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NATO says North Korean troops have been deployed in Russia’s Kursk border region, where Russian forces have struggled to push back a Ukrainian incursion.
… Tehran is calling for a global “military coalition” against Israel, while satellite photos show the Israeli airstrikes over the weekend targeted Iran’s Parchin military base.
… Egypt is pushing for a two-day cease-fire between Israel and Hamas.
… Adm. Samuel Paparo, who heads the Pentagon’s Indo-Pacific Command, says in an exclusive interview that China is practicing for a military blockade of Taiwan.
… Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba is vowing to stay in office, despite no clear winner in the snap elections he called to boost his support.
… Georgia’s president is urging the West to support opposition protests amid allegations of Russian meddling in the Eastern European nation.
… Myanmar’s military has lost ground a year after a major rebel offensive.
… Former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte says he maintained a “death squad” of criminals to kill other criminals when he was mayor of a southern Philippine city.
… And India has opened its first private military aircraft plant after collaborating with Spain.
Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is calling for a global “military coalition” against Israel, while other top officials in Tehran vow to make Israel pay a price for its weekend airstrikes against key Iranian military sites.
National Security Correspondent Ben Wolfgang reports that the supreme leader’s strong rhetoric on Sunday reflected Iran’s strengthening alliances with China, Russia and North Korea, all leading U.S. adversaries, indicating Tehran’s hope that those autocratic allies could ultimately stand with the Islamic republic against Israel.
The “axis of authoritarians,” as some analysts call it, is bolstered by Iranian and North Korean military support for Russia’s war in Ukraine, as well as expanding China-Iran cooperation that Beijing describes as “strategic.” Iran’s supreme leader did not call on any specific country to take direct military action against Israel, but said “a global coalition must be formed, as well as a political coalition, an economic coalition and, if necessary, a military coalition, against the malicious Zionist regime.”
Satellite photos show the Israeli airstrikes targeted Iran’s Parchin military base, which has been suspected in the past of conducting tests of high explosives that could trigger a nuclear weapon. The Israeli bombing is also thought to have targeted the nearby Khojir military base, which some analysts suspect hides an underground tunnel system and missile production sites.
The admiral who heads the Pentagon’s Indo-Pacific Command tells The Washington Times in an exclusive interview that large-scale Chinese military exercises surrounding Taiwan this month were rehearsals for action against the self-ruled island, including preparation for a military blockade.
National Security Correspondent Bill Gertz sat down with Adm. Paparo last week at Indo-Pacom headquarters in Honolulu, where the admiral described the recent Chinese exercises — dubbed Joint Sword 2024B — as “a symbolic demonstration of combat power intended to a) coerce Taiwan, and b) to an extent execute a rapid rehearsal of [China’s] operations.”
“Judging by the nature of what we saw, it looked like it was more oriented towards a blockade scenario,” said Adm. Paparo, who added that deterring a Chinese attack is a top priority for the Honolulu-based command. The admiral said that while Chinese military encroachment near Taiwan’s outlying islands is “certainly a concern,” Beijing is unlikely to invade the islands for strategic reasons because they are so close to the mainland.
Threat Status Special Mideast Correspondent Seth Frantzman says Saudi Arabia is closely watching Israel’s campaign against Lebanon-based Hezbollah to see whether Israeli forces have the capability to deal a significant blow to Iran’s proxy power projection in the Middle East — something that could intersect with Riyadh’s own security interests vis-a-vis Tehran.
“In terms of the Gulf support, or tacit support for Israel expanding its war, I think Saudi Arabia, for many years, you know, was a guarantor in terms of Lebanon after the Lebanese Civil War, after 1989, when it ended, the Saudis had deep interests in Lebanon, but they’ve been very disappointed to see the degree to which Hezbollah has a stranglehold there,” he said during an appearance on the latest Threat Status Weekly Podcast that dropped Friday.
Mr. Frantzman, the senior Middle East Correspondent and analyst at The Jerusalem Post, and an adjunct fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, says the Saudis and perhaps other Gulf Arab powers “would be happy to see the weakening of Iran.” At the same time, however, he contends that countries in the region “are also hedging because the Saudis have reconciled with the Iranians with Chinese-backed or -brokered reconciliation, so they are basically hedging on the fact that maybe Israel won’t be able to reduce the Iranian control in the region.”
U.S. intelligence community leaders are rethinking how spy agencies can best harness the power of artificial intelligence, according to Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Mark R. Warner, who tells Threat Status that a central question revolves around whether a single large-language model — an AI program that can understand and generate human language — should be used across multiple spy agencies.
“We are using AI kind of behind the scenes in terms of increasing productivity. But there are real questions,” Mr. Warner, Virginia Democrat, said in an exclusive interview last week with the Threat Status Influencers video series. “Do we need a single large-language model for all of the information we collect? Because we collect so much communications from NSA, you know, spies from CIA may collect thumb drives, our satellites collect so many images.”
“How do you just process all that in an appropriate way? Initially, we thought there might be just one [model]. Then each agency thought they would develop their own, and now we’re maybe back to having a discussion about [just] one,” he said. “This is a tool that we need … because right now we have so much information coming in, we’re not even able to fully process it all in a timely fashion.”
Mr. Warner emphasized during the interview that the U.S. intelligence community faces a transitional challenge with the dramatically advancing technology. “National security is much more than who has the most tanks and guns and ships and planes. It’s, ‘Who’s going to win AI? Who’s going to win quantum computing?’” Mr. Warner said. “How do we align our intelligence community to go after that kind of spying?”
Much like the United States, Europe is at a political crossroads, writes Joe Grogan, who asks the following: “Will its nations continue down the destructive path of anti-growth taxation, open borders, environmental extremism and overregulation? Or will European leaders respond to their citizens and affirm the conservative agenda that voters recently mandated in the European Union parliamentary elections?”
“In the elections in early June — as the EU-U.S. Forum’s polling predicted — conservative parties trounced the left in response to policies that are failing: incentives for illegal immigration, anti-farmer initiatives, and controls on free speech,” writes Mr. Grogan, who was director of the Domestic Policy Council in the Trump administration. “It turns out that the agenda of the left is at odds with the views of the majority of the people.”
“Yet as the EU forms its new government,” Mr. Grogan writes, “the far left stubbornly refuses to bow to defeat, threatening the ruling coalition to keep conservative parties from being considered for a handful of significant positions.”
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