John, 

Each month, we bring you an update on Mike’s latest work on the issues that are driving conversations around the globe. 

Here’s what’s happened since our last edition.

Bottom Line: “We know that every day a ceasefire continues, international pressure will grow greater on Israel, Hamas will grow stronger, and so we need to resist this movement. Israel is already following international law. Hamas, meanwhile, has slaughtered thousands of innocent civilians. Hamas, right now, is using innocent civilians as human shields. And the president, while flirting with these restrictions on Israel has it within his power to put sanctions on Hamas for this barbaric practice of using [innocent civilians] as human shields, because of a bill we passed in Congress, yet he refuses to do so.”

Bottom Line: "I'm incredibly concerned. It appears to me that after, you know, a couple of decades of neglect, we've allowed the CCP to turn the Monroe Doctrine into the Mao Doctrine, and we've had multiple reports. … It's time that we pay attention to our own backyard. For a while, we just got complacent, right? We were lucky to have non-hostile neighbors. We had two oceans surrounding us. We felt like we had this sense of security in our own backyard. The CCP is now exploiting that complacency in order to encroach on our territory, in my view, as part of an effort to undermine America and displace us as the global leader.”

Bottom Line: "This isn’t just a matter for the Commerce Department or the DoD. Every business – small, medium, and large – in Northeast Wisconsin has to potentially deal with the issue of intellectual property theft or, if you’re trying to break into the Chinese market, the complexities of that. Counterfeiting is a huge issue.”

Bottom Line: "The hate we're seeing spewed against Jewish Americans on TikTok should remind us of the basic facts: And the fact is that this app, which increasingly young Americans get their news from this app, this is the source of news and could become the dominant news platform in America, is controlled by a Chinese company that is at the behest of the Chinese Communist Party."

Bottom Line: "It is critical that tariffs on the People's Republic of China automobiles not only be maintained but also increased to stem the expected surge in PRC. If PRC automakers are able to withstand sustained losses with the support of the PRC government, it is only a matter of time before PRC manufacturers will be able to absorb the additional 25% tariff on PRC vehicles to access the U.S. market.”

Thank you for reading this month’s edition of the Foreign Policy Newsletter –– we’ll be in touch as we monitor developing stories from around the globe.