🇮🇱❌🇱🇧 — 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/

🏝 🇯🇵 🇨🇳 Alarmed by Chinese buyers quietly snapping up territory near its military hubs, Japan is launching an emergency nationwide audit of 13,000 uninhabited islands to prevent a national security disaster.

For the first time in history, the Japanese government will systematically investigate the ownership of these remote landmasses, with plans to nationalize those found to be leaderless or abandoned. This defensive move follows highly controversial land acquisitions by Chinese nationals in strategic maritime zones, including outposts in Okinawa and Yamaguchi Prefecture. With regional military tensions actively worsening, Tokyo fears these unmonitored shores could easily be exploited by foreign intelligence or international crime networks.

The scale of Japan's administrative blind spot is immense. While advanced mapping recently revealed the nation actually holds 14,125 islands, more than 13,400 of these uninhabited landmasses have spent decades completely unmanaged. The state historically focused its energy on its 417 inhabited islands and 273 critical border territories. However, leaving thousands of isolated shores entirely exposed has become a glaring vulnerability that Japan is now moving aggressively to close.

📎 UnveiledChina

🌐 🇬🇧 Britain’s world: The strategy of security in twelve geopolitical maps

The atlas includes 12 visualisations – a combination of maps, cartograms and infographics – which explain the United Kingdom’s (UK) position and interests in the mid-21st century:

1️⃣ The national powerbase – A map outlining Britain’s critical infrastructure, including energy sources and facilities, heavy and advanced industrial areas, major transport routes, ports and key urban areas;
2️⃣ National output – A cartogram breaking down the UK into the nine regions of England, as well as Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, comparing these 12 segments by size of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to comparable countries. It also shows GDP per capita for the 12 regions and countries;
3️⃣ Global Britain – A map of the world detailing Britain’s overseas territories, diplomatic footprint, and leading recipients of British official development assistance;
4️⃣ Undersea cables – A map outlining the countries to which Britain’s undersea communication cables connect, as well as the cables connecting the home islands;
5️⃣ Centres of world power – An infographic highlighting the most powerful nations in the world, focused on economic gravity, military might, and nuclear reach;
6️⃣ Rivals: The CRINK – An infographic of the ‘CRINK’ nations – the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Russia, Iran and North Korea, and countries which are aligned with the CRINK through membership and observer and dialogue partner status in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) and the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO);
7️⃣ Crunch zones – A map of CRINK infrastructure programmes, as well as the countries which are highly influenced by them, and nations which are being targeted by Chinese, Russian, Iranian and North Korean revisionism;
8️⃣ Allies and partners – An infographic breaking down Britain’s key alliances and partnerships into blocs, including: the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), Five Eyes, AUKUS, Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF), Five Power Defence Arrangements (FPDA), and refreshed bilaterals;
9️⃣ Maritime reach – A map showing Britain’s naval reach, including major military facilities, and nuclear reach, as well as critical choke points and average travel times between key naval facilities and nations;
🔟 The strategy of security – A map demonstrating a potential British strategy to contain the CRINK nations;
1️⃣1️⃣ Defending Europe – A map centred on the North Atlantic that outlines Britain’s capabilities, key defence agreements, and security missions across the continent;
1️⃣2️⃣ The Wider North – A map of the Arctic region, showing critical military bases of both NATO and Russia, and ranges for aircraft located at strategic locations.

https://www.geostrategy.org.uk/app/uploads/2026/01/Britains-World-The-strategy-of-security-in-twelve-geopolitical-maps.pdf