The Pentagon announced this week that it would send another small detachment of U.S. forces to the Middle East as the clash between Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah rapidly widens. It is the kind of regional escalation that the Biden administration has desperately tried to prevent since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel.

Mr. Biden came to power aiming to do the improbable: Dramatically shrink America’s military footprint in the Middle East and redirect Washington’s focus away from a volatile corner of the world that has consumed U.S. foreign policy attention and resources for more than two decades.

National Security Correspondent Ben Wolfgang takes a deep look at how Mr. Biden will now spend his final few months in office presiding over yet another surge of troops to the theater, joining his two immediate predecessors — Barack Obama and Donald Trump — as commanders in chief who were drawn deeper into a region despite their hopes to move on.

As Israel and Hezbollah traded military strikes, Mr. Biden remained optimistic in his U.N. General Assembly speech on Tuesday, asserting that “even as the situation has escalated, a diplomatic solution is still possible.”

Beyond the mangled and charred remains of what used to be the border crossing between Russia and Ukraine lies Kursk, the Russian oblast now stunningly in the hands of a Ukrainian invasion force. Threat Status Special Correspondent Guillaume Ptak got a first-hand look inside Kursk, where he traveled recently on a press tour overseen by Ukrainian military forces.

He reports on how the trip itself demonstrated that while Ukrainian forces remain in a desperate war of attrition with Russian troops along a 600-mile front, Kyiv is simultaneously waging a two-front public relations campaign — trying to reassure the U.S. and its allies of Kyiv’s ability to carry on the fight while confronting Russia’s own population with the crimes committed in their name.

Prepared with the utmost secrecy, kept hidden even from allied nations, the bold Ukrainian operation into Kursk stunned local residents, the Kremlin and — most importantly — the poorly trained Russian conscripts and national guardsmen tasked with defending what was believed to be a backwater border region of little significance to the heavy fighting elsewhere on the front.

Rep. John Moolenaar, chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, and House Committee on Education and the Workforce Chairwoman Virginia Foxx spoke on a panel moderated by Threat Status at the International Spy Museum in Washington this week titled: “Back in Class: Foreign Funding and Malign Influence on U.S. Higher Education.” The event was hosted by The Alexander Hamilton Society.

Threat Status produced a video of the discussion, during which the two Republican lawmakers outlined the findings from their new joint report, “CCP on the Quad: How American Taxpayers and Universities Fund the Chinese Communist Party’s Advanced Military and Technological Research.” The report reveals new details on how U.S. university research aids the Chinese military.

“We’ve collaborated together on this report, which really looks at the STEM fields, … high-tech research investments, and specifically research that was funded by the Department of Defense,” said Mr. Moolenaar. “What we found was there were close to 9,000 joint technical papers presented with collaboration between Chinese and American university professors. … There was research in sophisticated technology areas — AI, advanced physics — all these applications that can be used for military purposes against American servicemen and women.”

Robert Hsing-Cheng Tsao writes that U.N. Resolution 2758 of 1971 and China’s 2005 anti-secession law are “twin evils, rooted in falsehoods and international misinterpretation, [that] continue to haunt Taiwan’s sovereignty and stability.”

“The global community must understand that Resolution 2758 is a product of Cold War political maneuvering and should not be seen as an endorsement of China’s claim over Taiwan,” writes Mr. Tsao, who asserts that Taiwan is being “unjustly suppressed.”

“China’s 2005 anti-secession law is another abomination,” he writes. “It formalizes [Beijing’s] intention to annex Taiwan in the name of unification with mainland China, including by the use of force if necessary. The law is based on the erroneous claim that Taiwan has been an inseparable part of China since ancient times, a notion that has no basis in fact.”

It’s become reflexive, writes Clifford D. May: “Whatever actions Israelis take to deter and perhaps defeat their enemies — who declare without equivocation that Jewish genocide is their aim — are denounced as unfair and illegal by U.N. officials, bogus human rights activists and other members of the chattering classes who do not wish Israelis well.”

Mr. May, a Threat Status opinion contributor, asserts that the Biden administration is wrongly giving “heavy-handed guidance to Israel: Don’t escalate against Hezbollah, Iran’s foreign legion in Lebanon. Make a deal with Hamas, Tehran’s proxy.”

• Sept. 26 — The Global Impact of the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election, Center for Strategic and International Studies

• Sept. 26 — Defense Innovation and the New Cold War, Hudson Institute

• Sept. 26 — China’s Comprehensive Threat to American Security: A Conversation with Amb. Robert C. O’Brien, American Enterprise Institute

• Sept. 26 — Axis of Aggressors: H.R. McMaster on Defending America’s Interests, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

• Sept. 30 — The Strategic Culture of the United Wa State Army in Myanmar, Stimson Center

• Oct. 5-8 — 2024 Threat Conference, The Cipher Brief