Threat Status for Monday, September 29, 2025. Share this daily newsletter with your friends, who can sign up here. Send tips to National Security Editor Guy Taylor.
There are likely to be tense behind-the-scenes moments Monday as President Trump hosts Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House.
… Mr. Netanyahu says he’s working on a new ceasefire plan for Gaza with the White House, but critics warn that blowback from Israel’s military campaign is undermining Mr. Trump’s grand Abraham Accords vision for the Middle East.
… It’s “clear” that “the Israelis, our nominal allies and principal recipients of American largesse, have no intention whatsoever of stopping the killing in Gaza until there is no one left to kill, no matter what the Americans might say or want,” writes Washington Times columnist Michael McKenna.
… A new International Institute for Strategic Studies analysis examines Russia’s increased probing of NATO airspace, stating that “deterrence now rests on clear thresholds, consistent signaling and cost-effective air defense.”
… Denmark reported more drone sightings above its domestic military posts over the weekend, a day after NATO announced it would increase counter-drone operations in the Baltic Sea region.
… Danish authorities, meanwhile, have banned all civilian drone flights ahead of a European Union summit slated to be held in Copenhagen this week.
… Directed energy weaponry will be essential to the future of counter-drone operations, according to a top representative of Honeywell, who joined Threat Status for an exclusive video interview.
… Moldova’s pro-EU party won a parliamentary majority over the weekend, defeating groups that have been accused of pandering to Russia.
… And Vietnam’s president held a meeting with U.S. war veterans last week that included the handover of military identity cards from two missing American service members to relatives with the help of a POW-MIA activist group.
Wesley Sparks, director of Business Development at Honeywell, joined Threat Status for an exclusive video interview on the floor of the 2025 Air, Space & Cyber Conference to explain how directed energy “generally comes in two flavors: High-powered microwave or high-energy laser.”
Mr. Sparks goes inside the economic and technical benefits tied to the potential future deployment of directed energy in the realm of counter-drone weaponry. “Everyone knows that the trade-off cost of a kinetic effector against a cheap, $300 drone is not sustainable,” he says. “The magazine depth challenge of what’s on a ship, what’s out in theater that cannot be attrited left and right against these, again, $300 threats.”
With regard to future missions to counter small unmanned aerial systems, Mr. Sparks says high-energy lasers provide a “trade-off” of being a cost-effective approach with “very pointed” capabilities and limited side effects. In the future, he says, “It’s really the way that close-in air defense will be tackled.”
The latest episode of the Threat Status weekly podcast goes inside Russia’s increasing violations of NATO airspace, the Pentagon’s new restrictions on journalists and last week’s Air, Space & Cyber conference that played out inside a massive convention hall on the outskirts of Washington.
Then, John Cofrancesco, the founder of American AI Logistics, joins the show to talk about the future of government contracts in the age of artificial intelligence.
“Like all human factors, there are some people who are ready to take the leap, and then there’s some people who are very resistant,” says Mr. Cofrancesco. “If you actually look at supply chains overall, every interim step between the real producer and the real user creates an opportunity for value. It also creates an opportunity for procurement friction — and what AI is doing is it’s smoothing out that procurement cycle. It’s smoothing out that friction, so the cost of goods in the long run should come down.”
Several European leaders have pushed back at Mr. Trump’s warnings about unchecked immigration, but complaints about open borders from angry voters are fueling a political shift across the continent, with Denmark, Britain and Hungary the latest to clamp down on waves of migrants seeking asylum and opportunity in Europe.
Threat Status special correspondent Joseph Hammond offers a deep dive from the region, examining how populist right-wing parties with hawkish views on immigration have grown rapidly in recent years. The Alternative for Germany party holds 152 seats in the Bundestag after a surprise showing in elections earlier this year. In France, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally has a substantial bloc in the National Assembly and leads in national polling. Elsewhere in Europe, parties seeking tougher restrictions on immigration are already in power.
Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy won voters’ confidence after pledging to crack down on migrant boat crossings. Under Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party, Hungary’s construction of a fence along its southern border is a signature policy. The power of the grassroots movement is forcing left-wing politicians to move — haltingly, in most cases — to the right on immigration.
Mr. Trump has been “throwing threats around as if they were confetti” and “has not followed through on any of them,” according to national security and foreign affairs columnist Jed Babbin, who homes in on the president’s “50-day deadline for Russian President Vladimir Putin to make peace in Ukraine.”
“Frustrated by Mr. Putin’s inaction, he moved the deadline up to a 10-day period, which expired with the same result. When that deadline passed, Mr. Trump did nothing to penalize Russia,” Mr. Babbin writes in The Times, asserting that a similar pattern is afoot with regard to Venezuela, Afghanistan and the Israel-Hamas war.
“Mr. Trump should not be making empty threats,” he writes. “Our biggest enemies — China, Russia and Iran — are watching, studying and learning.”
Rick Berman takes issue with the “liberal media’s hand-wringing” over the Israeli military’s recent targeting of Hamas leaders meeting in Qatar, arguing that “historical precedent and common sense justify Israel’s targeting of Hamas leaders wherever they can be found.”
“In 2011, President Obama sent SEAL Team 6 into Pakistan to kill or capture Osama bin Laden. In 1980, President Carter authorized sending the Delta Force into Iran. His Operation Eagle Claw aborted, but the military had shoot-to-kill orders to rescue hostages in Tehran. Any media outrage was hard to find,” Mr. Berman, president of RBB Strategies, writes in an op-ed for The Times.
“Qatar’s government has hosted Hamas with immunity for more than a decade,” he writes, adding that it is “unknown to most” that “Qatar has spent tens of millions of dollars to whitewash its image while enabling this terrorist group,” and that “there is a long list of U.S. firms on the take for the Doha government, playing the double game of mediator and enabler.”
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