Threat Status for Tuesday, February 4, 2025. Share this daily newsletter with your friends, who can sign up here. Send tips to National Security Editor Guy Taylor.
Beijing hits back: China’s leaders retaliated against President Trump’s tariffs Tuesday by slapping a 15% tariff on U.S. coal and liquefied natural gas exports and a 10% tariff on American crude oil, agricultural machinery and large-engine cars sold in China.
… Mr. Trump has put a one-month pause on plans to hit Canada and Mexico with tariffs after promises by the two to strengthen border security and curb fentanyl smuggling.
… The president warned ahead of his meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday that there are “no guarantees” the Gaza ceasefire will last.
… Secretary of State Marco Rubio says El Salvador’s president has offered to accept deportees from the U.S. of any nationality, including violent American criminals.
… And Utah-based Strider Technologies is positioning itself to dominate in the private sector intelligence market. The company is adding former Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence Susan M. Gordon to its advisory board, whose ranks already include former National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster and Charles Carmakal, chief tech officer at the cyber giant Mandiant.
… Strider CEO Greg Levesque tells Threat Status the U.S. faces “a new geopolitical era, where great-power competition is back.” He emphasized the firm’s mission of “getting nation-state level intelligence into the hands of private industry leaders.”
It’s hard to disrupt a stalemated war that will pass the three-year mark this month, but the shift in power in Washington has managed to do just that. Threat Status Special Correspondent Guillaume Ptak examines the situation in a dispatch from Kyiv, where Mr. Trump’s election has been cause for both hope and concern among Ukrainians.
The new U.S. president’s campaign pledge to end the war in a day has come and gone. Retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, his designated envoy to resolving the conflict, has canceled a planned fact-finding trip to Kyiv and has yet to publicly announce a makeup date. Mr. Trump has threatened more sanctions and tariffs on Russia but has implemented no new policies.
Ihor Petrenko, a political scientist at Kyiv’s Taras Shevchenko National University, says that despite Mr. Trump’s “fondness” for Russian President Vladimir Putin, part of the Ukrainian public recalls that “Trump was the one who gave us the Javelin [anti-tank missiles].” But as Mr. Trump’s national security nominations, notably new Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, settle into their posts, U.S. military aid to Ukraine remains an outstanding question.
Frustration with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has simmered for decades among conservatives, who insist the agency has wandered from its core mission and squanders money. Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute calls USAID “the epitome of the deep state,” claiming it’s a “miserable bureaucracy” through which “people who are nothing in Washington can go overseas on the government’s dime and feel like kings.”
Mr. Trump has ordered a 90-day freeze on USAID’s funding, and Washington’s focus on the agency intensified Monday, with billionaire Trump adviser Elon Musk’s claim that the president has agreed to shutter the $40 billion agency and fold it into the State Department. But the administration’s moves, including an order for staffers to stay out of the agency’s Washington headquarters, have prompted intense outrage and hand-wringing.
Fuming Democrats say Mr. Musk’s plans require an act of Congress, threaten lives around the world and play into the hands of the nation’s global adversaries, including Russia, China and Iran. USAID notably funds democracy promotion and other soft-power projection overseas by organizations such as the International Republican Institute. “It is a matter for Congress to deal with, not an unelected, billionaire oligarch named Elon Musk,” Democratic Rep. Gerry Connolly of Virginia said Monday at a press conference outside USAID headquarters.
Panama will be the first country in the Western Hemisphere to withdraw from China’s Belt and Road program, the first fruit of Mr. Trump’s increased pressure campaign aimed at countering Beijing’s growing economic and diplomatic influence in the region.
Mr. Rubio claimed victory after visiting Panama over the weekend. President Jose Raul Molina’s announcement that his country will not renew its affiliation with Belt and Road “is a great step forward for U.S.-Panama relations, a free Panama Canal, and another example of [President Trump’s] leadership to protect our national security and deliver prosperity for the American people,” the secretary of state wrote on social media.
Beijing has responded angrily. Panama’s decision is “regrettable,” Fu Cong, the Chinese ambassador to the United Nations, told reporters in New York. “The smear campaign that is launched by the U.S. and some of the other Western countries on the Belt and Road Initiative is totally groundless.” The developments come months after the Pentagon’s then-top official in the region called for Washington to develop a “Marshall Plan” to counter Chinese and Russian operations in the region.
The markets and currencies of U.S. Asia allies Japan and South Korea plunged Monday as their capital markets opened for the first time since Mr. Trump announced plans to hammer Mexico and Canada with tariffs. The leadership in Seoul and Tokyo kept their heads below the parapets, but markets spoke loudly: Japan’s Nikkei Stock Average was down 2.66% at the close of business Monday, while South Korea’s leading Korea Composite Stock Price Index (KOSPI) was down 2.52%.
Canada and Mexico both secured a one-month pause on Mr. Trump’s plans to hit them with 25% tariffs by agreeing Monday to take steps to strengthen border security and curb the smuggling of deadly fentanyl. While there were early signs of recovery in South Korean and Japanese markets Tuesday, automakers in both nations are on edge, as they have major investments in the two economies bordering the United States.
China’s communist government now has 134 air bases within 1,000 nautical miles of the Taiwan Strait, and the United States is “running out of time to deter Beijing’s ambition to seize Taiwan and turn the island democracy into the next Hong Kong,” writes Sean Durns, who asserts that “for many close observers, alarms are blinking red.”
“Chinese President Xi Jinping has called for the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to conquer Taiwan by 2027,” writes Mr. Durns, a Washington-based foreign policy analyst. “Last March, U.S. Adm. John Aquilino, who was then serving as the head of the Indo-Pacific Command, said the PLA was on track to fulfill Mr. Xi’s wishes. A growing body of evidence indicates that he was right.”
“On Jan. 30, the Financial Times revealed, ‘China’s military is building a massive complex in western Beijing that U.S. intelligence believes will serve as a wartime command center far larger than the Pentagon,’” he writes. “Once completed, the facility will be the largest military command center in the world — 10 times the size of the Pentagon. Satellite imagery indicates that construction began around mid-2024.”
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