Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Situation Report, where at least one of your co-authors is spending the long July 4 holiday weekend at the beach in Delaware. (No sighting thus far of former U.S. President Joe Biden, but stay tuned.) We also want to wish a fond farewell to our departing colleague Lili Pike, who is embarking on an exciting new journey. Be sure to follow her on social media at @lilipike.bsky.social on Bluesky and @lili_pike on X.
Alright, here’s what’s on tap for the day: The Quad meets in Washington, the Pentagon suspends some weapons shipments to Ukraine, and Iran allegedly hacks Trump.
Quad Goals
For the second time in less than six months, the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue—better known simply as “the Quad”—convened in Washington. Just as he did the day after U.S. President Donald Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration, Secretary of State Marco Rubio hosted the foreign ministers of Japan, Australia, and India for a meeting of the informal but influential security grouping aimed largely at countering China’s influence in the Indo-Pacific region.
Originally set up to coordinate humanitarian assistance during the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the Quad has gone through multiple iterations and even nearly a decade of dormancy before being resurrected in its current form during Trump’s first term. The group has since endured and even strengthened through multiple administrations, helped in part by Biden’s love for “minilaterals,” which stood in sharp contrast to Trump’s distaste for anything involving more than himself and one other leader.
This week, too, Rubio and his counterparts—Indian Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar, Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong, and Japanese Foreign Minister Takeshi Iwaya—sought to present a united front. They once again coalesced around their shared opposition to China without actually naming the country in the joint statement that they released Tuesday, reaffirming their “steadfast commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific” and opposition to “any unilateral actions that seek to change the status quo by force or coercion.” The statement also included condemnation of North Korea’s ballistic missile launches and cybercrime as well as the April 22 terrorist attack in Indian-controlled Kashmir.
The main collective deliverable came in the form of the creation of the Quad Critical Minerals Initiative, which seeks “to strengthen economic security and collective resilience by collaborating to secure and diversify critical minerals supply chains,” the production of which China dominates and has increasingly shown a willingness to weaponize.
“These are very important strategic partners and allies of the United States, and together we have a lot of shared priorities,” Rubio told reporters on Tuesday.
“The vibes were strong,” Lindsey Ford, who played a key role in the Biden administration’s engagement with the Quad as deputy assistant secretary of defense for South and Southeast Asia, told SitRep. “There’s a lot to commend in this joint statement, which is the first one that gives us any sense of how the Quad may evolve under the Trump administration,” added Ford, who is now a senior advisor at the consulting firm Clarion Strategies. “In a lot of ways, this joint statement—by 2025 standards, at least—seems almost quaint in its normalcy.”
Yet new tensions among the member countries (mostly the Trump administration’s with each of the other three) could threaten to unravel the otherwise tightly knit Quad.
Touchy topics. Looming over the Quad camaraderie is Trump’s unpredictable and disruptive trade policy, with all three countries—along with dozens of others—racing to secure deals that will earn them a reprieve from sweeping U.S. tariffs that are set to take effect next Wednesday unless Trump delays them again.
India’s trade delegation has been in Washington since last week trying to negotiate an agreement, while Trump told reporters on Wednesday that he doubted a deal with Japan would materialize. Australia technically already has a free trade agreement with the United States, but that didn’t stop Trump from slapping a 10 percent tariff on Australian goods—a tariff that Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said this week “should be zero.”
There’s also India’s discomfort with Trump taking credit for a cease-fire between India and Pakistan last month, Australia’s worries about a Pentagon review of the trilateral AUKUS submarine pact, and Japan’s reported cancellation of an annual “2+2” security dialogue with the United States—which had been scheduled for this week—over a U.S. demand that it spend more on defense.
“One thing [about] the Quad: it is strong when the bilaterals underlying it are strong,” Tanvi Madan, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Brookings Institution, wrote on X ahead of the meeting. “If those weaken, the Quad will be weaker.”
Trump himself hasn’t engaged directly with the Quad in his second term thus far, instead leaving that task to Rubio, but the U.S. president is expected to attend the group’s leaders’ meeting in India later this year.
China quiet. Even opposition to China, purportedly the glue holding the Quad together, has been muddled under Trump—as Lili reports in her final piece for FP. Washington’s China strategy has swung between antagonism and appeasement over the past six months, raising questions on how much Trump can be relied upon to pick an Indo-Pacific fight should the need arise.
Beijing has been uncharacteristically muted on the Quad over the past few months, a sharp contrast from its previous railing against the group as an “Asian NATO” aimed at containing China. That may be because China now sees the Quad—and indeed U.S. alliances in general—as weakened by internal disagreements, according to Ford.
“My own general experience is if China isn’t complaining loudly about what you’re doing in Asia, you’re doing it wrong,” she said.
Let’s Get Personnel
The iconic J. Edgar Hoover Building in downtown Washington, D.C., will soon relinquish its role as the FBI headquarters, FBI Director Kash Patel announced on Wednesday. The agency will instead move a few blocks down the street to the Ronald Reagan Building, which was until recently home to the now-defunct U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
Lynne M. Tracy departs Moscow after serving two and a half years as the U.S. ambassador to Russia.
On the Button
What should be high on your radar, if it isn’t already.
Bibi goes to Washington. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is set to travel to Washington on July 7 as Trump pushes for a new cease-fire and hostage deal in Gaza. Netanyahu’s visit will come in the wake of Israel’s 12-day war with Iran, which culminated with historic U.S. strikes on key Iranian nuclear sites and a Trump-brokered cease-fire that started on shaky ground but appears to be holding for the moment.
Israeli Minister for Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer, one of Netanyahu’s top advisors, is already in Washington this week to discuss Gaza and Iran. Netanyahu’s impending visit will occur as questions continue to swirl around the full extent of the damage from the Israeli and U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites, despite repeated assertions from Trump that the Iranian nuclear program was “obliterated.” Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell estimated on Wednesday that the strikes had set the nuclear program back by one to two years.
Trump and Netanyahu are also set to discuss Syria amid signs that Israel is interested in moving toward normalizing ties with the new Syrian government. However, an array of issues—ranging from the Israeli annexation of the Golan Heights to Palestinian statehood—are likely to present obstacles to this goal. The Israeli military has also been operating in parts of Syria since late last year, following the ouster of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Washington suspends some Ukraine weapons. The United States is halting the shipment of certain weapons promised to Ukraine, citing concerns that Washington’s own stockpiles of those weapons are too low. The decision “was made to put America’s interests first following a DOD [Department of Defense] review of our nation’s military support and assistance to other countries across the globe,” White House deputy press secretary Anna Kelly said in a statement to Politico.
This comes as Russia has been seemingly struggling to make major territorial gains in a summer offensive despite advantages in terms of manpower and military equipment. Still, Ukraine faces significant challenges as the grinding war of attrition with Russia rages on.
Over the course of June, Russia launched 5,438 drones at Ukraine—a new monthly record, according to The Associated Press. Meanwhile, roughly 50,000 Russian troops have assembled near the northeastern Ukrainian city of Sumy, the capital of the Sumy region. The region was the staging ground for Ukraine’s stunning offensive across the border in Russia’s Kursk region last year. Ukraine has since been forced to retreat from most of Kursk, though Ukraine’s top military commander, Oleksandr Syrskyi, said in late June that his forces still controlled a small sliver of territory in the region.
Though Ukrainian forces near Sumy are reportedly outnumbered 3-to-1, Syrskyi said last week that Russian advances in the region had been halted. The Institute for the Study of War, which closely tracks the situation on the ground in Ukraine, has also said that Russia hasn’t made advances in the region lately.
Trump aides hacked. Hackers reportedly linked to Iran are threatening to release emails taken from Trump aides and others linked to the president—including White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, advisor Roger Stone, and porn actor Stormy Daniels. The hackers told Reuters that they might try to sell the emails.
The same group, which operates under the pseudonym “Robert,” was responsible for hacking the Trump campaign last year—though this ultimately had no bearing on the result of the 2024 presidential election.
After the reporting from Reuters on the hackers’ threats, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) warned in a statement that a “hostile foreign adversary is threatening to illegally exploit purportedly stolen and unverified material in an effort to distract, discredit and divide.” CISA said this represented a “calculated smear campaign” against Trump.
This comes several days after Trump railed against Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei for declaring victory over the United States and Israel. Trump responded by stating that he was dropping any steps toward sanctions relief for Iran.
Snapshot
Palestinian children line up to receive a hot meal at a food distribution point in Nuseirat, Gaza, on June 30.Eyad Baba/AFP via Getty Images
Put On Your Radar
Sunday, July 6: A BRICS summit hosted by Brazil is set to begin.
Wednesday, July 9: U.S. reciprocal tariffs on specified countries are poised to take effect.
By the Numbers
More than 14 million people could die over the next half decade, including 4.5 million children under the age of 5, due to the Trump administration gutting and dismantling USAID, according to a new analysis published in the Lancet on Monday. From 2001 through 2021, USAID-funded programs helped prevent close to 92 million deaths across 133 countries, according to the analysis.
Rubio on Tuesday announced that USAID would “officially cease to implement foreign assistance.” Rubio said the State Department was assuming responsibility over foreign assistance programs that “align with administration policies.”
Quote of the Week
“DOGE is the monster that might have to go back and eat Elon. Wouldn’t that be terrible?”
—Trump on his onetime buddy Elon Musk, who has slammed Trump’s spending bill and deepened a feud that began after Musk left the unofficial Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Trump also said he would “have to take a look” at potentially deporting Musk, who is a U.S. citizen, and mused about cutting the South African-born billionaire’s numerous U.S. government contracts.
This Week’s Most Read
- Iran Is on Course for a Bomb After U.S. Strikes Fail to Destroy Facilities by Jeffrey Lewis
- The End of Modernity by Christopher Clark
- How to Sell a Clash of Civilizations by Nick Danforth
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
It has now been nearly three weeks since a British F-35 fighter jet was first grounded in Thiruvananthapuram in the Indian state of Kerala after having to make an emergency landing—and the state government clearly feels that it’s no longer too soon to make jokes about it. “Kerala, the destination you’ll never want to leave,” the state’s tourism board wrote in a post on X, complete with a fake five-star review from the aircraft.