India surpassed China as the world’s most populous country in 2023. Two years later, the implications are becoming more concrete.

The demographic story is more nuanced than a headline number. India has a young population — median age around 28, compared to China’s 39 and Japan’s 49. In a global economy increasingly concerned about aging workforces and shrinking labor pools, this is a structural asset. More young workers means more potential output, more consumption, more innovation — if the economic conditions to absorb them exist.

The war in Gaza is the most morally misrepresented conflict of the 21st century. To read most international coverage, you would think two roughly equivalent parties are locked in a cycle of mutual violence with shared blame and murky origins. None of that is true.

Israel is a liberal democracy of nine million people, surrounded by neighbors a significant portion of whom have spent seventy-five years trying to destroy it. Gaza is governed — has been governed since 2007 — by Hamas, an Islamist organization whose founding covenant calls for the obliteration of the Jewish state and whose worldview is closer to seventh-century theocracy than to any recognizable modern political movement. This is not a territorial dispute between two nationalisms with competing but legitimate claims. It is a democracy defending its existence against an organization that regards Jewish life as something to be extinguished.

Four years into the largest land war in Europe since 1945, it is worth being clear-eyed about what has been decided and what remains unresolved.

What the war has settled: Russia cannot rapidly conquer Ukraine. The assumption in Moscow in February 2022 was that Kyiv would fall within days and the government would collapse or flee. That did not happen. Ukraine’s military, its institutional resilience, and the coherence of its civilian leadership confounded the invasion’s original premise. That failure has permanent consequences for how Russia’s military capacity is assessed globally.

Something structurally significant is happening in European defense spending, and it is moving faster than most foreign policy watchers expected.

Germany, which for decades treated its post-war pacifism as a near-constitutional value, has committed to defense spending above 2% of GDP — a threshold it avoided for thirty years. Poland is on track to reach 5%. The UK announced its largest defense budget expansion since the Cold War. These are not incremental adjustments. They represent a fundamental reassessment of the security environment.