Threat Status for Friday, March 7, 2025. Share this daily newsletter with your friends, who can sign up here. Send tips to National Security Editor Guy Taylor.
Uncertainty and 11th hour loopholes are definitive aspects of President Trump’s tariff strategy, with the White House indicating the president will shield thousands of goods from his 25% tariff on imports from Canada and Mexico.
… Democracies and U.S. security allies are wary of getting hit directly with U.S. tariffs, or sprayed by blowback from a U.S.-China trade war.
… Canada and the Philippines, meanwhile, are inking a major defense pact in response to Chinese military muscle-flexing.
… Sudan is accusing the United Arab Emirates of breaching the United Nations genocide convention by arming and funding the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces.
… Threat Status examined how Sudan’s civil war and the mass famine associated with it has global security implications touching the U.S., Russia, China and a range of other nations in an exclusive video interview.
… Two active U.S. Army soldiers and one former soldier were arrested this week and charged with conspiring to obtain and sell U.S. government secrets to China.
… And on the space technology front, Texas-based Firefly Aerospace has a contract for a dedicated Alpha launch tied to NASA’s INCUS mission, which will deploy three satellites with highly sensitive precipitation radar systems that track cloud density.
Ukrainian military forces deployed French Mirage-2000 warplanes overnight Thursday to help repel a large-scale Russian missile and drone bombardment of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. It was the first deployment of the aircraft that Paris began delivering to Kyiv last month. Ukrainian forces also have Western-supplied F-16 fighter jets in their arsenal, although it was not immediately clear whether they were involved in the operation to counter Russia’s overnight attack.
“Russia is trying to hurt ordinary Ukrainians by striking energy and gas production facilities, without abandoning its goal of leaving us without light and heat, and causing the greatest harm to ordinary citizens,” Ukrainian Energy Minister Herman Halushchenko wrote on Facebook.
Ukraine’s largest private natural gas producer, DTEK, said the overnight bombardment was Russia’s sixth attack in the past 2 1/2 weeks on its facilities. It unfolded hours after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced plans to travel to Saudi Arabia on Monday to meet the country’s crown prince, and that Ukrainian officials would also hold talks with U.S. officials in the Mideast nation.
The latest episode of the Threat Status weekly podcast explores whether Mr. Trump’s hardball Ukraine strategy is actually working, while also diving into how the Russia-Ukraine war has impacted the global landscape of ransomware cyberattacks, in which hackers bore into a target’s computer to lock files and then demand payment to restore the victim’s access to the files.
Johnathon Miller, vice president of security operations at the Arizona-based cybersecurity firm Lumifi Cyber, explains in an exclusive interview on the podcast that “ransomware used to be this financially motivated activity where people were really just looking for a quick score, quick kind of money grab. Essentially, [hackers] would encrypt the files … and then they would say, ‘Hey, if you guys want the files back, or you want the decryption, go ahead and just pay us, we’ll send it back to you.”
“When the Russia-Ukraine conflict happened,” says Mr. Miller, organized crime groups and financially motivated-groups started to “blur the line” between “state-sponsored attacks and the criminal activity.” The result, he says, was a wave of infighting among secretive hacking groups, as some worked directly with Russian government efforts to deface Ukrainian government websites, while others were uneasy over aligning with Moscow.
One of the core messages of Mr. Trump’s address to Congress this week was that U.S. allies and partners around the world must beef up their own defenses. Another was that unfair trade practices would be hammered with tariffs.
Washington Times Asia Editor Andrew Salmon reports from Seoul that both messages put East Asia’s prosperous democracies on notice that big changes may be in store in relations with Washington. South Korean officials are bracing for higher tariffs from Washington, while Japan appears to be digging in against pressure from the Trump administration over defense spending and contributions to regional security.
“Japan decides its defense budget by itself,” Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba said in remarks to his country’s parliament, or Diet, hours after Mr. Trump’s Tuesday night speech to Congress. “It should not be decided based on what other nations tell it to do.”
Mr. Ishiba was responding specifically to comments by Elbridge Colby, the Trump administration’s nominee for undersecretary of defense for policy, who said during a Senate Armed Services Committee confirmation hearing on Tuesday that “Japan should be spending at least 3% of GDP on defense as soon as possible.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “grand strategic objective is to make Ukraine a satellite state, just as Josef Stalin did to Eastern Europe’s Warsaw Pact members,” writes former CIA Clandestine Services Officer Daniel N. Hoffman, a Threat Status contributor.
“We might find the death and destruction of the war abhorrent, but to paraphrase Stalin, those are just ‘statistics’ to Mr. Putin,” writes Mr. Hoffman. “Mr. Putin might accept a ceasefire and seek considerable concessions in return, but only if he retains the capability through overt military and covert action to carry on his long strategy of destroying Ukraine as a state.”
“Despite the hundreds of thousands of dead or injured soldiers, Russia shows no sign of interest in a fair, peaceful settlement of the war it started,” Mr. Hoffman writes. “Now it’s up to CIA Director John Ratcliffe and his team to find evidence to the contrary, if any such evidence exists.”
Mr. Zelenskyy has offered to step down as president of his country if NATO offers Ukraine membership and guarantees its security. “This is not the hallmark of a dictator,” writes Jeffrey Scott Shapiro, a member of The Washington Times editorial board.
“Mr. Zelenskyy’s gesture to resign in exchange for security assurances demonstrates his commitment to core U.S. values such as democracy and freedom,” writes Mr. Shapiro. “Mr. Zelenskyy’s embrace of core U.S. values is what inspired him to seek NATO membership in the first place and why he wants to save Ukrainians in occupied territories instead of abandoning them as part of a peace deal.”
“However, President Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance have different value systems,” argues Mr. Shapiro. “To them, protecting the free world is not about morality. It is about money and power. It is a business transaction aimed at getting a financial return on investment or gaining political capital to ignite their base in the ‘America First’ movement.”
• March 13 — Germany’s Election Aftermath: Implications for Foreign Policy, Wilson Center
• March 17-19 — 2025 ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit, ARPA-E
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