Threat Status for Wednesday, May 14, 2025. Share this daily newsletter with your friends, who can sign up here. Send tips to National Security Correspondent Ben Wolfgang.
President Trump met with new Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa on Wednesday morning in Saudi Arabia, the first official meeting between leaders of the two nations in 25 years.
… Mr. Trump’s pursuit of a positive U.S.-Syria relationship could help his broader regional goals. After announcing he was lifting sanctions on Syria, the president urged the Syrian leader to “tell all foreign terrorists to leave Syria.”
… He also pushed Mr. al-Sharaa to normalize relations with Israel in a bid to expand the 2020 U.S.-brokered Abraham Accords. Mr. Trump wants Saudi Arabia to do the same.
… Mexican officials confirmed that 17 family members of cartel leaders crossed into the U.S. as part of a deal with the Trump administration.
… Here’s a deep dive into the backstory that led Mr. Trump to accept a luxury 747 jumbo jet from Qatar.
… The Department of Homeland Security has signed off on a full production plan for a new Coast Guard icebreaker.
… And Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says there is “no way” Israel will halt its war in Gaza until Hamas is fully defeated.
Mr. Trump’s push to expand the Abraham Accords, and to have Syria and eventually Saudi Arabia normalize relations with Israel, would further isolate Iran, Saudi Arabia’s chief regional rival. The administration is simultaneously trying to put heavy pressure on Iran, including with new sanctions on its oil sector, while also pursuing diplomacy with Tehran on its nuclear program.
At an investor forum in Saudi Arabia, Mr. Trump told Iran it’s “time to choose” whether it truly wants a nuclear deal. There have been four rounds of talks between the two sides, most recently on Sunday. There are plans to move forward, but so far, no breakthroughs.
Mr. Trump said that if Iran refuses to reach an agreement or negotiate a deal, the U.S. will respond with “maximum pressure.”
“If Iran’s leadership rejects this olive branch and continues to attack their neighbors, then we will have no choice but to inflict massive, maximum pressure … and take all action required to stop the regime from ever having a nuclear weapon. Iran will never have a nuclear weapon,” he said.
Sen. Tim Sheehy, Montana Republican, announced the formation of the chamber’s Golden Dome caucus during his keynote speech Tuesday at a major event in Pentagon City hosted by Threat Status. The creation of the caucus, designed to advance Mr. Trump’s proposed Golden Dome missile shield, underscores the belief in national security circles that the project will require the kinds of deep, large-scale cooperation and coordination between various arms of the government and private industry seen only a handful of times in recent American history.
“I think a project of this scope, like we saw in the Apollo program and the Manhattan Project, is going to require a far more close relationship between the appropriators, the [Department of Defense], our legislators and industry to ensure that this project isn’t just built, but it evolves with the threat in real time,” Mr. Sheehy said at Threat Status’ “Golden Dome for America” gathering. The event brought together retired military officials, key U.S. lawmakers, top academic researchers and defense industry leaders for in-depth discussions about the proposed Golden Dome missile shield, which aims to protect the entire continental U.S. from ballistic and hypersonic missile threats from Russia, China and other adversaries..
Sen. Deb Fischer, Nebraska Republican and chair of the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Strategic Forces, also delivered a keynote address and offered strong support for the Golden Dome.
Just hours after the Threat Status event, the Defense Intelligence Agency released a new unclassified assessment laying out the various missile threats confronting the U.S. The DIA paper listed intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, boosted hypersonic weapons, land-attack cruise missiles and fractional orbital bombardment systems as the most pressing dangers — and the threats that the Golden Dome must be able to stop.
Other panelists at Tuesday’s Threat Status event sounded the alarm on exactly where the U.S. stands today on missile defense. Mark Lewis, the CEO of Purdue University’s Applied Research Institute, said America is “falling further behind,” particularly as it relates to hypersonics and the ability to defend against them. Military Correspondent Mike Glenn offers a deeper look at the issue.
One more note on Tuesday’s Golden Dome event: Panelists largely agreed that the project needs one single commander at the top, and there’s a growing consensus that it will be current Space Force Vice Chief of Space Operations Gen. Michael A. Guetlein.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says that he’ll be in Ankara on Thursday and is prepared to meet his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin. It’s still not clear whether Mr. Putin will show up in Turkey. A face-to-face meeting between the two men would be a monumental development in the U.S.-led peace push between Russia and Ukraine.
Mr. Trump has urged the two men to talk directly and has expressed openness to attending the Ankara meeting himself. Russian state-run media says that the Russian delegation plans to discuss “political and technical issues” at the meeting, but did not say whether Mr. Putin will attend.
China and Russia have touted a “no limits” partnership. But how strong is the bond between the two U.S. adversaries?
Threat Status contributor Miles Yu, director of the Hudson Institute’s China Center, explores that complex topic in a new piece and zeroes in on a relationship that he says is “brittle and fraught with historical resentment, strategic contradiction and an unsustainable imbalance of power.”
“The ‘no limits’ partnership is an illusion, an alliance of convenience masquerading as brotherhood. Strip away the joint communiques, military parades and diplomatic fanfare, and you find a hollow shell held together not by trust but by mutual exploitation,” he writes. “When the moment of reckoning comes, and it will, the dragon and the bear will turn on each other, just like Adolf Hitler’s Germany and Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union did nearly 85 years ago.”
• May 15 — Committee hearing, DoD Responsibilities Related to Foreign Military Sales System and International Armaments Cooperation, Senate Armed Services Committee
• May 15 — Motwani Jadeja U.S.-India Dialogue Series | Strategic Technology and the U.S.-India Relationship, Hudson Institute
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