Threat Status for Monday, December 1, 2025. Share this daily newsletter with your friends, who can sign up here. Send tips to National Security Editor Guy Taylor.
President Trump is downplaying reports that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered U.S. forces to strike a suspected drug boat in the Caribbean a second time after an initial strike failed to kill two crewmen.
… Key congressional lawmakers want a “full accounting” of the incident.
… A second, or “follow-on,” strike would raise significant questions, because the initial strike almost surely would have stopped the boat from moving drugs northward — the publicly stated goal of U.S. military operations in the region.
… Nine domestic U.S. Army posts have been selected to take part in an initiative to deploy micronuclear reactors on military bases.
… An Israeli military incursion to track down suspected terrorists in southern Syria killed 10 people and left five Israeli troops injured.
… Leaked audio from special envoy Steve Witkoff’s phone call with a top Russian official shows how desperately the Trump administration wants Moscow to engage in peace talks.
… North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un is vowing to upgrade his outdated air force with nuclear capabilities.
… The Trump administration says the Afghan refugee accused of shooting two National Guard members was likely radicalized in the U.S. after entering the country in 2021.
… And the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party has fired back at Threat Status contributor and Washington Times columnist Miles Yu.
Russia launched a deadly drone assault against Ukraine over the weekend while Kyiv’s forces targeted Russian oil tankers in the Black Sea, the latest round of violence between the two sides as U.S. and Ukrainian negotiators met in Florida in the hope of reaching a deal to end the war.
The two sides are still discussing Mr. Trump’s proposed peace plan. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said “much can change” over the course of talks. Thus far, neither side has provided details on changes made to Mr. Trump’s initial plan. The issue of territorial concessions from Ukraine to Russia is considered the biggest obstacle to a deal.
The initial draft of Mr. Trump’s plan called for Ukraine to cede land in the Donbas to Russia, accept limits on its military and agree not to join NATO. In return, Ukraine would receive security guarantees from the U.S. and European nations. However, those guarantees were initially vague, and it’s unclear whether the proposal had any concrete mechanisms to prevent future Russian attacks on Ukraine.
While the Trump administration has significantly curtailed the number of direct press engagements by officials at the Pentagon and the State Department, Moscow and Beijing are using the public podiums of their foreign ministries as staging grounds for anti-U.S. propaganda campaigns.
Times Reporter Vaughn Cockayne reports that the Chinese Foreign Ministry held at least 20 press briefings at its headquarters in Beijing in November, often fielding questions from Western press outlets such as Reuters and Bloomberg on a range of hot topics. The State Department held a single question-and-answer press conference during the same period.
The shift in communications comes as the U.S. juggles multiple issues such as the Russia-Ukraine war, maintaining the ceasefire between Hamas and Israel in Gaza and offering support for Syria’s postwar government. Mr. Trump’s supporters argue that daily briefings often lack substance and give a stage to what administration officials characterize as anti-Trump mainstream U.S. news outlets.
In areas of Cambodia and the Thai-Myanmar border, tightly controlled compounds have sprung up where criminals and possibly coerced victims undertake online and telephone scams. The Treasury Department has taken notice, warning that the scams are “targeting people around the world, particularly Americans.”
Times Asia Editor Andrew Salmon reports that the operations are enabled by the opacity of financial transactions in the region, the corruption of local officials and general lawlessness. They are also run by what experts say is a new breed of criminals.
The new, online criminals, according to one risk analyst, are “mainland Chinese nationals who have taken advantage of open borders and lax tourist visa requirements.” Key nodes of activity are the borders of Myanmar, torn by war, and Cambodia, where the rule of law is weak. Thailand, the source believes, may provide a money-laundering hub.
The Trump administration secured “a significant national security win [in October] by negotiating a one-year pause on Chinese export controls on rare earth elements,” writes David Sauer, who notes that “China currently dominates the global supply chain for rare earths, which are vital to manufacturing automobiles, defense systems and other key products.
“The administration now has a critical opportunity to address an even greater emerging threat to U.S. national security by moving quickly to ban imports of polysilicon sourced from China,” Mr. Sauer, a retired senior CIA officer, writes in an op-ed for The Times.
“Polysilicon is used in solar energy technologies,” he writes. “In a higher-purity form, it is fundamental to the manufacture of semiconductor chips required for military, energy and telecommunications systems, as well as artificial intelligence data centers.”
There is a presidential runoff in Chile on Dec. 14, and if Jose Antonio Kast — the conservative in the race — wins, he would have to show he can “build a coalition of his own, bringing together all the elements of the disparate right,” according to Alvaro Vargas Llosa, who notes that right-of-center parties have already claimed a combined 76 seats in the country’s Chamber of Deputies, just one short of the 77 seats needed for a simple majority.
Conservatives also have claimed half of Chile’s Senate seats in a “rightward shift” that’s “consistent with recent trends elsewhere in Latin America,” Mr. Vargas Llosa, a senior fellow with the Independent Institute think tank, writes in an op-ed for The Times.
“In Bolivia, once a bastion of the populist left, a (sort of) free-market president is now in power, supported by an outspoken free-market leader in the Bolivian Congress,” Mr. Vargas Llosa writes. “In Peru and Colombia, meanwhile, where elections will be held next year, the right is ahead in the polls. And in Argentina, another free-market advocate — President Javier Milei — recently received a strong vote of confidence in the country’s midterm elections (thanks to a decidedly non-free market bailout from the United States).”
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