A joint U.S.-Philippines security statement on Tuesday condemned China’s aggression in Southeast Asia and said Washington will work with Manila over the coming year to “increase deployments of U.S. cutting-edge missile and unmanned systems to the Philippines.”

The statement made explicit reference to missiles, despite sharp criticism from Chinese officials over the installation in the northern Philippines of a U.S. mid-range missile system called the Typhon in 2024 and of an anti-ship missile launcher last year. Beijing has said the U.S. weapons are aimed at containing China’s rise and warned they are a threat to regional stability.

The Philippines has a mutual defense treaty with the United States. Tuesday’s joint statement came a day after U.S. and Filipino officials held annual talks in Manila. The statement outlined specific defense and security plans for this year, including joint military exercises and Washington’s support for efforts to modernize the Philippines military.

Moscow is prepared to deploy naval assets to protect its oil tankers from seizure by European powers, a senior Russian official said Tuesday. Nikolai Patrushev, who heads Moscow’s maritime board, said Russia “will break any blockade” and may take retaliatory action against vessels sailing under European flags.

The threatening comments come as Western leaders look to curb the export of Russian oil via the country’s so-called shadow fleet of tankers used to covertly transport crude oil to Russia’s major buyers, mostly China and India, thereby skirting international sanctions.

The U.S. has moved recently to physically stop some Russian-linked vessels in the Caribbean that were suspected of transporting sanctioned oil off the coast of Venezuela. European navies have yet to implement a widespread strategy aimed at physically stopping the Russian ships, relying instead on economic sanctions.

Iranian military forces held live fire missile drills in the Strait of Hormuz on Tuesday, briefly closing parts of the vital oil choke point in a show of force that threatened to derail a high-stakes round of talks that took place between U.S. and Iranian officials.

The talks involving Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, U.S. Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and Mr. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner played out in Geneva. The Iranian side said ahead of the talks that Tehran was willing to discuss its ongoing nuclear program if Washington would respond by lifting some of the sanctions crippling Iran’s economy.

It remains to be seen if the talks can reduce tensions. The Trump administration has been increasing the U.S. military presence in the Middle East with at least 10 warships in the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Sea, and the Strait of Hormuz. The USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier is currently operating as the primary strike platform, and the USS Gerald R. Ford was ordered to the region last week.

Alex Miller, the U.S. Army’s chief technology officer, says the service is acting more and more like “a company that wants to stay current,” and that means using older systems in new ways. In an exclusive interview on the latest episode of the Threat Status podcast, Mr. Miller described how the Army is loading completely new software onto vehicle computers designed decades ago, modernizing how soldiers use them without paying for an entirely new piece of equipment.

It also means updating critical elements that have lagged behind. Mr. Miller explained how the Army is “adding new radios, changing the way those radios work” and “totally revamping those architectures” that were still relying on technology developed decades ago. “A lot of the barriers that we at the Army used to have to deal with upwards have been removed,” he said, crediting Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s drive for reforming the purchasing process.

“Now, we’re able to own our own destiny much more fluidly,” Mr. Miller said on the podcast, adding that the Army’s new approach represents more than just a few pieces of technology — it’s a fundamental change to how American soldiers think about the tools they use to fight.

Beijing has “tried for years to convince the world that Taiwan is its ultimate, sacred ‘core interest,’ the one issue that eclipses everything else,” writes Miles Yu, who notes that the Chinese Communist Party’s “fixation is not only imperious but also profoundly phony.

“History has seen this movie before. In the 1930s, Adolf Hitler fixated the world’s attention on the Sudetenland, a small, German-speaking enclave within the sovereign state of Czechoslovakia,” Mr. Yu, director of the China Center at the Hudson Institute and a Threat Status contributor, writes in an op-ed for The Washington Times.

“Of course, Sudetenland was never the endgame,” he writes. “It was the opening move. The result was not stability but a chain of aggression that plunged the world into catastrophe.”

• Feb. 17 — Defense Tech Leadership Summit

• Feb. 18 — The State of Civil-Military Relations in 2026 and Beyond, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

• Feb. 18 — Post-Maduro Venezuela, Alexander Hamilton Society

• Feb. 19 — Fault Lines in the Horn of Africa: The Gulf States and Turkey Fuel Red Sea Tensions, American Enterprise Institute

• Feb. 23-25 — Warfare Symposium, Air & Space Forces Association