Google Trends is not marketed as an intelligence tool. It is presented as a utility for marketers and journalists trying to understand what people are searching for. But the data it surfaces—aggregated, anonymized, and publicly accessible—has properties that make it useful for open source intelligence work: it is behaviorally derived, it is difficult to falsify, and it updates in near real time. What people search for under conditions of stress, uncertainty, or crisis reflects what they actually believe and fear, not what they say in surveys or state media.

China’s 15th Five-Year Plan contains an AI agenda that extends well beyond domestic deployment. The plan calls for China to create a global AI organization, establish international cooperation platforms, develop regulatory frameworks, and set technical standards — not participate in these structures, but originate them.

This is not a new impulse. China has pursued technical standards influence in telecommunications (5G), transportation, and digital infrastructure for years, with meaningful success in some arenas. The 15th FYP extends this strategy into AI explicitly, treating the governance layer as a competitive domain as significant as the technology itself.

On March 12, 2026, China’s legislature formally approved the 15th Five-Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development, covering 2025–2030, along with an Outline of Long-Term Goals extending to 2035. The document had already cleared the Communist Party’s Central Committee before reaching the legislature — the approval was a formality, not a debate.

The Five-Year Plan is one of the most consequential documents the Chinese state produces. It is not a budget. It is not a law. It is a framework — a statement of national priorities that cascades down through every level of government, every state-owned enterprise, and increasingly every major private firm operating in China. When the plan says semiconductors matter, capital flows toward semiconductors. When it says belt and road, contracts move.

The comparison between American and European identity models is one of the most useful tools for understanding what Europe actually is, because the differences are so structural and so consequential.

American national identity is, in design, ideological. You become American by affirming a set of propositions — about liberty, rights, constitutional government — not by ancestry or cultural inheritance. The proposition is that the idea is prior to the place. This produces a different relationship to history: America is perpetually new, perpetually reinventing itself against its founding documents.

Russia’s expanding security footprint in Africa poses a set of policy questions for the United States that do not resolve easily — and for which the current administration has offered no comprehensive answer. The Trump Administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy articulates a goal of reestablishing strategic stability with Russia but does not specify any approach to Russian operations on the African continent. That silence is itself a policy choice, and Congress is beginning to probe what it means.

Libya has never fit the Africa Corps model quite as cleanly as CAR or Mali. Russia’s engagement there is not primarily about counterinsurgency support to a fragile government — it is about projecting power into the Mediterranean and maintaining a logistics corridor that serves Russia’s broader African operations. Libya is less a client state than a strategic platform.

Wagner personnel reportedly began supporting Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan National Army around 2018, as Haftar positioned himself as a rival to the internationally recognized government in Tripoli. U.S. Africa Command assessed Wagner’s presence at roughly 2,000 personnel as of 2020, describing their role as vital to the LNA’s 2019–2020 campaign to seize Tripoli — a campaign that ultimately failed. Those numbers declined in 2022 as some operators were pulled toward Ukraine, and current figures remain uncertain.

Mali is where Russia’s Africa strategy produced its most dramatic geopolitical realignment — and where the limits of that strategy have become most visible. The Russian presence there displaced a significant French and American counterterrorism effort, handed Moscow a propaganda victory against Western influence in the Sahel, and helped Mali’s military junta consolidate power. It has also delivered insurgent ambushes, a major battlefield embarrassment, and a security situation that has not materially improved.

The Central African Republic is where Russia’s Africa playbook was first fully field-tested, and it remains one of the clearest illustrations of how the model works in practice. Russian personnel first arrived in late 2017 — about 175 “instructors,” including Wagner operators — after Russia secured a UN arms embargo exemption to supply weapons to the Touadera government. What began as an advisory mission expanded rapidly into something far more integrated.

Over the past decade, thousands of Russian security personnel have deployed across Africa under an arrangement that analysts have taken to calling a “military-business model” — security support exchanged for payment or access to natural resources. What began as a nominally private enterprise has since been folded into the Russian state apparatus, rebranded, and extended to new theaters. The operation is larger, more institutionalized, and more geopolitically consequential than its mercenary origins might suggest.

Sudan’s relationship with Russia has always been defined more by resource extraction and opportunistic arms dealing than by the kind of structured security partnership Moscow built in CAR or Mali. It is also the case that has most clearly illustrated the sanctions-evasion function of Russia’s African operations — and the extent to which the continent’s conflicts have become arenas for Russian commercial interests dressed up as strategic engagement.

The foundation was laid in 2017, when then-President Omar al-Bashir struck a series of deals with Moscow that opened Sudan to Wagner-linked commercial activity. Those firms moved into gold mining, working alongside elements of Sudan’s security forces in arrangements that were profitable for both sides and opaque to outside scrutiny. In 2022, Wagner was implicated in a scheme that involved smuggling Sudanese gold to Russia — providing hard currency at a moment when Western sanctions were beginning to bite.

Modern warfare is not constrained by willpower; it’s constrained by supply chains.

The romantic version of military strategy centers on resolve—the side that wants victory more, endures more, sacrifices more, prevails. It’s a useful story for recruitment and memorialization. It has almost nothing to do with how prolonged industrial-era and post-industrial conflicts actually terminate. What ends wars is not the exhaustion of will but the exhaustion of the material systems that translate will into battlefield effect.

The strategic landscape of energy and maritime security is tightening rather than simply shifting, with the European Union advancing toward its next round of sanctions enforcement. At the center of this effort is the growing focus on the so-called “shadow fleet”—a dispersed network of aging, lightly regulated tankers used to bypass oil price caps and sanctions regimes. European officials, including Kaja Kallas, have signaled that disrupting these networks is now a priority, not as a new doctrine, but as an overdue escalation in enforcement.