Threat Status for Friday, January 3, 2025. Share this daily newsletter with your friends, who can sign up here. Send tips to National Security Editor Guy Taylor.
It is confounding that the New Orleans massacre and the Tesla Cybertruck explosion outside Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas occurred within hours of each other. But investigators now believe the two incidents are not linked — even though both men involved served in the U.S. Army, spent time at Fort Liberty (formerly Fort Bragg) and served in Afghanistan in 2009.
… Yes, the parallels are suggestive. But before jumping to conclusions, consider that many tens of thousands of other veterans also served in those places, and investigators so far say there is no evidence these two men were at Fort Bragg at the same time. Nor is there evidence they were ever in the same unit.
… High-level intelligence sources have cautioned Threat Status to keep an open mind about the fast-paced fluidity of the investigations. It is worth noting that the House Homeland Security Committee warned outright in October of a “blinking red” terrorist threat inside the U.S., with more than 50 “jihadist” cases in 29 states between 2021 and 2024.
… A former CIA officer who says she was attacked by some type of foreign energy weapon is charging the CIA with covering it up.
… President Biden is formally blocking the sale of U.S. Steel to Japan’s Nippon Steel on the grounds that production is critical for infrastructure and defense and should remain in American hands.
… Washington Times Asia Editor Andrew Salmon goes inside the political chaos in Seoul, where investigators attempted but failed on Friday to arrest impeached South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol.
… And Democratic-led sanctuary cities that refused to help with immigrant deportations during President Trump’s first term are now pondering more active resistance.
Federal law enforcement and U.S. intelligence officials are still combing through material found on three cellphones and two laptop computers linked to the Army veteran turned terrorist who carried out the New Orleans massacre, trying to determine whether he had tangible connections to the Islamic State or was radicalized by online propaganda from the international terrorist group, also known as ISIS.
The FBI said Thursday it now believes that Shamsud-Din Bahar, 42, acted alone on New Year’s Day in planting improvised explosive devices in the city’s French Quarter and plowing a rented pickup truck into pedestrians along Bourbon Street. But a top counterterrorism official at the bureau also said Jabbar was “100% inspired by ISIS.”
Nathan Sales, who was State Department special envoy to the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS in the first Trump administration, tells Threat Status that digital forensics will help answer questions about “other participants in the plot, as well as any possible ties to ISIS HQ.”
“Was this guy inspired by ISIS, or was he directed by ISIS, or maybe something in-between?” says Mr. Sales. “Who was he sending money to, receiving money from? Who was he in communication with, if anyone? What kind of online content was he accessing? Was he looking at recorded sermons from radical preachers? Was he looking at bomb-making instructions?”
The United States at the present moment “can’t comprehensively defend itself against a conventional cruise or ballistic missile attack,” according to retired Navy Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery, who tells the Threat Status weekly podcast in an exclusive interview that “this means we can’t detect them, we can’t track them, and we can’t engage them in the vast majority of the country.”
“There’s some limited cruise missile defense capability around the Washington National Capital Region, and there’s some limited tracking capabilities,” says Mr. Montgomery. “It’s really oriented only towards ballistic missiles that tend to be focused on radars that are on our West Coast and in Alaska and Hawaii.”
He dives deeper into the issue on the podcast, which dropped this morning on Spotify and other platforms, acknowledging that he’s “been going slightly bonkers recently about hypersonic missile defense, where, God love us, we’re catching up on hypersonic offense — spending four or five billion a year, which is what we need to do to catch up with Russia and China, because we took a 10- or 15-year holiday on that.”
“But on hypersonic missile defense, we’re spending a solid $200 million a year, in other words, five cents on the dollar of offense,” Mr. Montgomery says. “… Five cents on the dollar of offense will not get you much defense, and it hasn’t.”
BRICS, the informal group of nations including Russia, China and India that was formed to challenge Western primacy in the global economy and financial system, is muscling up in 2025, adding nine nations, including three major Southeast Asian economies, as partners.
On Jan. 1, 2025, BRICS admitted Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia — all democracies — as partners, respectively, the first-, second- and fifth-largest economies in Southeast Asia. The other newly added BRICS partner nations are Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, Kazakhstan, Uganda and Uzbekistan.
The growing size of the group and its partners adds to the challenge BRICS presents to Mr. Trump, the U.S. president-elect, who has threatened massive sanctions against the alliance if it seeks to undermine the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency. Formed more than a decade ago, the BRICS group, whose founding members also include Brazil and South Africa, last year went into expansion mode, offering more rising developing nations a place in the non-Western bloc. In 2024, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates joined as BRICS members.
The status of two other potential BRICS partners — Saudi Arabia and Vietnam — is unclear. And Argentina, under conservative President Javier Milei, has halted its application to join the group.
Chinese President Xi Jinping said in a New Year’s Eve speech that China and Taiwan are “one family” and once again vowed one day to take control of the self-ruled island democracy, which is supported by the United States.
“We Chinese on both sides of the Taiwan Strait belong to one and the same family,” Mr. Xi said, according to a transcript provided by the Foreign Ministry. “No one can ever sever the bond of kinship between us, and no one can ever stop China’s reunification, a trend of the times.”
Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te said in October that Taipei will “uphold the commitment to resist annexation or encroachment upon our sovereignty.” Mr. Lai also called for maintaining the fragile status quo that has maintained the peace across the 100-mile-wide Taiwan Strait, in the face of increasing Chinese military provocations that have gone far beyond previous intimidation exercises.
Mr. Xi made a veiled reference to global instability as a result of wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, citing in his New Year’s remarks “a world of both transformation and turbulence.” China is continuing to promote its communist system in what Mr. Xi called the Global South through its infrastructure-financing Belt and Road Initiative and other outreach activities in Africa, Central Asia and the Asia Pacific region.
The incoming Trump administration has an opportunity to overhaul the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), one of the most important tools of American smart power, according to Richard Crespin and Avnish Gungadurdoss. They argue in an op-ed that the agency has for decades “been hamstrung by a procurement model that prioritizes paperwork over results, leaving America less effective and competitive in global development in the face of increasing competition, especially with China and Russia.”
“Fixing this broken system would not only enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of America’s more than $44 billion in foreign aid but also bolster the incoming Trump administration’s promise to put America first,” write Mr. Crespin and Mr. Gungadurdoss.
“USAID’s reliance on cost-plus-fixed-fee, or CPFF, contracts — which reimburse implementers for costs regardless of whether they meet project goals — has turned foreign aid into an unnecessarily burdensome bureaucratic exercise,” they write. “This model provides incentive for compliance over creativity, hinders partnerships with local actors, and wastes taxpayer money on programs with little measurable impact.”
• Jan. 7 — Report launch and panel: NATO and U.S.-Turkey defense cooperation in a new era, Atlantic Council
• Jan. 7 — The Hidden Costs: Transparency and the U.S. Arms Trade, Stimson Center
• Jan. 8 — Russia’s Difficult Road to Freedom: A Conversation with Vladimir Kara-Murza, American Enterprise Institute
• Jan. 9 — What do people in Taiwan and the United States think about Taiwan’s security situation? Brookings Institution
Thanks for reading Threat Status. Don’t forget to share it with your friends, who can sign up here. And listen to our weekly podcast available here or wherever you get your podcasts.
