There's no greater pleasure at @CSIS than to be on the "Trade Guys" podcast. In this episode, I speak with Trade Guys Bill Reinsch and Scott Miller about this week's Trump-Xi summit, tariffs, the truce, the Board of Trade, the Board of Investment & more!

🇺🇸🇨🇳 America’s factories and arsenals are not ready for a major war with China... Detailed CSIS simulations of a Taiwan Strait fight show U.S. forces burning through thousands of long-range precision missiles within the first 3 weeks, numbers that already exceeded pre-war stockpiles years ago. The same studies found that certain critical munitions would be exhausted in under a single week. Without deep reserves or the ability to surge production rapidly, both deterrence by denial and deterrence by punishment lose credibility. The gap between what a Pacific war would demand and what U.S. industry can currently deliver remains vast. Source: CSIS / Writer: Samuel

🇸🇦🇾🇪 Saudi Arabia has flown 157 airstrikes on the Houthis, and the man who counts America's weapons says the result will be a mowed lawn that grows back Mark Cancian tracks arsenals for CSIS, and the Saudi campaign looks sustainable to him for one reason: it burns the short and medium-range bombs the United States stocks deeply and sells freely. What it cannot do is the thing Riyadh needs. The Houthis have dug in the way Hezbollah and Hamas did, airpower can hamper their ports without closing them, and a third of normal traffic still moves through the Red Sea only because the Houthis choose not to hit the rest. Israel, meanwhile, has struck a mutual silence with both Yemen and Iran, and the F-35s Washington just authorized for Riyadh won't reach a Saudi runway for years. So the lawn gets mowed, the grass returns, and the port of Yanbu stays a target. The only exit that has ever worked here is a ceasefire, and the Saudis aren't asking for one. @MarkCancian @WeTheBrandon

The Trump administration "thought they could use massive unilateral pressure to force China to make concessions, ​and that did not occur," said Scott Kennedy, an expert on the US-China economic relationship at Washington-based think tank CSIS. "Now this is Xi Jinping's world, and we're all living in it."

342 days after the US government blacklisted a Turkish company in a Russia procurement case, it quietly took that company back off the list. The rule was effective Friday and published Monday!! CSIS reported in June that the list had gone without a single addition since October 2025, the longest drought since 2008. When it finally moved, it moved twice, and both moves were removals. The wording BIS published when it listed Atempo on 16th September 2025 was that EB Teknoloji, in conjunction with Atempo, is engaged in concealing shipments of Tier 2 CHPL US origin goods to Russian entities. CHPL is the Common High Priority List, the multilateral list of components that export controllers treat as highest risk of ending up in Russian weapons. Read the grammar extremely carefully and you might notice interesting things. EB Teknoloji is the subject of that sentence. Atempo is the company it was said to have acted in conjunction with. On Friday the government removed the second name in that sentence and left the subject of it on the list. Atempo carried footnote 3, the Russian procurement designation, with a licence review policy of denial for everything. Compliance software treats that as a permanent state. It is not permanent. The designation has an exit, and this week BIS opened it. Opening it took a unanimous interagency vote. The End User Review Committee is Commerce in the chair, with State, Defense, Energy and, where appropriate, Treasury, and a removal carries only if every member agrees. Every member agreed. None of them said why. The rule cites the regulation that lets a listed party ask, and stops there. The companion rule is smaller and stranger. It deletes two Hong Kong addresses for Arrow Electronics, tidying up after the November 2025 China removals. So the first movement on the list since last October was some housekeeping and a footnote 3 exit. The asymmetry underneath is structural and nobody prices it. Additions arrive with a press release, a briefing and a name. This removal arrived as a numbered rule with nothing attached to it. The loud channel carries only escalation. The quiet channel carries the reversals. Every sanctions risk model in the market is trained on the loud one. From 2018 to 2024 BIS added names every 35 days on average. It has now gone ten months without adding one, and came back to subtract.

Intelligence agencies: 🇺🇸 United States → CIA 🇮🇱 Israel → Mossad 🇷🇺 Russia → SVR 🇬🇧 United Kingdom → MI6 🇮🇳 India → RAW 🇦🇺 Australia → ASIS 🇵🇰 Pakistan → ISI 🇩🇪 Germany → BND 🇫🇷 France → DGSE 🇨🇦 Canada → CSIS 🇨🇳 China → MSS 🇿🇦 South Africa → SSA 🇮🇹 Italy → AISE 🇸🇪 Sweden → SÄPO 🇳🇴 Norway → NIS 🇰🇷 South Korea → NIS 🇧🇷 Brazil → ABIN 🇳🇬 Nigeria → NIA 🇪🇸 Spain → CNI 🇺🇦 Ukraine → FISU 🇵🇱 Poland → AW 🇳🇱 Netherlands → AIVD 🇮🇩 Indonesia → BIN 🇦🇷 Argentina → AFI 🇹🇷 Turkey → MIT 🇲🇽 Mexico → CNI

🇺🇸🇮🇷 The latest U.S. campaign against Iran may be winding down, but the BILL is already substantial... A detailed CSIS assessment puts the direct extra cost to the Defense Department at roughly $40 billion. Munitions consumed the largest share, followed by damage to bases, higher operating tempo, equipment losses, and elevated fuel prices. Other federal agencies added another billion or so. The broader economic effects, especially higher energy costs for the public, pushes the true national price much higher. Congress now faces the political fight of actually PAYING for it. None of the regular budgets included these expenses, and any supplemental or reprogramming request is certain to reopen debates about the war itself. Source: CSIS / Writer: Samuel