Does the president intend to order the Pentagon to deploy U.S. special operations forces on counterterrorism missions inside Latin American nations to target drug and human smuggling cartels that his administration has declared are foreign terrorist organizations? We go inside that question on the latest episode of the Threat Status weekly podcast.

Award-winning Washington Times journalist and long-time immigration expert Stephen Dinan says on the podcast that such special forces missions, as well as other possible U.S. troop deployments in the illegal immigration crackdown, are “being heatedly debated” among Mr. Trump’s inner national security circle.

“Trump clearly wants the U.S. military involved in border security, right? He’s already asked the Coast Guard to do more in that area,” says Mr. Dinan. “Fifteen hundred troops in an initial deployment are already moving, and he has talked about … using special forces. So he’s very interested in that. I’m sure there’s a debate about exactly how far they are able to go and sort of what the rules of engagement [are] and [what] space for engagement is possible there.”

The Pentagon’s Defense Science Board recently completed a study on how strategic nuclear forces will be used to blast deeply buried and hardened underground targets. No details of the study were made public in an executive summary about the research on the board’s website — a sign that plans for such strikes are secret.

National Security Correspondent Bill Gertz reports that the study appears to be part of the U.S. military response to China’s large-scale nuclear military buildup and Russia’s exotic new nuclear arms. China’s nuclear infrastructure — missiles, warheads and factories — has been built underground in hardened facilities spread out along a network of some 3,000 tunnels dubbed the “Great Underground Wall.” The sole nuclear penetrator in the U.S. arsenal is the B83 bomb, which the Biden administration tried to cancel.

Eric D. Evans, the board’s chairman, said the study, shared with senior Pentagon leaders, contained options for “difficult target defeat” strikes or other missions for destroying deeply underground, hidden or hard-to-reach targets in a nuclear war. The goal, Mr. Evans said, is to assure the U.S. military’s “operational dominance” in various wartime and crisis scenarios.

North Korean state-controlled media coverage of the political crisis gripping U.S. ally South Korea has been remarkably scant, a reflection some say of the dangers the situation that’s unfolding in Seoul represents for the regime of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

Washington Times Asia Editor Andrew Salmon reports from the South Korean capital that there are sound reasons behind Pyongyang’s prudence. Were ordinary North Koreans exposed to the legal ouster of a national leader amid mass displays of free expression and free assembly, they might take a more critical view of their own ruling class and system.

North Korean state media generated unwanted domestic blowback back in 2016 with its coverage of mass protests that sparked the removal of South Korea’s last conservative president, Park Geun-hye. Similar blowback occurred decades earlier when news distributed in North Korea inadvertently exposed residents to the fact of South Korea’s far greater economic prosperity. Behind the Kim regime’s information firewall, outside content presents risks. That means international news requires careful management and timely reporting of the current crisis in Seoul is not a priority for Pyongyang’s propagandists.

The threat landscape today “appears as ominous as it did when CIA Director George Tenet, shortly before 9/11, warned the ‘system was blinking red’ after al Qaeda attacked the World Trade Center in 1993, bombed two U.S. embassies in 1998 and launched the suicide attack on the USS Cole in 2000,” writes Daniel N. Hoffman.

“The roughly 3,000 U.S. troops forward-deployed in Syria and Iraq have an outstanding record of success in eliminating terrorist threats and denying haven to our enemies,” he writes. “But the Trump administration needs to reexamine our counterterrorism strategy for South Asia, where the past is likely to be prologue.”

“We need more and better human intelligence sources to disrupt terrorist finance networks, frustrate terrorist plots and conduct operations against our enemies when necessary,” writes Mr. Hoffman, a retired officer of the spy agency and contributor to Threat Status.

While the free world continues to sound the alarm about Russia’s influence in Europe, “little attention has been paid to the damage Moscow is causing in America’s hemisphere,” writes Jeffrey Scott Shapiro, who asserts that “Russian state media mixes fact with fiction to create confusion, trigger emotions and diminish trust in democratic institutions.”

“The Kremlin’s false narratives, which appear in Russian state-sponsored press reports, social media platforms and the personal pages of Kremlin officials, influence Hispanic-Americans and Latin Americans to distrust the United States and support candidates and policies that favor Moscow,” writes Mr. Shapiro, the assistant commentary editor for The Washington Times.

“The plans of President Trump to introduce tariffs have produced concern in Latin America, and this area, too, is a target for Russian disinformation,” he writes. “In an attempt to create solidarity with Latin Americans, Russia has depicted U.S. tariffs as a tool to damage regional economies and “intensify … covert operations.”

• Jan. 27 — Huawei Redux: Understanding the World’s Most Infamous Company and Its Geopolitical Significance, Center for Strategic & International Studies

• Jan. 28 — Make America Boom Again: Supersonic Watch Party, Foundation for American Innovation 

• Jan. 28 — The North Caucasus and Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine, Wilson Center

• Jan. 28 — Defense Innovation and Acquisition Reform Hearing, Senate Armed Services Committee

• Feb. 3 — Security in Focus: Poland’s EU Presidency and the Transatlantic Alliance in 2025, Wilson Center

• Feb. 6 — Juche and North Korean Special Operations Forces, Institute of World Politics

• Feb. 10-11 — Artificial Intelligence Action Summit, Government of France