Threat Status for Monday, February 3, 2025. Share this daily newsletter with your friends, who can sign up here. Send tips to National Security Editor Guy Taylor.
“Shut it down?” Elon Musk, who heads the administration’s unofficial Department of Government Efficiency” or DOGE, says President Trump agrees that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) — the primary funder of American aid programs and soft-power projection around the world — should be closed.
… Canada and Mexico are retaliating after Mr. Trump’s announcement of 25% tariffs on the two top U.S. trade partners, but the reaction from China, America’s third-largest trade partner, has been more muted to an announcement of an additional 10% hike on all Chinese goods.
… Craig Singleton, who heads the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ China Program, says Beijing faces a “delicate balancing act” in how to respond, given China’s own economic woes at the moment. “China will frame Trump’s tariffs as unilateral and destabilizing, casting China as a champion of multilateralism and global economic stability,” he says.
… Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he’ll discuss “victory over Hamas” when he meets with Mr. Trump in Washington Tuesday, despite the Palestinian militant group’s reassertion of control over Gaza amid the current ceasefire.
… U.S. fighter jets pounded Islamic State targets in Somalia over the weekend in the first major American operation against terrorist groups abroad since Mr. Trump took office.
… And Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has issued new guidance ending U.S. military events marking Black History Month, Women’s History Month and other “cultural awareness months.”
Projections that the 11,000-strong North Korean army contingent deployed to the Russia-Ukraine war would be ill-equipped cannon fodder are evaporating as battlefield reports indicate Pyongyang’s forces display high motivation, quality training and lavish scales of gear.
The North Korean units have defied high casualties to amass experience in the high-intensity, millennial war that current-generation Western troops lack. Washington Times Asia Editor Andrew Salmon takes a deeper look, reporting that Pyongyang’s deployment puts the highly militarized Asian fortress state on the cutting edge of the loose alliance alongside U.S. adversaries in China, Russia and Iran — a grouping some have dubbed the “CRINK” axis.
Still, there are uncertainties. North Korean troops reportedly have been pulled back from part of the front in Russia’s Kursk region, where Ukrainian forces cling to a sliver of Russian territory. The Kyiv Independent reports that North Korean troops have pulled back from Kursk’s “zero line,” but that the break won’t last long and could be only an operational pause to regroup, recover and reinforce.
China’s space program is advancing with more clarity and nationalist focus than that of the United States, according to the U.S. Institute of Peace’s senior adviser on China. Dean Cheng tells the Threat Status weekly podcast that the Chinese “are going to the moon with people, but unlike us, they’re not going to be one and done.”
“They’re not going to plant the flag and say, “Hey, look at what we did, we’re done.’ They are almost certainly going to want to establish a lunar base,” Mr. Cheng said in an exclusive interview on the latest episode of the podcast, during which he emphasized how far Beijing’s space program has come over the past 15 years.
Mr. Cheng says the Chinese government’s mentality toward competition with the U.S. in space is as follows: “We have more satellites, better capabilities, more money than you do.” He adds that “it’s nationalism. It’s pride. It’s overcoming past weakness, and it is a signal to the United States.” Beijing is sending a signal to Washington that “we’re you’re equal,” Mr. Cheng says.
The San Francisco-based tech giant OpenAI unveiled a new artificial intelligence advanced research tool on Sunday evening — the latest in an escalating battle between the U.S. and China to build artificial general intelligence systems that can surpass humans’ capabilities.
OpenAI says its new AI assistant, dubbed “deep research,” will help users accomplish tasks in tens of minutes that would normally take someone several hours. The move represents the company’s answer to AI models made public by China’s DeepSeek last month.
Fresh off a trip to Washington to huddle with federal officials, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced the new AI agent “deep research” on X while visiting Japan. “This is like a superpower — experts on demand!” Mr. Altman wrote. “It can go use the internet, do complex research and reasoning, and give you back a report. It is really good, and can do tasks that would take hours/days and cost hundreds of dollars.”
Any week now, Mr. Trump is “going to approve renewed hard-line strategies against the terrorist state Iran after President Biden spent four years coddling the mullahs,” writes Washington Times columnist Rowan Scarborough.
“The president’s close advisers are signaling it’s get-tough time again and that Iran’s dictatorship is vulnerable,” writes Mr. Scarborough, who draws attention to remarks retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, a key Trump foreign policy adviser, made at a recent rally of Iranian dissidents in Europe.
“The historical irony is this: Mr. Biden’s goodwill convinced Iran that it was invincible. Its backing of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, Jewish carnage stirred Israel to decimate Iran’s two most important terrorist clients, Hamas and Hezbollah,” writes Mr. Scarborough. “Amid the Iran empire debacle, anti-Syrian regime Islamists mounted offensives that ousted Bashar Assad, a key Iran geopolitical ally.”
For the first time since President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), Mr. Trump’s executive order to build an “Iron Dome” for America “opens the door for building a truly cost-effective defense to protect Americans from an existential threat of missile attack while reinforcing U.S. efforts to deter its adversaries in China, Russia, North Korea and Iran,” write Henry F. Cooper and Daniel J. Gallington.
“Moreover, we believe such a broad-based review of current technology will demonstrate again that space-based defenses are still the most cost-effective means to achieve that objective,” write Mr. Cooper, who was Reagan’s SDI director, and Mr. Gallington, who aided Reagan-era Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger.
“We expect the usual naysayers again to claim this outcome is impossible,” the two write. “Still, we recall from our up-close and personal experience that the likelihood of truly cost-effective missile defenses can reinforce negotiations to significantly reduce the threat of missile attack to the United States and our allies.”
• Feb. 12 — U.S., South Korean, and Japanese Approaches to Economic Security, Brookings Institution
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