Threat Status for Tuesday, December 2, 2025. Share this daily newsletter with your friends, who can sign up here. Send tips to National Security Editor Guy Taylor.
The White House is hoping today’s Moscow visit by special envoy Steve Witkoff and President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner will produce a breakthrough in Ukraine talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
… An analysis by Chatham House says Mr. Putin’s visit to India later this week is aimed at reaffirming New Delhi-Moscow relations just as Mr. Trump is applying pressure to downgrade them.
… Mr. Trump is doubling down as criticism over the drug boat second strike incident reaches a fever pitch.
… Canada has joined a major European Union defense fund in a bid to diversify its military spending away from the U.S.
… A joint operation by U.S. troops and Syrian security personnel destroyed more than a dozen Islamic State weapons sites in Syria just two weeks after Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa signed an anti-terrorism pact with Mr. Trump.
… After warning Israel not to destabilize Syria, Mr. Trump has invited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to make another visit to the White House.
… And JPMorgan Chase, which announced plans in October to bolster U.S. national security, now says it will pump money into venture-backed defense startups as well as legacy companies.
The White House confirmed this week that Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Kushner would travel to Russia following Mr. Witkoff’s meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his national security adviser, Rustem Umerov, on Monday.
The developments follow the leak of a 28-point U.S.-backed Ukraine peace proposal that set off alarms in Kyiv and among Washington’s European allies last month. That draft, allegedly written by Mr. Witkoff with help from Russian diplomats, would have forced Ukraine to concede contested regions to Russia, give up its goal of joining NATO and commit to severely reducing its military.
U.S. and Ukrainian diplomats met in Geneva on Nov. 23 to discuss a European counterproposal. After the meeting, Secretary of State Marco Rubio insisted that major progress had been made toward peace, with only a few remaining issues to be resolved. Russia has thus far insisted that it has not seen a revised version of the peace plan.
Mr. Trump huddled with his national security team Monday evening amid a growing firestorm about a deadly “follow-on strike” by U.S. forces on a Venezuelan boat suspected of carrying drugs through international waters on Sept. 2. The White House said Adm. Frank M. “Mitch” Bradley, the head of U.S. Special Operations Command, issued the order for that second strike.
The administration argues the second strike, which some lawmakers say could constitute a war crime, was fully justified. Lawmakers argue the initial strike almost surely would have stopped the boat from moving drugs to American shores, which is the publicly stated goal of U.S. military operations in the region. In at least one other instance, the U.S. picked up two survivors of an American military strike on an alleged drug boat and repatriated them to their home countries.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has faced sharp criticism over the incident. Notably, he wrote on X last week that the criticism amounted to “fake news” and “as we’ve said from the beginning, and in every statement, these highly effective strikes are specifically intended to be ‘lethal, kinetic strikes.’”
The human cost for Pyongyang has been real as North Korean soldiers fight for Russia in its war against Ukraine. South Korean intelligence estimates that nearly 600 North Korean soldiers have died in the conflict and thousands more have been wounded since an initial deployment of 11,000 elite soldiers were sent to Russia in late 2024. While North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has lamented those losses, his regime appears to have gained something invaluable: battlefield experience in a modern, large-scale war.
The fighting in Ukraine has increasingly been defined and shaped by drones, which now account for the majority of battlefield casualties. And for North Korea’s military — long reliant on aging Soviet doctrine and equipment — the exposure to such technology and tactics has been transformative. Propaganda footage from the Kursk front has shown North Korean troops drilling to counter enemy drones and also deploying their own.
Threat Status Special Correspondent Guillaume Ptak in Ukraine writes in a dispatch from Kyiv that North Koreans now deploy first-person-view drones piloted by trained operators working in teams with real-time surveillance feeds. Analysts say the development shows Pyongyang has begun to master the basics of linking reconnaissance with strike assets, an impressive leap for a force once defined by its rigid, centralized command.
The June bombing raids on Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities failed to eliminate Tehran’s nuclear program, according to a report by a former Israel Defense Forces military intelligence official, explaining how the Israeli part of the operation was very complex and involved Israeli F-35 stealth jets, drone strikes, missile attacks, cyber operations and sabotage.
The report published by the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, an Israeli think tank, described the effectiveness of the raid as “mixed,” with the strikes causing an “appreciable delay” in the Iranian nuclear program while possibly leading to an acceleration of clandestine nuclear weaponization or justifying a nuclear “breakout” by Tehran.
The raid also could lead to regional escalation, a shift in Iranian nuclear posture and possibly a “recalibration” of Iran’s internal deterrence calculus, stated the report, which predicts that diplomatic fallout for Israel to be “bearable” and dependent on an unstable geopolitical climate.
Current U.S. military acquisition efforts and congressional interests “frequently inhibit the ability to create the responsive, low-cost lethality required to excel on the modern battlefield,” writes Josh “Bugsy” Segal, who asserts that, “for years, single-use consumable weapons have been purchased at costs significantly more than their targets.
“Making matters worse, weapons are often surpassed by adversary countermeasures before they ever reach the stockpile,” Mr. Segal, an adviser to senior leaders across the Department of Defense, writes in an op-ed for The Washington Times. “American weapons, despite all the positive press, had short-lived utility in Ukraine. Weapons ranging from switchblades to JDAMs failed because of predictable Russian GPS interference,” he writes, referring to Joint Direct Attack Munitions.
“Planned mitigations would not succeed because of the proliferation and widespread dispersion of cheap, small jammers on the battlefield,” he writes, adding that “these painful lessons demand immediate attention to prevent costly failures in the future, but the U.S. has been slow to embrace this paradigm.”
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