Threat Status for Wednesday, September 3, 2025. Share this daily newsletter with your friends, who can sign up here. Send tips to National Security Editor Guy Taylor.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un flanked Chinese President Xi Jinping on the VIP viewing stand — the balcony of Beijing’s Forbidden City — for China’s massive military parade.
… President Trump wrote on Truth Social: “Please give my warmest regards to Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong Un, as you conspire against The United States of America.”
… Here’s a look at the advanced weapons China had on display.
… Russia unleashed an overnight blitz of more than 500 drones and two dozen missiles targeting Ukrainian civilian infrastructure.
… U.S. military forces fired on a ship manned by narco-terrorists in international waters off the coast of Venezuela.
… Secretary of State Marco Rubio meets Wednesday with Mexico’s president about creating a joint investigative body to combat the northward flow of fentanyl and weapons.
… The journal Nature has a deep study on how conflict is shaped by poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa.
… And the U.S. Coast Guard has awarded $137 million to the Whiting-Turner Contracting Co. for work on modernizing Base Seattle to enable Arctic and Antarctic operations.
The Chinese Communist Party sought with its massive military parade on Wednesday to project itself as an impenetrable world power, celebrating the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II with choreographed optics that brought together the top leaders of the world’s authoritarian powers and carefully ignored the U.S. role in ending the conflict that shaped global geopolitics through the last eight decades.
Mr. Trump sniped at the gathering from his Truth Social platform, emphasizing Beijing’s pointed omission of the massive U.S. support and “blood” that helped China secure its freedom from Japanese invaders. The president added a sarcastic note about the presence of the leaders of the growing anti-U.S. alliance of China, Russia and North Korea: “Please give my warmest regards to Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong Un, as you conspire against The United States of America.”
Amid global cleavages between authoritarian continental powers and maritime democracies, the leaders of China’s other World War II allies — France and the U.K., as well as Commonwealth states that fought in the Pacific — Australia, India and New Zealand — were no-shows at Wednesday’s parade in Beijing. Other absentees were leaders of regional democracies Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.
Notably, Chinese communists played little role in defeating the Japanese during World War II. The CCP did not take power until after the war. Nationalists who fled to Taiwan during a civil war with the communists in 1949 had conducted most of China’s fighting during the war.
Mr. Trump said the U.S. military carried out a strike on Tuesday that “shot out” a ship operated by “narco-terrorists” in international waters carrying drugs from Venezuela. The president said Tuesday the ship was being operated by Tren de Aragua, the Venezuela-based gang that the U.S. has declared a terrorist organization. He said 11 members of the gang were killed in the operation.
The development comes amid rising tensions between Washington and Caracas. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro said Monday that he “would constitutionally declare a republic in arms” if Venezuela were attacked by U.S. forces battling cartels in the Caribbean.
It also comes as Mr. Rubio visits the region. State Department officials say immigration, cartel issues and countering Chinese influence are expected to dominate his stops in Mexico and Ecuador. The trip marks Mr. Rubio’s third to the region since joining the Trump administration. He’s slated to meet Wednesday with Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum for a discussion on a new security agreement that would create a joint investigative body to combat the northward flow of fentanyl and weapons across the U.S.-Mexico border.
The Russia-Ukraine conflict has brought the planet closer to a near-apocalyptic nuclear incident than any other clash in recent history. National Security Correspondent Ben Wolfgang offers a deep analysis, examining International Atomic Energy Agency assessments of Russia’s attack last year on Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant and an attack last month on a nuclear plant in Russia’s western Kursk region.
Attacks on such electrical plants are generally far more dangerous than military strikes on enrichment facilities such as the Iranian sites bombed by American warplanes in June. “That poses a lot less of a radiological risk, some chemical risk, isolated to humans around those facilities. But attacks against power plants are fundamentally different,” says Joseph Rodgers, deputy director of the Project on Nuclear Issues at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“Nuclear power plants contain very high levels of radiation when they’re operating,” Mr. Rodgers says. “The attack we saw by, probably, Ukrainian forces against the Kursk plant, it seems that the drone struck a power transformer. … If there’s a massive attack against the reactor vessel or multiple reactors, especially at Kursk … you could have an instance worse than Chernobyl.”
When Mr. Trump entered the White House, “few expected him to reshape America’s approach to South Asia,” according to Christopher Shays, a former Republican congressman from Connecticut, who notes how, “for decades, U.S. policy had tilted toward India — courting its market, cultivating its democracy and counting on New Delhi to serve as a counterweight to Beijing.
“Pakistan, by contrast, was cast as an unreliable partner, useful only as a proxy to fight terrorists in Afghanistan but accused of taking U.S. aid for granted,” Mr. Shays writes in a column for The Washington Times. “In the past year, however, Mr. Trump has unsettled that orthodoxy.
“In his own disruptive way,” the former congressman writes, Mr. Trump “has forged a more strategic balance between Pakistan and India that recognizes Pakistan’s enduring importance to regional stability and reminds India that Washington’s support is not unconditional.”
Jason Redman, a retired Navy SEAL, writes that the U.S. government made “a series of shortsighted, disastrous decisions that abandoned two decades of blood, sacrifice and fragile progress” in Afghanistan. “Overnight, everything we had fought for was surrendered back to the Taliban, the same extremists who had harbored al Qaeda and killed thousands of Americans on 9/11,” Mr. Redman writes in an op-ed for The Times.
“We turned Afghanistan back over to the terrorists who killed our citizens and teammates,” he writes. “We consigned a generation of Afghan women to the shadows. We betrayed allies who believed in the ideals we claimed to represent.
“Here at home, I hear endless debates about being ‘woke,’ but where were those voices when Afghanistan fell?” Mr. Redman asks. “Where was the outrage when we abandoned millions to a regime that hates women, free thought, gay people, technology — freedom itself?”
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