Hi, everyone, and welcome back to the Daily Review.
Today at WPR, columnist Mary Gallagher analyzes Beijing’s curious decision to double down on industrial overcapacity and what that means for China’s trade partners. And Adam Gallagher looks at the U.S.-Saudi nuclear deal and what it reveals about America’s misconceptions about its interests in the Middle East.
Scroll down for more on those items. But first, here’s our take on today’s top story:
U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Michigan Democratic U.S. Senate primary candidate Abdul El-Sayed and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders at a campaign rally, July 18, 2026, in Detroit. (AP Photo by Jose Juarez)
Democratic primary voters will be going to the polls today in several U.S. states to choose their party’s candidates for the midterm elections in November, as they seek to recoup some of their losses from 2024 and build momentum heading into the presidential election cycle in 2028. One contest in particular, the race between Rep. Haley Stevens and Abdul El-Sayed for Michigan’s open Senate seat, has attracted attention for highlighting two prominent fault lines among Democrats.
The first has to do with the battle within the party between moderate figures like Stevens, who is backed by the Democratic establishment in Washington, and the more progressive leftist wing of the party represented by El-Sayed, a former public health official who has been endorsed by Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
The second fault line has to do with a sea change in public opinion among Democrats regarding the U.S.-Israel relationship. But while that shift has perhaps been more pronounced among Democrats and more associated with them, it is also visible among Republicans, particularly some of the high-profile figures that shape opinion among the party’s base.
Though catalyzed by different events for the two parties, the respective tensions the shift is causing bear a striking resemblance. In both cases, a generational insurgency pitting predominantly younger voters and candidates against the older party establishment has called into question America’s support for Israel. That support has been a longstanding bipartisan consensus in Washington, a pillar of America’s foreign policy and the cornerstone of its strategic approach to the Middle East.
Regardless of the outcomes of this year’s primaries and elections, a further erosion in U.S. public attitudes toward Israel seems all but inevitable. What it will mean for U.S. foreign policy, however, is far from certain.
Opposition to the U.S.-Israeli alliance has long existed in both parties. Among Democrats, it was a legacy of the progressive anti-colonial wing of the party and focused mainly on Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and blockade of Gaza, while expressing support for Palestinian self-determination and statehood. By contrast, in the GOP it was espoused by the isolationist wing of the party and mainly targeted America’s military guarantees and aid largesse. In both cases, too, opposition to Israel was at times cover for antisemitism.
Both of those factions remained at the margins of their respective parties, however, until two distinct events fueled the rise in anti-Israel sentiment among them in recent years. Among Democratic voters, particularly younger ones, it was Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza, which has been deemed a genocide by the U.N., numerous genocide scholars, and Israeli and Western human rights organizations. For Republicans, it was the embrace by the MAGA movement of Trump’s America First agenda, and the subsequent betrayal his followers experienced when Trump launched the war against Iran in February at the urging of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Progressive Democrats, but also younger voters who otherwise support moderate policies, are now calling for an end to U.S. military aid to Israel, which they argue makes America complicit in Israel’s war crimes in Gaza and its campaign of ethnic cleansing in the occupied West Bank. Meanwhile, Republicans are increasingly echoing the calls for an end to U.S. military aid to Israel, but in order to avoid another needless American entanglement in a war in the Middle East.
As before, the rhetoric used in recent months to vilify supporters of U.S. aid to Israel has at times used tropes and “dog whistles” that bordered on and at times crossed over the line of blatant antisemitism. The fact that some vocal opponents of Israel, like El-Sayed and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, are Muslim has in turn caused them to be similarly targeted with Islamophobic attacks.
But Israeli leaders like Netanyahu, who have long conflated attacks on Israeli policy with antisemitism, as well as the many Jewish American leaders who echo that claim, are also in part to blame for having muddied the waters of where one ends and the other begins.
For now, the shift in U.S. public opinion on Israel has not had a meaningful impact on U.S. policy. Under Biden, America continued to supply Israel with the arms it needed to carry out the war in Gaza with little meaningful restraint and in contravention of legal prohibitions on supplying weapons to states engaged in human rights violations.
And while Trump has at times been more willing to publicly impose his will over Netanyahu’s objections, that hasn’t necessarily resulted in dramatic changes in Israeli behavior on the ground. Moreover, despite his campaign promises in 2024 to avoid unnecessary wars and his obsession with winning the Nobel Peace Prize, Trump did not hesitate to go along with Netanyahu in attacking Iran.
Whether that will change as the anti-Israel constituency in each party gains momentum is uncertain. For now, the insurgencies in both are running headlong into the older and more powerfully entrenched establishment figures for whom unconditional support for Israel is almost instinctive, whether due to political habit or neoconservative ideology.
But even if future cohorts of lawmakers make U.S. military aid more conditional, or discontinue it altogether, it is hard to imagine Washington abandoning its strategic relationship with Israel, for a simple reason: America’s national interests lie largely on the same side as Israel’s on all of the Middle East’s major conflicts and fault lines.
Until that changes, or the domestic constituency for U.S. retrenchment gains the upper hand in Washington’s foreign policy debates, the U.S.-Israel relationship will continue to be subject to tensions and friction. But it won’t be severed in the foreseeable future.
Last week, China’s Ministry of Commerce published Beijing’s first official response to allegations of overcapacity in Chinese industry. Excessive production in key sectors has been blamed for undermining manufacturing and employment in China’s trading partners by flooding export markets with goods produced below market costs.
The Commerce Ministry report, tellingly titled “China’s Position on the So-Called Excess Capacity Issue,” is a full-throated rejection of the overcapacity problem. But it also much more than that: It is the Communist Party’s attempt to defend economic globalization and China’s position in it as the “world’s factory.” It is supremely defensive but also overconfident, and will not reassure China’s interlocutors abroad, Mary Gallagher writes.
The Trump administration recently agreed to a civilian nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia that could lay the groundwork for the kingdom to develop its own bomb. The so-called 123 Agreement would allow for the export of U.S. nuclear technology to Riyadh and leave the door open for it to enrich nuclear material on its own territory. In typical Trumpian fashion, the president is trying to add new conditions to the deal after it was signed, throwing its fate into uncertainty. But regardless of whether or not the agreement is ultimately enacted, the Trump administration’s motivations for pursuing it reveal broader misconceptions about U.S. interests in the Middle East, Adam Gallagher argues.
Colombia: Outgoing President Gustavo Petro is continuing to challenge the results of this year’s presidential election, with just days remaining before President-elect Abelardo de la Espriella takes office. Petro made an hourlong presentation to journalists Monday, alleging that thousands of tally sheets had been manipulated after the vote count.
However, international observers and Colombia’s own electoral authorities have dismissed Petro’s allegations, and de la Espriella’s victory over Ivan Cepeda, a member of Petro’s Historic Pact party, has already been certified. De la Espriella is scheduled to be sworn in on Friday for a four-year term, an event Petro has branded as “the inauguration of an illegitimate president.”
As James Bosworth wrote in a WPR column in March, Petro’s public expressions of doubt about the 2026 election date back to July 2025, but his brazen attempts to undermine faith in Colombia’s elections carry substantial risks. “When sitting presidents across the ideological spectrum spend years telling their own citizens that elections can’t be trusted, the damage is broader and outlasts any single presidency,” Bosworth noted.
Russia, Ukraine: Ukrainian drones hit two warehouses run by Wildberries, Russia’s largest online retailer, in the St. Petersburg and Tver regions. A third strike hit an industrial zone in Moscow believed to be linked to Wildberries, killing at least five people and injuring another 10. Kyiv said such sites have been providing supplies to the Russian military—a claim Moscow denies—and in recent weeks has targeted facilities linked to the company often referred to as the “Russian Amazon.”
Russia’s defense ministry said it intercepted and destroyed 320 drones overnight, while its own strikes across Ukraine killed at least four people. The exchange follows a deadly drone strike on a crowded beach in southern Russia that killed seven people and injured 58. Both sides deny deliberately targeting civilians.
As I wrote in a newsletter in June, Ukraine has been waging a war of embarrassment against Russian President Vladimir Putin, aimed at showing the Russian public that Kyiv can bring the war to their doorstep. While those attacks once focused on oil facilities and other energy infrastructure, e-commerce warehouses appear to be the newest front for Ukraine’s drones, even as Russia maintains the ability to launch brutal and destructive counterattacks across Ukraine.
Saudi Arabia: Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil company, reported a 33 percent jump in profits in the second quarter, even as the war between Iran and the United States choked off its main oil export route through the Strait of Hormuz.
The firm reported an adjusted net income of $33.4 billion from April to June, up from $25.2 billion during the same period last year. While Aramco produced less oil during this period, it reaped higher profits from selling the barrels at higher prices.
United States: The U.S. Army has depleted nearly all of its long-range precision missiles after five months of fighting with Iran, three people familiar with internal stockpile data told Reuters. The sources did not provide exact figures but said “virtually all” of the remaining inventory is exhausted. The depletion is another data point in a mounting set of evidence that U.S. military readiness has suffered due to the conflict in the Middle East. The White House, however, disputed any cause for alarm, with President Donald Trump maintaining that the U.S. had “far more munitions than anyone in the world.”
Cameroon: President Paul Biya, absent from public view for two months, has reshuffled Cameroon’s senior military leadership, replacing commanders in four of the country’s five joint military regions. Biya, 93 and the world’s oldest sitting head of state, left for Europe on June 7 for what his office called a brief private stay and hasn’t returned since.
Amid persistent rumors about the aging president’s health and evidence of his cognitive decline, Cameroon is anxiously preparing for the post-Biya era. The conventional wisdom is that his son, Franck Biya, is being groomed to replace him. But if history is any guide, a dynastic succession could trigger a bout of political instability, Lesley Anne Warner wrote for WPR in June.
More From WPR
James Bosworth on the looming power struggle in Honduras following former President Juan Orlando Hernández’s return.
Jonathan Fenton-Harvey on how the GCC missed an opportunity to unite amid the Iran war.
Yaqiu Wang on the global danger of China’s state-controlled AI models.
Paul Post on why the U.K. is no longer a great power.
Read all of our latest coverage here.
