Iran Missile Strike Hits Kuwait Base, $60M in US Losses

The Iran war struck a US position directly on Saturday when an Iranian Fateh-110 ballistic missile hit Kuwait's Ali Al Salem Air Base. Kuwaiti air defenses intercepted it, but falling debris wounded about five US service members and contractors, destroyed one MQ-9 Reaper drone and badly damaged a second -- roughly $60 million in losses by Bloomberg's estimate -- and pushed past 1,850 the number of Iranian ballistic missiles fired since the war began on February 28. The strike landed a day after President Donald Trump's White House Situation Room talks broke up Friday without agreement on a framework to extend a ceasefire first reached on April 7; reporting described a deal under which Washington would lift its naval blockade of Iranian ports as Iran cleared mines and reopened the Strait of Hormuz. With the agreement in doubt, commanders were weighing retaliation.

The other pole of the day was in Singapore, where Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth used the Shangri-La Dialogue to demand that Asian allies raise defense spending to 3.5 percent of GDP, declaring that "the era of the United States subsidizing the defense of wealthy nations is over." He framed US aims as a "stable equilibrium" in which no state, China included, could impose hegemony, and said Washington was "more than capable" of resuming the war with Iran if needed. On the margins he vowed to keep arming Ukraine -- pointing to $56 billion earmarked for drone dominance in the 2027 budget -- and joined his British and Australian counterparts to launch a first AUKUS Pillar Two project on uncrewed undersea vehicles to protect subsea cables and pipelines, with initial capability targeted for 2027.

The hard security line ran alongside a thaw in trade. The administration proposed a new "board of trade" -- an idea floated by US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer in March and agreed in principle at Trump's summit with Xi Jinping this month -- to manage commerce in "non-sensitive" goods covering $30 billion or more of exports each way, with business groups lobbying over which products win tariff relief; Hegseth separately called US-China ties "better than in years." In technology, Nvidia is expected next week to unveil the first Windows PCs built around its own chips, in partnership with Microsoft and shown at Computex in Taiwan and the Build conference in San Francisco, with machines coming from the Surface line and Dell.

At home, the Supreme Court sided 5-4 with a Black death-row inmate in Mississippi who challenged the racial exclusion of jurors, while the Justice Department opened a criminal investigation tied to writer E. Jean Carroll's litigation against Trump, focused on a trust founded by donor Reid Hoffman. On the Atlantic alliance, NATO Military Committee chair Admiral Giuseppe Cavo Dragone said European members were on course toward the 5 percent of GDP target Washington has pressed for and cautioned against overreacting to Russian drone incursions into NATO airspace.

A United Airlines flight from Chicago to Minneapolis diverted to Madison, Wisconsin, after a passenger tried to breach the cockpit; the traveler was detained and the FBI opened an inquiry. And an Axios analysis of Census Bureau estimates found that more than 600 US cities of 20,000 or more lost residents between April 2020 and July 2025, with the steepest declines in majority-Black towns of the Deep South, working-class Mexican American and Native American cities in the Southwest, and legacy industrial centers in the Midwest.