Threat Status for Wednesday, November 27, 2024. Share this daily newsletter with your friends, who can sign up here. Send tips to National Security Editor Guy Taylor.
President-elect Donald Trump’s signing of the memo of understanding on the transition with the Biden White House means back-channel communications should start flowing on critical national security matters such as China policy, the Ukraine war, Iran’s nuclear enrichment programs and the expanding Russia-North Korea alliance.
… Beijing is responding harshly to Mr. Trump’s threat to hike tariffs, saying “no one will win a trade war.” But Chinese officials are praising the U.S.-brokered Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire.
… Here’s a rundown of reactions to the ceasefire from key players, including Iran, whose foreign minister has guardedly accepted the deal.
… Japan and South Korea, indispensable U.S. allies in Northeast Asia, are having yet another squabble over how to remember their complicated World War II legacy.
… A Ukrainian delegation is in Seoul as South Korean leaders weigh whether to directly arm Kyiv in response to North Korea’s troops deployment to Russia.
… The Biden administration has secured the release of three Americans from detention in China in exchange for unnamed Chinese nationals held in U.S. prisons.
… And Sen. Rand Paul’s power is growing in the wake of the 2024 elections, and he wants to use it to bolster Mr. Trump on illegal immigration, block government involvement in Big Tech censorship and probe whether U.S. funds backed China’s role in the emergence of the virus that causes COVID-19.
The ceasefire between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah forces in Lebanon could be a major breakthrough that brings the wider Middle East back from the brink of all-out war, but questions remain over the extent to which the agreement reached this week will impact Israel’s ongoing military campaign against Hamas — and whether other Iranian regional allies, such as Yemen’s Houthis and Kataib Hezbollah in Iraq, will honor the deal.
Sources tell Threat Status that Lebanese Hezbollah’s relationship with Kataib Hezbollah is being closely tracked within the context of the ceasefire. A U.S. drone strike killed a key leader of the Iraq-based Shiite militia group in February. Kataib Hezbollah leaders have so far praised the ceasefire, but their statement was menacing and the group has carried out its own strikes against Israeli targets over the past year.
The ceasefire deal calls for a two-month initial halt in fighting and would require Hezbollah fighters to end their armed presence in a broad swath of southern Lebanon, while Israeli troops would return to their side of the border. Thousands of non-Hezbollah troops from the Lebanese military and U.N. peacekeepers would then deploy in the south, and an international panel headed by the United States would monitor all sides’ compliance.
Threat Status is tracking whether the deal can actually be implemented. Israel has demanded the right to resume fighting should Hezbollah violate its obligations. And the deal does not address Israel’s ongoing war against Hamas in Gaza. Also unclear is whether it will hold as Mr. Trump prepares to take office in January. The incoming administration’s national security adviser nominee, Florida Rep. Mike Waltz, praised the ceasefire on Tuesday, asserting that “everyone is coming to the table because of President Trump.”
The U.S. government needs to move quickly to establish a modern-day “Manhattan Project” to develop advanced artificial intelligence capabilities that surpass anything China has created. That’s a top recommendation of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission’s annual report released this month.
The congressionally-backed commission calls on lawmakers to extend “broad multiyear contracting authority to the executive branch” for American AI, cloud computing and data-center companies to compete for market dominance, and require that the secretary of defense make this a national priority.
The Manhattan Project was a top-secret program to develop the first atomic bombs during World War II, with much of the early research carried out at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The cutting-edge lab in East Tennessee has already created an AI security research center. Edmon Begoli, the center’s founding director, told Threat Status in April that he worries about the implications of a ruthlessly efficient AI system. National Security Tech Correspondent Ryan Lovelace is tracking the developments.
Mr. Paul, who will chair the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee beginning in January, says lawmakers on his panel will vote on the new Congress’ first day on measures to block migrants from seeking asylum if they enter the U.S. illegally, end the government’s involvement in Big Tech censorship and investigate the role of U.S. funding of virus research at a Wuhan, China, laboratory that may have played a role in sparking the COVID-19 global pandemic.
The Kentucky Republican tells Washington Times Political Correspondent Susan Ferrechio that he’ll work with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — Mr. Trump’s nominee to head the Department of Health and Human Services — to obtain hidden government records about the U.S. funding of the Wuhan lab, specifically on the deliberations involving “gain-of-function” research that may have led to the development of SARS-CoV-2.
“We now know through whistleblowers that [the funding data] actually is collected throughout government and that the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the White House has a copy of all this, and it’s all been withheld from us,” said Mr. Paul. “So I’m very hopeful Robert Kennedy will be confirmed at HHS. I know he also has a strong desire for the truth to come out on COVID.”
Threat Status is tracking Mr. Paul’s push, since whatever is ultimately found to be in the hidden records could impact the growing GOP effort to halt U.S. public and private funding of advanced technology research with Chinese scientists — research that critics say Beijing has been hijacking for weapons development programs.
The Europeans need “strong conservative leaders to step up and lead,” argues George Harizanov, CEO of the Institute of Right-Wing Policies in Sofia, Bulgaria.
“Return of common sense: Banning men from women’s sports; banning sex reassignment surgery for children; forcing schools and universities to get back to education and stay away from critical race theory, pro-Hamas movements, gender studies, LGBTQ propaganda and fake science political activism as part of the government’s domestic and international agenda. These are precisely the problems of Europe and the solutions that Europe needs,” writes Mr. Harizanov.
“Mr. Trump has won the political debate on all of these by a landslide,” he writes. “Every political leader in Europe except Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban should learn this lesson from the best in the business.”
Leaders in China and other trading partners are bracing for Mr. Trump’s threatened 60% tariff on Chinese imports and 10% or 20% across-the-board tariffs, writes national columnist Peter Morici, who calls on the president-elect to “consider how the world has changed since he first ran for president on a protectionist platform and the connections between trade and security.”
“Like it or not, Mr. Trump needs European military allies. The dealmaker may threaten them with 20% tariffs, but he’d be smart to use those to leverage the Europeans to prioritize building the integrated military capabilities they lack to more fully defend themselves with some American backstop,” writes Mr. Morici, an economist and emeritus business professor at the University of Maryland.
“China is making economic and strategic inroads in [emerging-market economies] with more technologically sophisticated products, sourcing raw materials and building ports, railways and other infrastructure,” he writes. “Broadly taxing U.S. trade with emerging markets, Japan and South Korea would only play into China’s Asian strategy, limit markets for U.S. technology products, … and reduce American influence with security partners in Asia.”
• 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. 3 — In Competition, Crisis, and Conflict: Building America’s Warfighting Navy with CNO Lisa Franchetti, Stimson Center
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