Banananomics: Help For Critical Proxy Wars

Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, Israel's military chief, explains that the Iranian strike "will be met with a response."

Inputs that matter: Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder, Pentagon press secretary, said any response is up to Israel to decide; he added: "We don't want to see escalation, but we obviously will take necessary measures to protect our forces in the region."

• Ukraine's military head, Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyy, warned over the weekend that the battlefield situation in the country's east has "significantly worsened in recent days," as warming weather has allowed Russian forces to launch a fresh offensive.

The opportunity: House Speaker Mike Johnson is pushing toward action this week on aid for Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan, unveiling an elaborate plan on Monday to break the package into separate votes to squeeze through the House's political divides on foreign policy.

• Germany announced that it will deliver an additional Patriot air defense system to Ukraine, days after Russian missiles and drones on Thursday struck infrastructure and power facilities across several regions.

• In an update on X, formerly known as Twitter, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said he had discussed the "massive" Russian air attacks on civilian energy infrastructure with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Saturday. He declared that Berlin will "stand unbreakably by Ukraine's side."

Zoom in: Ukraine seeks similar military support that Israel had during the Iran attack.

• "European skies could have received the same level of protection long ago if Ukraine had received similar full support from its partners in intercepting drones and missiles," Zelenskyy wrote Monday evening in a post on X.

Between the lines: Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told his Iranian counterpart Hossein Amir-Abdollahian via a phone call on Monday that China appreciated Iran's emphasis on not targeting regional and neighboring countries, according to the official Xinhua news agency on Tuesday.

• Iran is part of BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the U.A.E.), which competes with the G7 (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the U.K., the U.S., and unofficially the E.U.).

• Currently, 80% of Iranian oil goes to China.

Follow the money: "We can't just pick and say, Iran is bad, but Russia is OK, and China is bad… They're all in this together," Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said Sunday on CBS's "Face the Nation."

• Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is preparing fresh sanctions for Iran, a Treasury official told NBC News, as Yellen vows that the U.S. "will not hesitate" to inflict economic punishment on Tehran in the wake of its retaliatory attack on Israel.

• G7 sanctions are already in place against Russian oil with price caps.

U.S. Space Force is partnering with Rocket Lab and True Anomaly for a mission to demonstrate how the military can counter "on-orbit aggression."

Inputs that matter: "When another nation puts an asset up into space, and we don't quite know what that asset is, we don't know what its intent is, we don't know what its capabilities are, we need the ability to go up there and figure out what this thing is," said Gen. Michael Guetlein, the Space Force's vice chief of space operations.

• "If a near-peer competitor makes a movement, we need to have it in our quiver to make a counter maneuver," Guetlein said.

The opportunity: "We no longer have the luxury of time to wait years, even 10 or 15 years, to deliver some of these capabilities," Guetlein said in a January discussion hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

• We need "a tactically relevant timeline is a matter of weeks, days, or even hours."

• "Victus Haze is about continuing to break those paradigms and to show how we would rapidly build a space domain awareness capability and operate it in real-time against a threat," Guetlein said.

Zoom in: "We recognize the significant opportunity to leverage the commercial space industry's innovations to counter China as America's pacing threat," said Col. Bryon McClain, Space Systems Command's program executive officer for space domain awareness and combat power.

•  "The United States has the most innovative space industry in the world. Victus Haze will demonstrate, under operationally realistic conditions, our ability to respond to irresponsible behavior on orbit."

Between the lines: The United States, Russia, and over 100 other states are parties to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty (OST), which remains in force and can be understood as a de facto constitution for space operations.

• Almost 60 years later, the OST's vague language regarding military limitations in space, as space policy expert Michelle L.D. Hanlon and Greg Autry highlight, "leave more than enough room for interpretation to result in conflict."

• 2019, the Pentagon created the Space Force, an entirely new military branch "focused solely on pursuing superiority in the space domain."

• DefenseNews reports, "Russia, China, India, and the United States have tested anti-satellite missiles, and several major world powers have developed technology meant to disrupt signals in space."

Follow the money: The new mission falls under the scope of Space Force's Assured Access to Space program, which aims to ensure "flexible, responsive, and reliable launch" -- lining up small space companies to launch rockets for the military on short notice.

• Rocket Lab USA, Inc. announced that it has been selected for a $32M U.S. Space Force Space Systems Command (SSC) contracted to deliver the VICTUS HAZE Tactically Responsive Space (TacRS) mission.

• Gizmodo describes the Electron rocket as "the first rocket with a full carbon-composite build and the Rutherford engine, the first 3D-printed and electrically pumped rocket engine."

The House Select Committee on China recently discovered that the People's Republic of China (PRC) plays a vital role in the flow of Fentanyl into the U.S.

Inputs that matter: According to the House Select Committee report, "The fentanyl crisis has helped [PRC-linked] organized criminal groups become the world's premier money launderers, enriched the [PRC] chemical industry, and has had a devastating impact on Americans."

• "Rather than investigating drug traffickers, [PRC] security services have not cooperated with U.S. law enforcement and have even notified targets of U.S. investigations when they received requests for assistance," said the report.

• An NPR investigation in 2020 found a web of PRC companies whose employees were openly marketing fentanyl precursors and selling them to clients in Mexico and the United States.

The opportunity: The report was released just ahead of a scheduled hearing Tuesday at which Chairman Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., and ranking member Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., are expected to detail what they argue is China's complicity in fueling the fentanyl crisis in the U.S.

• NBC reports, "U.S. officials have identified China as the main source of the key ingredients drug cartels in Mexico use to synthesize fentanyl."

• "We're taking action to significantly reduce the flow of precursor chemicals and pill presses from China to the Western hemisphere," President Joe Biden said, following a summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping in California.

Zoom in: Barron reports, "The synthetic opioid has caused an addiction epidemic in the United States and is responsible for tens of thousands of overdose deaths a year."

• "Illicit fentanyl-type drugs accounted for over 100,000 US deaths last year," said Brandon Fried, executive director of the Air Forwarders Association.

• "And now the White House is looking at intermediaries – freight forwarders and others – as possible tools in the fight against illicit fentanyl traffic coming into the U.S."

• "But any notion of 100% physical inspection of every package is a non-starter to us."

Between the lines: The U.S. fentanyl crisis is a hot topic for the 2024 presidential election.

• "There is a PRC subsidy program in place that gives money for people to make illegal drugs and send it outside of China," the majority committee aide said.

Follow the money: Mexico's President López Obrador confirms that "Fentanyl is produced in the United States, in Canada, and Mexico. And the chemical precursors come from Asia."

• "In the United States, fentanyl was introduced by suppliers – first Chinese criminal networks, Chinese producers, later on, Mexican cartels," explains Dr. Vanda Felab-Brown, Senior Fellow of the Brookings Institution.

• "The fentanyl trade has allowed Chinese organized crime to become the world's premier money launderers with U.S. law enforcement finding evidence indicating that money laundering schemes involved Chinese government officials and the Chinese Communist Party elite," the majority committee aide concluded.