Russian military forces are engaged in a major spring offensive against Ukraine, firing nearly 1,000 drones over a 24-hour period this week, as well as cruise and ballistic missiles that have targeted at least 10 locations across the war-torn country since Monday. One strike damaged an energy facility near the city of Chernihiv, leaving some 150,000 Ukrainians without electricity.

Ukrainian forces also have increased the tempo of their own attacks. France 24 reported Wednesday that Russian air defenses had downed nearly 400 incoming drones from Ukraine, which engaged in one of its largest overnight attacks on Russian regions and Crimea since the start of the invasion in February 2022.

Ukrainian forces along the 750-mile front line snaking through the eastern and southern parts of the country are bracing for a new ground offensive by Russia’s bigger army as the weather improves. Ukrainian Commanding Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi says Russian troops in recent days have made simultaneous attempts to break through defensive lines in several strategic areas.

Israel hopes its approach of assassinating top Iranian leaders can generate the instability required for regime change in Tehran, but some regional experts argue it could have the opposite effect by inadvertently consolidating power among Iranian hardliners. With that as a backdrop, Mr. Trump is suggesting the U.S. may allow Iran’s current government to survive despite Israel’s ongoing effort to eliminate its leaders.

The assassination strategy intends to weaken Iran’s internal security apparatus and spark a popular revolution. “We are undermining this regime in the hope of giving the Iranian people an opportunity to remove it,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in an address last week. But the Iranian government appears to have plans to replace key leaders relatively quickly.

Killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was notably replaced within a week, despite serving as Iran’s supreme political and spiritual authority for more than three decades. His death had long been viewed as a potential seismic event that could upend the Iranian government. Instead, his son Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei took the job and appears to be maintaining his father’s hardline position against capitulation. 

Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson said he no longer views Communist China as a major threat and is calling for the U.S. to share power with Beijing in a new world order with a weakened America. National Security Correspondent Bill Gertz examines assertions by the influential podcaster, who boasts 21 million followers on X and YouTube, that the U.S. military is unable to defend Taiwan against a Chinese cross-strait assault.

Mr. Gertz reports that Mr. Carlson’s comments clash with those of Adm. Samuel J. Paparo, commander of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, who has said in congressional testimony that his military forces would prevail in a conflict with China over Taiwan, but at a high cost.

Mr. Carlson has suggested a Chinese takeover of Taiwan would be justified because “big powers want to get control of their regions,” just as the Trump administration is doing in the Western Hemisphere under a revived Monroe Doctrine. On dealing with Beijing, the podcaster has said, the U.S. “can no longer be the sole author of terms, of commerce, of anything, we have to share power [with China] … because of their scale.”

On the “illiberal left and the defeatist right, America’s military campaign against the Islamic Republic of Iran is being condemned as ‘a war of choice, not a war of necessity,’” writes Clifford D. May, an opinion contributor to Threat Status.

“I’m here to make the case for wars of choice,” he writes in a column in The Washington Times. “My argument is simple: Delaying wars does not ensure lasting peace. On the contrary, delaying wars has often led to wars more costly in blood and treasure. World War II is the most obvious example.”

Mr. May, the founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank, adds that “a war of choice is a conflict we decide to wage to achieve vital goals before our enemies push our backs up against the wall.”

The conflicts in Ukraine and Iran “demonstrate the limitations of high-technology defense systems to ward off enemies in an era of cheap and easy-to-make drones,” according to Peter Morici, who writes that “interceptor missiles, such as the Patriot, THAAD and AMRAAM, are expensive, and our manufacturing capacity is limited.

“Iran’s strategy has been to have cheaper drones hit by American interceptors before striking with missiles and to overwhelm the Navy’s capacity to fend off attacks in the strait with a mosquito fleet of small boats and mobile land-based launchers,” Mr. Morici, an economist and national opinion columnist, writes in The Times.

He asserts that U.S. prosperity and capacity to project power and influence abroad “increasingly depend” on artificial intelligence and semiconductors, designed in America but fabricated in Taiwan and South Korea. “We can prosper and defend our interests only if those two nations are squarely in America’s camp,” he writes. “The loss of either to China or North Korea would give the Axis leverage over Western economies similar to that enjoyed by Iran, which can block shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.”

• March 25-26 — Global Force Symposium & Exposition, Association of the U.S. Army

• March 25 — Putin’s Russia Today: What Comes Next? Michael V. Hayden Center

• March 26 — AI and the Future of Open-Source Intelligence, Stimson Center

• March 26 — Still Watching: How Venezuela Deploys Surveillance to Maintain Political Control, Atlantic Council

• March 27 — How Ukraine’s Drones and Russia’s Reconnaissance Fit Into the Iran War, Atlantic Council

• March 30 — China’s Economic Slowdown: Risks, Realities and Strategic Implications, Hudson Institute

• April 1 — How is the U.S.-Israel War on Iran Impacting Energy and the Global Economy? Chatham House