Threat Status for Monday, November 3, 2025. Share this daily newsletter with your friends, who can sign up here. Send tips to National Security Editor Guy Taylor.
… President Trump says Taiwan didn’t come up in his talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping, but he’s certain Beijing won’t act against the U.S.-aligned island democracy while Mr. Trump is in office.
… Mr. Trump made the comments in a “60 Minutes” interview that aired over the weekend, during which he declined to say if the U.S. would strike Venezuela, insisted U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids could go further and asserted that Nvidia won’t provide its advanced Blackwell microchips to China.
… On a separate front, Mr. Trump threatened on Saturday to send U.S. troops to Nigeria if the government there “continues to allow the killing of Christians.”
… A spokesperson for Nigerian President Bola Tinubu said Sunday Nigeria would accept U.S. military assistance, but Mr. Trump should respect the African nation’s sovereignty.
… Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth inked a 10-year defense agreement with his Indian counterpart during his Asia trip last week.
… During a stop in Hanoi, Mr. Hegseth said resolving cases of missing Americans from the Vietnam War remains a top priority of the Trump administration.
The killer robots that have been staples of science fiction and Hollywood fantasy are no longer imaginary: Ruthlessly efficient artificial-intelligence-driven machines are meting out death daily on the battlefields of Ukraine. Threat Status Special Correspondent in Ukraine Guillaume Ptak offers a deep dive, writing in a dispatch from Kyiv that the war raging on Ukraine’s eastern plains is increasingly being fought by machines.
Airborne drones constantly scan the broken landscape while shooting video. Computers use algorithms to sift through hours of footage in seconds. Battlefield software fuses sensor feeds into target lists. Semi-autonomous systems use those lists to help human operators steer drones carrying explosives through electronic jamming, smoke and adverse weather.
“It’s not about the future; it’s about the present,” says Yaroslav Honchar, co-founder of Aerorozvidka, a group of Ukrainian volunteers who have become experts on drone warfare while helping defend the country. “Artificial intelligence is already here because the battlefield demands it,” Mr. Honchar says. “Sometimes we have more drones than operators, so we had to find ways to compensate.”
The defense secretary is urging member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations to join a new maritime awareness program that will identify and respond to growing Chinese “aggression and coercion” in the South China Sea.
At a meeting with defense ministers from ASEAN countries over the weekend, Mr. Hegseth warned that China’s “intimidation, harassment and illegal activities” in the South China Sea were a wake-up call. “China’s destabilizing actions have only increased,” he said. “Some of you have been on the active and receiving end of it — ramming, blasting water cannons at ships and baselessly claiming that there’s trespassing going on, unlawfully claiming jurisdiction over waters that are not theirs.”
The blunt talk on China came a day after Mr. Hegseth held his first in-person meeting with China’s Defense Minister Dong Jun at the ASEAN defense ministers’ conference. The talks included candid exchanges on Taiwan, which America is pledged under U.S. law to defend with weapons sales, and the large-scale Chinese military operations around the island that are described by U.S. military leaders as a rehearsal for an invasion.
Mr. Hegseth says Mr. Trump’s announcement last week that the U.S. will start testing nuclear weapons “on an equal basis” as Russia and China was necessary to strengthen the credibility of the U.S. nuclear arsenal and would help prevent nuclear war.
The defense secretary told reporters on Friday that the Pentagon will partner with the Energy Department, which is in charge of maintaining nuclear warheads, on resuming underground tests. “The president was clear: We need to have a credible nuclear deterrent. That is the baseline of our deterrence,” Mr. Hegseth said while attending the ASEAN defense ministers meeting in Malaysia.
Mr. Trump said the decision to begin testing again after a 33-year hiatus under a self-imposed testing moratorium was based on adversaries resuming nuclear tests. He provided no details on those tests. However, Russian President Vladimir Putin said recently that if the United States begins nuclear testing again, Russia will also conduct nuclear tests.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban says he’ll ask Mr. Trump for an official exemption from U.S. sanctions on Russian oil when the two leaders meet in Washington this week for a bilateral summit that is likely delicate for both. Mr. Orban is widely considered to be a close Trump ally but finds himself in the crosshairs of the president’s attempt to use oil sanctions to pressure Russia into talks to end its war on Ukraine.
Mr. Orban argued in remarks Friday that Hungary, as a landlocked nation, is reliant on pipeline networks for its oil, specifically the Druzhba pipeline. The U.S. sanctions, which target Russian oil companies Rosneft and Lukoil, would force Hungary to fill its oil demand elsewhere. “We have to make the Americans understand this peculiar situation if we want them to allow exemptions from the American sanctions against Russia,” Mr. Orban said.
The Orban government also seeks to avoid upcoming European Union restrictions on Russian oil. Despite being a member of NATO and the EU, Hungary has sought exemptions since Russia invaded Ukraine. Mr. Orban has, however, been sharply critical of the invasion.
Mr. Trump has “few choices with respect to forcing an end to the Russian war on Ukraine,” Jed Babbin, a national security and foreign affairs columnist, writes in a Washington Times op-ed.
The president “could sanction the Russian ‘oil-igarchs’ personally as well as their companies, but that would probably have as little effect as the sanctions he has already imposed,” Mr. Babbin writes. “He certainly won’t sanction Mr. Putin, with whom he still thinks he has a good relationship, despite all other indications.
“Mr. Trump could hold NATO’s feet to the fire — meaning Turkey’s — on importing Russian oil, which would probably have no effect because Turkey is our most unreliable NATO ally,” he writes. “For Mr. Trump to gain ground in the Russia-Ukraine war, he will have to be much tougher with Mr. Putin, but he has little leverage to do so.”
• Nov. 11 — Free Showing of the Award-winning Documentary ‘Honor in the Air: Remembering Captain Scott Alwin and the 68th Assault Helicopter Company,’ Washington Policy Institute
• Nov. 13 — The Fourth Intelligence Revolution: Anthony Vinci on AI, Geopolitics and the Future of Espionage, Hudson Institute
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