND it is why they negotiated and made concessions. I do not object to this approach of using access to the U.S. market as leverage. I think American citizens should insist that their political leaders try to get these kinds of concessions from our trading partners and fight to protect the interests of all Americans.

That requires providing the Executive Branch with the tools of economic statecraft to force our trading partners to the table. Many see “protectionism” as a dirty word… I, for one, believe that protecting the interests of one’s constituents is a requirement for elected leaders. Anyone who claims to be against protectionism is either deceiving themselves or the public. In an effort to speak directly to an American audience… this article is, in fact, published in the New York-based Foreign Affairs, not in Frankfurter Allgeneine Zeitung or Handelsblatt, presumably the media outlets his own constituents read.

On February 13th (yes Friday the 13th), the German Chancellor, Fredrich Merz, made it clear how Germany (Europe) fells about the United States. Merz’s title is “How to Avert the Tragedy of Great-Power Politics” and he claims, in the first sentence, that Europe has ended its long “vacation from history.” What that means is that Germany (Europe) is going its own way and feels no obligation to align with the United States on the most pressing geopolitical challenges.

Germany (Europe) still expects the United States to defend them against Russia (a country with an economy smaller than Italy’s) until they can get their act together, but Germany (Europe) rejects the idea that they have any obligation to the United States with regard to the PRC. This is self-evident in what Merz writes and is the reality of the NATO Treaty. The treaty is narrowly bound to a geographic region which encompasses the entirety of Europe and excludes large swaths of American territory and U.S.

interests (just read Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty). on the forces, vessels, or aircraft of any of the Parties, when in or over these territories or any other area in Europe in which occupation forces of any of the Parties were stationed on the date when the Treaty entered into force or the Mediterranean Sea or the North Atlantic area north of the Tropic of Cancer. Attacks on Hawaii or Guam (or Puerto Rico), or attacks on U.S.

forces, vessels, or aircraft operating or stationed outside of the “North Atlantic area north of the Tropic of Cancer” are explicitly excluded from the Article 5 provision that we all know (“The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all…”). A German frigate attacked in the Mediterranean Sea triggers a legitimate Article 5 obligation on the United States.

An American destroyer attacked in the Pacific triggers no such obligation on any NATO ally. A missile barrage on the German Navy’s maritime surveillance station on Fehmarn Island in the Baltic Sea triggers a legitimate Article 5 obligation on the United States. A similar missile barrage on the radar station at Andersen Air Force Base on Guam triggers no such obligation on any NATO ally. Five or ten years ago, I assumed that Europe would join with the United States if the PRC waged a war of aggression in the Western Pacific… I am no longer confident that would happen.

Perhaps I was naïve to believe they ever would. I’ve become convinced that sizable proportions of Europeans and Canadians (and quite a few of their leaders) would cheer our defeat, as evidenced by the treatment of Americans at the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics… most of whom, I assume, didn’t vote for Donald Trump. Merz claims that Germany (Europe) does “not believe in tariffs and protectionism but in free trade”… except of course when that trade involves any industry in which the United States has a comparative advantage: decades long discrimination against U.S.

agricultural exports, decades long discrimination of U.S. energy exports, decades long protectionism of Airbus and a European aerospace industry, decades long protectionism against U.S. automobiles, and the sustained and expanding non-tariff barriers and discrimination against American digital products and services. Germany (Europe) only believes in so-called “free trade” when it suits their interests and when it advantages them against the United States.

There needs to be a big fat asterisk beside any claim that Germans (Europeans) reject “protectionism” are committed to “free trade.” Perhaps media outlets will do their “fact-checking” the next time a German leader makes these claims. Merz asserts “we stand by global climate agreements and the World Health Organization” even as both have demonstrated that they do NOT solve global challenges.

Merz’s commitment to these things are simply virtue signaling and an effort to distance themselves from alignment with the United States, rather than an effort to address these challenges seriously. If Germany (Europe) was actually serious about reducing CO2 emissions… globally, not just locally… it wouldn’t be outsourcing its manufacturing to the world’s largest CO2 emitter. It wouldn’t have shutdown its nuclear reactors to replace them with Russian oil and gas imports.

Germany (Europe) would pursue “protectionism” to ensure that industrial activity only took place in locations with high environmental standards. If Germany (Europe) was serious about achieving the purpose of the WHO, rather than protecting its bureaucracy in Geneva, Merz would insist on a full and transparent investigation on the origins of COVID and the failures of the WHO, rather than covering up what German intelligence knew early on.

Remember that it was only released publicly in March 2025, that German intelligence had concluded in 2020 that there “was a 80-90% chance that coronavirus accidentally leaked from a Chinese lab.” Yeah, you read that right… just as American leaders in the first Trump Administration were publicly accusing the PRC of covering up the origins of COVID and that the WHO was assisting them, the BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst) had published a report to German leaders that the United States was right.

What did Merz’s predecessor do with that? Absolutely nothing. Has this caused Merz to re-evaluate German support for the WHO? Nope. His subtitle is “Germany knows the costs of a world governed by power alone,” yet one would be forgiven for thinking that Berlin has largely forgotten that fact as Chancellor Merz boards his airplane for Beijing on Tuesday. Merz’s “Dear John” letter is a declaration that Germany (Europe) wants to “see other people” but it doesn’t want America to move out until it gets its finances in order and can change the locks.

A lot of blame for the acrimony in this situation rests squarely on Donald Trump’s shoulders… Marco Rubio’s speech at the Munich Security Conference suggests that you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, but Germany (Europe)’s refusal to take the obligations of our security alliance seriously emerged well before Trump. I think there is a legitimate question we should ask our European and Canadian Allies: would they be adopting any of these more responsible actions (defense spending increases, addressing supply chain dependencies, etc.) had it not been for the very public rebukes made by President Trump?

Let’s be honest, the Biden Administration tried very hard for four years to speak respectfully in public about our aligned values and our desire to work more closely with our allies, even as Team Biden urged the Europeans and Canadians behind closed doors to do these things… and our Allies largely refused to change their ways. I wish this could have been done more respectfully and without coercion, but that hadn’t worked and was likely not to work.

President Trump had just won reelection and was basking in the parade of congratulatory pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago. On this day in November 2024, an old friend and a first-time visitor were meeting privately with Trump. They wanted something, and they brought something. Charlie Kirk — a beloved Trump confidant who had just led a smashingly successful turnout drive among young voters — was shepherding TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew.

A law banning the Chinese-owned TikTok in the U.S. was scheduled to kick in the same week Trump was inaugurated. They wanted him to stall the ban and eventually kill it. Knowing Trump responds best to visual stimuli, Kirk had coached the company to spin up four pages of infographics, “Trump on TikTok,” showing his campaign’s tens of billions of views on the now-threatened app. A chart (shown above) on the first page jumped out at Trump, who had backed a TikTok ban in his first term.

“I’m more popular than Taylor Swift,” he crowed. Many in Trumpworld heard he quickly called Barron, his youngest son, to savor the stat. On Day 1 of his second term, Trump signed an executive order to punt the TikTok ban. Why it matters: The Mar-a-Lago meeting was a pivotal victory in a campaign by several Trump insiders to overcome furious opposition to TikTok from China hawks on the Hill and in his political orbit who had national-security concerns.

These insiders helped convince Trump’s campaign to launch a TikTok account in June 2024, when he was looking for ways around traditional media. Then the insiders patiently engineered a complex deal, which closed last month, to sell TikTok’s U.S. operations to a joint venture controlled by American investors — the death of the ban. How it happened: The campaign was born in early 2024, according to sources familiar with the internal deliberations.

Tony Sayegh, a Treasury and White House official in Trump’s first term, became a key man in the TikTok triumph. Sayegh was on a ski vacation when he saw President Biden declare in March 2024 that he’d sign a TikTok ban if Congress passed one. Sayegh — dubbed “TikTok’s Trump Whisperer” by a Wall Street Journal article shortly after Trump’s election — phoned a TikTok executive and suggested the very solution that eventually came to pass: If Trump won, he could sign an executive order thwarting the ban.

But it did, thanks to an aggressive political and legal strategy, paired with some lucky breaks. Some TikTok executives were skittish about going all-in with Trump, but Sayegh often told the company’s D.C. team that Trump was the only person who could save TikTok in America. Chew warmed to the strategy. The biggest U.S. investor in ByteDance, TikTok’s China-based parent company, is Susquehanna International Group, where Sayegh is head of public affairs.

Jason Miller — a senior adviser to Trump during the campaign, who remains in close touch with him — told me that Trump “always recognized the power of TikTok, because he saw the impact it had with younger voters.” “He’d say all the time: ‘You guys are missing it! These young people, they love TikTok. They’re on it all day long.’ And he’d recount stories of Barron talking about it, and also younger people who work with him and for him.” Behind the scenes: To counter fears among some top Republicans about China’s control of TikTok, Sayegh, Miller and others amped up outside allies — including Kirk, Tucker Carlson and Kellyanne Conway — to give Trump cover to take the plunge.

Miller says Kirk “was massively, massively influential because Charlie was as MAGA as you get. This is one of the countless examples since the president entered public life where he said: ‘I’m going to follow my gut, and I’m going to do this.’ You also had a bit of boomer-splaining going on — people looking at TikTok purely as a public-policy decision as opposed to a lifestyle [for] younger voters.” Kirk earlier had his own issues with TikTok, which had flagged a Turning Point USA account for violating community standards.

“Kirk received a call from Tony Sayegh … who was now lobbying for a group that represented ByteDance,” Robert Draper reported in a New York Times Magazine profile of Kirk, seven months before he was assassinated. Sayegh told Kirk: “We want to prove to you that we’re for free speech.” Kirk’s digital team “began to meet over Zoom with TikTok officials, who described how to avoid AI-generated content moderation,” Draper wrote.

Once Trump’s campaign joined TikTok, the account quickly surpassed President Biden’s. Senior leaders remained involved in the strategy for the app. A young staffer known as “TikTok Jack” was contracted by the campaign to shoot and edit video. Alex Bruesewitz — who was the architect of the campaign’s podcast strategy, and continues as a Trumpworld social-media guru — told us: “TikTok was an incredible platform for us to reach the youth.

[Trump] is naturally cool and had the rizz and aura necessary to become an overnight TikTok star.” I’m sure the popularity of Trump’s two TikTok accounts had absolutely nothing to do with the algorithmic decisions made by ByteDance. The Trump administration on Wednesday expressed concern that Peru risks ceding its sovereignty to the Chinese government after a Peruvian court restricted a local regulator’s oversight of a Chinese-built megaport.

“Concerned about latest reports that Peru could be powerless to oversee Chancay, one of its largest ports, which is under the jurisdiction of predatory Chinese owners,” the X account for the State Department’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere wrote in a statement in English and Spanish. It added that the U.S. supports “Peru’s sovereign right to oversee critical infrastructure in its own territory.

Let this be a cautionary tale for the region and the world: cheap Chinese money costs sovereignty.” The $1.3 billion deep-water port in Chancay, northern Peru, is being developed by China’s state-owned shipping and logistics company, Cosco. On Jan. 29, a lower court judge ordered Peruvian authorities to refrain from exercising “powers of regulation, supervision, oversight and sanction” over the port in Chancay, the Associated Press reported.

Peru’s government regulator, Ositran, vowed to appeal the ruling. “[Cosco Shipping] would be the only company providing services to the public that could not be supervised,” Verónica Zambrano, president of Ositran, told a local radio station Wednesday, the AP reported. Although it’s privately owned, the Chancay Port covers about 445 acres of Peruvian territory, Zambrano added, according to the AP, making it subject to government efforts to monitor and enforce compliance with local user protection standards.

Lin Jian, spokesperson for China’s Foreign Ministry, rejected U.S. accusations that China is threatening Peru’s sovereignty. Peru’s Congress on Tuesday ousted President José Jerí just four months into his term over a scandal involving undisclosed meetings with a Chinese businessman, extending a cycle of political upheaval that has gripped the Andean nation for much of the past decade. There were 75 lawmakers who voted in favor of removing Jerí, while 24 voted against and three abstained.

Legislators will now elect a new head of Congress who will also assume Peru’s presidency, becoming the country’s eighth president in as many years. Jerí is Peru’s third consecutive president to be removed from office. The rapid-fire ousters underscore how Peru’s political class has failed to address voter concerns such as crime and corruption, leaving the country stuck in a cycle of short-lived administrations with little time or authority to tackle problems and a deeply unpopular Congress that seeks to gain support by removing unpopular leaders.

Ruth Luque, one of the lawmakers who backed the censure measures, said she wanted to replace Jerí with a leader who would put public interest and security first, ahead of a new president coming into office. “We ask to end this agony so we can truly create the transition citizens are hoping for,” she said. “Not a transition with hidden interests, influence-peddling, secret meetings and hooded figures.

We don’t want that sort of transition.” With yet another interim leader set to take over ahead of scheduled elections on April 12, the volatility risks deepening public distrust as legislators and politicians seek to posture themselves as presidential contenders. “It strikes me that there is no trace of high-mindedness here, only electoral calculations,” said Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue think tank in Washington.

“Enough lawmakers concluded their support for Jerí would hurt them in elections, so they had to act.” The scandal that was dubbed “Chifagate” — after a local name for Chinese restaurants — began last month when Jerí was filmed arriving at a restaurant late at night wearing a hood to meet with Chinese businessman Zhihua Yang, who owns stores and a concession for an energy project. The meeting was not publicly disclosed.

Satellite imagery of secretive nuclear facilities reveals Beijing’s efforts to expand its arsenal, just as the last global guardrails on nuclear weapons vanish. In the lush, misty valleys of southwest China, satellite imagery reveals the country’s accelerating nuclear buildup, a force designed for a new age of superpower rivalry. One such valley is known as Zitong, in Sichuan Province, where engineers have been building new bunkers and ramparts.

A new complex bristles with pipes, suggesting the facility handles highly hazardous materials. Another valley is home to a double-fenced facility known as Pingtong, where experts believe China is making plutonium-packed cores of nuclear warheads. The main structure, dominated by a 360-foot-high ventilation stack, has been refurbished in recent years with new vents and heat dispersers. More construction is underway next to it.

Above the Pingtong facility entrance, a hallmark exhortation of China’s leader, Xi Jinping, appears in characters so large they are visible from space: “Stay true to the founding cause and always remember our mission.” U.S. Hardens Allegation That China Conducted a Secret Nuclear TestMichael R. Gordon, Wall Street Journal, February 17, 2026 The U.S. presented new seismic data Tuesday to buttress its recent allegation that China has secretly carried out low-yield nuclear tests, challenging Beijing’s insistence that it has scrupulously observed an international accord banning all nuclear detonations.

A senior State Department official said that a seismic monitoring station in Kazakhstan had detected a 2.75 magnitude event on June 22, 2020. The U.S. has accused China of conducting a clandestine low-yield nuclear test at that time. “We are aware that China conducted a nuclear explosive test,” said Christopher Yeaw, an assistant secretary of state. He said the probable explosion occurred near Lop Nor in northwest China, which has long served as China’s main nuclear test site.

The U.S. allegation comes at a time when the Trump administration is seeking to pressure Beijing to join potential talks with the U.S. and Russia on drafting a new accord to limit nuclear weapons. The question of how to limit nuclear arms is all the more pressing as it follows the expiration earlier this month of the New Start treaty that reduced U.S. and Russian long-range nuclear arms. President Trump is planning to visit Beijing for a summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in April.

Trump said last year that the U.S. would resume nuclear testing “on an equal basis” with China and Russia. The administration has yet to order a resumption of nuclear tests, but American officials have said that if they proceed, any U.S. tests would be similar to the low-yield nuclear detonations it has accused China and Russia of conducting. China has repeatedly denied allegations that it has carried out such tests.

China’s embassy in Washington didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment about the seismic data cited by Yeaw. The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1996 allows signatories to carry out activities to assure the safety and reliability of their nuclear arsenal, including experiments involving fissile material, as long as they don’t result in a nuclear-explosive yield. The question is whether China has crossed that line, as the Trump administration now alleges, and whether the U.S.

needs to respond in kind or can continue to rely on supercomputers and other techniques to maintain and upgrade its nuclear arsenal. The treaty isn’t legally in force because not enough nations have ratified it, but major powers including China, Russia and the U.S. say they are abiding by its terms. The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization that was established to monitor the treaty said earlier this month that it hadn’t detected any evidence of a Chinese nuclear explosion on June 22, 2020.

But Robert Floyd, executive secretary of the organization, revised that assessment Tuesday, noting in a statement that “two very small seismic events,” 12 seconds apart, had been detected on that date. The Kremlin said on Wednesday that neither China nor Russia have carried out secret nuclear tests, noting Beijing had denied U.S. accusations that it had done so. The United States this month accused China of conducting a secret nuclear test in 2020 as it called for a new, broader arms control treaty that would bring in China as well as Russia.

Almost $1 billion in US government funding helped fuel a series of research projects involving defense labs in China in recent years, according to a new study that concludes security policies around such partnerships have failed. The study is believed to be the first of its kind to put a dollar figure — $943.5 million — on such collaborations, which critics have cited as examples of the US unwisely aiding its top adversary’s military, and using taxpayer money to do so.

The report was published by the nonpartisan Center for Research Security & Integrity, a Virginia-based nonprofit. The report doesn’t allege illegal activity. Instead, it argues that a big part of the problem is precisely that the US government has not put more limits on research collaboration. For example, because academic research is exempt from export controls, in many cases there’s nothing to stop a professor in the US from working with a defense lab in China — even if Washington has otherwise restricted it from accessing US technology on national-security grounds.

The analysis documented collaborations with 45 Chinese government-designated defense labs from 2019 through mid-2025. The resulting 313 English-language articles involved topics such as directed energy systems, artificial intelligence and high-performance computational physics. And why isn’t the U.S. Government finding this stuff on their own… that goes or both Republican and Democratic Party Administrations?

The folks responsible for making these decisions to provide these research grants are career government employees at the DoD, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, etc. We need much better due diligence on these things. One might assume that the reason why folks at places like the Center for Research Security and Integrity are publishing these reports publicly is because folks in Government who are responsible for this kind of due diligence are refusing to do it themselves.

Are Research Security Policies in the Us Working? A Case Study on Research Collaborations with PRC Defense Laboratories and Us Federally Sponsored Research Since 2019, at least $943.5 million in U.S. federal funding has supported research collaborations between U.S. institutions and 45 Chinese defense laboratories, though the actual total is likely higher due to incomplete grant data. Power shifts are never easy.

A major one is now underway, not between rival states, but between competing approaches to international order. Call it a clash of two operating systems. One view holds that the most pressing issues of the day can be addressed only through a framework of global and supranational institutions and multilateral rules. The other insists that the nation-state remains the foundation of legitimate authority and effective action, and that outcomes ultimately depend on the decisions, capacities, and accountability of individual states.

For much of the post–Cold War era, what one can call a “global first” approach dominated international thinking. Governments, international organizations, and nongovernmental actors shared the assumption that challenges to do with security, economic disruption, migration, pandemics, and climate change required global solutions. The collapse of the Soviet Union and China’s accession to the World Trade Organization accelerated economic globalization, reinforcing the belief among leaders in the United States and elsewhere that global institutions were best suited to manage complexity and preserve peace.

For decades, these institutions (and the governments and the phalanx of nongovernmental organizations that supported them) advanced a common creed: that only global bodies could tackle the defining problems of the age. Yet the results of this global-first model have been uneven at best. Despite decades of negotiations, global greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, and no major economy is on track to meet the targets set by the 2015 Paris agreement on climate change.

Record numbers of people have been displaced, migration has destabilized domestic politics in many countries, and armed conflicts are more numerous and protracted than at any point since the end of the Cold War. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed failures in global health governance, while progress toward the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals has fallen dramatically short of ambitions. At the same time, China rose rapidly within this global order, accumulating economic, technological, and military power while selectively exploiting international rules and arrangements.

Today, China is mounting the most serious strategic challenge the United States has faced since the end of the Cold War, discrediting the notion that deeper integration and multilateral engagement would produce a more cooperative and stable international system. China increased its support for Russia’s war in Ukraine in 2025 and is likely to deepen cooperation with Moscow further this year, Western officials said, casting doubt on efforts by European leaders to improve relations with Beijing.

President Xi Jinping has become more assertive and confident in his supporting Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and attempts by the Europeans to persuade their Chinese counterparts to help end the war have become more challenging over the past year, the officials said. Russia’s war in Ukraine wouldn’t be able to continue without ongoing Chinese support, particularly the export of dual-use components and critical minerals used in Russian drone production, the officials said.

They described Beijing as the key facilitator of the war. “China could call Vladimir Putin and end this war tomorrow,” US Ambassador to NATO Matthew Whitaker said during a panel late Friday at the Munich Security Conference. “This war is being completely enabled by China.” By reaching back to Maoist tactics of “rectification,” the Chinese leader is signaling that control over the gun requires a state of perpetual cleansing.

When Xi Jinping rang in the new year from Beijing, he called on China to remember the legacy of Yan’an, the rural stronghold where Mao Zedong transformed revolutionary guerrilla fighters into a disciplined force under his command that would go on to take the country. It may have been a hint of what was to come. Yan’an was also where Mao Zedong launched his party’s first major “rectification,” a campaign of political terror that eliminated rivals and cemented his absolute authority over the party.

Three weeks after Mr. Xi’s speech, China effectively purged the military’s top commander Gen. Zhang Youxia, who had once been seen as a confidant of Mr. Xi’s. Like Mao, Mr. Xi is pursuing a kind of spiritual renewal of the party and the military he commands, what he calls constant “self revolution.” And like Mao, that has taken the form of constant purging of enemies, associates and now, those in his inner circle, too.

It is a new level of ruthlessness for a man who has already concentrated power in himself to a degree not seen since Mao. Over the past three years, Mr. Xi has essentially ousted five of the six generals in China’s top military body, the Central Military Commission, which controls China’s armed forces. Only two members are left: Mr. Xi himself and a vice chairman who has overseen Mr. Xi’s purges.

China’s Fragile Future, how Secure Is the CCP?Andrew J. Nathan, Foreign Affairs, February 17, 2026 Agency posts YouTube video depicting a Chinese officer’s lament about high-level purges. The Central Intelligence Agency released a new video on Thursday seeking to capitalize on upheaval at the top of China’s armed forces to recruit potential spies. The 95-second Mandarin-language video shows an officer walking through a military installation musing about ruthless power struggles at the top of the armed forces.

“What the leaders are truly protecting is only their own selfish interests,” the narrator states. “Their power is built on countless lies. But now, these walls of lies are crumbling, leaving us only to clean up the mess.” The highly produced video was released less than a month after Chinese leader Xi Jinping purged two top generals, including his highest-ranking deputy in the military, Gen.

Zhang Youxia. The video contains apparent references to Zhang, who was one of the few senior Chinese military officers with combat experience—from the conflict with Vietnam that started in 1979—and was seen as a capable leader. “Anyone with leadership ability will inevitably be feared and ruthlessly eliminated,” the narrator says. “I cannot allow these madmen to shape my daughter’s future world.” Xi has removed more than 60 top officers and defense-industry executives since 2023, according to a review of official disclosures by The Wall Street Journal.

The turmoil has left the Central Military Commission, the top body that controls the military, with just two members: Xi himself and the head of the military’s body for internal investigations. The video concludes with the officer opening a laptop while parked in an isolated spot and calling up a page that says “Contact the CIA” in Chinese. The closing credits display a CIA address on Tor, an anonymizing network.

While intelligence agencies routinely cultivate sources within both friendly and adversarial militaries, observers noted the 95-second clip was unusually overt. Its release comes as U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping attempt to walk back tensions driven by a range of grievances, from trade to an escalating rivalry in the West Pacific. The timing is also sensitive for China’s military establishment, coming just weeks after another senior officer was swept up in Xi’s anti-corruption campaign.

“The Chinese side will take all necessary measures to firmly crack down on infiltration and sabotage activities by external anti-China forces and to firmly safeguard national sovereignty, security, and development interests,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian said at a Friday’s regular press briefing. “The attempts of anti-China forces will not succeed.” Japan Releases Chinese Boat Captain After Detaining Him for 30 HoursJavier C.

Hernández and Hisako Ueno, New York Times, February 14, 2026 After details of payments from Beijing’s sports bureau to freestyle skiing champion Eileen Gu were accidentally revealed last year, her name was quickly scrubbed from the budget. From the start of her freestyle skiing career, Eileen Gu has been a runaway financial success. When the U.S.-born star opted in 2019 to compete for her mother’s home country of China, sponsors flocked to her camera-ready charisma—and for her access to one of the world’s largest markets.

But Gu, who grew up in the Bay Area and studies at Stanford, might be even more valuable to the Chinese government than she is to backers such as Porsche and Red Bull. And in the leadup to this Olympics, it became clear just how much China was willing to pay to support her. In 2025, the Beijing Municipal Sports Bureau was set to pay Gu and another athlete a combined $6.6 million. That figure emerged in a public budget that was released in early 2025.

It accidentally included the names of Gu and figure skater Zhu Yi or Beverly Zhu, another U.S.-born Olympic athlete who competes for China. The document didn’t break down their individual payments, though it’s likely that Gu, a three-time Olympic medalist, received a larger share of the funding. In total, Beijing’s sports bureau was set to pay Gu and Zhu nearly 100 million yuan, or $14 million over the past three years.

The most recent allocation was for “striving for excellent results in qualifying for the 2026 Milan Winter Olympics,” according to the budget. Gu’s name, along with Zhu’s, was deleted from the budgets soon after they emerged, but not before they spurred surprise and criticism from the Chinese public at a time when budgets were tight for essential services. Those comments were also scrubbed from social media.

Gu is already one of the highest paid female athletes in the world. She earned $23 million last year, almost entirely from endorsements, according to the sports-business publication Sportico. That ranked behind only three other female athletes in the world, tennis players Coco Gauff, Aryna Sabalenka, and Iga Swiatek. Alysa Liu’s father, Arthur Liu, fled the PRC as a political refugee following the Tiananmen Square massacre.

In the run-up to the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, Alysa and her father were the targets of a massive Chinese Communist Party intimidation campaign on American soil. The FBI ended up having to provide them 24/7 protection. Five Individuals Charged Variously with Stalking, Harassing, and Spying on U.S. Residents on Behalf of the PRC Secret Police (U.S. Justice Department, March 16, 2022) China targeted dad of Olympic figure skater Alysa Liu, other critics in U.S., DOJ will charge (CNBC, March 16, 2022) U.S.

Olympic figure skater Alysa Liu, father targeted in Chinese spy case (ESPN, March 17, 2022) Justice Department accuses Chinese agents of trying to intimidate critics in the U.S. (NBC News, March 16, 2022) It is kind of amazing that CBS’s 60 Minutes didn’t even bother to mention any of this a month ago when they ran a 13-minute report on Alysa Liu and her father. The feature focused overwhelmingly on the pressure she was under in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics… made a passing reference to her father escaping China after Tiananmen… but made no mention of the CCP intimidation campaign during this same time.

I’m no psychologist… but maybe… this disgusting behavior by the Chinese Communist Party had something to do with the pressure Alysa Liu was feeling in 2021 and early 2022… instead 60 Minutes attributes it all to her father, fulfilling yet another objective of the CCP, discrediting political dissidents like Arthur Liu. China is killing the fish: An environmental danger almost no one is paying attention to.

Christopher Coates, director of foreign policy, national defence, and national security at MLI, speaks in Ottawa at a news conference on the findings of an investigation into the activities of the Chinese Communist Party’s united front groups in Canada and other Western countries, co-hosted with the Jamestown Foundation in February 2026. The Chinese transnational criminal at the center of what began as a counter-terrorism raid on a Las Vegas residential garage told a co-conspirator that his fraudulent theft of U.S.

scientific property would help “defeat the American aggressor and wild ambitious wolf.” In another exchange — part of a sprawling CAD $330 million American IP theft ring run from Vancouver — Jiabei “Jesse” Zhu offered a darker philosophy: “The law is strong, but the outlaws are ten times stronger.” Those statements, drawn from Canadian court records, now appear in a Las Vegas arrest declaration behind the raid that has linked an illegal biolab network in Nevada to a California laboratory that Congressional investigators say is backed by Chinese military-linked corporate networks.

The declaration — a 22-page document first reported on by Just The News and reviewed in full by The Bureau — was filed by a detective assigned to LVMPD’s Southern Nevada Counter Terrorism Section, working in conjunction with the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. It is an arrest document drafted by a counter-terrorism detective, and it reads accordingly — assembling not just evidence of what was found in a garage, but a case for why the man behind it should be understood as something more than a fraudster who cut corners with hazardous materials.

Zhu’s “defeat the American aggressor” statements were made years ago, in the context of what a Canadian judge called intellectual property fraud on an “epic scale.” But investigators appear to be using them now to frame the ideology of a man they say ran an unlicensed biolab in Reedley, California, attempted to open another in Las Vegas, and — even from a federal prison cell — allegedly directed a business partner to manage properties where law enforcement says it found laboratory equipment, unmarked biological vials, hazardous chemicals, and boxes of Chinese-shipped fentanyl and opioid test kits, all sitting in a residential garage doubling as a short-term rental.

One item a tipster reported seeing in the garage stands out as especially chilling in the post-pandemic era: a biological safety cabinet with integrated gloves extending through a sealed glass panel. This is the kind of hands-through-glass chamber the world came to recognize in photographs from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where scientists wearing blue pressure suits reach into the box where the most lethal pathogens on earth are kept alive.

A Reedley code enforcement officer told detectives the equipment described by a tipster in Las Vegas was consistent with a BSL-4 lab — the highest biosafety classification, reserved for Ebola, Marburg, smallpox. I recommend reading his book, Willful Blindness: How a Network of Narcos, Tycoons and CCP Agents Infiltrated the West. Published in 2021, it is amazing how little the Justin Trudeau Government and now the Mark Carney Government has done to dismantle these operations.

An army of lawyers is advancing. Taiwan is the targetNathan Attrill and Shelly Shih, State of the Strait, February 10, 2026 Designations of Palau’s Senate President and Marshall Islands’ Former Mayor for Involvement in Significant CorruptionThomas “Tommy” Pigott, U.S. Department of State, February 10, 2026 EUR 1.2 billion in counterfeit cash stopped in postal operationEuropol, February 9, 2026 Justice Department Files Action to Protect National Security by Enforcing President’s Order of Chinese Company’s Divestment from U.S.

CompanyU.S. Department of Justice, February 10, 2026 Hefei’s Ganquan Church: Pastor Zhou and Elder Ding Sentenced to 4.5 and 4 YearsWang Zhipeng, Bitter Winter, February 18, 2026 How Do You Steal an Airplane? One Piece at a TimeJordan Robertson, Victor Yvellez, and Drake Bennett, Bloomberg, February 13, 2026 U.K. Regulator Weighs Rule Change to Attract Chinese ListingsJoe Stonor, Wall Street Journal, February 13, 2026 Is China Leading the Robotics Revolution?Hugh Grant-Chapman, Leon Li, Brian Hart, Bonny Lin, Truly Tinsley, Feifei Hung, CSIS, February 12, 2026 Apple is apparently considering the pitfalls of turning to Chinese memory makers, YMTC and CXMT, to satiate its thirst for memory resources.

While details are scarce at the moment, the gambit might simply be Apple’s way of countering the hardball negotiation tactics employed by the so-called big three – SK hynix, Samsung, and Micron – as well as KIOXIA. For the benefit of those who might not be aware, Apple secures its DRAM resources primarily from Samsung Electronics, which accounts for around 60 percent of the DRAM supply for the iPhone 17 lineup.

Even so, the Cupertino giant also taps SK hynix and Micron to plug its residual DRAM demand. I wonder if folks understand just how vulnerable Apple’s entire business is to geopolitical shocks… if Beijing blockades Taiwan, there are no more Apple products being produced and exported out of the PRC. Will Darwin Port Remain Under Chinese Control?Allen Zhang, The Diplomat, February 9, 2026 U.S. Plans to Deploy More Missile Systems in the Philippines, Challenging ChinaGabriele Steinhauser, Wall Street Journal, February 17, 2026 Commitment to key Asian ally coincides with increased pressure on other defense partners.

The U.S. plans to deploy more advanced missile systems and other weapons in the Philippines to deter Chinese aggression in the South China Sea, the State Department said Tuesday, affirming a policy that has angered Beijing. Senior officials from the U.S. and the Philippines met in Manila this week for annual talks on their alliance, which rests on a mutual-defense treaty signed in 1951. Their strongly worded statement—which condemned what it said were Beijing’s illegal and deceptive activities in the South China Sea—comes when the Trump administration has increased pressure on, and at times openly questioned, other longstanding defense alliances, especially in Europe.

More than any other Southeast Asian nation, the Philippines has openly challenged China’s claims to much of the South China Sea, a strategic thoroughfare for about a third of global maritime trade. It has taken Beijing to court over its claims and regularly calls out so-called gray-zone deployments by Chinese ships and vessels that have blocked the Philippines’s access to disputed maritime features.

In recent years, both Manila and Washington have made moves to deepen their alliance, drawing more pushback from Beijing. In 2024, the U.S. Army moved its Typhon missile system, which could strike commercial and military targets on the Chinese mainland, to a base in the northern Philippines and then kept it there after joint exercises. Last year, the Marines deployed a shorter-range, antiship missile launcher, known as the Navy-Marine Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System, or NMESIS, to another Philippine island close to Taiwan.

Japan Detains a Chinese Boat and Its Captain Amid Rift with BeijingJavier C. Hernández, New York Times, February 13, 2026 C.I.A. Video Appeals to Potential Spies in China’s MilitaryJulian E. Barnes, New York Times, February 12, 2026 Belarus’s deep structural dependence on Russia has necessitated a cautious approach to external diversification, one that is designed to avoid challenging the foundation of its security arrangements, economic model, or political alignment.

Within this context, Belarus’s engagement with China, particularly through the Great Stone Industrial Park, stands out as Minsk’s most prominent effort to prudently expand its limited strategic space. Rather than functioning as a conventional development project, the Great Stone initiative operates as a political-economic instrument that marginally expands Belarus’s room for maneuver while remaining embedded within the constraints created by its dependence on Moscow.

Dear Colleagues: With this email, I would like to share with you my article on the activities of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in Guatemala, Taiwan’s largest diplomatic ally in Central America, as well as the efforts of the Taiwanese government to work with its Guatemalan counterpart in the wake of PRC efforts to persuade Guatemala to abandon Taiwan for the PRC. The work is based on a combination of research, and 25 in-depth interviews I conducted with subject-matter experts in the country during the end of January-beginning of February 2026.

As I have written elsewhere, I was struck yet again that the core of PRC influence and leverage is not so much the loans or infrastructure projects it promises, but the webs of relationships, Chinese partners “with benefits,” and often corruption, that it weaves within all parts of society, from ideologically-oriented leftists, to “pragmatic” businesspersons and government bureaucrats. As in other countries, I was impacted at the number of Guatemalan Congresspersons, Ministers, business elites from reputable conservative families and commerce guilds, as well as journalists and others, involved in “deals” of various types with the PRC.

As the U.S. government increasingly seeks to push back against PRC influence in the hemisphere, consistent with the policies of the Trump Administration and the new U.S. National Security Strategy, I am convinced that a key to the success of such efforts is making public, and looking closely at, those across the region involved in such relationships, even when doing so in their “sovereign right,” or asserting that it is “just business.” It is no longer a China versus the West, nor the West versus the rest.

In fact, we no longer live in a world of blocs at all. Instead, we are moving into a world of issues-based cooperation. This is perhaps clearest from the cavalcade of leaders who are visiting Beijing. Already, French President Emmanuel Macron, South Korean President Lee Jae-myung, Taoiseach of Ireland Micheál Martin, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, and U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer have all visited China in recent months.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz is expected to begin his visit in February. Even U.S. President Donald Trump is set to visit in April. At its core, these visits are a response to the erosion of the post-Cold War order, whose death became the main topic of discussion at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. With Washington no longer serving as a reliable steward of the multilateral system, the European Union’s long-standing pursuit of strategic autonomy is moving from rhetoric to practice.

The result will be Europe’s emergence as an independent pole, one defined by regulatory power, economic gravity, and normative influence. What has changed most fundamentally is not the disappearance of values but their role in global alignment. For much of the post-Cold War period, perceptions of shared values sustained bloc loyalty, even when material interests diverged. It was a “community of shared values” that created the G-7 and NATO.

It was a set of shared values that saw much of the Western world intervene together in the Balkans in 1999, fight in Afghanistan together after 9/11, and join forces to support Ukraine. Over the past decade, this same Euro-Atlantic community was gradually moving toward a consensus that China was hostile to the community of liberal Western states and should be isolated with a cordon sanitaire. But even that unity, such as it was, is now at an end.

With Washington attacking Europe rather than trying to rally it, Canada, the U.K., and the EU have all begun to reach out to China to engage on their own terms.

Summary

This report covers the latest developments in samsung. The information presented highlights key changes and updates that are relevant to those following this topic.

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