Dispatches on war,
power, and who pays the price

On Tuesday, the White House released the 2026 National Counterterrorism Strategy — the first such doctrine of Trump's second term. The 16-page memo formally designates three categories of terror groups the federal government will pursue: "narcoterrorists and transnational gangs," "legacy Islamist terrorists," and "violent left-wing extremists, including anarchists and fascists." The third category is the structural inflection. It is the first time a US national counterterrorism strategy has named a domestic political orientation as a category of terror equivalent to ISIS or the Sinaloa Cartel. The memo simultaneously praises Trump for "unleashing the greatest fighting force the world has ever seen," disparages the "borderless Biden years," and accuses the intelligence community of being "actively weaponized as a political tool." Lawfare and a small handful of national-security trade outlets have covered it. Major US broadcast networks have not — despite the strategy's direct implications for federal surveillance authorities, FBI counterterrorism resourcing, and the criminal categorization of protest activity heading into the 2026 midterms.

On Monday, May 5, the Department of Homeland Security submitted to OMB the final rule eliminating the "duration of status" framework that has governed F-1 (student) and J-1 (exchange visitor) visas for decades. Under the current framework, students can stay in the US as long as they remain enrolled in good standing. The proposed rule would replace this with a hard 2-4 year fixed-stay limit, after which students would have to file for an extension — with no guarantee of approval and no automatic continuity for PhD students whose programs run longer. The US currently hosts roughly 1.1 million international students contributing an estimated $43.8 billion to the US economy. The rule is expected to publish in the Federal Register within weeks and take effect 60 days later. The administration's own immigration tracker notes the rule will "likely retain most if not all of the changes included in the proposed version." This is the most consequential structural change to US student immigration in a generation. The trade press has covered it. Network broadcast has not.

At the opening of the 48th ASEAN Summit in Cebu today, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. — chairing the bloc's 2026 cycle — described the cause of the regional energy crisis in unusually direct language: the "United States-Israeli war on Iran" had been felt "through higher living costs" and "threatened livelihoods" across the 700-million-person bloc. The draft summit declaration reportedly calls for "good-faith negotiations between the US and Iran," a halt in hostilities, upholding international law, and reopening the Strait of Hormuz. This is a striking departure from ASEAN's usual diplomatic blandness — a bloc that historically issues consensus-by-lowest-common-denominator statements is naming the United States as a coequal aggressor with Iran in the framing of a war. The story has been led by Al Jazeera and regional Southeast Asian outlets. US broadcast networks have run brief energy-prices framing without naming the ASEAN diplomatic rebuke. Meanwhile, Russia's "Victory Day ceasefire" has already collapsed: by morning May 8, Russia had downed 264 Ukrainian drones and Ukraine reported 140+ Russian attacks and 850+ Russian drone strikes during the supposed truce. The propaganda function — captured by Putin's Red Square parade — proceeded as scheduled.