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North Korea appears poised to conduct nuclear and intercontinental ballistic missile tests around the U.S. election, South Korean sources say.
… Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin is meeting his South Korean counterpart at the Pentagon to discuss advancing “deterrence cooperation.”
… The meeting comes as a South Korean delegation prepares to brief NATO on North Korea’s deployment of troops to aid Russia’s war in Ukraine.
… Germany has ordered two of its warships to go around Africa this week because of the ongoing threat of missile attacks in the Red Sea from Iran-backed Houthi militants.
… Russia launched a major exercise of its nuclear forces on Tuesday, featuring missile launches simulating a retaliatory strike.
… Mykola Bielieskov, a research fellow at Ukraine’s National Institute for Strategic Studies, warns there are “growing indications that Russia may now be creating the conditions for victory.”
… Sweden, the newest member of NATO, is sending more than $10 million in humanitarian aid to Ukraine to help Kyiv meet its needs ahead of winter.
… In a memo ahead of Jack Teixeira’s sentencing next month, the Massachusetts Air National Guardsman’s lawyers say he deserves no more than 11 years in prison for posting classified information online.
… And while commercial soap dispensers can be found on Amazon for as little as $10, the Air Force paid more than 80 times that for dispensers on C-17 Globemasters, according to a Pentagon audit that underscores Boeing’s role in the purchases.
The Pentagon is condemning a pair of bills passed this week by Israel’s parliament that would effectively bar the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, the U.N.’s primary Palestinian relief agency, from operating inside the country. Biden administration officials say the legislation, passed Monday in the Knesset, could trigger an even greater crisis inside the Gaza Strip.
Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder, a Pentagon spokesman, told reporters on Tuesday that U.S. military officials were “deeply troubled” by the new laws, which will come into effect in 90 days. He said guaranteeing humanitarian assistance to Palestinians in Gaza remains a priority for Mr. Austin. Earlier this month, the Biden administration gave Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government 30 days to improve the unfolding humanitarian crisis in Gaza or face an arms embargo.
Israeli officials have accused UNRWA of having a number of Hamas terrorists on its payroll, including some who took part in the Oct. 7, 2023, rampage into southern Israel that killed some 1,200 people — mostly civilians — and resulted in hundreds of others being taken hostage.
China poses the major security threat to the United States and the danger is compounded by Beijing’s growing links with Russia, North Korea and Iran, according to Adm. Sam Paparo, head of the Pentagon’s Indo-Pacific Command.
The admiral assessed during a speech last week in Honolulu that Israel’s war against Hamas following the Oct. 7, 2023, terror attack in Gaza has evolved into “multi-party proxy war” with that includes Hezbollah and the Houthis, all while North Korea continues large-scale ballistic missile testing, enhances its nuclear arms development, and forges close military, economic and diplomatic links with Russia. China, meanwhile, is engaged in the world’s largest military expansion since World War II and is pushing a coercive pressure campaign against Taiwan.
None of the threats are contained to “a stovepipe” — disconnected from other geopolitical crises, Adm. Paparo said. “They’re increasingly linked, and our would-be adversaries in cases have formed transactional and symbiotic, ’no-limits’ relationships.” China, Russia, Iran and North Korea are “collaborating and cooperating together to oppose the United States, our allies and our partners, like-minded democracies, every single day,” he said, asserting that “the security environment that we’re living in right now is incredibly challenging, but you should be confident that we’re going to prevail.”
Threat Status Special Correspondent Guillaume Ptak goes inside the world of Proliska, a Ukrainian volunteer organization that has been engaged in the gritty and dangerous work of providing humanitarian aid to war-torn civilian areas of Ukraine since Russian forces first pushed into the country’s Donbas region back in 2014.
Proliska’s volunteers, many of them natives of Donbas, have provided front-line communities in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions with humanitarian, social and psychological aid, and have considerably scaled up their operations since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.
It’s a part of the war that doesn’t make the headlines, and it offers a small window into the widening strain Ukrainians face fighting off a larger, better-armed opponent in a conflict that shows no signs of ending soon, Mr. Ptak writes in a dispatch from Hryshyne, Ukraine. With the Russian onslaught in the Donetsk region escalating in recent months, he writes, volunteers and local authorities are now concentrating on one objective: getting as many civilians as possible out of harm’s way.
North Korea’s enhanced allied relationship with Russia and leader Kim Jong-un’s decision to send troops to aid Russia in its war of aggression in Ukraine could be the prelude to war on the Korean Peninsula, according to Joseph R. DeTrani, a former senior U.S. intelligence official and regular opinion contributor to Threat Status.
“When North Korea was closely allied with the Soviet Union from 1950 to 1991, the regime in Pyongyang was reckless,” Mr. DeTrani writes. “When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and North Korea could no longer rely on Moscow, they changed tack and behaved responsibly. Now, North Korea is allied with Russia and will likely revert to provoking South Korea and inciting war on the Korean Peninsula.”
He adds that “the only country that could persuade Kim Jong-un to stop this escalation is China,” asserting that it is “in China’s interest to convince Mr. Kim that war on the Korean Peninsula must be prevented.”
China, Russia, Iran and North Korea are “increasingly cooperating with one another to undermine the United States and its interests,” writes Bradley Bowman. “Despite our large economy and powerful military, the U.S. lacks sufficient resources to confront this growing axis of aggressors alone.”
“Fortunately, the United States has an unparalleled network of allies with whom we can work to defend common interests and counter common adversaries. In the Middle East, America’s most reliable, capable and motivated ally is Israel,” writes Mr. Bowman, senior director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
“Iran and its terror proxies who hate the United States as much as they do Israel are attacking the Jewish state on seven fronts — yet our ally Israel is fighting and winning,” he writes. “As the United States confronts difficult days ahead, that’s just the kind of friend we are going to need.”
• Oct. 30 — Elections 2024: Congressman Mike Turner on Geopolitics and the Next U.S. President, Atlantic Council
• Oct. 30 — Assessing Global Arms Trade Transparency, Stimson Center
• Oct. 31 — The War on America’s 2024 Elections: How U.S. Adversaries Seek to Divide Americans and Undermine Trust, Foundation for Defense of Democracies
• Nov. 1 — Countering Authoritarian Regimes’ New Tactics in Latin America, Hudson Institute
• Nov. 7 — First in War, First in Peace: Building Post-Conflict Stability and Democracy, U.S. Institute of Peace
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