DOJ Probes Brooklyn Cafe After It Boasts of Refusing Service to Pro-Israel Congressman
The Justice Department has opened a civil rights investigation into a Brooklyn coffee shop after it publicly claimed it refused service to Rep. Dan Goldman over his support for Israel, a move federal officials said could violate anti-discrimination laws governing public accommodations.
“The Civil Rights Division has opened an investigation and will bring an enforcement action if warranted,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon wrote Monday on X.
Dhillon added that “Federal law prohibits public accommodations such as coffee shops from discriminating against patrons based on their race, religion, or national origin.”
The investigation follows a social media controversy involving Poetica, a cafe in Williamsburg, which posted and later deleted a message after Goldman visited the shop during a Democratic primary campaign stop.
In the deleted post, the cafe wrote: “Hey Congressman Dan Goldman, we see that you stopped by our shop today for a coffee. Do you see how it doesn’t taste like genocide juice? Or are you still having a hard time telling the difference?”
The business also said it had refunded Goldman for his purchase without being asked and added: “We don’t need your money (it’s probably coming from AIPAC anyways,” referring to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
Goldman addressed the incident during an appearance on CNN with Laura Coates, saying the encounter inside the cafe had been cordial.
According to the congressman, he entered the shop because his seven-year-old daughter needed to use the restroom. After a barista allowed her to do so, Goldman said he bought a coffee and left a large tip.
“I had such a nice interaction with the barista in the coffee shop,” Goldman said.
“She was wearing a hijab, I didn’t know her, but she couldn’t have been nicer and allowed my daughter to go use the bathroom, and I honestly was so grateful for her kindness that I felt like I should buy a coffee, and so I did, and I gave her a large tip.”
Goldman said the episode reflected broader political divisions.
“It’s a reflection, I think, of a sad state of affairs that without knowing me, we could have had such a nice interaction,” Goldman continued.
The controversy erupted on the eve of Goldman’s Democratic primary contest against former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, who has highlighted Goldman’s past support from AIPAC during the campaign.
Libya’s eastern government bans entry of nationals from Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia
Libya’s eastern-based government has banned the entry of nationals of four African countries, a decision a government source said was due to a “reorganization of foreign nationals’ entry to Libya”.
“Citizens of Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia are prohibited from entering Libyan territory through all land, sea, and air ports,” according to a decree by the parallel government in Libya’s second-largest city Benghazi.
The Benghazi-based government of Osama Hamad is allied to military commander Khalifa Haftar, who controls the east and large areas of southern Libya.
The internationally recognized government of Abdulhamid Dbeibah, who came to power through a U.N.-backed process in 2021, is based in Tripoli.
An eastern-based government source told Reuters that the decision is aimed at “reorganizing foreign nationals’ entry to Libya”.
The decision exempts members of accredited diplomatic and consular missions and family members from the four countries.
It also exempts workers in the education, medical and allied health professions services provided they obtain the necessary approvals and valid work contracts from relevant authorities.
Libya has become a transit route for migrants fleeing conflict and poverty to Europe across the Mediterranean since the fall in 2011 of dictator Muammar Gaddafi to a NATO-backed uprising. Factional conflict has split the country since 2014.
The North African country is home to more than 900,000 migrants, according to U.N. data collected early this year.
Slow Cooker Philly Cheesesteak Casserole is a hearty, cheesy, and comforting dinner inspired by the classic Philly cheesesteak sandwich. It has all the savory flavors you love—ground beef, bell peppers, onions, garlic, Worcestershire sauce, and melted cheese—but instead of a hoagie roll, everything is mixed with hash browns and cooked into a creamy casserole.
This easy slow cooker recipe is perfect for busy weeknights, family dinners, potlucks, or meal prep. It is rich, filling, and loaded with cheesesteak flavor in every bite.
Why You’ll Love This Philly Cheesesteak Casserole
Easy slow cooker dinner
All the flavor of a Philly cheesesteak without the bread
Creamy, cheesy, and hearty
Made with simple ingredients
Great for family meals
Perfect for meal prep
Can be made in the oven too
Comfort food with minimal work
What Makes This Recipe So Good?
This casserole takes the flavors of a Philly cheesesteak and turns them into a warm, satisfying slow cooker meal. Ground beef gives it a hearty base, while bell peppers and onions add classic cheesesteak flavor.
Frozen hash browns replace the hoagie roll and make the casserole filling. Cheddar cheese soup, sour cream, Worcestershire sauce, and shredded mozzarella create a creamy, savory sauce that ties everything together.
Ingredients
2 pounds ground beef
1 teaspoon kosher salt
½ teaspoon black pepper
1 tablespoon minced garlic
1 green bell pepper, diced
1 red bell pepper, diced
1 large yellow onion, diced
1 bag frozen Southern hash browns, 28 ounces
1 can cheddar cheese soup, 10.5 ounces
½ cup sour cream
2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
1½ cups shredded mozzarella cheese
Chopped parsley, for garnish
Salt and pepper, to taste
Ingredient Notes
Ground Beef
Ground beef gives this casserole a rich, meaty flavor. You can also use ground turkey or ground chicken for a lighter version.
Bell Peppers
Green and red bell peppers add color, flavor, and the classic Philly cheesesteak taste.
Onion
Yellow onion brings sweetness and savory depth to the casserole.
Hash Browns
Frozen Southern-style hash browns make the casserole hearty and filling. They replace the bread from a traditional Philly cheesesteak sandwich.
Cheddar Cheese Soup
Cheddar cheese soup creates a creamy, cheesy base that coats the beef, vegetables, and potatoes.
Sour Cream
Sour cream adds creaminess and a slight tang that balances the richness.
Worcestershire Sauce
Worcestershire sauce adds savory depth and helps bring out the beefy flavor.
Mozzarella Cheese
Mozzarella melts beautifully on top. You can also use provolone, Monterey Jack, pepper jack, or your favorite shredded cheese.
Step 1: Cook the Ground Beef
In a medium skillet over medium heat, add the ground beef, salt, and black pepper.
Cook for 8 to 10 minutes, breaking up the meat as it cooks, until no longer pink.
Add the minced garlic and cook for 1 more minute.
Drain any excess grease if needed.
Step 2: Add Everything to the Slow Cooker
Add the cooked ground beef to the bowl of a slow cooker.
Add the diced green bell pepper, red bell pepper, onion, frozen hash browns, cheddar cheese soup, sour cream, and Worcestershire sauce.
Stir until everything is well combined.
Step 3: Slow Cook
Cover and cook on HIGH for 2½ hours.
Or, cook on LOW for 4 to 5 hours.
The casserole is ready when the potatoes are tender and the mixture is hot and creamy.
Step 4: Add the Cheese
Sprinkle shredded mozzarella cheese over the top.
Cover again and cook for 10 more minutes, or until the cheese is melted.
Step 5: Garnish and Serve
Garnish with chopped parsley.
Taste and add more salt and pepper if needed.
Serve warm.
Oven Instructions
You can also make this casserole without a slow cooker.
Preheat the oven to 350°F.
Cook the ground beef in a large skillet with salt and pepper until no longer pink.
Add garlic and cook for 1 minute.
Add the bell peppers and onions to the skillet and cook for 5 to 7 minutes, or until softened.
In a separate bowl, mix the cheddar cheese soup, sour cream, and Worcestershire sauce.
In a large bowl, combine the soup mixture, frozen hash browns, cooked beef, peppers, and onions.
Spread the mixture into a greased 9×13-inch baking dish.
Sprinkle mozzarella cheese over the top.
Cover with aluminum foil and bake for 30 to 35 minutes, or until hot and bubbly.
Remove the foil and bake for another 5 to 10 minutes if you want the cheese more golden.
Let cool slightly before serving.
Tips for the Best Philly Cheesesteak Casserole
Brown the Beef First
Cooking the beef before adding it to the slow cooker gives the casserole better texture and flavor.
Drain Excess Grease
If your beef releases a lot of grease, drain it before adding it to the slow cooker.
Use Frozen Hash Browns
There is no need to thaw the hash browns first. Add them straight from the freezer.
Choose Your Cheese
Mozzarella melts smoothly, but provolone gives a more classic Philly cheesesteak flavor.
Let It Rest Before Serving
Let the casserole sit for a few minutes after cooking so it thickens slightly.
Variations
Provolone Philly Cheesesteak Casserole
Use shredded or sliced provolone instead of mozzarella for a more traditional cheesesteak flavor.
Spicy Philly Cheesesteak Casserole
Use pepper jack cheese or add diced jalapeños.
Ground Turkey Version
Swap the ground beef for ground turkey.
Mushroom Cheesesteak Casserole
Add sliced mushrooms with the peppers and onions.
Low-Carb Version
Replace the hash browns with cauliflower florets or cauliflower rice.
What to Serve With Philly Cheesesteak Casserole
This casserole is filling on its own, but it pairs well with:
Garlic knots
Dinner rolls
French baguette
Roasted potato wedges
Cornbread
Steamed rice
Roasted Brussels sprouts
Roasted asparagus
Green salad
Pickles
Coleslaw
Storage Instructions
Let the casserole cool to room temperature.
Store leftovers in an airtight container in the refrigerator for up to 3 to 4 days.
You can also portion it into individual containers for easy grab-and-reheat meals.
Freezing Instructions
Freeze cooled casserole in a freezer-safe container for up to 2 to 3 months.
Thaw overnight in the refrigerator before reheating.
Reheating
Reheat individual portions in the microwave until hot.
You can also reheat the casserole on the stovetop over low heat or in the oven at 350°F until warmed through.
Add a splash of milk or broth if the casserole seems too thick.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I Make This Without a Slow Cooker?
Yes. You can bake it in the oven at 350°F in a 9×13-inch dish.
Can I Use Ground Turkey?
Yes. Ground turkey or ground chicken can be used instead of ground beef.
Do I Need to Thaw the Hash Browns?
No. Add the frozen hash browns directly to the slow cooker.
What Cheese Is Best?
Mozzarella melts well, but provolone gives a more classic Philly cheesesteak flavor. Monterey Jack or pepper jack also work.
Can I Make This Ahead of Time?
Yes. Cook the beef, mix the ingredients, and refrigerate until ready to slow cook.
Recipe Information
Prep Time: 15 minutes Cook Time: 2 hours 30 minutes Total Time: 2 hours 45 minutes Servings: 8 Calories: About 463 per serving
Final Thoughts
Slow Cooker Philly Cheesesteak Casserole is creamy, cheesy, hearty, and full of classic cheesesteak flavor. With ground beef, peppers, onions, hash browns, and melted cheese, it is a comforting dinner that is easy to prepare and perfect for feeding the family.
Whether you make it in the slow cooker or oven, this casserole is a simple and satisfying meal that brings all the flavor of a Philly cheesesteak to your dinner table.
US Senate passes War Powers Resolution rebuking Trump’s Iran war
People attend a protest against US-Israeli attacks on Iran in New York on February 28, 2026. Photo: Zhang Fengguo / Xinhua
In a “major bipartisan rebuke” of President Donald Trump’s illegal war on Iran, the US Senate on Tuesday passed a war powers resolution instructing Trump to withdraw US forces from Iran.
The vote was 50 to 48, with four Republicans joining the vast majority of Democrats to approve the resolution that was passed by the US House of Representatives earlier this month.
“The House and the Senate have both stood up,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) wrote in celebration of the vote on social media. “It’s time to stop this deadly and costly conflict.”
Republican Sens. Rand Paul (Ky.), Susan Collins (Maine), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) and Bill Cassidy (La.) voted in favor of the resolution while Democratic Sen. John Fetterman (Pa.) voted against it.
“The vote was 50-48, with four Republicans joining Democrats to say Trump should not be able to keep dragging America deeper into military conflict,” attorney Aaron Parnas wrote on social media. “This is a major bipartisan rebuke of Trump’s foreign policy chaos.”
Anti-war group CodePink wrote, “The will of the people is undeniable: It’s time to permanently end this war of aggression.”
BREAKING: US Senate passes Iran War Powers Resolution by a vote of 50-48.
The resolution demands the removal of US forces from all hostilities against Iran. It’s already passed the House.
The will of the people is undeniable: it’s time to permanently end this war of aggression. pic.twitter.com/27rxceRu81
The vote was a long time coming, as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumernoted it was Democrats’ 10th attempt to limit Trump’s ability to wage undeclared war since he unilaterally embroiled the US in a joint attack on Iran with Israel, beginning on February 28.
Schumer criticized the majority of Republicans for repeatedly failing to vote against the war, which he said would “go down in the history books as one of the worst foreign policy forays America has ever made,” according to The Associated Press.
Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) wrote on social media: “Congress finally passed a war powers resolution to stop Trump’s illegal war in Iran. It has been a disaster from the start. End it now.”
The vote made history by being the first time both the House and Senate have passed a concurrent resolution calling for an end to a conflict since the War Powers Resolution of 1973, as The New York Timesreported.
Concurrent resolutions do not require a presidential signature and therefore do not typically have the force of law. However, Democratic lawmakers and foreign policy experts argue that because Congress has the ability to declare war under the Constitution, the resolution should still restrict the president’s actions.
Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY), who sponsored the House resolution, wrote:
“With the Senate passage of my Iran War Powers Resolution, both chambers have now made clear that the president cannot continue this war of choice and must cease all hostilities against Iran. Regardless of what President Trump says, this measure is binding under the War Powers Resolution, and I will explore all legal avenues to ensure the executive complies with the will of Congress. Congress never authorized this failed war, and the president certainly has no authority to continue it indefinitely without our consent as the Constitution demands.”
The vote comes about a week after the US and Iran signed a memorandum of understanding to move toward ending the war that has killed at least 3,400 in Iran and thousands more across the region.
However, the subsequent ceasefire and negotiations have been rocky and uncertain due to continued Israeli attacks on Lebanon and threats from Trump.
Odd police video shows drone removing knife from motionless suspect
In a supposed “nationwide first” use of drones to disarm a person, the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office in California promoted a video showing how a small quadcopter drone used a dangling magnet to remove a knife from the hand of a motionless suspect.
The promotional video shared to Facebook and Instagram on June 22, 2026, uses the Mission: Impossible film franchise theme to dramatize video footage of the incident that took place earlier in the month, which involved what the video describes as a “felony suspect armed with a knife and a firearm” who “was not responding to negotiators.” The sheriff’s office is just one among hundreds of US police departments and sheriff’s offices that have deployed camera-equipped drones to assist first responders.
In a Facebook post, the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office described having surrounded the suspect’s residence with a SWAT team after the “known felon and parolee-at-large was seen earlier with a firearm.” A first drone deployed to the scene located the suspect hiding in a corner of the garage, but also spotted the motionless suspect holding a knife in one outstretched arm.
Piloted by an officer wearing a drone operator’s first-person view goggles, a second small drone equipped with a magnet on a cable flew into the garage. The video shows the motionless suspect in a gray hoodie lying facedown on a chair or sofa while still clutching the knife.
The drone then used the dangling magnet to grab the knife by the blade and pull it free from the apparently unresisting suspect’s hand. A final shot from the video shows the drone flying outside with the dangling knife spinning freely beneath it, enabling police officers to retrieve the drone. Some of the action in the video is also captured from the camera perspective of the first observer drone.
It is unclear what happened to the gun that the suspect supposedly possessed at one point.
The sheriff’s office praised the “incredible display of creativity, skill and precision by the drone pilot” in its Facebook post. But several comments on the sheriff’s office Facebook post alluded to the fact that the suspect was not actively moving, including a popular comment from Vic Moss, CEO and cofounder of the Drone Service Providers Alliance, a drone industry trade association based in Lakewood, Colorado.
“The dude was comatose,” Moss wrote in the Facebook comment. “You could’ve disarmed him with a marshmallow. But congrats on good use of the drone.”
In an interview with The Hill on NewsNation, Jim Cooper, head of the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office, said the suspect “may have overdosed” after initially responding to law enforcement. But he praised a patrol officer for coming up with the magnet idea and said it “possibly saved someone’s life, preventing us from taking a life.”
Such opportunities to safely disarm an armed suspect using a drone may still be rare as long as the person is fully conscious. In an October 2025 incident, a man armed with a rifle shot down one of the drones operated by the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office before officers negotiated his surrender.
Sheriff’s office drone retrieves knife from suspect
Rise of drones as first responders
The main law enforcement use of drones is still geared toward scouting for situational awareness and overhead surveillance. Cooper told The Hill that his officers use drones “all the time to fly into houses, through a garage door, doggy doors.” The sheriff’s office has previously shared other promotional videos featuring drones, including a video about one of the drone operators on its SCOUT (Sheriff’s Craft Observation, Utilizing Technology) team posted on March 5, 2026.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Atlas of Surveillance database lists more than 1,800 police departments and sheriff’s offices as having operated drones in the United States. The nonprofit organization also highlighted a notable rise in US law enforcement adopting “drone as first responder” programs in 2025, with tech and drone companies teaming up to sell law enforcement on drones with enhanced surveillance capabilities.
Such companies pitching drone surveillance systems tailored for law enforcement include Flock Safety, Axon and Skydio, and Brinc and Motorola Solutions. For example, Flock’s drones carry the company’s automated license plate readers.
“Flying cameras are bad enough,” wrote Beryl Lipton, a senior investigative researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in reference to the drone-as-first-responder programs. “They can see and record footage from a special vantage point, capturing video of your home, your backyard, and your movements that should require clear policies around retention, audits, and use, including when the cameras shouldn’t be recording.”
The Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office listed 18 drones in its inventory for its 2025 annual report, including commercial multirotor drones made by Chinese drone manufacturers DJI and Autel, along with a single fixed-wing drone from the Ohio-based company Event 38 capable of vertical takeoffs and landings.
In September 2025, Sacramento County supervisors unanimously approved the purchase of another 27 drones for the sheriff’s office with a starting price of $5,000 per drone, according to the KCRA 3 TV station. The drone purchases came as part of a larger $1 million package for the sheriff’s office that also included a robot and a Bearcat armored vehicle, along with other military-style equipment.
Silicon shock, token inequality, and techflation are no longer fringe theories floated on these pages. They have become the invisible gravity warping the global economy, rewriting policy, and keeping politicians awake at night.
In January, when we called silicon shock an era-defining event, we braced for a massive reckoning. What we did not expect, perhaps reflecting our own naive optimism, was the market’s infinite capacity for distraction.
The market, with its usual gift for looking busy near the wrong fire, has chosen to ask whether the AI trade is already priced in. It is a fine question for a screen. It is a poor question for an economy.
All the impatience around when technology product prices will begin to roll over massively simplifies the intricacies of hardware businesses’ moats and the realities of rising AI capabilities.
We are studying a technological earthquake the way a gambler studies a scoreboard, fixated on the ticker while the ground itself reorganizes underneath the table. There are other less glamorous and more useful issues: what happens when software, the great fixed-price machine of the last 30 years, starts burning a variable-cost fuel every time it thinks?
Three years ago, we wrote that the traditional software-as-a-service (SaaS – rhymes with grass or class) model was dying. The killer then was capability, as software began to execute the work it had merely organized, causing the old logic of renting tools to humans to crack.
That was the first death, a death by disintermediation, with value sliding off the software layer and down into the hardware that did the real thinking.
It was the story of an earlier era, the era when computers learned to speak human language and programming itself changed shape. Those are still genuine forces, but the SaaS model now faces new pressure from the techflation themes.
Simply said: the first SaaS pressure came from what AI could do. The second is being caused by what AI costs. Software companies suddenly have meaningful and fast-rising variable costs. The SaaS-type pricing worked when software companies effectively had 100% gross margins.
This note about SaaS’s second death uses a much-used term (unlike when we first used it in 2023), but has a larger body count. The turmoil caused by a new cost item, the AI compute cost, is creating ripples through the application layer.
That happens as companies, from the largest to those starting, grapple not only with costs but also with how to:
attract customers with the right pricing;
manage the rising customer anguish; and
navigate a competitive landscape that’s changing fast, due not just to products and features but also to the innovations in pricing models.
The changes in the ways software is priced and sold or what it is allowed to promise will likely remain unsettled for a while. For investors in these companies, it is not just about the implications on revenues and profits in the coming years, but in some cases about who will survive and who will suddenly be waylaid on account of sudden pricing-related business decisions.
The barrel and the refinery: software as hardware’s downstream
We may still be in the minority of one but, to us, the ongoing Silicon Shock has multiple parallels with the 1970s Oil Shock (and thus we similarly capitalize the era name).
Of course, there are massive differences, but the term is used not just to draw attention but also, repeatedly, to assert that techflation is about not just some technology companies making more or less money, but also its impact on everything macro globally for a prolonged period.
For the purpose of this note, the useful analogy is not the Oil Shock itself but what it did to the companies sitting downstream of the barrel. Refiners must buy a feedstock they do not control, convert it into something finished and discover in a crisis that they have inherited all of the volatility and almost none of the pricing power.
When crude quadrupled in 1973 and lurched again in 1979, the producers were largely insulated and frequently enriched. The converters downstream took the blow.
What is easy to forget is how much of the modern apparatus of that industry was built specifically to survive those years. Before 1973, the majors ran on posted prices, long contracts, and the comfortable assumption that a barrel bought today would cost roughly the same tomorrow. The shock retired that assumption permanently.
Spot markets appeared where stable contracts had been, the Rotterdam cargo trade became a price-setter and a generation of refiners learned to live and occasionally die on the crack spread. Petrochemical makers, one rung further down, found their margins compressing every time the feedstock jumped before their own prices could follow.
The defensive habits that followed – hedging desks, feedstock pass-through clauses, flexible plants that could switch inputs, take-or-pay contracts that moved the risk around – were not strategy in any ambitious sense. They were the scar tissue of an industry that had been taught it no longer owned its own cost base.
Software now sits in precisely that downstream seat, one rung below a silicon shock instead of an oil one. The token is the barrel. The model labs and the semi manufacturers are the producers, raising prices and signing capacity contracts and banking the spread with the serenity of people who own the well.
For software companies, it is far worse in some ways because of their history and the simultaneous forces of disruption caused by GenAI. The decades-long miracle of SaaS, the flat subscription, was only ever possible because the feedstock was free. One cannot overstate the shock of moving to the world of meaningful variable costs.
The buffet closes
For three decades, software peddled a rather exquisite miracle. The initial iteration may or may not have demanded a fortune to construct, yet every subsequent replica cost precisely nothing.
That singular property of near-zero marginal cost engineered the entire illusion of the all-inclusive buffet. Vendors could comfortably offer unlimited access for a fixed fee and retain nearly every dollar, simply because refills were effectively free.
Artificial intelligence irrevocably shattered that delicate arrangement by injecting a relentless metabolism into the code. Now, every computational response incinerates metered compute, and the foundational feedstock lurches unpredictably.
The all-you-can-eat paradigm simply collapses the moment the kitchen faces real material costs for every plate served, especially when those costs are dictated by upstream monopolies. Software no longer leases a quiet place to sit; it vends the raw electricity required to think.
The entities positioned closest to the consumer are naturally the first to falter under this new physics, loudly discovering they cannot pass the shock through cleanly.
Consider the developer revolt in real time when GitHub transitioned every Copilot plan to metered, token-based billing at the start of June, abruptly retiring the beloved premium-request model.
Users who treated the tool as a silent utility suddenly reported incinerating eight percent of a monthly allowance in two hours, while others watched a single query rack up a six-dollar toll. Microsoft subsequently retreated, pulling premium models from lower tiers and freezing signups to survey the wreckage.
What died was not a price, but a massive subsidy. The twenty-dollar unlimited plan was merely venture-funded customer acquisition, currently being clawed back with the exact ruthless efficiency of an Uber surge or a Netflix hike.
When the most aggressive Chinese discounters in the market begin stripping away the unlimited subscriptions once deployed as irresistible bait, the era of the endless buffet has conclusively ended.
A software seat historically assumed the hundredth click cost the vendor precisely what the first click did. When an autonomous agent executes a thousand actions before morning coffee cools, that foundational assumption completely shatters.
This structural collapse forces an entirely new vocabulary upon the industry, because the unit of billing inevitably colonizes the unit of thought. The sector organized itself exclusively around human attention, counting seats, calculating logins and optimizing retention.
The token measures something else entirely, tracking cognition in discrete fragments akin to a municipal power grid dispensing kilowatt-hours.
Submitting an invoice measured in tokens acts as a quiet, definitive confession regarding the fragility of an underlying cost structure. The industry is not converging on a civilized replacement for the subscription; it is actively fracturing into a dizzying portfolio of commercial primitives, desperately searching for a new grammar to obscure the spinning meter.
The grammar of the meter
The reason for this new variable cost is simple enough, which is always a warning that the consequences will be complicated. Most AI features do not run inside the customer’s own machine, at least not yet in any serious way.
They run on centralized, shared, expensive hardware owned or rented by someone else, and for now, the software company is the one standing between the user’s appetite and the upstream bill. The app may look like software. The cost base behaves like infrastructure. This is an awkward costume change, and the stitching is visible.
The clearest measure of how fast this is reordering the industry is not in any margin table. It is in the language. A business that rewrites its vocabulary every few months is a business that has not found its footing and software has spent the past year minting units at a pace that would embarrass a venture deck. The seat is being retired, and in its place has arrived a small menagerie, each unit carrying a different theory of who should absorb the uncertainty.
The seat counted a human. The token counts machine cognition in small fragments, closer to a power meter than a membership card. A token is a tiny unit of thought with an invoice attached. And with that as the unit, the entire moral economy of software changes.
This deliberate lack of interchangeability transforms the pricing landscape into a labyrinth, and the credit reigns supreme as the preferred instrument of structural obfuscation. Stripped of the polished marketing veneer, the cleverness of this pivot begins to feel slightly embarrassing.
A credit functions exactly like an airline mile, operating as a private scrip whose underlying exchange rate is controlled entirely by the issuer and routinely devalued in the dark. It naturally sounds substantially cleaner than a raw compute token during a polite sales pitch, right up until the realization dawns that it is simply fiat currency minted by a vendor, holding value exclusively within their own walled kingdom.
Salesforce currently meters Agentforce in Flex Credits, Microsoft restricts Copilot Studio to Copilot Credits, Adobe burns through Generative Credits, while SAP issues its own proprietary AI Units.
The architecture of the credit brilliantly hides the true underlying compute cost while simultaneously manufacturing immense switching friction for the trapped user. Crucially, it allows an enterprise to execute a vicious price hike merely by altering how many credits a routine task consumes, raising the real financial burden without ever laying a finger on the published sticker rate.
For all practical purposes, this is aggressive monetary policy conducted by a software company, complete with a regime of silent, unannounced inflation that the captive customer is entirely uninvited to audit.
Token pricing, with or without credits, protects the vendor because the user pays for every ounce of compute consumed, including wasted compute. Action pricing says the machine did something measurable, so someone should pay.
Outcome pricing says the machine achieved something useful, so payment should depend on success. That final model is the most elegant and the most dangerous for the vendor, because it turns software into labor with performance risk.
The industry is therefore not moving from one old model to one new model. It is splitting into dialects. Customer support wants resolutions and cost control. Sales wants qualified leads. Developer tools want tokens, requests, or model usage.
Enterprise agents want actions. Creative tools want credits. Data platforms want spend caps. Model providers want cached-token discounts, batch discounts, and faster lanes at higher rates.
And, the management is additionally struggling with new cost items. The same word, “AI,” now contains a dozen cost structures wearing one overworked suit.
There is a reason the new grammar feels unstable. No one yet knows the right unit of AI work. A prompt is too crude. A token is too technical. A seat is too human. A task is too vague. A resolution is too hard to verify. An agent-hour sounds satisfyingly industrial but may reward slow machines.
A credit hides the complexity and then quietly inherits all of it. The market is trying to price cognition before it has agreed what cognition is, which is bold, but then so was selling unlimited intelligence for twenty dollars.
The direction, however, is clear. The old software invoice measured access. The new invoice measures exertion. Once that change is accepted, the rest follows with the dull inevitability of plumbing.
The price sheet will not sit still
For most of the history of enterprise software, the commercial department was the quietest room in the building.
A pricing committee might convene once every two years to weigh a five percent increase on a premium tier, usually to justify a feature nobody had requested, and then return to its slumber. Price was the most stable thing a software company owned. It had the rhythm of a ground lease.
That room no longer sleeps. The old price sheet was a document. The new one is a confession, revised by committee and engineering and finance and legal and whoever in infrastructure has just seen the cloud bill.
Across the five hundred largest names in software, one tracker counted more than 1,800 pricing and packaging changes in 2025, against 339 the year before across a sample seven times larger.
The leaders are now revising how they charge several times a day between them, and the revisions are not the genteel kind. Lovable, the vibe-coding firm, rewrote its pricing roughly once a month through the year, launching a team plan in the spring and retiring it by summer.
Replit offers the fuller education. It began with a flat quarter of a dollar per checkpoint, moved to effort-based pricing in the summer with a rollout it later apologized for, then shipped a more autonomous agent in September that quietly turned a 200-dollar monthly habit into something users reported running past 1,000 dollars in a week, then sunset its team plan entirely the following February.
The strange part is that the arrows point in opposite directions at once. For example, Google cut its premium tier from 250 to 200 dollars in May, then halved its entry plan to 4.99 a month in June while doubling the storage attached to it.
At the top of the consumer market some stickers are falling. Read quickly, that looks like ordinary deflation, the soothing kind that lets an investor picture a clean productivity wave passing through the system.
Read slowly, it is less comforting because the same vendor cutting the headline is often complicating the meter underneath it in the same season, trading a simple monthly promise for rolling windows, weekly caps, and quota arithmetic that needed a small constitutional reform within weeks of arriving. A genuine price cut does not usually require an apology and a patch.
The enterprise side is more unsettled still, because there the vendors are abandoning the seat itself. One now provisions developers with no fixed monthly fee at all, which is close to heresy in the church of subscription software.
Another retired its old request model after conceding that a quick question and a multi-hour autonomous session had been priced too alike. A third bills a single task as a composite of the model it used, the context it retrieved, the tools it called, and the seconds it ran.
The customer is no longer buying software so much as a small live auction among models, wrapped in a familiar interface.
The deepest tell is that the largest vendors have stopped trying to choose at all. Salesforce sells the same agent through several incompatible costumes at once, and the revealing part is not that one of them is wrong.
It is that all of them are plausible, which means none has won. The revenue arrived regardless, past half a billion dollars and growing quickly, yet only around 8% of its own customers had agreed to any version, which is the sound of a market declining to answer a question the seller could not answer first.
None of this is version churn. A faster sidebar is a product change. Rewriting the unit of sale four times in eighteen months, while cutting the headline and complicating the meter in the same quarter, is an industry trying to discover in public what the thing it sells actually is.
The collective answer, delivered with the straight face of a pricing page, is that nobody yet knows. A normal industry changes its prices when the product matures. This one changes its prices because the product is not yet sure what it is.
The Chinese turn
There is an older version of this story, and it ran through container ports rather than data centers.
For two generations the reflex for defending a margin was to send the work east, where it could be done for less, and an entire architecture of global trade was built on that one arbitrage. The generative era has revived the reflex for a different reason. The constraint is no longer cheap hands. It is cheap thought.
The premise underneath it is unglamorous and correct. Most tasks do not need the newest, most capable, most expensive model. A great deal of routine software work runs perfectly well on a cheaper engine, and the Chinese models have become precisely that engine.
Built under export controls, trained and served on more mature silicon without the latest interconnects or the most abundant high-bandwidth memory, they were pushed toward thrift by the very constraints meant to hold them back. Scarcity did not make them weak. It made them frugal, which is worse news for anyone selling intelligence by the spoonful.
When the meter is running, good enough and cheap beats excellent and dear, and that single fact is quietly reorganizing the application layer. The hardest question in software is no longer what the product can do. It is which engine to call for which task, and how little can be spent clearing the bar.
The vendor becomes less a cathedral builder than a dispatcher, choosing which machine takes the job before the customer notices a choice was made. Much to the chagrin of policymakers still fighting the previous war over trade balances and tariffs, the cost gravity points one way, and the invoice keeps winning arguments the speeches cannot.
The turn is no longer fringe. Cursor built its in-house model on a Chinese open foundation and was caught only when a developer read the model’s own identifier in its traffic, an executive later conceding it had been a miss not to say so from the start. The embarrassment is the instructive part. The product was sold as homegrown. The cost structure remembered otherwise.
The most uncomfortable case sits at the largest American software company of all, reportedly weighing a self-hosted Chinese model inside its enterprise agent to keep the price tolerable, a sentence that contains the whole decade: an American giant may need a Chinese model, wrapped in an American cloud, to make an American product affordable.
The irony writes itself, though it would surely prefer a cheaper model to do the drafting. We spent a decade fearing that software would be disintermediated by intelligence. We are watching it re-intermediate itself instead, as a buyer and broker of the cheapest adequate intelligence it can source.
The application layer is not dying quietly. It is becoming a routing layer, a bargaining layer, a place where the margin is defended one model choice at a time. Its new advantage is not owning the smartest model. It is knowing when not to reach for it.
There is so much more to say on this topic. We are sure to have full-blown pieces on the subject in the coming months.
The cost of repricing trust
As I write this section, with active interventions from my Claude Cowork, I overhear my partner Venky complaining about how his Claude has again stopped working for being overloaded. I have no heart to flaunt the privileges of my higher tier access. In every group, token inequality is causing new relationship dynamics.
A price is also a promise, and an industry rewriting its prices every quarter is rewriting its promises at the same pace. On every side of the software company at once, customers, employees, and the people who fund it, the old understandings are loosening, and the evidence is piling up faster than the commentary.
The customer relationship is fraying first because that is where the meter is most visible. When GitHub moved Copilot to token billing in June, developers reported burning through monthly allowances in hours and, in the company’s own forums, called the change a joke.
When Cursor restructured its pricing in 2025, the founder conceded the rollout was not communicated clearly and offered refunds. When Google tightened Gemini’s limits, the complaints were public enough that it walked several of them back within weeks.
The pattern repeats so often it has become a sequence: Ship a price, absorb the revolt, retreat. Refunds, grace periods, restored limits and paused signups are now routine release notes rather than rare climbdowns, which is a fair measure of how often the first guess is wrong.
The complaints have also changed in kind. Customers used to dispute the size of a bill. Now they dispute its legibility, since credits, token counts and silent model swaps make a charge hard to predict in advance and harder to verify after.
In June that distrust reached a courtroom, with a proposed class action alleging that a premium AI plan sold as a multiple of usage delivered materially less than advertised and did not disclose the limits clearly. Whether the specific claim holds is for the lawyers. The signal is that pricing opacity has moved from a forum grievance to a legal one.
The strain runs inward, into territory pricing never used to touch. The request for more compute has become something escalated to finance, and access to the better model is now a managed resource rather than a default. Clearly, who has access and who does not is giving rise to new hierarchies within organizations.
Capital feels it from the other direction, and the friction is sharpest in private hands. The investor who backed software for its near-perfect gross margin now owns something that no longer behaves that way.
ICONIQ’s 2026 survey found AI product builders expecting average gross margins near 52%, compared with the 70% to 80% that defined the category, suggesting the thing being funded has quietly changed shape after the check was written.
The conversations have changed with it. Founders report sailing through the first meeting and then being held over the coals in the second on inference cost, gross margin and contract length, with later rounds stretching out and bridge extensions becoming the default while backers wait for proof the unit economics work.
The awkward part is that the spend keeps climbing for reasons the original plan did not budget for.
Techflation: tech inflation or tech conflation?
Three years ago, when we first wrote about the pressure on the software subscription model, the cause was singular and of a different kind. It lay in the changing nature of software development itself. That argument is well understood now, and most observers have taken a firm position on one side of it or the other.
Two further causes have since been added to the pile. The first we set out in our tollbooth article, which noted the growing absurdity of charging by the human seat when autonomous agents do the bulk of the work across the server.
The second, the subject of this piece, is the more serious. Software companies have quietly taken compute onto their own books, wrapping pure hardware cost inside a digital interface and discovering the unfamiliar discomfort of a variable input. A business built on the miracle of near-zero marginal cost does not easily survive the arrival of a bill of materials.
Management teams accordingly find themselves on unfamiliar ground, without the predictability that once defined their quarters. The work is no longer only about designing good software. It is also about sourcing the intelligence underneath it at a price that leaves a margin.
And the choices are genuinely hard. Whether to lean on cheaper open-weight models or pay for the frontier. How far to commit to a single cloud, at a moment when inference is beginning to diverge between providers because each routes it through its own custom silicon, so that a model’s behavior and cost now depend on whose chips it runs on.
That every competitor faces the same dilemma is not a comfort but a complication, since each rival’s move forces a response, and the responses feed the very uncertainty everyone is trying to escape.
The lack of visibility that long defined the hardware business has arrived in software, in its own form, and the people running these companies are navigating it the way one drives through fog, by watching the taillights of the car ahead.
None of this retires the deeper forces still rewiring the application layer. From the management of people to the durability of a moat, the difficulties are shared across every company that built its business on top of someone else’s models.
Among those difficulties, the management of compute cost, the token budget, is becoming the one that organizes all the others. It shapes not only profit but the speed of product development and the temper of the team. Access to the better model is now something to be allocated, and where it is allocated quietly redraws the hierarchy inside a firm.
Two years ago, the idea that office politics might turn on who holds which application programming interface (API) key would have been unintelligible. It is now a normal feature of working life, and a small but real instance of the token inequality we have written about before.
For the many companies still building, still spending more than they earn, the new cost line is a heavy charge levied well before the older questions about shifting capability have been settled, and before business plans that keep getting rewritten by each advance in capability have had time to set.
For the analysts who cover the great listed software franchises, the temptation will be to watch the topline alone, reassured by revenue that hardware bundling helps inflate, and to leave the cost base for another day. That would be a mistake.
The unraveling of the SaaS pricing model, the arrival of a gross margin where there was never one to speak of, and the unbundling of the features that margin used to conceal, have more of their consequences ahead of them than behind. The refinery has only just read the meter.
Nilesh Jasani is CEO and portfolio manager of Geninnov Fund, which originally published this article. It is republished with kind permission.
US’s climate.gov site, taken down by Trump, relaunched by nonprofit
Over decades, researchers in the US government and programs it sponsored built up a tremendous number of climate resources, from comprehensive analyses to massive datasets to basic explainers meant to inform the public. And people within the government built the climate.gov website to make it all accessible. But if you try to navigate there today, you get redirected to the climate page of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and are greeted with the following message:
In compliance with Executive Order 14303 (“Restoring Gold Standard Science”), the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s June 23, 2025 Memorandum (“Agency Guidance for Implementing Gold Standard Science in the Conduct & Management of Scientific Activities”), 15 USC § 2904 (“National Climate Program”), 15 USC § 2934 (“National Global Change Research Plan”), and 33 USC § 893a (“NOAA Ocean and Atmospheric Science Education Programs”), you have been redirected to NOAA.gov. Future research products previously housed under Climate.gov will be available at NOAA.gov/climate and its affiliate websites.
Climate.gov was essentially gone, and the team that deleted implied that it happened because climate research somehow failed to uphold what the administration was calling “gold standard science.”
But the people who put together climate.gov didn’t go away. While the government didn’t hesitate to delete inconvenient climate information, dedicated volunteers outside the government managed to preserve copies of much of the material, which the federal government is prohibited from copyrighting. The volunteers and former climate.gov admins got together and launched climate.us. On Tuesday, the team announced that it had completed the project to restore everything lost when climate.gov shut down.
The website features Climate.gov’s 15-year collection of climate news and stories, expert blogs, visual status reports on key climate indicators, maps and data pathways, climate literacy resources, classroom materials, and restored access to the Fifth National Climate Assessment.
The team behind it, which includes several key people who built climate.gov, says it’s not satisfied with simply restoring what was lost. Having established a nonprofit to maintain the new website, the organization will shift its focus to what it calls “long-term public service.” It plans to establish new resources and develop additional materials to help explain the changing climate to the public.
Beloved Actor Breaks Silence on Secret Health Battle
Joe Manganiello is opening up about a private health nightmare that nearly took his life.
The Magic Mike and Spider-Man actor, 49, reveals in his upcoming memoir, Bloodlines, that he spent seven years battling a brutal autoimmune disease while the public knew him best for his ripped physique and action-star image.
According to the book’s synopsis, Manganiello’s body was hit by “a cascade of autoimmune-related illnesses” that attacked his skin, thyroid, eyes, lungs and digestive system. The battle reportedly left him dealing with chronic pain, a life-saving organ amputation and a deep personal crisis that forced him to rethink almost everything about his life.
The actor, who was previously married to Modern Family star Sofia Vergara and is now engaged to model Caitlin O’Connor, kept much of the health battle out of the spotlight as he searched for answers.
Bloodlines, set for release on October 13, will dig into illness, family history, masculinity, faith, ambition and the identities people build in order to survive.
But Manganiello’s road back was far from ordinary.
The memoir details how he followed what is described as an “unorthodox path” toward healing, one that included shamans, pagan rituals, ancient myths, long-lost family records and a renewed sense of spirituality.
In a statement to People, Manganiello said he hopes his story gives others strength while they fight their own private battles.
“Answers and healing may lie for them on the other side of whatever they are fighting through,” he said.
For years, fans saw Manganiello as the picture of strength. Now, he is revealing the painful fight that was happening behind the scenes.
Scars mark Britain’s economy 10 years after Brexit vote
Britain’s vote to leave the European Union in 2016 has acted as a persistent drag on its economy, compounding some of the deep-seated structural problems behind the push for Brexit.
From inflation to financial services, here are some indicators that help tell the story of the decade that followed.
GDP GROWTH PER CAPITA
Economists mostly agree that Brexit has damaged Britain’s economic performance, although separating its impact from that of the COVID-19 pandemic, which struck just as Britain completed its departure from the EU, is difficult.
Britain ranks second-bottom among the Group of Seven (G7) advanced economies for per-capita economic growth, ahead of only manufacturing-heavy Germany, which has struggled to adapt to a shifting global trade environment.
Successive governments have failed to meaningfully lift Britain’s economic performance, which remains marked by stop-start growth and weak long-term productivity growth.
Brexit supporters say Britain’s independence from the EU will give it flexibility in the long run, while the worst-case predictions for the economic fallout did not materialise.
Some sectors have fared well — notably fintech, life sciences and AI, where Britain has maintained a strong global position.
But economists argue that even these strengths have underperformed what might have been expected, held back by the same investment weakness, political instability and trade friction that have weighed on the broader economy.
INFLATION
Britain has seen more inflation than any other Western European country apart from Austria since the Brexit vote, with consumer prices up 41.4% as of May 2026, official data shows.
While initially pinned on one-off events like sterling’s post-referendum depreciation or Russia’s Ukraine invasion, the failure to control inflation has become a deep-seated problem.
Adam Posen, an ex-Bank of England rate-setter and president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics think tank in Washington, D.C., said Britain had become structurally inflation-prone through weak economic governance — political instability, fiscal fragility and weak productivity growth.
“In a world where the U.S. is not providing global economic insurance, a UK that is neither in Europe nor fully with the U.S. is a small, open economy in a fundamentally more exposed position than it’s been for decades. Brexit reinforces that,” Posen said.
FINANCIAL SERVICES
In 2015, Britain’s financial services exports dwarfed those of France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands and Italy combined. As of 2024, those five countries had collectively overtaken the UK, showing how Brexit has diluted London’s European dominance.
Between 2015 and 2025, the economic output of Britain’s financial services sector fell by 27%, and it has lost market share in 10 out of 12 categories of international finance, research firm New Financial said.
London remains the continent’s dominant financial services centre and the biggest hub for trade in the almost $10 trillion-a-day global currency markets.
BUSINESS INVESTMENT
Years of uncertainty over Britain’s post-Brexit trade terms depressed business investment, which stands only around 12% higher than its level of mid-2016, compared with 23% higher in France and 48% in the United States. Germany has fared worse than Britain, with growth of only 1% due to its poor economic performance.
BONDS
British government bonds have been more volatile than other debt issued by G7 countries, measured by the 10-year standard deviation of benchmark 10-year bonds.
That has contributed to the loss of gilts’ “safe haven” status among investors.
Britain’s poor inflation record has boosted interest rate expectations, reflected in the high rates of return offered by UK debt that add to financing pressures.
Keir Starmer’s announcement on Monday that he will quit as prime minister, in the same week as the Brexit referendum anniversary, highlights the fragile political backdrop, with Britain set to get its seventh leader in 10 years.
Bond market frailties were also laid bare during the 2022 gilts crisis when the budget plans of Liz Truss sparked a rout that forced the BoE to intervene and the then prime minister and her finance minister to resign.
STERLING
Britain’s pound is some 10% weaker against the dollar and euro versus where it was before the 2016 vote , . That has contributed to increased import costs, adding to inflation troubles at a time when Britain has also grappled with an energy shock unleashed first by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and more recently with the Iran war. Sterling has been susceptible to political instability and hit a record low against the dollar during the 2022 mini-budget crisis.
“Sterling has probably offered a better yield than many other major currencies but generally hasn’t performed as well as that yield would suggest, which does suggest that there’s a policy risk premium being built up,” said Michael Metcalfe, head of macro strategy at State Street Markets. Questions have resurfaced over sterling’s reserve currency standing, especially amid renewed concerns over UK debt levels. The pound remains the world’s fourth most actively traded currency, although its share has fallen sharply, the latest Bank for International Settlements FX survey shows.
Sterling has proved more resilient to political risks this year, however, with analysts pointing to slightly better economic conditions.
STOCKS
An investor in UK domestic mid-cap stocks, measured by the FTSE 250, would have lost 2% in real terms since the Brexit vote, against inflation-adjusted gains of 13% in France and 19% in Germany, before dividends.
While the blue-chip FTSE 100, home to companies with a more international focus, hit record highs earlier this year, it has traded at a deep discount to U.S. and European markets.
As South Korea hosts the Jeju Forum for Peace and Prosperity from June 24 to 26, an important question confronts policymakers across Asia: What is the future of peace on the Korean Peninsula? Equally important is how South Korea’s evolving strategic and domestic realities will affect regional stability and what neighboring countries can do to safeguard their interests in an increasingly uncertain security environment.
The Jeju Forum is particularly timely. The Korean Peninsula is entering a period of profound transformation driven by growing geopolitical competition, North Korea’s expanding military capabilities, changing alliance dynamics, and mounting economic and demographic challenges within South Korea itself. Together, these developments are reshaping the foundations upon which peace and stability in the region have rested for decades.
On June 13, 2026, North Korea issued one of its strongest statements in recent years regarding inter-Korean relations. In a declaration titled “South Korea Remains an Unchanging Enemy State That Has Internalized Hostility and Confrontation,” Pyongyang explicitly rejected the possibility of peaceful coexistence and reaffirmed its position that South Korea is a permanent hostile state.
The significance of this statement extends far beyond routine political rhetoric. It directly challenges the foundations of previous peace initiatives by dismissing concepts such as reconciliation, peaceful coexistence and eventual reunification. For decades, despite recurring crises and military confrontations, both Koreas officially maintained that reunification remained a long-term objective. That framework now appears to be rapidly eroding.
North Korea increasingly views South Korea not as a partner for eventual reunification but as a separate and hostile state. The language used in the June statement leaves little room for future reconciliation efforts and suggests that Pyongyang now approaches inter-Korean relations primarily through a military and security lens.
This shift reflects North Korea’s growing confidence in its strategic position. Deepening military cooperation with Russia, continued advances in nuclear and missile capabilities, growing diplomatic relevance amid intensifying geopolitical competition and greater confidence in its ability to withstand sanctions have all strengthened Pyongyang’s sense of leverage. As a result, the North Korean leadership appears to see little strategic benefit in engagement with Seoul.
Particularly concerning is North Korea’s accelerating expansion of its nuclear arsenal. Recent statements by Kim Jong-un and North Korean state media indicate a determination to continuously increase both the quantity and sophistication of the country’s nuclear weapons. Combined with advances in ballistic missile technology, tactical nuclear systems, and strategic delivery platforms, North Korea’s growing nuclear capabilities represent one of the most serious security challenges facing Northeast Asia. The continued expansion of its nuclear arsenal not only undermines prospects for denuclearization but also increases the risks of miscalculation, arms competition, and strategic instability throughout the region.
Russia has become an increasingly important factor in North Korea’s calculations. Moscow now provides diplomatic support, economic opportunities and military cooperation, all of which reduce North Korea’s dependence on inter-Korean engagement. As long as these benefits continue, Pyongyang’s incentive to pursue reconciliation with South Korea is likely to remain limited.
The broader consequence is clear. The traditional peace process that dominated discussions of the Korean Peninsula for decades is gradually giving way to a framework centered on deterrence, military preparedness and strategic competition. North Korea’s expanding nuclear arsenal is likely to further accelerate military modernization efforts by South Korea while contributing to growing geopolitical polarization across Northeast Asia.
Today, the Korean Peninsula increasingly resembles a geopolitical confrontation between two rival states rather than a divided nation seeking eventual reunification. This transformation raises profound questions regarding the future of peace, stability, and conflict management in Northeast Asia.
South Korea’s growing strategic and domestic challenges
While North Korea’s posture presents serious challenges, South Korea faces an equally complex set of strategic and domestic pressures.
One emerging concern is the future credibility of the US-South Korea alliance. Following recent developments in the Middle East and the conflict involving Iran, questions have begun to emerge in some strategic circles regarding the reliability of American security commitments. Whether these concerns are justified or not, perceptions matter in international politics.
If confidence in US security guarantees continues to weaken, regional actors may begin adjusting their strategic calculations accordingly. Such uncertainty could become a significant source of instability in Northeast Asia and create strategic opportunities for China to expand its political, economic, and security influence on the Korean Peninsula.
South Korea also faces the increasingly difficult challenge of managing China’s rise. China’s economic and military power continues to grow, making it an increasingly influential actor in regional affairs. South Korea depends heavily on China economically while relying on the US for its security. Balancing these competing realities is becoming increasingly difficult as strategic competition between Washington and Beijing intensifies.
Any major policy miscalculation could expose South Korea to significant diplomatic and security risks. More importantly, it could undermine regional stability and increase the risk of strategic confrontation among the major powers operating in Northeast Asia.
Beyond external challenges, South Korea is confronting a series of structural economic problems that could have long-term implications for national stability. Although strong demand for semiconductors has recently supported economic growth, deeper challenges remain unresolved. A shrinking workforce, slowing productivity growth, rising welfare expenditures, growing dependence on a narrow range of export industries, increasing household debt and intensifying competition from China are all creating long-term pressures on the Korean economy. The transition toward an AI-driven economy will further accelerate these structural adjustments, posing significant challenges to employment patterns, industrial competitiveness, economic resilience and social stability.
South Korea’s demographic crisis poses an even greater challenge. Despite extensive government efforts, the country’s fertility rate remains among the lowest in the world. The proportion of elderly citizens continues to rise rapidly while the number of young people entering the workforce steadily declines. Traditional family structures are under increasing strain, marriage rates continue to fall, and social isolation and mental health concerns remain significant challenges. These trends threaten not only economic growth but also long-term social cohesion.
The demographic crisis is also beginning to affect national security. South Korea’s defense industry has emerged as a major global success story, yet the country faces a growing shortage of military-age personnel. Each year, fewer young men are available for military service. Although this has not yet significantly affected operational readiness, the trend poses a long-term challenge for South Korea’s defense posture.
If left unaddressed, manpower shortages could gradually weaken the foundations of national defense and alter the regional military balance. Over the longer term, such trends may encourage North Korea to adopt a more assertive posture toward South Korea and pursue its strategic objectives with greater confidence.
What regional countries must do
The future of peace on the Korean Peninsula carries significant implications for countries across the Indo-Pacific region. North Korea’s expanding nuclear capabilities, growing military cooperation with Russia and increasing geopolitical polarization in Northeast Asia have consequences that extend far beyond the peninsula itself.
Countries such as India can no longer afford to view developments on the Korean Peninsula as a peripheral security issue while focusing primarily on economic cooperation and defense-industrial partnerships. The rapidly changing security environment on the peninsula requires a broader strategic perspective that incorporates political, military, and geopolitical considerations.
For too long, North Korea has received relatively limited attention in regional strategic thinking. That approach is becoming increasingly difficult to justify. As North Korea’s military capabilities expand and its strategic relevance grows, developments on the peninsula will have a greater impact on regional security calculations.
Particular attention should be devoted to monitoring the evolving DPRK-Russia partnership and assessing its implications for regional and global security. Concerns regarding the potential transfer of North Korean missile technologies, military expertise, and nuclear-related knowledge to third countries deserve careful scrutiny. Such developments could directly affect the security interests of countries far beyond Northeast Asia.
At the same time, regional countries should pay closer attention to South Korea’s internal challenges. South Korea is increasingly viewed as a critical economic, technological, and strategic partner in the emerging Indo-Pacific order. However, demographic decline, economic restructuring, and social pressures could affect Seoul’s ability to play this role effectively.
Ignoring these domestic challenges would be a strategic mistake for countries that have begun incorporating South Korea into their long-term regional calculations.
As leaders gather in Jeju to discuss peace and prosperity, they must recognize a fundamental reality. The future of peace on the Korean Peninsula will depend not only on relations between North and South Korea but also on how the region responds to a broader set of geopolitical, economic, demographic, and social challenges. Peace can no longer be defined simply as the absence of war. It must also encompass economic resilience, social stability, strategic balance, and the capacity of states to adapt to an increasingly complex and competitive regional environment.
The Korean Peninsula is entering a new and uncertain era. Whether this period is ultimately defined by stability, managed competition, or prolonged confrontation will depend on the strategic choices made not only by South Korea but also by the major regional powers whose interests increasingly intersect on the peninsula. The decisions taken today will shape the future security architecture of Northeast Asia for decades to come.
