Earlier this month the Chinese president Xi Jinping paid a three-day visit to Riyadh, where he participated in a summit with representatives of several Arab governments, as well as additional meetings with the leaders of the Persian Gulf monarchies. The visit, Mohammed Alyahya writes, is a sign of an emerging arrangement where China buys Saudi oil and sells Saudi Arabia its weapons, perhaps even usurping the role traditionally played by the U.S. Alyahya explains the motivations behind Riyadh’s pivot to Asia, while cautioning against it.

During both the Obama and Biden administrations, Iranian aggression via its terrorist proxies in Yemen has been met with U.S. calls for de-escalation, frequently blaming Saudi Arabia for a conflict it did not seek. In Syria, the United States saddled us with the horrifying and threatening specter of a neighboring country controlled by Iranian troops and Russian bombers. As part of the Iran nuclear deal, the Obama administration sent tens of billions of dollars flowing into Iranian coffers—money that was used to demolish Iraq, crush Syria, create chaos in Lebanon, and support Houthi attacks against Saudi territory. It was the Obama administration that decided to give the Russian president Vladimir Putin a strategic foothold in the eastern Mediterranean, which the administration sold to the American people as a way to . . . de-escalate the civil war in Syria.

Against this background, it should be abundantly clear why many Saudis are beginning to shift their gaze eastward. But I would counsel them that their hopes of China replacing the United States as a partner for Saudi Arabia are naïve.

Conflating U.S. miscalculation with U.S. incapability is foolish. The world order created and long sustained by the United States can’t be destroyed by any global actor, including China. It can only be destroyed by the United States itself. For good and for ill, our two countries’ fates remain inescapably intertwined. . . . Hopefully, a hard look at the future the United States is creating might help dispel the ghosts that are haunting the Middle East.

On Tuesday, a Hizballah drone attack injured three people in northern Israel. The next day, another attack, targeting an IDF base, injured eighteen people, six of them seriously, in Arab al-Amshe, also in the north. This second attack involved the simultaneous use of drones carrying explosives and guided antitank missiles. In both cases, the defensive systems that performed so successfully last weekend failed to stop the drones and missiles. Ron Ben-Yishai has a straightforward explanation as to why: the Lebanon-backed terrorist group is getting better at evading Israel defenses. He explains the three basis systems used to pilot these unmanned aircraft, and their practical effects:

These systems allow drones to act similarly to fighter jets, using “dead zones”—areas not visible to radar or other optical detection—to approach targets. They fly low initially, then ascend just before crashing and detonating on the target. The terrain of southern Lebanon is particularly conducive to such attacks.

But this requires skills that the terror group has honed over months of fighting against Israel. The latest attacks involved a large drone capable of carrying over 50 kg (110 lbs.) of explosives. The terrorists have likely analyzed Israel’s alert and interception systems, recognizing that shooting down their drones requires early detection to allow sufficient time for launching interceptors.

The IDF tries to detect any incoming drones on its radar, as it had done prior to the war. Despite Hizballah’s learning curve, the IDF’s technological edge offers an advantage. However, the military must recognize that any measure it takes is quickly observed and analyzed, and even the most effective defenses can be incomplete. The terrain near the Lebanon-Israel border continues to pose a challenge, necessitating technological solutions and significant financial investment.