Threat Status for Wednesday, September 17, 2025. Share this daily newsletter with your friends, who can sign up here. Send tips to National Security Editor Guy Taylor.
President Trump arrived in London for a state visit to highlight and renew the U.S.-Britain “special relationship.”
… The State Department on Wednesday designated four “Iran-aligned militia groups” as foreign terrorist organizations.
… The Treasury Department separately sanctioned Iranian financiers and others over $100 million in cryptocurrency transfers from Iran’s oil sales.
… The U.N. “snapback” sanctions on Iran could lead to a new escalation in the Persian Gulf, a Washington Institute for Near East Policy report says.
… The House Intelligence Committee’s chairman tells National Security Correspondent Bill Gertz that U.S. counterintelligence needs major reform amid rising Chinese spying threats.
… Israeli ground forces churned deeper into Gaza City on Wednesday as Palestinians fled.
… With the second invasion of the city in less than two years underway, Israel also struck Iran-backed Houthi militant targets in Yemen.
… And Sebastien Lai, the son of jailed Hong Kong democracy advocate and media mogul Jimmy Lai, speaks about his father’s case in an exclusive video interview with Washington Times Commentary Editor Kelly Sadler.
Multiple U.S. counterintelligence agencies charged with neutralizing foreign spy operations lack focus and the system needs major reform, according to House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Rick Crawford. The Arkansas Republican tells Mr. Gertz in an exclusive interview that China’s aggressive intelligence-gathering operations in the United States are the main focus of the reforms.
Spying by Russia, Iran, North Korea and Cuba will also be targeted, says Mr. Crawford, who spoke following committee passage last week of a major reform package within the fiscal 2026 intelligence authorization bill. The legislation is awaiting a full House vote.
The measure is called the Strategic Enhancement of Counterintelligence and Unifying Reform Efforts Act. A major element would be creation of a new National Counterintelligence Center, or NCIC, within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The new center would replace the current National Counterintelligence and Security Center that lacks the coordinating power to fuse activities by counterspy branches within the CIA, FBI, Defense Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, military services and other security agencies.
A combination of public shock at the treatment of South Korean workers in a Georgia immigration raid, legal measures taken by former sex workers for U.S. troops in Korea and uneven U.S. tariffs on Korean and Japanese autos is generating concern about a possible resurrection of mass anti-Americanism in South Korea.
Washington Times Asia Editor Andrew Salmon writes in a dispatch from Seoul that while animosity for the U.S. seemed to be at a lull in recent years, a resurgence could shake relations at a delicate time as the future of the bilateral U.S.-South Korea security alliance is currently under negotiation. South Korean President Lee Jae-myung had a successful summit with Mr. Trump in August, but the future of the bilateral security alliance remains to be worked out.
Koreans know a withdrawal of U.S. troops would necessitate massively increased defense spending and likely an extension of the unpopular draft. Lesser known is the contribution of U.S. forces to South Korea’s global borrowing costs and inward investment: Their presence helps underwrite the country’s sovereign credit ratings.
Retired four-star Adm. Robert P. Burke, who commanded U.S. Navy forces in Europe and Africa from 2020 to 2022, was sentenced Tuesday to six years in prison after he was convicted in a corruption case for steering lucrative government contracts to a government vendor — the New York-based tech company Next Jump — in exchange for a high-paying job.
A federal jury in the District of Columbia had found Burke, 62, of Coconut Creek, Florida, guilty on May 19 of conspiring to commit bribery, performing acts affecting a personal financial interest and concealing material facts from the United States. A separate trial for his co-defendants — Next Jump co-CEOs Yongchul Kim and Meghan Messenger — ended with a hung jury and a mistrial.
Federal prosecutors say Mr. Kim and Ms. Messenger offered Burke a post-retirement job with the company that included a $500,000 salary and stock options projected to be worth millions. In exchange, he ordered his staff to hire Next Jump to provide training materials and instructions to his command for more than $350,000. They also agreed that Burke would use his official position to influence other Navy officers to award further contracts to the company, estimated to be worth in the “triple-digit millions.”
Congress in 2019 passed the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act, a viselike instrument designed to pressure the brutal Assad regime and “it worked,” according to George Stifo, who writes in a op-ed for The Times that the problem is the Caesar Act “remains law” today and it is undermining the post-Assad government’s ability to draw international investment and reengage on positive footing with the rest of the world.
“Congress must repeal it. Only then can America shift from a policy of punishment to one of engagement, allowing Syria to begin reconstruction in earnest,” writes Mr. Stifo, who serves on the advisory board of the Syrian American Alliance for Peace and Prosperity.
“Washington can repeal the Caesar Act and still target war criminals: Mr. Assad, his associates, the Islamic State group and Iranian-backed militias. It can freeze illicit assets, support counterterrorism, back civil society and monitor Syria’s efforts to normalize relations with Israel, all while letting ordinary Syrians rebuild,” he writes, referring to former Syrian President Bashar Assad. “Lifting sanctions is morally right and strategically smart. It would allow the U.S. to reengage not through endless aid but through private investment from Syrian Americans and regional partners. It would also counter Iran and Russia’s influence.”
China should “reconsider its support” of Russian President Vladimir Putin in his “war of aggression in Ukraine and his goal of re-creating the Russian Empire,” according to Joseph R. DeTrani, who writes that Beijing “must be aware” of its history with Russia.
“Are the textbooks informing students of the 42 divisions, more than 1 million troops, that the Soviet Union deployed on China’s border in 1969, with indications that Moscow was considering a nuclear strike on Chinese nuclear facilities? Or the military clash that year on the Ussuri River, with both sides taking casualties?” writes Mr. DeTrani, a former high-level U.S. intelligence official and opinion contributor to Threat Status.
“Russia is the only country that has not returned Chinese territory taken during the Century of Humiliation and the unequal treaties imposed on a weak China during the 19th century and the rule of the Qing dynasty,” he writes, adding that “it was China’s relationship with the U.S. that contributed to China’s economic renaissance, now with the second-largest economy in the world” and that “a close relationship with a revanchist Russian Federation is not in China’s interest.”
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