Threat Status for Wednesday, June 18, 2025. Share this daily newsletter with your friends, who can sign up here. Send tips to National Security Editor Guy Taylor.
Iran’s supreme leader leveled fresh threats Wednesday to target Americans if the U.S. bombs Iran.
… Sources tell Threat Status President Trump is carefully mulling whether to aid Israel in carrying out a massive airstrike on Iran’s most fortified nuclear facility.
… The decision facing Mr. Trump, who campaigned against involvement in foreign wars and promised to bring world peace, has ignited a meltdown among his supporters — particularly anti-war conservatives in the president’s base.
… Denmark says it’s willing to provide Greenland with more autonomy and investment in the face of U.S. offers to annex the Arctic island.
… Engines are roaring at the Paris Air Show, where Lockheed Martin announced this week that its upgrade to the F-35 is the most “aggressive” refresh in the warplane’s history.
… Companies building a next-generation combat fighter for France, Germany and Spain are publicly sparring over the program in Paris, according to Defense One.
… Palestinians say at least 51 people were killed by an Israeli airstrike while waiting for aid trucks in Gaza.
… And a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine says end-of-war talks are unlikely to progress without serious White House pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Iran’s supreme leader threatened Wednesday to inflict “irreparable damage” on the United States if American forces join in Israel’s ongoing campaign of airstrikes against the Islamic Republic. His comments came a day after Mr. Trump convened a Situation Room meeting to mull whether U.S. fighter jets should bomb Iran’s most fortified nuclear facilities. He also warned in a social media post that “we know exactly where the so-called ‘Supreme Leader’ is hiding.”
“He is an easy target, but is safe there — We are not going to take him out (kill!), at least not for now,” the president wrote. The back-and-forth threats between Mr. Trump and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei underscore how dramatically the Israel-Iran war has escalated as it churns through its sixth day on Wednesday, amid reports that Israeli officials are lobbying Mr. Trump to deliver a knockout blow bombing raid to Iran’s mountain-encased Fordo nuclear site.
Sources say Israeli Defense Forces have already laid out plans to attack Fordo, with or without U.S. support, although Israel lacks aircraft capable of carrying the 30,000-pound “bunker buster” bombs that analysts say would likely be needed to fully decimate Fordo’s deep underground operation centers.
North Korea will soon begin deploying construction battalions and mine-clearance troops to Russia’s heavily damaged Kursk region, according to a report by the state-owned Russian news agency Tass, which underscored the evolving military ties between Moscow and Pyongyang.
The Tass report on Tuesday came a day after the independent media outlet NK News reported that North Korea has begun supplying cluster munitions for a rare 107mm multiple-launch rocket system that Russian forces are using in Ukraine. The NK News report said images showing Russia using more North Korean launchers and shells were a sign of Moscow’s “deepening reliance on Pyongyang.”
Tass, meanwhile, reported that Russian State Security Council Secretary Sergei Shoigu, a former defense minister and a close confidant of Mr. Putin, was received in Pyongyang on Tuesday by North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. Washington Times Asia Editor Andrew Salmon noted in a dispatch from Seoul, South Korea, that the visit was the third by Mr. Shoigu in as many months and came a day ahead of the first anniversary of the signing of a bilateral Comprehensive Strategic Partnership treaty by Mr. Kim and Mr. Putin.
FBI Director Kash Patel has declassified an intelligence report from within the bureau detailing what he described this week as “alarming allegations related to the 2020 U.S. election, including allegations of interference by the CCP,” the acronym for the Chinese Communist Party.
Mr. Patel posted a link on X Monday to a news report that said an FBI intelligence report had raised concerns that Beijing mass-produced fake American driver’s licenses to skew the 2020 election with phony mail-in ballots backing then-candidate Joseph R. Biden. Mr. Biden won the election that November.
“I have…turned the documents over” to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley for further review, the FBI director said. On Tuesday, Mr. Grassley sent a letter to Mr. Patel asking the FBI to produce a September 25, 2020, intelligence report from the Albany, New York, field office and additional information to help “better understand the decision-making process of your predecessor’s FBI.”
Clifford D. May examines the Iranian regime’s long history of seeking the demise of Israel and the United States. “In 1979, I spent several months in Iran covering what was then called the Iranian Revolution,” Mr. May writes. “My attempts to learn Farsi were unsuccessful, but all these years later, two phrases stick in my mind: ‘Marg bar EsraŹ¾il!’ and ‘Marg bar Amrika!’”
“Many of my fellow reporters insisted that ‘Death to Israel!’ and ‘Death to America!’ should not be taken literally or even seriously,” writes Mr. May, founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “Also, many Iranians didn’t believe that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the religious leader who led the revolution, intended to become a dictator and mass murderer.”
“Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who became the second supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1989, has unwaveringly adhered to Khomeinist theology,” he writes. “In a public address two years ago, he stated plainly: ‘The situation between America and Iran is this: When you chant ‘Death to America!’ it is not just a slogan; it is a policy.’”
Some press and policymakers have “sought to portray Israel as the aggressor, overlooking the fact that on Oct. 7, 2023, Iranian proxies perpetrated the largest slaughter of Jewish civilians since the Holocaust, and that the regime has waged a ceaseless war on the Jewish state for half a century,” writes Sean Durns of the Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis.
“The fact that the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism seeks nuclear weapons is a danger to the United States and its allies,” Mr. Durns writes. “Iran’s pursuit of intercontinental ballistic missiles, equipped with nuclear weapons, enables the regime to threaten Americans, Israelis, Europeans and others far from the Middle East. As Mr. Trump recently noted: ‘You can’t have peace if Iran has a nuclear weapon.’”
• June 26 — The Realities of an Invasion of Taiwan, Stimson Center
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