Welcome to Threat Status: Share it with your friends, who can sign up here. Send tips to National Security Editor Guy Taylor.
Cambodia says China’s military is giving it two warships as Beijing funds the expansion of a key naval base in the Southeast Asian nation, sparking fresh concern that Beijing is establishing a permanent military presence in the Gulf of Thailand.
… The Billington CyberSecurity Summit is well underway in Washington, where the NSA Cybersecurity Director Dave Luber told attendees on Tuesday that his agency’s codebreakers and codemakers are changing their approach in response to the Chinese hacker group Volt Typhoon’s tactics.
… Ukraine’s foreign minister just resigned as part of a larger Cabinet shakeup, as Russian airstrikes kill at least seven people in the city of Lviv, less than 50 miles from the Polish border.
… Iraqi women fear a rise in child marriages, while a new Human Rights Watch report implicates Venezuelan security forces and pro-government armed groups in recent post-election violence against regime opponents.
… Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi is on his first official visit to Turkey, and Serbia’s U.S.-sanctioned deputy prime minister just met with President Vladimir Putin in Russia.
… And Washington Times Asia Editor Andrew Salmon has an in-depth dispatch from the region examining the red-carpet treatment Mr. Putin got earlier this week in Mongolia.
The former deputy chief of staff to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul was arrested by the FBI this week and charged with working as an influence agent for the Chinese Communist Party, prosecutors disclosed in an unsealed indictment.
Linda Sun, the former aide, held several other positions in the administrations of Ms. Hochul and then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo, both Democrats, according to a federal indictment made public Tuesday by the office of the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York.
Ms. Sun, 41, and her husband, Chris Hu, 40, deny the allegations. They were arrested Tuesday at their $3.6 million Long Island home and charged in a 64-page indictment with 10 criminal counts, including acting as unregistered agents of the Chinese government and receiving “millions of dollars” through Chinese government-linked businesses. They also were charged with money laundering.
The indictment says the couple spent the millions of dollars they received from Beijing on luxuries such as the house in Manhasset, New York, a $1.9 million condominium in Honolulu and a 2024 Ferrari.
Historian and former diplomat Philip Zelikow recently warned in an exclusive “Threat Status Influencers” video interview that humanity is teetering dangerously close to global war amid conflicts raging in the Mideast, Europe and Africa, rising tensions in Asia, and a tightening anti-U.S. power alignment among authoritarian states China, Russia, Iran and North Korea.
Threat Status is now tracking how the Kremlin has added Mr. Zelikow, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, to its growing list of U.S. citizens who the Russian Foreign Ministry says are formally blocked from entering Russia on the grounds that they’re “involved in anti-Russian activities.”
Mr. Zelikow’s name appeared alongside 92 others added to the total list of more than 2,000 that the foreign ministry says has been compiled “in response to the Biden administration’s Russophobic policy.” The administration has led the enforcement of a global sanctions regime against the government of President Vladimir Putin in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Several prominent American academics, historians and journalists are on Russia’s list.
The “Threat Status Influencers” video interview with Mr. Zelikow is here.
After two ballistic missiles killed more than 50 people at a military academy and hospital in the eastern Ukrainian city of Poltava this week, the Defense Department said the Biden administration is not prepared to ease its policy restricting the use of American-provided weapons by Kyiv for deep strikes inside Russia.
For months, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has pleaded with American officials for permission to use U.S.-supplied weapons, such as the MGM-140 Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS), against military targets deep inside Russia. The White House has refused, citing the Biden administration’s intention not to escalate the fighting.
Pressed once again on the matter Tuesday, Pentagon spokesman Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said that despite recent events, “I don’t have any announcements to make in terms of a change in policy.”
U.S. Central Command says a senior ISIS leader who aided in the escape last week of terrorists from a detention facility in Syria has been captured, while the search for others who aided the prison break remains underway.
American forces and members of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) apprehended Khaled Ahmed al-Dandal on Sunday. Central Command called him a “facilitator” and said he was involved in the Aug. 29 escape of five ISIS fighters from the Raqqah prison in Syria. The SDF also captured two of the escapees: Imam Abdulwahed Akhwan of Russia and Muhammad Noh Muhammad of Libya.
“Over 9,000 ISIS detainees remain in over 20 SDF detention facilities in Syria, a literal and figurative ‘ISIS Army’ in detention,” CentCom Commander Army Gen. Michael E. Kurilla said in a statement. “If a large number of these ISIS fighters escaped, it would pose an extreme danger to the region and beyond.”
By embracing “appeasement rather than pressure, the Biden-Harris team has undermined American interests and strengthened the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism,” according to Jeff Bartos, a Republican strategist from Pennsylvania, who writes that “under former President Donald Trump, Iran was broke, its proxies were weaker and Israel was safer.”
“The Trump administration held Iran in check through a robust regime that crippled its economy and limited its ability to fund its regional ambitions,” argues Mr. Bartos. “This ‘maximum pressure’ campaign, which included strict enforcement of sanctions and the targeted elimination of key figures such as [Iranian General] Qasem Soleimani, sent a clear message that the U.S. would not tolerate Iran’s destabilizing activities.”
Foundation for Defense of Democracies President and Threat Status opinion contributor Clifford D. May writes that retired Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster’s new memoir, “At War With Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House,” is a “riveting read.”
Mr. May emphasizes that Gen. McMaster prefaces his memoir with a sobering note to readers. “Those who despise Donald Trump will want to read in these pages confirmation that he was a narcissist unfit for the highest office in the land,” Mr. McMaster writes in the memoir. “Those who revere him will want to read how Trump, the anti-hero, fought to save the United States from establishment politicians and bureaucrats who had for too long been derelict in their duty to the American people.”
• Sept. 10 — How to Counter China’s Global South Strategy in the Indo-Pacific, Hudson Institute
Thanks for reading Threat Status. Don’t forget to share it with your friends, who can sign up here. And listen to our weekly podcast available here or wherever you get your podcasts.
