Threat Status for Tuesday, September 2, 2025. Share this daily newsletter with your friends, who can sign up here. Send tips to National Security Editor Guy Taylor.
China’s massive military parade is turning into a leaders summit of the CRINKs — the China-Russia-Iran-North Korea authoritarian power alignment against the U.S. and Western democracies.
… North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un arrived by train to Beijing, where Chinese President Xi Jinping greeted Iran’s president Tuesday.
… Russian President Vladimir Putin has been there since the weekend, when Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was also in China, glad-handing with his Russian and Chinese counterparts just days after the Trump administration imposed 50% tariffs on India as punishment for its purchases of Russian oil.
… National Security Correspondent Bill Gertz has a deep dive on threats posed by Chinese intelligence services to critical tech research at U.S. universities.
… President Trump is expected to announce Tuesday that U.S. Space Command is relocating to Huntsville, Alabama.
… Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro says he’ll declare “a republic in arms” if attacked by U.S. forces battling cartels in the Caribbean.
… Belgium will join Australia, Canada, France and the United Kingdom in recognizing a Palestinian state at the U.N. General Assembly.
… And Mr. Trump is slated to announce a major deal involving Canadian shipbuilder Davie Defense to create an “American Icebreaker Factory” in Texas.
North Korea’s leader will join Mr. Putin and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian alongside Mr. Xi at Wednesday’s Chinese military parade commemorating the end of World War II. Some 26 world leaders in all will be at Mr. Xi’s side for the parade, which follows a major summit in China that was attended by a slew of other heads of state, including Mr. Modi from India.
A defiant Mr. Putin decried the “Euro-Atlantic” world order and warmly greeted Mr. Modi and Mr. Xi at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Tianjin, China, offering no sign of progress on Ukraine as Mr. Trump’s peace deadline came and went.
Mr. Trump had only an oblique response to the power optics in Tianjin, rebuking New Delhi on Truth Social over its purchases of Russian oil while defending his 50% tariffs on Indian imports, an attempt to reset trade balances and punish India for propping up Moscow’s economy.
In terms of global capacity, it’s “totally overstated” that China’s navy is on the verge of eclipsing the naval power of the United States. That’s a key point that retired Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery makes in an exclusive Threat Status Influencers video interview, during which he asserts outright that “the U.S. is still the only global maritime power.”
But there is reason for concern, particularly regarding the prospect of a U.S.-China clash within 1,500 miles of the Chinese coast, where Beijing’s forces are “playing a home game, and we’re playing an 8,000-mile, best-case away game,” said Mr. Montgomery, a thought leader with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “For both our air and naval power, which are the key, our center of gravity in this kind of conflict … that will be an away game.”
In that context, China is “beginning to establish a critical mass that does eclipse us,” he said. “And so therefore we’re going to have to buy the right weapons, buy the right munitions, develop the right techniques to master the redundant communications and cyber systems that are going to be necessary to win. Still very winnable for the United States, but it’s much harder. But China is not the global maritime power. They’re a strong regional power.”
Prominent voices in the U.S. national security community are calling on Mr. Trump to ramp up maximum sanctions pressure on Russia. The latest episode of the Threat Status weekly podcast explores the president’s wariness over potential global market blowback that could be caused by dramatically increasing sanctions on Russian crude oil.
Emily Kilcrease, senior fellow and director of the Energy, Economics, and Security Program at the Center for a New American Security, explains the challenges being weighed by the White House. “What essentially you’re trying to do is make sure that Russia doesn’t make money from its oil sales, but still keep that oil on the market,” she says in an exclusive interview on the podcast, adding that there are “dual objectives that are in tension with each other, which is not crater global energy markets, but deny Russia the revenue.”
The Biden administration “tried to do this with the oil price cap, keeping oil on the market, but saying it can only be sold below a certain price,” says Ms. Kilcrease, who contends that the Trump administration “doesn’t seem to like that approach, so they’re going with the favorite tool of tariffs, and innovating on tariffs and going with secondary tariffs. But they still haven’t gotten around the fundamental market issue, which is that if you take Russian oil off the market, you’re going to have some pretty detrimental effects on global energy markets, and that could come back to hurt the U.S. economy.”
Chinese hackers linked to Beijing’s intelligence services are engaged in large-scale global cyberattacks against critical infrastructure, according to a joint international report from the National Security Agency and services from nine other nations.
The Chinese hacker group known as Salt Typhoon has been conducting cyber operations around the world since at least 2021, targeting networks related to telecommunications, government, transportation, lodging, military infrastructure and other sectors. “This cluster of cyber threat activity has been observed in the United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and other areas globally,” states the report, posted last week as a “Joint Cybersecurity Advisory” on the NSA’s website.
The document contains technical details on how the Chinese hackers use security vulnerabilities to gain access to networks for stealing information or planting digital trap doors that could be used for future sabotage.
China’s “pretense of neutrality is belied by its actions,” writes Threat Status opinion contributor Miles Yu, who notes how, “just weeks before Russia’s invasion, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin declared a ‘no limits partnership.’
“Since then, Beijing has helped Russia keep its war machine afloat through energy trade, technology transfers and sanctions evasion,” writes Mr. Yu. “For Ukraine to entertain the notion that such a power could guarantee its security would be to invite betrayal into the very heart of a postwar order.
“China also must be excluded for a deeper structural reason: The United States and its allies have borne the overwhelming costs of this war,” he writes, warning that “Beijing has positioned itself to reap dividends without sacrifice. The pattern is familiar. In Iraq and Afghanistan, America sacrificed thousands of lives, spent trillions of dollars and shouldered the burden of stabilizing broken states. Meanwhile, China opportunistically moved in afterward to claim the economic spoils.”
• Sept. 4 — The Digital Front Line: Building a Cyber-Resilient Taiwan, Hudson Institute
• Sept. 5 — Truth and Trust in the AI Supply Chain, Atlantic Council
• Sept. 9 — From Monroe to the Golden Age: Charting America’s Path in Latin America, Alexander Hamilton Society
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