🇮🇷🇧🇭🇰🇼🇺🇸⚡️ — NEW: Iran's IRGC says that four oil tankers operating under U.S. military direction attempted to transit the Strait of Hormuz without authorization or coordination and ignored warnings from the IRGC Navy.

➡️ One tanker was targeted and halted, while the other vessels turned back.

➡️ The IRGC said that U.S. drones later struck telecommunications facilities in Qeshm and Sirik. In response, it launched ballistic missile attacks against two U.S. airbases in Kuwait, including Ali Al-Salem Air Base and the U.S. Fifth Fleet in Bahrain.

➡️ The IRGC warned that any further U.S. actions would prompt a broader response and threatened that continued hostilities could result in the complete closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

🇺🇸❌🇮🇷 — WATCH: CENTCOM has released footage of strikes on Iranian coastal surveillance radar sites in Goruk and on Qeshm Island.

🇺🇸⚡️ — A federal judge has struck down sweeping immigration restrictions imposed by the Trump administration that affected applicants from 39 countries.

In a ruling issued Friday, District Judge John J. McConnell Jr. invalidated policies introduced in November 2025 following the Washington, D.C., shooting of two National Guard members.

The measures effectively prevented citizens of the affected countries from receiving final decisions on asylum claims, green cards, work permits, and citizenship applications.

McConnell noted that policies “threw the lives of countless immigrants living in the U.S. into indeterminate legal limbo” and found that USCIS had exceeded its authority.

The 39 countries in question are located predominantly in Africa, the Middle East and Asia.

🇺🇸🇮🇱⚡️ — NEW: The Pentagon has raised Israel’s counterintelligence threat rating to its highest level amid concerns that Israeli intelligence is intensifying efforts to gather information on the Trump administration’s internal discussions and decision-making regarding conflicts in the Middle East, NBC News reports.

➡️ A recent Defense Intelligence Agency assessment rated Israel’s human espionage and technical intelligence-gathering capabilities as being at a “critical level” and cited several incidents that heightened concern.

➡️ While intelligence sharing between the two countries remains unaffected, officials said U.S. personnel are expected to take additional precautions when traveling to Israel or meeting Israeli counterparts.

🇮🇱❌🇱🇧 — A raid targeted the Khurdali road, with preliminary information indicating a Lebanese army brigadier was among those targeted.

🇮🇱❌🇱🇧 — Brigadier General Wissam Sabra was killed in the strike on the Khurdali road this morning, accompanied by a number of military personnel.

🇮🇷⚔️🇺🇸 Iran’s IRGC says four tankers tried leaving Hormuz at 1:30 a.m.; one was hit, two turned back. At 2:00 a.m., US drones struck sites in Qeshm and Sirik islands. Iran then responded with missile strikes on Kuwait’s Ali Al Salem Air Base and U.S. Fifth Fleet facilities in Bahrain.

📝 MenchOSINT: Reminder that USCENTCOM still denies the fact that they are quietly attempting to escort Oil Tankers through the Strait of Hormuz.

Why ? Because many oil tankers end up in flames (without UKMTO reporting), and Trump admin doesn't want the public to know this.

🔗 EGYOSINT

🌍 Hedging Is the New Normal

We are living in a new world of hedgers. The shocks of the last several years—COVID-19, Russia’s war in Ukraine, U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs, and the Iran conflict—have upended how nations approach international affairs. The smooth flows of a globalized and rules-based world have clotted into uncertainty, forcing states to find new pathways for trade, diplomacy, resource extraction, and defense cooperation. Countries no longer consider historical partnerships, values-driven alliances, and regional blocs to be sufficient to protect and advance national interests.

Hedging is the practice of avoiding exclusive dependence in a world of unreliable partners. It involves cultivating competing relationships across different domains so that no crisis or betrayal will leave a state out of options. In decades past, states tended to hedge their bets in specific circumstances. India, for example, emerged from colonization as a nonaligned nation but hedged amid China’s rapid growth to build ties with the United States—even as it maintained warm relations with Russia. Now, this is not just a tactic limited to emerging powers or a response to particular geopolitical shake-ups. Hedging has become central to international relations, shaping how powers great and small approach trade, technology, finance, energy, and security.

States are no longer hedging within a system that is episodically volatile but out of a recognition that there no longer is much of a system at all. The rise of what we might call “hedgemony” is both a response to the reshuffling of the global order and an accelerant of this transformation. Although these moves are being pursued by individual governments in search of stability and security, the net result may be a world that is less predictable and even more dangerous.

Twenty-five years ago, globalization was embraced as almost a panacea. Deeper integration across borders was expected to make the world richer, more cohesive, and more humane. U.S. President Bill Clinton encapsulated the vision in his 2000 State of the Union address, when he argued that “open markets and rule-based trade are the best engines we know of for raising living standards, reducing global poverty and environmental destruction, and assuring the free flow of ideas.”

That conviction shaped an era of free trade agreements and global value chains: Companies shifted manufacturing to lower-cost jurisdictions and sourced inputs from wherever they came cheapest. Products designed in one country used components from others, were assembled elsewhere, and eventually funneled for shipping through centralized hubs to markets worldwide. That model bore cheap goods and global economic growth, but it also scattered the seeds of future fragility. The 2008 financial crisis was an early warning that globalization carried the risk of cross-regional contagion.

Interdependence was not easily undone. By the eve of its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Russia was supplying around 40 percent of the European Union’s pipeline gas imports. China still refines roughly 70 percent of the world’s supplies of 19 of the 20 most important strategic minerals—though the United States and other Western nations are fervently trying to change this amid intensifying U.S.-China competition and Beijing’s periodic throttling of critical mineral exports.

Now that the spell of innocuous interdependence has been broken, nations are moving with grim resolve to foster diversified, even redundant, dependencies. Countries are increasingly hedging their bets with hegemons—namely, by seeking strong ties with both China and the United States—while also striving to lessen hegemonic dependency through greater self-sufficiency and diversified relationships. Even the superpowers are hedging: The Biden administration’s CHIPS and Science Act and Trump’s Pax Silica both sought to reduce reliance on China and, by association, Taiwan;

🔗 https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/04/29/hedging-strategy-geopolitics-international-affairs-global-order/