Countering China’s dramatic defense buildup and aggressive military posturing in Asia will be the center-stage issue when Mr. Biden hosts Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida at the White House on Wednesday, and again when Mr. Biden and Mr. Kishida hold a three-way summit Thursday with the Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.

Washington Times Asia Editor Andrew Salmon reports that Japanese sources hope for movement on the issue of enhanced U.S.-Japan military command structures, while Mr. Marcos and Mr. Biden are expected to address rumored Pentagon plans to build an American base on a highly strategic island close to Taiwan.

Lacking a formal NATO-style alliance in the Indo-Pacific theater, the U.S. has sought to boost coordination with regional democratic allies in the face of such challenges as China and North Korea — an effort that has sometimes been hindered by tensions between the allies themselves.

“Mini-lateralizing of the American alliance system in Asia … really is the hub or the core of this effort,” says Victor Cha at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “What you have is the U.S.-Japan alliance as the core, and what you see is branching off and pulling in others for different forms of trilateral” relationships.

Serbian President Aleksander Vucic said in Paris on Tuesday that his country is close to purchasing 12 French Rafale multipurpose fighter jets, in what could be a dramatic shift away from Belgrade’s traditional military supplier, Russia.

Serbia is not a member of NATO, but is a candidate for European Union membership. Russia has long been its primary military provider and Belgrade has refused to join international sanctions against Moscow over its invasion of Ukraine. Serbian military increases in recent years have sparked unease, given the bloody breakup of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

Some Balkan leaders claim Russian President Vladimir Putin seeks to foment a new war in the Balkans to distract the West from Ukraine. Zlatko Lagumdzija, Bosnia’s ambassador to the United Nations, told Threat Status last year that the U.S. had a chance to regain influence in the region.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, Ohio Republican, took a swipe at national security hawks over their insistence that the government’s top spying tool be reauthorized without a warrant requirement. “The same people who spied on President Trump’s campaign are now fighting against a warrant requirement in the new FISA bill,” Mr. Jordan said in a post on X. “Makes you wonder.”

Congress is racing toward an April 19 deadline for the expiration of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Section 702. The FBI and the intelligence community have leaned on congressional lawmakers for over a year to re-up the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act without a warrant requirement, citing vital national security needs.

The success of China’s state-backed disinformation operations depends upon “local collaborators” capable of reaching individual audiences beyond the grasp of new tech tools, according to Taiwanese officials, who say they faced a digital onslaught from China aimed at manipulating voters before the island democracy’s January elections.

National Security Tech Correspondent Ryan Lovelace reports that a coalition of Taiwanese government officials and independent researchers are in Washington sharing their findings and lessons learned from Beijing’s attempted meddling in Taiwan’s elections before America votes in November.

Taiwan Ministry of Justice Investigation Bureau’s Wen-Ping Liu said China’s influence operations required the presence of key people inside Taiwan to assist efforts to disrupt public affairs. “The enemy needs local collaborators,” Mr. Liu said Monday at the National Press Club in Washington. “Local collaborators are a very important element of cognitive warfare practice.”

The Threat Status podcast recently featured an interview with Taiwan AI Labs founder Ethan Tu, who says Beijing uses generative artificial intelligence to create armies of disinformation trolls across social media platforms in multiple languages.

The Senate will take up impeachment articles this week against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and the White House is weighing in, calling the proceedings a “complete waste of time.”

Ian Sams, a White House spokesman, pointed to constitutional law experts who have largely panned the impeachment as lacking constitutional grounding, and he said that, given the stated opposition even from some Senate Republicans, the effort isn’t going anywhere.

TikTok has dominated the headlines, but former Deputy Director of National Intelligence Kash Patel argues that Congress has missed an even bigger threat posed by upstart retailer Temu — a lesser-known Chinese brand owned by PDD Holdings, which also owns the Pinduoduo shopping app. “China’s National Intelligence Law of 2017 mandates that all Chinese companies are legally obligated to share all collected data with the Communist Party regardless of whether it is collected in China or overseas,” writes Mr. Patel.

“Less than a year ago, the Pinduoduo app was suspended from Google Play after Google discovered malware in some of its versions,” he writes. “Experts concluded that the Pinduoduo app exploited vulnerabilities in Android operating systems and that such exploits were used to spy on users and competitors.” Temu’s extraordinary growth in the United States and intention to increase investment here warrant deeper scrutiny by Congress, argues Mr. Patel.