Threat Status for Wednesday, July 30, 2025. Share this daily newsletter with your friends, who can sign up here. Send tips to National Security Editor Guy Taylor.
Iran’s foreign minister says Tehran has no current plans to reestablish diplomatic talks with U.S. negotiators.
… President Trump announced Wednesday that he’ll impose a 25% tariff on goods from India, plus an additional import tax because of New Delhi’s purchases of Russian oil.
… Semafor has an eye-opening chart examining the president’s tariff threats against 12 African nations, several of which are places where the U.S. and China are battling for influence and access to critical rare earth minerals.
… Beijing is scrambling to counter and exploit Mr. Trump’s tariff-oriented foreign policy by pledging aid to companies hit by higher tariffs.
… Sen. Bernard Sanders, Vermont independent, wants to force votes to block the sale of 1,000-pound bombs and Joint Direct Attack Munition guidance kits to Israel because of starvation in Gaza.
… Britain’s transport minister says her government’s potential recognition of a Palestinian state should not be viewed as a reward for Hamas.
… And the Trump administration has moved its shipbuilding mission from the National Security Council to the Office of Management and Budget following the president’s April executive order on “Restoring America’s Maritime Dominance.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin has been using Russian state media lately to promote a narrative that the U.S. owes credit for its birth in the 18th century and its survival during the Civil War to an unlikely source: Russia. National Security Correspondent Ben Wolfgang offers a deep dive analysis, examining the extent to which the claim has any accuracy or is simply the latest twist in Mr. Putin’s evolving divisive misinformation operations.
The truth, historians say, is much more nuanced. Russia did support the Union during the Civil War and sent naval detachments to both coasts during the conflict. During the American Revolution, Russia’s refusal to send troops to fight alongside the British, and its maritime “neutrality” policy that undercut total British dominance of the seas, significantly aided the Americans’ cause, historians argue.
Yet the recent focus on those centuries-old events seems designed to advance a subtle foreign policy talking point for the Kremlin: To end the Russia-Ukraine war, the Trump administration should approach Moscow with humility and gratitude, not hubris and antagonism. Scholars say Mr. Putin’s comments reflect one of his core beliefs: that major powers on both sides of the Atlantic owe Russia.
America’s current approach to strategic deterrence is not enough to protect the country from growing nuclear threats posed by China, North Korea and Russia and multiple warheads should be rapidly added to current missiles, according to a new think tank report.
Mark B. Schneider, a former Pentagon nuclear strategist, and strategic weapons expert Keith B. Payne — both of the National Institute for Public Policy — assert in the report that the U.S. multibillion-dollar nuclear force modernization is not happening fast enough to mitigate dangers posed by China and Russia. Moreover, the emerging entente between those two nations, a new alliance between Moscow and Pyongyang, and Russian-Iranian-North Korean cooperation in the war in Ukraine has increased the potential for a new world war.
With U.S. nuclear forces aging, the United States’ ability to maintain nuclear deterrence “has drastically declined due to the combination of deep U.S. nuclear weapons reductions and the expansion of opponents’ nuclear and other military forces,” states the report, which calls for adding multiple warheads to 400 land-based Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles and to the Navy’s submarine-launched ballistic missiles.
Statements in recent days by Britain and Australia that they are prepared to fight to defend Taiwan if China were to follow through on threats to invade the island democracy have outraged Chinese Communist Party officials.
The CCP-run Global Times editorialized on July 28 that Britain’s “flaunting” of aircraft carriers in the Pacific and “hyping up militarism over the Taiwan Strait is little more than self-indulgent nostalgia.”
Washington Times Asia Editor Andrew Salmon writes in a dispatch from the region that the audience Australia and Britain are targeting may be less Chinese and more American. London and Canberra are keen to proceed with a trilateral nuclear submarine deal that the two signed with the Biden administration in 2021. The Trump administration is critically reviewing that deal.
Joseph R. DeTrani, a longtime American diplomat and intelligence official, points to evidence that there are currently “more than 45 armed conflicts in the Middle East and Africa, 21 armed conflicts in Asia, seven armed conflicts in Europe and six armed conflicts in Latin America.” On Gaza, he writes: “We see daily pictures of emaciated babies and children and desperate adults begging for food that’s not available.”
“The U.S. focus has been on ending Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine and securing a ceasefire in Gaza, knowing Iran continues to support proxies in the region — Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis — determined to annihilate the state of Israel,” writes Mr. DeTrani, an opinion contributor to Threat Status. “Recent efforts by the Trump administration to actively seek an end to the armed conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza are commendable.
“However,” he writes, “as we seek a ceasefire and resolution to these conflicts, our immediate goal should also be to provide the food necessary for the 2 million people of Gaza and to end the tragic malnourishment and starvation of babies, children, pregnant women and the people so inhumanely treated.”
Mr. Trump’s assertion that Ahmad al-Sharaa — aka Abu Mohammed al-Golani, whose forces toppled the Assad regime in Syria last year — is a “tough guy” with “the skills to “hold Syria together” is now being tested, according to Clifford D. May, an opinion contributor to Threat Status.
He notes that prior to his current status, Mr. al-Sharaa “for years had headed the Nusra Front, an al Qaeda affiliate.”
“I don’t doubt that Syria suffers from tribal rivalries, land disputes and grievances galore,” Mr. May writes. “No people — Druze, Jews, Arabs or Americans — is monolithic.
“For generations, however, the many ethnic and religious minorities of the Middle East have been subject to slaughter, slavery, forced conversions and expulsions at the hands of Islamic supremacists and jihadis,” he writes. “Those minorities deserve concern, support and protection, much more than they have received from the ‘international community’ and the Western media.”
• Aug. 5 — Misinformation: What Is It and What Should We Do About It? Cato Institute
• Aug. 5-7 — 2025 Space & Missile Defense Symposium, SMD Symposium
• Aug. 13 — The U.S. Space Force’s Jonathan Farrow on the U.S. Space Warfighting Framework, Atlantic Council
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