Threat Status for Wednesday, November 26, 2025. Share this daily newsletter with your friends, who can sign up here. Send tips to National Security Correspondent Ben Wolfgang.
There are new behind-the-scenes details about exactly how the Trump administration’s Russia-Ukraine peace plan came together. Leaked audio reportedly from a call between White House special envoy Steve Witkoff and Kremlin adviser Yuri Ushakov seems to indicate Mr. Witkoff advising the Russian side how to pitch a peace proposal to President Trump.
… Mr. Trump defended Mr. Witkoff after the revelations. But the story will likely fuel the narrative that the U.S.-backed plan is, at its core, a glorified Russian wishlist. Still, Washington and Kyiv have agreed to many of the principles of the proposal, though key issues such as territorial concessions are unresolved.
… More detail is emerging about Kirill Dmitriev, the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund who also reportedly played a key role in helping to craft the Ukraine peace proposal.
… Taiwan says it will spend an additional $40 billion on defense to counter growing threats from communist China.
… The Taiwanese effort will include the development of a multilayered “T-Dome” air defense system, capable of countering Chinese drones, missiles and warplanes.
… Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth escalated his feud with Sen. Mark Kelly, a retired Navy captain representing Arizona.
… Mr. Kelly and the other five Democrats who appeared in a video urging troops to refuse illegal orders say they’re facing an FBI investigation.
… And Colombia’s president says oil is the real driving factor behind the Trump administration’s pressure campaign on Venezuela.
Military Correspondent Mike Glenn is tracking what could be a historic break between two American institutions: the U.S. military and Scouting America, formerly known as the Boy Scouts of America.
In a draft memo to Congress, first reported by NPR, Mr. Hegseth said the organization’s promotion in recent years of a diversity, equity and inclusion agenda at the expense of its merit-based policies has prompted the Pentagon to consider severing all military support for the organization. He accused Scouting America of being “genderless” and attacking “boy-friendly spaces,” according to the memo.
The military has supported the organization for more than 100 years. If Mr. Hegseth cuts that support, medical and logistical help would be suspended to the organization’s National Jamboree, which brings in as many as 20,000 Scouts to West Virginia each year. Congress mandates that the U.S. military support the event. However, federal law gives the defense secretary an option to withdraw support for the gathering if it becomes detrimental to national security.
Scouting America President and CEO Roger Krone fired back at Mr. Hegseth and said the notion that Scouting America is no longer a meritocracy is “clearly uninformed.”
The original plan was for the Navy to buy up to 20 of the multi-mission Constellation class guided-missile frigates at a combined cost of more than $22 billion. The company Fincantieri Marinette Marine was awarded a contract in 2020 to design and construct the lead frigate.
But the program, aimed at delivering capable and versatile small surface combatant vessels to replace the problem-plagued littoral combat ships, has faced major design and construction challenges. Navy Secretary John C. Phelan announced in a social media video Tuesday that the service is making a “strategic shift” away from the program.
The Navy and the defense contractor reached a “comprehensive framework” that terminates the last four ships of the class, which were not yet under construction. Fincantieri will keep working on the first two ships in the class, the USS Constellation and the USS Congress, the secretary said.
Beijing’s hybrid warfare against other key players in the Pacific — namely Japan and the Philippines — has sparked blowback that could severely limit China’s military options in any future military operation against Taiwan.
Washington Times Asia Editor Andrew Salmon is tracking the recent comments from Japanese Defense Minister Shinjirō Koizumi, who spoke to reporters Sunday on Yonaguni island, just 65 miles off Taiwan, about the placement of medium-range air defense systems there. The comments were surely heard in Beijing, which is already infuriated by Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s recent remarks equating Taiwanese security and Japanese security.
The U.S. and Japan are working closely to build up defenses on Yonaguni island and elsewhere in the Pacific as part of the “first island chain strategy.” At the same time, the Philippines has been building up the northernmost island chain, Batanes. U.S. troops have also been deploying long-range missile batteries to Philippine soil.
The efforts could deny the strategic Bashi Channel, between Taiwan and the Philippines, to Chinese shipping. The closure of maritime choke points on both sides of Taiwan could present major problems for Chinese war planners.
Add to that the new $40 billion in defense spending announced by Taipei this week, and regional defenses against Chinese aggression are becoming much more robust.
Miles Yu, director of the China Center at the Hudson Institute and a Threat Status contributor, writes in a Times op-ed that Ms. Takaichi has offered a very geopolitically useful and potentially game-changing argument for protecting Taiwan from any potential Chinese military aggression.
And the U.S., Mr. Yu says, should follow her blueprint and shift the conversation around the defense of Taiwan away from broad principles such as the protection of democracy, as worthy a goal as that is. Instead, he argues, the Trump administration and its allies should zero in on the national security and economic consequences for their own respective countries.
The Japanese prime minister focused heavily on the impacts a Chinese attack on Taiwan would have on Japanese energy shipments and the country’s defense perimeter.
“Like Japan, the United States faces a dramatically altered strategic landscape if Taiwan falls under Beijing’s control,” Mr. Yu writes. “It would give China the last strategic choke point in the region and connect China’s East China Sea claims to its South China Sea ambitions, essentially rendering the entire West Pacific under Beijing’s control. … Most important, it would allow Beijing to challenge U.S. naval and air dominance in ways that would directly affect American economic and security interests for decades.”
Russia’s key allies, China, Iran and North Korea, are watching closely to see how and when the Russia-Ukraine war comes to an end. If Russia escapes with relatively light punishment after invading its neighbor, that could signal to other authoritarian regimes that U.S. deterrence is on the ropes.
Threat Status contributor Joseph R. DeTrani, former associate director of national intelligence, explores those dynamics in a new op-ed for The Times. What’s clear, he argues, is that U.S. and Western deterrences failed in their goal of stopping Russian military aggression in Eastern Europe. The question now is whether that objective can survive future tests.
“China, North Korea and Iran, allies of Russia, are watching closely to see how the war in Ukraine ends. Indeed, their interest in the peace plan includes interest in the consequences meted out to Russia, given that Russia invaded Ukraine after it, the U.S. and the United Kingdom signed the 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, pledging to respect Ukraine’s independence, sovereignty and existing borders,” Mr. DeTrani writes.
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