Threat Status for Tuesday, June 10, 2025. Share this daily newsletter with your friends, who can sign up here. Send tips to National Security Editor Guy Taylor.
Amazon says it will launch its second Secret Cloud Region in 2025, providing critical infrastructure to U.S. government employees working with classified information.
… President Trump has mobilized 700 U.S. Marines to deploy to Los Angeles and added another 2,000 National Guard members to maintain security amid the threat of renewed protests over raids by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
… The top U.N. nuclear watchdog says Iranian officials told him that an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities would solidify their determination to develop nuclear weapons.
… U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said talks playing out between the U.S. and Chinese delegations in London are going well.
… This weekend’s Group of Seven summit will give top officials from the world’s largest economies a chance to negotiate face to face with Mr. Trump over tariffs.
… Natalie Ecanow and Jack Burnham of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies examine how a growing alliance between Qatar and China could be dangerous.
… Military historian William R. Forstchen says a “Golden Dome” missile shield could protect the U.S. from an electromagnetic pulse attack.
The Pentagon has mobilized 700 U.S. Marines to deploy to Los Angeles to help more than 2,000 National Guard members maintain security following the weekend’s violent anti-ICE protests. U.S. Northern Command said in a statement that the Marines will add heft to the guard members, who are trained in de-escalation tactics and crowd control.
The deployment of the Marines and another 2,000 National Guard members by Mr. Trump were announced hours after California Gov. Gavin Newsom filed a lawsuit against the president to derail the deployment of the National Guard, saying Mr. Trump’s move was unwarranted and needlessly heightened a city already on edge over a wave of ICE arrests. Tensions remained high in downtown Los Angeles on Tuesday, although the protests appeared to have dissipated.
Washington Times reporter Stephen Dinan reports that the anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles have been undergirded by some basic misunderstandings about immigration law, such as who can be arrested and where and when it can happen. The anger is mirrored in growing clashes across the country as ire at ICE’s aggressive tactics under Mr. Trump, such as masked officers arresting foreign students on the streets or smashing car windows to reach targets who aren’t cooperating, has sparked a massive backlash.
The Trump administration’s tariffs on Japanese and South Korean goods have ratcheted up the stakes for the two U.S. allies ahead of the June 15-17 G-7 summit in Canada, which represents an opportunity for officials from the world’s largest economies to negotiate face to face with Mr. Trump over the sweeping tariffs he announced on April 2.
Leaders in Tokyo and Seoul, both of whom maintain dynamic U.S. security ties on China’s periphery and oversee two of the world’s largest manufacturing economies with long histories of trade surpluses with Washington, have been stunned by the Trump administration’s hardball style.
Threat Status will be tracking the G-7 closely for indications of whether or not Mr. Trump, who has openly complained that Seoul and Tokyo should pay more to support the presence of U.S. forces on their soil, may offer loopholes for the two leading U.S. security allies in East Asia.
Democracy in Mongolia, which lies between authoritarian Russia and Communist China, has proven resilient so far, weathering frequent political crises since being established in 1990. But the nation faces strain following the recent collapse of its ruling coalition and resignation of Prime Minister Luvsannamsrai Oyun-Erdene, who stands accused of corruption.
Washington Times Asia Editor Andrew Salmon writes in a deep-dive analysis that Mongolia’s economy depends heavily upon both Russia and China. “If I was Mongolian, I would worry about eventually being absorbed by China,” says Denny Roy, who watches the region from the East-West Center for Security in Honolulu. “The People’s Republic of China represents a long history of digesting smaller nations on China’s periphery.”
But others say the bigger threat is corruption, a longstanding issue in Mongolia, which is gifted with rich coal, copper and gold seams, some of which are being exploited by international mining concerns that have partnered with Mongolian interests. Bolor Lkhaajav, a U.S.-based Mongolian researcher, says the major risk is internal: “Mongolia is small [in population] compared to Russia and China, but is an independent state. … If you asked me what the major issue facing Mongolia is, I would say corruption.”
Summits, especially those held in China’s imperial capital city, have long been part of the Chinese Communist Party’s “playbook for consolidating power at home and projecting strength abroad,” writes Washington Times columnist and Threat Status contributor Miles Yu, director of the China Center at the Hudson Institute.
“In a lengthy phone conversation last week with China’s communist leader, President Trump accepted Xi Jinping’s invitation to visit Beijing soon,” writes Mr. Yu. “The U.S. president wants to use such a summit to solve specific problems with China, including fentanyl, rare earth materials and tariffs, and the Chinese Communist Party leader seeks to ‘reset’ the entire U.S. policy toward the CCP.”
“For Mr. Xi, such summits are not instruments of negotiation or goodwill. They are weapons of narrative warfare — scripted performances designed to deceive, demoralize and dominate. The stakes are not merely symbolic,” writes Mr. Yu. “Every meeting staged on the CCP’s terms reinforces a regime bent on reshaping the global order in its authoritarian image.”
U.S. tariffs on China “should be about rebalancing the whole relationship with China, not just our trade relationship,” writes Trisha Curtis, who asserts that “many China analysts and scholars discuss China’s manufacturing prowess, production capacity and scale but fail to mention the energy that underpins all that production, predominantly coal-fired power generation.”
China’s “investment in coal allows it to use cheap and reliable baseload power and further subsidize this abundant and reliable energy source, offering an incredible edge in competition in biotechnology and cars,” writes Ms. Curtis, CEO of PetroNerds and an economist for the American Energy Institute. “This makes it easy for China to compete, especially when Chinese companies are not beholden to the same rules of competition as Western firms, namely profitability.
“The U.S. is the world’s largest oil and gas producer and has more coal than any other nation,” she writes. “There is no excuse for America not to have redundant, reliable and affordable power generation to give its consumers, businesses and manufacturing a competitive edge.”
• June 26 — The Realities of an Invasion of Taiwan, Stimson Center
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