The Democratic Republic of Congo is struggling to contain the fastest-growing Ebola outbreak it’s ever seen, with more than 3,400 cases and over 1,700 deaths reported since May 15. With the Trump administration pulling back on U.S. aid to Africa, China has seized the opportunity to step up efforts to win the hearts and minds on the continent.

Threat Status Special Correspondent Joseph Hammond examines the situation, writing that the Chinese Communist Party is deploying medical aid and diplomats in a show of strength, with Beijing’s foreign policy often tying humanitarian assistance to longer-term goals, including protecting Chinese access to critical minerals.

Beijing already dominates much of the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s mining industry, but Washington has sought to challenge Beijing’s primacy. The Trump administration has created its own Ebola task force involving the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the State Department and the Department of Defense. The administration hopes renewed engagement will create opportunities for American companies to gain access to Congo’s copper, cobalt and other strategic minerals.

Longtime Latin America expert Michael Shifter joined the Threat Status Influencers series for an exclusive video interview examining the political nuances of the region that the U.S. national security community should consider when weighing how countries across the Western Hemisphere are likely to respond to Mr. Trump’s “Donroe Doctrine.”

Mr. Shifter, of the Inter-American Dialogue, shared his insights on the emergence of conservative and populist political leaders in Central and South American countries, and the extent to which the Trump administration is — or is not — in a position to capitalize on pro-U.S. and pro-free market sentiment at a moment when China and Russia are increasingly active in the region, with Russia, particularly, pushing anti-U.S. propaganda in Latin America.

“It’s undeniable that there is a more politically aligned region for President Trump and his policies than there has been before,” he says, though he argues that “much of this is luck, because in a lot of these countries, there were leftist presidents that came before. It’s hard to point to many examples where Trump himself has really been instrumental in this turn.”

Qatari officials said Tuesday that they are actively mediating new negotiations between U.S. and Iranian delegations — with draft proposals relating to the future of the Strait of Hormuz being exchanged between the two sides — and that mediators from Oman and Pakistan are also involved in the talks.

The assertions from the Qatari Foreign Ministry came as a projectile near the coast of Oman struck an unidentified cargo vessel in the strait, a day after Mr. Trump said the new negotiations with Iran will be Tehran’s “last chance” for a deal and blamed the Iranian regime for engaging in “duplicitous” disavowals of his earlier assertions that a peace agreement could be imminent.

The core of the current dispute rests on the administration’s demand that Tehran cede control of the strategic waterway. Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmail Baghaei told reporters on Monday that the only diplomatic conversations Iran is engaged in are with Oman over creating an “understanding on a route that would ensure the safe passage of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.”

The “most important security development in East Asia this year” involved “two white-hulled coast guard vessels,” according to Miles Yu, who notes in his Red Horizon column for The Washington Times how American officials for the first time publicly acknowledged that the U.S. and Taiwan coast guards had “conducted joint patrols in the Taiwan Strait.

“It was the first visible step toward restoring the maritime presence that kept peace in the Taiwan Strait for nearly two decades, and whose disappearance has allowed Beijing to wage its campaign of maritime coercion ever since,” writes Mr. Yu, who heads the Hudson Institute’s China Center and contributes regularly to Threat Status.

“Peace in the Taiwan Strait cannot rest on communiques or diplomatic formulas alone. It depends on ships at sea, operating routinely, visibly and lawfully,” he writes. “America did not preserve stability in Asia by withdrawing from contested waters. It preserved stability by remaining there.”

Failure to reopen the Strait of Hormuz will “reverberate far beyond the Middle East, emboldening America’s adversaries worldwide,” retired U.S. Air Force Gen. Charles Wald writes in an op-ed for The Times.

“The U.S. military can restore freedom of navigation through the critical waterway,” Gen. Wald writes. “But it will require determination and patience to implement and stick with a three-pronged campaign: opening a protected corridor through the strait so commerce can move now; cutting off Iran’s overland supply routes; and signaling a willingness to reescalate if Iran resumes targeting ships.

“Hormuz is too important to global commerce to remain closed. Roughly a quarter of the world’s oil trade and a fifth of global liquefied natural gas trade normally transit the waterway,” he writes. “More than 30% of the world’s traded urea and roughly 20% of the world’s fertilizers also transit through Hormuz. Disruption of these commodities threatens much of the world’s food supply.”

• Aug. 4 — Taiwan’s Ever-Changing Security Environment, Hudson Institute

• Aug. 4-5 — 2026 Air Force & Space Force Procurement Conference, American Defense Alliance

• Aug. 5-6 — Border Security & Intelligence Summit, Defense Strategies Institute

• Aug. 6 — Sudan’s War: Humanitarian Cost, Prospects for Peace and Potential Ways Forward, Arab Center Washington D.C.

• Aug. 9-12 — DoDIIS Worldwide Conference 2026, Defense Intelligence Agency

• Aug. 11-13 — Space & Missile Defense Symposium, Huntsville, Alabama

• Aug. 25-26 — Counter UAS Summit, Institute for Defense and Government Advancement