NATO faces a crucial test of its credibility and future viability this week as leaders meet in Turkey, with new European defense spending targets under unprecedented scrutiny from the White House.

This week’s summit, beginning Tuesday, will examine whether Europe can turn bigger budgets into military power fast enough to keep President Donald Trump engaged, while preparing for a future in which Washington plays a smaller role in the continent’s security.

Last year’s summit at The Hague was seen as a breakthrough after allies committed to spending 5% of GDP on defense by 2035, including 3.5% on core defense requirements and 1.5% on broader security needs.

(Continue Reading - CNBC)

The Iran war exposed a long-simmering feud within the world’s most powerful oil cartel, boiling over this spring when it contended with the biggest oil supply shock in history.

Now OPEC, the largest consortium of oil-producing nations, faces a fight for its existence.

The Strait of Hormuz has started to reopen, and some OPEC nations are clamoring to ramp up oil production to make up for lost time and sales. That’s reigniting age-old feuds about production quotas that already led the United Arab Emirates, one of OPEC’s most significant members, to leave the group in April.

(Continue Reading - CNN)

A year ago, the message from many business leaders was that AI was going to wipe out jobs. For the past month or so, tech CEOs have been striking a more optimistic tone.

In late May, OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman—who has long predicted that AI will lead to seismic shifts in the workforce—said during a conference, “We’ve been roughly right on technological predictions and pretty wrong on the social and economic implications.”

Soon after, he told CNBC, “Our industry underestimated how much we’re going to be able to keep people at the center of everything.”

(Continue Reading - WSJ)