Threat Status for Wednesday, August 20, 2025. Share this daily newsletter with your friends, who can sign up here. Send tips to National Security Editor Guy Taylor.
Space is the new great power battlefield, with hijacked satellites and orbiting weapons systems becoming the norm in the 21st century.
… China views President Trump’s push for a space-based “Golden Dome” missile defense shield as a threat to conduct preemptive attacks on Chinese nuclear missile forces.
… NATO defense chiefs are scrambling to nail down security guarantees that can be demanded for Ukraine in any negotiations that ultimately play out with Russia.
… Mr. Trump has ruled out the prospect of U.S. boots on the ground in Ukraine.
… Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is facing pressure but has yet to state his position on the new ceasefire proposal with Hamas.
… And the Department of Homeland Security has instructed officers to use migrants’ “anti-American” behavior to block them from upgrading their legal status.
China is working against the “Golden Dome” plan for a next-generation strategic missile defense system covering the United States, viewing it as a threat to Beijing’s own large missile forces. Chinese Defense and Foreign Ministry officials have criticized the system, which is expected to include space weapons, as likely leading to an arms race in space.
“The initial responses in the People’s Republic of China to Golden Dome have been overwhelmingly negative, with Beijing raising both strategic and normative objections to the U.S. reviving its past efforts to build a strategic missile defense system,” according to an analysis by the U.S. Air Force’s China Aerospace Studies Institute.
China’s objections include claims that the missile shield will undermine strategic stability by weakening mutual deterrence despite Beijing’s massive expansion of its nuclear forces and missile programs. According to the CASI analysis, leaders of the Chinese Communist Party and its People’s Liberation Army have voiced specific concerns about Golden Dome’s plans for “active launch suppression,” viewed by Beijing as a U.S. threat to conduct preemptive attacks on Chinese nuclear missile forces.
Mr. Trump says no U.S. troops will be deployed to Ukraine as part of a potential end-of-war peace deal with Russia. However, the president indicated on Tuesday that he has not ruled out other military options, including using American airpower to deter future Russian invasions.
The comments came as new questions emerged about a proposed meeting between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Moscow has downplayed the prospect of such a meeting, even as the White House projects confidence it could occur soon. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Tuesday that Moscow doesn’t outright reject talks with Ukraine but insisted a summit would have to be prepared “step by step, gradually, starting from the expert level and then going through all the necessary stages.”
The back-and-forth came ahead of a gathering Wednesday of NATO defense chiefs aimed at nailing down future security guarantees that can be demanded for Ukraine in any negotiations that ultimately play out with Russia. The Associated Press reports that Kyiv’s European allies are looking to set up a force that could backstop any peace agreement. A coalition of 30 countries, including European nations, Japan and Australia, has signed up to support the initiative.
A Chinese illegal immigrant in California was sentenced to eight years in prison Tuesday for sending weapons and technology to North Korea in preparation for a surprise attack on the South. Wen Shenghua, 42, entered the United States legally on a student visa in 2012 and remained in the country after the visa expired, the Justice Department said in announcing the sentencing.
National Security Correspondent Bill Gertz offers a deeper dive, reporting that Wen pleaded guilty in June to sending arms, ammunition and export-controlled military technology to Nampo, North Korea, through Hong Kong. He also pleaded guilty to acting as a foreign agent of North Korea. According to court documents, Wen met with North Korean officials in China before coming to the United States and was directed in 2022 to acquire and export U.S. weapons, ammunition and military goods to Pyongyang.
Clifford D. May examines symbolic actions that occurred during last week’s Trump-Putin summit in Alaska, writing that “restoring the diminished Russian/Soviet empire is Mr. Putin’s mission.”
The Russian president “began in 2008 by sending his soldiers into Georgia, another former Soviet ‘republic,’ where they sliced off two territories: Abkhazia and South Ossetia,” writes Mr. May, the founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and an opinion contributor to Threat Status.
“Today, in addition to occupying Georgian territory, Moscow exerts significant and malevolent influence over Georgia’s ruling political party, Georgian Dream,” he writes. “Mr. Putin also is waging a hybrid warfare campaign, combining political, economic, propaganda and security pressure, against Moldova, another formerly Soviet country.”
Havana has quietly developed itself as an “an exporter of mercenary manpower to fight U.S. interests,” according to Wilson Beaver and Andre Rainville, who cite Ukrainian government estimates that 6,000 to 7,000 Cubans are serving in the Russian military in Ukraine, representing the second greatest force of foreign fighters, just behind North Korea.
Mr. Beaver, a senior policy adviser at The Heritage Foundation, and Mr. Rainville, a member of the think tank’s Young Leadership Program, write in an op-ed that “Russia has sweetened the pot” by “offering Cuban volunteers the ability to earn Russian citizenship for themselves and their families, and with it a golden ticket to escape the never-ending repression and economic crisis of their homeland.”
“Moscow,” they write, “has tricked Cuban men who, unaware of the sheer scope and brutality of the war, merely believed what they were told: that they were being recruited into low-skilled, civilian jobs.”
• Sept. 4 — The Digital Front Line: Building a Cyber-Resilient Taiwan, Hudson Institute
Thanks for reading Threat Status. Don’t forget to share it with your friends, who can sign up here. And listen to our weekly podcast available here or wherever you get your podcasts.
