Threat Status for Friday, November 22, 2024. Share this daily newsletter with your friends, who can sign up here. Send tips to National Security Editor Guy Taylor.
Is the Biden administration stoking war with Russia as a part of a political strategy to sabotage President-elect Donald Trump’s plan to end the violence in Ukraine?
… A North Korean military general has been wounded in Russia’s Kursk oblast as the Ukraine war escalates, with Russian President Vladimir Putin threatening to directly strike NATO countries backing Kyiv.
… U.S. Indo-Pacific Command chief Adm. Sam Paparo says the supply of advanced U.S. air defense and air-to-air missiles to Ukraine is depleting stockpiles needed for deterring China.
… Taiwan’s president will visit allies in the South Pacific as rival China seeks inroads.
… Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has invited Benjamin Netanyahu to visit Europe, vowing to support him a day after the Israeli prime minister and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant were hit with International Criminal Court arrest warrants.
… A new white paper by MITRE, the nonprofit tech research and development organization, says the U.S. has a chance to maintain an intelligence edge in Africa amid great power challenges.
… U.S. authorities arrested and charged a prolific drug trafficker and son-in-law of a Mexican cartel leader, years after the suspect faked his own death.
… And the GAO says roughly 80% of the more than 3,600 on-duty, non-combat accidents involving U.S. Special Forces personnel between 2012 and 2022 occurred during training, with parachute and dive training accounting for about 40% of those incidents.
U.S. officials say the Kremlin alerted them through established arms control channels before launching an experimental longer-range ballistic missile into the Ukrainian city of Dnipro on Thursday. Mr. Putin described the launch as a direct response to the U.S. and British moves to bolster Kyiv’s ability to bomb targets deeper inside Russia.
Mr. Putin made clear that the introduction of the experimental Oreshnik missile was meant as a warning to Ukraine and its Western supporters. He said his forces had fired not an ICBM but a model of a Russian-made “intermediate-range ballistic missile,” or IRBM. He suggested the conflict has now escalated to a degree that Moscow is contemplating direct strikes against NATO countries supporting Kyiv — sparking renewed and elevated concern in European capitals, as well as in Washington, over the prospect of spiraling regional war.
“We believe that we have the right to use our weapons against military facilities of the countries that allow the use of their weapons against our facilities,” Mr. Putin said in a national address after the IRBM attack on Dnipro. “And in case of escalation of aggressive actions, we will respond resolutely in a mirror way.”
Concerns are rising over security blowback in Northeast Asia that’s likely to result from North Korea’s growing military involvement in the Ukraine war. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un this week demanded the mass production of suicide drones, which have been used to terrifying effect in the Ukraine conflict.
Some are drawing comparisons between Mr. Kim’s drone-production ambitions and the Pentagon’s growing Replicator program, which aims to field thousands of all-domain autonomous systems by August 2025. Washington Times Asia Editor Andrew Salmon reports from Seoul that technical innovations occurring in the war in the heart of Europe will soon be felt on the divided Korean Peninsula, where the U.S. and South Korea may confront what could be an even more formidable enemy in Pyongyang.
Unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, complement North Korea’s asymmetrical approach to conflict and offer the Kim regime a cheap, low-tech weapon to counter the high-tech militaries of far wealthier countries such as South Korea and the U.S. Mr. Kim is betting that the combination of fighting skills gained in Russia and the new arms will elevate the North Korean army, which has not fought a major war since 1953.
Understanding Beijing’s use of duplicity in statecraft is critical for successful American policies, according to Miles Yu, a former State Department policymaker and expert on the Chinese military.
National Security Correspondent Bill Gertz examines a report penned by Mr. Yu this week for the Hoover Institution’s Military History in Contemporary Conflict Working Group. The report contends that Henry Kissinger understood Chinese deception well, once saying that leader Mao Zedong showed “an almost instinctive ability to misdirect his opponent, creating illusions of weakness where the strength lay and vice versa.”
For China, strategic deception is shaped by concepts of realpolitik dating back to the Warring States era, between 475 B.C. and 221 B.C., and combined with revised Marxist dialectical thinking. Realpolitik influence uses pragmatism, deception and unprincipled flexibility, while Marxist dialectical thinking is used to understand and manipulate contradictions to drive progress.
“Together,” writes Mr. Yu, “these two perspectives offer the [Chinese Communist Party] a toolkit of strategies for managing complex and conflicting interests both domestically and internationally, enabling a highly adaptive and multilayered approach to governance that frequently is duplicitous.”
Simply reimposing the successful policies of his first term, however much they might improve on the Biden-Harris record, will not be enough to correct the course in the Mideast, where the aftershocks of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel continue to reverberate, writes Victoria Coates.
“Reestablishing deterrence against Iran, bolstering Israel’s defenses and getting back on track to even more significant regional peace deals will require a fresh approach,” writes Ms. Coates, who served as a key Mideast adviser during Mr. Trump’s first term and is now with The Heritage Foundation.
“The imperative should be to establish, in consultation with Israel and other regional allies, the necessary steps to deter Iran without igniting a regional war,” she writes. “This great challenge, however, also presents a great opportunity. Why? Because to prevent a nuclear Iran, Mr. Trump will need to execute something unimaginable in 2017: a peace deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia.”
At first glance, it “might seem absurd” to view Mr. Trump as a crusader for women’s rights, particularly in tumultuous Afghanistan, according to Dalia al-Aqidi, who argues that “beneath the surface” the incoming president’s “diplomacy is pragmatic and guided by hard realities — qualities that the Taliban respect.”
“To glimpse Mr. Trump’s potential strategy for the Taliban, we can look at his approach to Saudi Arabia,” writes Ms. al-Aqidi, an Iraqi-born journalist, activist and Republican politician.
“Backing the kingdom’s Vision 2030 plan, Mr. Trump supported groundbreaking reforms for such a conservative nation. These included lifting the ban on women driving, combating workplace harassment and raising women’s workforce participation target from 22% to 30%,” she writes. “These are steppingstones to a broader economic and social transformation. This strategy could provide a blueprint for Afghanistan, where women are key to economic revival.”
• Dec. 2 — The Troublemaker: How Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire, Hong Kong’s Greatest Dissident, and China’s Most Feared Critic, American Enterprise Institute
• Dec. 4 — El Salvador’s economic evolution: investment insights and opportunities, Atlantic Council
• Dec. 4 — Alaska’s Strategic Importance for the Indo-Pacific, Hudson Institute
• Dec. 5 — China’s Role in Indonesia’s Clean Energy Transition, Wilson Center
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