Threat Status for Tuesday, November 18, 2025. Share this daily newsletter with your friends, who can sign up here. Send tips to National Security Editor Guy Taylor.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is headed to Turkey to restart peace negotiations, but Russia says it’s not coming.
… Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is making his first White House visit since the 2018 killing and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident journalist, at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul.
… President Trump says he hopes the crown prince will join the Abraham Accords normalizing relations with Israel.
… The U.N. Security Council has approved the Trump administration’s plan for an international stabilization force in Gaza.
… China and Russia blasted the plan but abstained from the Security Council vote, paving the way for its passage.
… U.S. military commanders are increasingly describing South Korea as a key military ally for deterring and containing China.
… FBI Director Kash Patel says China agreed to cooperate in halting shipments of fentanyl during talks this month in Beijing that were the first in a decade by an FBI director visiting China.
… And the Department of Homeland Security says it arrested an illegal immigrant from Uzbekistan who got a driver’s license in Pennsylvania, despite being accused of terrorism in his home country.
Mr. Trump will lobby the crown prince to normalize relations with Israel when he rolls out the red carpet for the Middle East leader Tuesday in Washington. Securing diplomatic and commercial ties between the Middle East power and Israel would be a major coup for Mr. Trump.
It could prompt other Arab nations to join the Abraham Accords, a signature Trump project that normalized relations between Israel and Bahrain, Morocco and the United Arab Emirates in 2020. “We’re going to be discussing it. I hope that Saudi Arabia will be going into the Abraham Accords very shortly,” Mr. Trump told reporters ahead of the meeting.
Saudi Arabia is seeking to reassert its role as America’s most vital Arab partner, particularly after Mr. Trump signed a September deal to guarantee the security and territorial integrity of Qatar, a much smaller Arab state. The crown prince will bring a wish list. He wants to purchase F-35 fighter jets, hoping to overcome U.S. reservations about whether the technology could be stolen and sold to rogue nations such as China.
For the second time in less than a week, a top U.S. military commander has described South Korea as a forward player in U.S.-led efforts to deter and contain China — a shift in defense strategy that would be seismic for Seoul, whose military traditionally focuses on North Korea and whose government has expressed enthusiasm for improving relations with China, its key trading partner.
Washington Times Asia Editor Andrew Salmon examines the statements from U.S. commanders, which have come just two weeks after Mr. Trump, on a visit to South Korea, approved South Korean President Lee Jae-myung’s request for a proprietary U.S. weapon that Seoul has sought for more than two decades: nuclear-powered attack submarines.
Speaking to Korean reporters last week during a trip to assess South Korean shipbuilding capabilities, Adm. Daryl Caudle, the U.S. Navy’s chief of operations, voiced a “natural expectation” that the nuclear boats South Korea is set to procure from the U.S. would join efforts to deter China. Gen. Xavier Brunson, the commander of U.S. Forces Korea, added to the comments Monday, calling for a new understanding of South Korea’s geostrategic positioning in the region, especially regarding China.
Estonia says Moscow issued bogus denials that three Russian MiG-31 fighter jets crossed into Estonian airspace in mid-September. Estonian Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna said during a discussion Monday at the Atlantic Council think tank in Washington that the Russian incursions were a brazen violation of the NATO member’s sovereignty.
The Russian fighters flew over the Gulf of Finland for about 12 minutes before being escorted out by Italian F-35s. Russia’s Ministry of Defense and the Kremlin both denied the violation. They said the MiG-31 jets were on a scheduled flight over neutral waters of the Baltic Sea and did not cross any state borders. “We took it very seriously, and NATO reacted in a very solid way. It was under NATO control,” Mr. Tsahkna said on Monday. “The Russians said it was ‘fake news.’”
Following the incident, Estonia invoked Article 4 of the NATO charter, which calls for consultation among members. Mr. Trump responded at the time by saying NATO countries should shoot down Russian aircraft that violate their airspace.
The Saudi crown prince’s visit to Washington “promises to be much more than a routine diplomatic stop,” according to Mohammed Alhamed, a Saudi geopolitical analyst,and Jason Epstein, president of Southfive Strategies LLC, who write that the visit “will likely reaffirm and enhance the U.S.-Saudi partnership as the cornerstone of stability in the traditionally regressive and volatile Middle East and beyond.
“Saudi Arabia has been an indispensable interlocutor in helping the Trump administration bring about a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, and the kingdom vowed to back efforts for the strip’s reconstruction and political rehabilitation,” Mr. Alhamed and Mr. Epstein write in an op-ed for The Washington Times.
Similarly, the meeting between MBS, as he is called, and Mr. Trump “might replant the seeds for regional integration, sidelined as a result of the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, allowing for an eventual deal establishing diplomatic ties between the kingdom and Israel,” they write. “Although Saudi officials have repeatedly stated that its primary condition remains a two-state solution, Mr. Trump said recently on ’60 Minutes’ that he doesn’t believe there is a prerequisite.”
The regime in Caracas, Venezuela, is “less a government than a protection racket: a potpourri of criminal patronage networks, foreign intelligence advisers and illicit-finance pipelines,” writes Martin Rodriguez y Rodriguez, who asserts that the regime “lacks the popular support and social legitimacy to sustain an insurgency.
“The country’s military, though parading a diverse mix of air defenses, is hollowed by corruption and neglect. The regime’s power structure can be better understood as a Mexican standoff — that is, an uneasy equilibrium of distrust and criminal dependence where no faction moves because each fears the other’s retaliation,” Mr. Rodriguez y Rodriguez writes in an op-ed for The Times. “This dynamic sustains an illusion of cohesion even as the regime corrodes from within. A material threat to its safety and riches will trigger flight, not fight.
“Naturally, there will be post-transition security challenges. The risk of criminal anarchy metastasizing is real,” he writes. “Still, that is a categorically different problem from civil war, one that a post-Maduro government could manage through deliberate state power and international cooperation,” he added, referring to Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.
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