Nasrallah, the longtime leader of the terrorist group Hezbollah, is the most powerful figure killed by Israel in its war against Hamas, Hezbollah and other branches of Iran’s so-called axis of resistance. He is also the most prominent regional player to have been successfully targeted since Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani was killed in January 2020 by a U.S. drone strike in Baghdad.

For the U.S., the death of Nasrallah further fuels fears that escalation in the Middle East is inevitable or has arrived. President Biden in a statement Saturday cast the Israeli strike that killed Nasrallah as a just act, but he once again pleaded for all sides to avoid further conflict and embrace cease-fire proposals.

Israel said it targeted other top Hezbollah commanders on Sunday, just two days after the Nasrallah strike in Beirut. Hezbollah’s acting leader Naim Kassem vowed on Monday to continue battling Israel and said the militant group was prepared for a long fight. Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, meanwhile, has reportedly been moved to a secure location amid fears of Israeli strikes inside Iran.

Former Israeli intelligence official Avi Melamed says in an exclusive interview on the latest Threat Status podcast that Israel’s ability to make hundreds of Hezbollah pager devices explode earlier this month likely involved long-term intelligence partnerships and coordination on both the international and the regional levels.

“There are agencies … in the region that have a lot of capacities and accessibility tools — inside informers and information,” says Mr. Melamed. “This is something that has been built up for years. … It involves a lot of capacities, technologically [and] human resources.”

“What I think is really interesting to think about from an intelligence perspective is that what we are looking at is a very carefully, thoroughly, meticulously tailored chess game that has been done in a long-term process,” he says, adding that from an operational perspective, those involved needed to have the ability to “play five moves ahead.”

North Korea’s regime is trying to reassert control over its economy, but it is finding that the genie of market mechanisms cannot easily be shoved back into its bottle. Mr. Salmon goes inside the situation with a dispatch from Seoul, examining how Kim Jong-un’s failed personal summitry with President Trump led to a renewed focus on the regime’s nuclear programs, all while the COVID-19 pandemic devastated North Korea’s already anemic economy.

Ordinary North Koreans — disappointed by the failure of Mr. Kim’s U.S. overtures — suffered during the pandemic from sharp cutbacks in cross-border trade with China, long the country’s leading trade partner. A new factor has entered play over the past year, however, with two summits between Mr. Kim and Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2023 and 2024.

Moscow has extended a lifeline to Pyongyang without demanding market concessions that undercut the regime’s control of the economy. Even so, North Koreans’ poverty in the heart of prosperous, high-tech Northeast Asia is impossible to ignore, which may explain Mr. Kim’s break with Pyongyang precedents by showcasing his daughter to the North Korean public. The message: The pocketbook deprivations North Koreans are suffering in service of nuclear arms guarantee their next generation’s future.

American forces in recent days carried out major airstrikes in Syria, killing key terrorist figures and dozens of fighters linked to the Islamic State and al Qaeda, according to the Pentagon.

U.S. Central Command said in a statement over the weekend that a Sept. 16 strike targeted an Islamic State training camp in central Syria, killing at least 28 ISIS fighters, including four senior leaders.

U.S. forces then targeted the terror group Hurras al-Din, an al Qaeda affiliate, in northwest Syria on Sept. 24. That strike killed at least nine fighters, including key leader Marwan Bassam ’Abd-al-Ra’uf, who oversees the group’s operations in Syria, according to CENTCOM.

The announcement of the U.S. strikes came after the Biden administration said it will make major changes to the American anti-ISIS campaign, which began a decade ago. The Pentagon said last week that its currently authorized mission in Iraq will wind down over the next year and transition from an international coalition to a bilateral defense partnership between Washington and Baghdad.

Although his rhetoric can be overly provocative, Mr. Trump is correct in his criticism of disproportionate U.S. investment in NATO, writes retired Marine Corps Brig. Gen. Norm Cooling, who served in several U.S. European Command and NATO assignments in his 33 years of service.

“The United States can’t afford to prop up the alliance at historic spending levels,” writes Mr. Cooling. “Non-binding investment pledges are insufficient compensation for NATO’s Article 5 assurance that an attack on one constitutes an attack against all.”

“Our next president,” he adds, “would be wise to continue to press our allies to increase their investment and to do so in defense capabilities that are of value to the collective.”

• Sept. 30 — Conflict and Displacement in Sudan: The Urgent Need to Reduce Barriers to Humanitarian Response, Center for Strategic and International Studies

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

• Oct. 1 — Accelerating U.S. Nuclear Leadership, Center for Strategic and International Studies

• Oct. 4 — Targeting Taiwan: Beijing’s Playbook for Economic and Cyber Warfare, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

• Oct. 4 — The United States and China in Latin America: Rivalry, Cooperation, or Something In-between? Florida International University and Brookings Institution

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