When the some 4,000 soldiers of the brigade leave for Europe later this year, they will do so as the Army’s “most modern brigade” – the service’s first brigade to complete the Army’s push to modernize heavy formations. At the training center, the 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team brought its arsenal of 87 new M1A2 SEPv3 Abrams tanks, 125 M2A4 Bradley Fighting Vehicles, 13 M7A4 Bradley Fire Support Team Vehicles and 18 M109A7 Paladin self-propelled howitzers – the Army’s newest and most deadly versions of the weapons that anchor a heavy brigade.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen outlined her vision for the future of EU-China relations at a speech in Brussels on Thursday.

"It is clear that our relations have become more distant and more difficult in the last few years," she said, but added, "I believe it is neither viable or in Europe's interest to de-couple from China."

In the latest evidence of major shifts in global power dynamics, the Saudi government has approved the kingdom's partial membership in a Chinese-led economic, political and security bloc.    

In a quest to maintain its hegemony in a unipolar world, American foreign policy strategy has sought to weaken a Russia that it sees as an “acute threat” and to confront and contain a China that it sees as “the most comprehensive and serious challenge to U.S. national security.”

China has just completed its first trade of liquefied natural gas (LNG) settled in yuan, the Shanghai Petroleum and Natural Gas Exchange said on Tuesday. As OilPrice notes, the Chinese state oil and gas giant CNOOC and TotalEnergies completed the first LNG trade on the exchange with settlement in the Chinese currency, the exchange said in a statement carried by Reuters.

China and Brazil have reached a deal to trade in their own currencies, ditching the US dollar as an intermediary, the Brazilian government said on Wednesday, Beijing’s latest salvo against the almighty greenback.

The deal will enable China, the top rival to US economic hegemony, and Brazil, the biggest economy in Latin America, to conduct their massive trade and financial transactions directly, exchanging yuan for reais and vice versa instead of going through the dollar.

The head of the U.S. Space Force, Gen. Chance Saltzman, says that China has launched numerous satellites in the past six months and currently possesses 347 orbiting crafts capable of gathering intelligence on American armed forces.

The general warned that China is the “most immediate threat” to U.S. operations in space given its development of technologies such as lasers to disrupt satellite sensors, electronic warfare jammers, and even building crafts that can potentially disrupt rival orbiting platforms.

A leading Asian studies expert is weighing in on how the U.S. can diminish the threat China poses to Taiwan, even as tensions between the two countries remain high.

“I think the first thing we need to do is clear a backlog of arms sales to Taiwan. We sell Taiwan advanced military hardware, and a number of important platforms that the Taiwanese have purchased have been backlogged, and this has been going on for years now,” says Jeff Smith, director of The Heritage Foundation’s Asian Studies Center. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)

China on Wednesday warned that it would respond if Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen met with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) while she visits the US as part of a trip to Central America.

Tsai departed for her trip to Guatemala and Belize, two countries that maintain formal diplomatic relations with Taipei. On the way there, Tsai will spend two days in New York, and on the way back, she will stop in Los Angeles on April 4 and 5, where she’s expected to meet with McCarthy.

Members of Congress inveighing against online “harm”; a nervous tech executive defending his company’s policies; thinly veiled threats about regulatory changes. If you tuned into C-SPAN last Thursday, you’d be forgiven for thinking you were looking at the rerun of a pre-2022 hearing, when Democrats used their control of Congress to haul Facebook personnel before them to harangue. Almost, but not quite.