British authorities Tuesday charged Mohmed Ahmad Abdulkarim and Nouman Essghir, both 24-year-old British nationals, with violating the National Security Act in an alleged terror plot targeting the RAF Fairford military base that had been used by U.S. forces to conduct bombing raids on Iran.

Mr. Abdulkarim is charged with assisting Iran’s intelligence service. It was not immediately clear whether the charges refer to Iran’s official intelligence ministry or an intelligence arm of the Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Mr. Essghir, meanwhile, is one of the five men arrested near RAF Fairford Sept. 27 after residents called police to report a suspicious white van and masked men. He was charged with entering a prohibited place for a purpose prejudicial to the United Kingdom. Police found no evidence of explosives in the vans on the scene.

Lana Nusseibeh, a United Arab Emirates diplomat who has emerged as a candidate to become the next secretary-general of the United Nations, says the global body is in desperate need of a “mindset shift” as it looks to play a more active role in solving some of the world’s most pressing issues.

Ms. Nusseibeh said in an exclusive interview with Foreign Affairs Correspondent Vaughn Cockayne that she’s “stubbornly optimistic” about the U.N.’s future. “We need to reboot morale in the United Nations and its ability to deliver,” she said. “The way we do that is by demonstrating action, by demonstrating delivery, by proving to countries that the U.N. is back at the table on peace and security, on development, and on human rights.”

UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan put his support behind Ms. Nusseibeh last week. Her nomination has since received scattered support and criticism from around the diplomatic world. Her candidacy comes against a backdrop of expanding UAE military activity in Africa, particularly in Libya and Sudan. Africa is home to the highest concentration of U.N. peacekeeping operations.

The U.S. military has banned electric vehicles manufactured by Chinese automaker BYD from a key U.S. air base in Japan, citing “risks to our personnel.” The move comes months after the Pentagon placed BYD, the largest global supplier of EVs, on a blacklist of companies allegedly supporting China’s military.

Japanese media speculate the presence of U.S. Typhon missile systems at Kadena Air Base in Okinawa may be one reason for the BYD ban. The weapons are capable of striking Chinese ports and have irked Beijing. The concern is that BYD “smart vehicles” could help China spy on the sprawling American base.

Current-generation civilian vehicles with built-in navigation sensors, dashboard cameras and other systems that record and store location, image and audio datasets are emerging as security risks. Those risks came into sharp focus in an exercise conducted earlier this month by Norway’s Home Guard. Rental cars used by reservists reportedly captured video of personnel and recorded security pad codes at facility gates during the exercise.

The USS Colorado will be the first U.S. Navy submarine assigned to Submarine Rotational Force-West (SRF-West) in Australia beginning in late 2027. It’s a major Trump-era development undergirding the U.S.-Australia-United Kingdom (AUKUS) security alignment originally set in motion by the Biden administration to provide Australia with nuclear-powered attack submarines in response to China’s expanding military moves. 

SRF-West is a joint partnership between the three allies that will establish a rotational presence of allied nuclear-powered attack submarines at Stirling naval base near Perth in Western Australia, according to the Pentagon. The program will eventually host up to one British and four U.S. submarines at the base. 

Britain and the U.S. have operated nuclear-powered submarines since the early Cold War era, but Australia is new to this game. “SRF-West will accelerate Australia’s readiness to own, operate, maintain, and regulate a sovereign, conventionally-armed, nuclear-powered submarine capability, as well as support submarine deployments by expanding maintenance options and sustainment infrastructure in the region for AUKUS partners,” the Australian Submarine Agency said in a statement.

In communist China, the fundamental problem is not simply that “elections are absent but that the ruling party has made itself virtually immune to accountability,” Miles Yu, director of the China Center at the Hudson Institute, writes in his “Red Horizon” column for The Washington Times. 

The Chinese Communist Party claims that one-party rule “delivers efficiency and stability by eliminating electoral competition. What it actually eliminates is the people’s power to dismiss those who govern them,” writes Mr. Yu. “The CCP investigates, judges, disciplines and ultimately absolves itself. It decides what constitutes success, what counts as failure and who must take the blame. 

“The public has no independent electoral means of challenging that verdict,” he writes. “This creates a dangerous political culture. Leaders who never have to face voters become accustomed to issuing commands rather than answering questions. Criticism becomes disloyalty, dissent a security threat. Over time, unchecked power breeds an arrogant, aggressive, imperious ruling party convinced that its authority is beyond challenge at home and that its will should be imposed abroad.”

• Oct. 27 — Chemistry of Combat: Rebuilding America’s Energetics Base, Hudson Institute

• Oct. 28-29 — China’s Power: Up for Debate 2026, Center for Strategic and International Studies

• Oct. 30 — Gen. Dagvin R.M. Anderson, Commander of U.S. Africa Command, on U.S. Strategy and Security in Africa, Atlantic Council

• Nov. 16 — The Black Sea Blueprint for Taiwan: Lessons in Asymmetric Naval Warfare, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

• Nov. 17 — Special Threat Status Event: The Golden Age of Space, Threat Status

• Nov. 20-22 — Halifax International Security Forum in Nova Scotia, Canada, HFX