Mr. Hegseth has summoned top U.S. military generals and admirals to the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia for a major meeting next week. The Pentagon has not publicly revealed details of the meeting or its focus. But the suddenness of the gathering and the unusual size — hundreds of top commanders are expected to descend on Quantico from active-duty posts around the world — have sparked international headlines.

The development comes amid much-publicized hand-wringing over the Pentagon’s sweeping new rules for journalists, including the demand that reporters sign a pledge not to release any “unauthorized” information or risk losing access to the Pentagon, which would deeply erode news coverage of the nation’s military.

National Security Correspondent Ben Wolfgang goes inside the new policy, which is the latest in a series of game-changing moves at the Pentagon under Mr. Hegseth, who says most of the changes are designed to restore what he calls the “warrior ethos.” Analysts and media law scholars say the effort to control the press is a violation of the First Amendment and may not survive legal scrutiny.

India on Thursday test-launched a nuclear-capable intermediate-range ballistic missile that is designed to use the country’s vast network of railways to avoid detection by enemy forces. The Agni Prime missile was fired from a rail-based launcher pulled by an Indian Railways locomotive. Defense Minister Rajnath Singh said the successful mission demonstrated India’s growing strategic deterrence capabilities.

The next-generation Agni Prime is designed to cover a range of more than 1,200 miles and is equipped with “various advanced features,” Mr. Singh said in a statement. Threat Status Pentagon Correspondent Mike Glenn reports in a dispatch from New Delhi that prior to Thursday’s launch, the Agni Prime was deployed on truck launchers, but the new test firing marked its debut as a rail-based weapons platform.

Ballistic missiles are traditionally launched from fixed missile sites. However, that leaves them vulnerable to a preemptive nuclear strike. India’s railway network is one of the largest and busiest in the world, comprising more than 42,000 miles of track. Indian officials refer to the system as “a vital component of national security.”

South Korea’s point man on North Korea warned this week that Pyongyang’s uranium enrichment programs possess enough fissile material for potentially hundreds of nuclear devices and has plans for more. “It is urgent to stop [them],” Unification Minister Chung Dong-young told a press conference in Seoul, saying it would be “desirable” for U.S.-North Korea talks to “take place as soon as possible.”

South Korean President Lee Jae-myung, meanwhile, used his speech to the U.N. General Assembly to call for a resumption of North-South relations toward the goal of denuclearizing North Korea. It’s unclear whether the Trump administration has the foreign policy bandwidth to engage Pyongyang. Prior to taking office in January, Mr. Trump tapped Richard Grenell to be special envoy for North Korea. But there has been little movement since, and in February, the president named Mr. Grenell as interim executive director of the Kennedy Center in Washington.  

Some believe Pyongyang could use asymmetric delivery assets — such as nuclearized mini submarines or disguised trawlers that could infiltrate South Korean or Japanese harbors. That threat array sparked high-profile diplomatic initiatives in the past, including the China-sponsored “Six Party Talks” and bilateral leader-level diplomacy by the United States. The last high-level negotiations broke off after Mr. Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un failed to reach an agreement in a 2019 summit in Vietnam.

A meeting between Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim “could develop into a series of meetings that result in North Korea’s halting the further production of fissile material for nuclear weapons, with no additional nuclear tests and a moratorium on ballistic missile launches,” writes Joseph  R. DeTrani, a former high-level U.S. intelligence official and opinion contributor to Threat Status.

“This would be a major success for Mr. Trump and the U.S. It would also lessen tension with South Korea and Japan,” writes Mr. DeTrani, who states that the eventual goal “should continue to be complete and verifiable denuclearization. However, this doesn’t have to be up front.

“It’s an ultimate goal that should be pursued as relations with North Korea improve, with an action-for-action process: As North Korea halts the production of fissile material and stops producing more nuclear weapons and refrains from ballistic missile launches, U.N. sanctions imposed after 2016 could be lifted,” Mr. DeTrani writes. “This could be accompanied by security assurances and economic development assistance, as well as discussion of liaison offices in our respective capitals. North Korea should be encouraged to rejoin the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.”

Andrew King hones in on Mr. Trump’s announcement that Chinese President Xi Jinping has “approved” a TikTok deal. “Let’s stop pretending this is a culture war. It’s a power, data and capital war, one we are choosing to lose,” writes Mr. King, an investor at Bastille Ventures, investing in critical national security technologies, and president of Future Union. “TikTok is not allowed to operate in China, but it dominates the attention of American teenagers and 20-somethings because advertising budgets and American capital chose it.”

“Last year,” he writes in The Washington Times, “our research at Future Union mapped the money trail. U.S. public pensions have roughly $8.1 billion committed to funds with ByteDance investments; university endowments tally about $1 billion more; major nonprofits and foundations are in the mix, especially the Robert Wood Johnson, the MacArthur and the Mellon foundations, helping finance the Chinese Communist Party’s most effective propaganda tool. 

“This is not incidental. China’s government holds a ‘golden share’ and a board seat in a key ByteDance subsidiary, embedding state leverage by design,” he writes. The deal Mr. Trump approved Thursday “posits a structure in which a U.S. company, Oracle, would host all U.S. data. Yet any ‘deal’ that preserves ownership, licensing or algorithmic influence, keeping America’s information environment downstream of a regime that can compel cooperation, is illusory. The threat is not just access to data but also the ability to steer the feed.”

• Sept. 26-30 — U.N. General Assembly High-level Week 2025, United Nations
 
• Sept. 30 — Growing the Midwest Quantum Ecosystem, Center for Strategic & International Studies
 
• Oct. 6 — Big Deal, Small Deal or No Deal? Possible Outcomes of a Trump-Xi Summit, Center for Strategic & International Studies
 
• Oct. 8 — Investing in the North Korean People: Broadening Access to Information in North Korea, Stimson Center
 
• Oct. 8 — Relearning Great Power Diplomacy: A Conversation with Wess Mitchell, Hudson Institute