Threat Status for Wednesday, December 3, 2025. Share this daily newsletter with your friends, who can sign up here. Send tips to National Security Editor Guy Taylor.
President Trump is openly threatening U.S. military strikes against land targets in Venezuela and Colombia as he plans to expand operations against drug traffickers in the region.
… Sources on Capitol Hill tell Threat Status there is bipartisan support for a push to make Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth testify over the controversial September follow-up strike on an alleged drug-smuggling boat.
… They also tell Threat Status there’s growing momentum on both sides of the aisle to approve the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, but a final vote likely won’t happen before next week.
… Washington and Moscow agreed to withhold details on the substance of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s meeting Tuesday with White House special envoy Steve Witkoff and Mr. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.
… Political activist Laura Loomer and former Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz — both firebrand supporters of Mr. Trump — were called on to ask questions during a Pentagon press briefing Tuesday.
… It was the first such briefing since Mr. Hegseth’s imposition of restrictive new rules about press access that most news outlets, including The Washington Times, refused to sign.
… And House Foreign Affairs Europe Subcommittee Chairman Keith Self warned at a hearing Tuesday that apart from “Russian aggression against Ukraine, the Western Balkans remains the most unstable region in Europe.”
Foreign ministers from several of Ukraine-backing European NATO countries say yes. Following five hours of secretive Putin-Witkoff-Kushner talks in Moscow on Tuesday, Estonian Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna made headlines when he said, “Putin has not changed any course. He’s pushing more aggressively on the battlefield. … It’s pretty obvious that he doesn’t want to have any kind of peace.”
Ukraine and its European allies broadly accused Mr. Putin on Wednesday of feigning interest in peace efforts. The Russian leader “should end the bluster and the bloodshed and be ready to come to the table and to support a just and lasting peace,” said U.K. Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha urged Mr. Putin to “stop wasting the world’s time.”
Mr. Trump has been trying to engineer an end to the Ukraine war since entering office nearly a year ago. The current talks follow the leak of a 28-point U.S.-backed peace proposal, allegedly written by Mr. Witkoff with help from Russian diplomats, that would force Ukraine to concede contested regions to Russia, give up its goal of joining NATO and commit to reducing its military.
The president is vowing to carry out missile strikes on land in some South American countries as he plans to expand operations that so far have focused on drug smugglers’ boats in the Caribbean Sea. Mr. Trump said Tuesday that cocaine manufacturing plants likely would be the targets and that any nation producing drugs that reach the U.S. could be hit. “Not necessarily just Venezuela,” he said. “I hear Colombia is making cocaine. They have cocaine manufacturing plants.”
U.S. strikes in Caribbean waters have destroyed 22 vessels and killed 83 people. Mr. Trump is doubling down amid scrutiny over Mr. Hegseth’s role in a follow-up strike on the alleged drug-carrying boat in September. Lawmakers have opened investigations following a report that Mr. Hegseth issued a verbal order to “kill everybody” on the boat, which some say is a violation of rules governing armed conflict.
Speculation has swirled for weeks that U.S. land strikes on Venezuela may be imminent. National security sources have noted in background discussions with Threat Status that Mr. Trump’s increased focus on Venezuela is occurring in tandem with the administration’s push for Russia — a primary backer of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro — to end the Ukraine war.
China believes it must respond aggressively to comments from Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, who last month equated a Chinese move against Taiwan to a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan, according to Yun Sun, senior fellow and director of the China Program at the Stimson Center in Washington.
“In Beijing’s view, if China does not push back on Takaichi’s comment, the future question on Japan’s role in the Taiwan contingency will no longer be whether Japan will play a role, but how Japan will play the role,” Ms. Yun said Tuesday during an appearance on The Washington Brief, a monthly online forum hosted by The Washington Times Foundation. “The new narrative will change the course of policy and change the course of discussion and potentially introduce a new normal of U.S. allies’ collective response to Taiwan contingency.”
Ms. Yun said other nations, such as Australia or even NATO countries, could follow Japan’s lead and cast a Taiwan offensive as a threat to themselves and the broader global order, and Beijing believes it must act now to stop that trend. “Currently, what we’re seeing is China is out for blood,” she said. “Beijing aims to use this opportunity to … push back, to set the record straight and deny Japan any legitimate role in a future Taiwan contingency.”
North Korea’s mutual defense treaty with Russia and its participation in the war with Ukraine were “major failings of the U.S. and South Korea,” writes Joseph R. DeTrani, a former associate director of national intelligence and opinion contributor to Threat Status.
“We should have seen movement in this direction and done more to prevent it from happening. It’s highly ironic that Russia now says North Korea should have nuclear weapons when, in the six-party talks, it was in sync with the U.S. and others arguing that North Korea should not have nuclear weapons,” Mr. DeTrani writes. “North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs are existential threats to the U.S. and its allies.
“Our past policy to ‘contain and deter’ North Korea and be ‘strategically patient’ with North Korea didn’t work. U.S. and South Korean leaders must try to get Mr. Kim to reengage, especially with President Trump,” he writes. “As South Korean President Lee Jae-myung [has] said, North and South Korea are in a ‘very dangerous situation’ in which an accidental clash is possible at any time.”
Clashes and quarrels from Ukraine to Taiwan “raise the specter of the dreaded two-front — or maybe multifront — war, and it’s one for which the United States is ill-prepared,” according to Donald Kirk. “Incredibly, China and Russia share common cause in both cauldrons of conflict and could even form a horrifying alliance against the U.S., if they haven’t already.”
“China does not have to offer material aid to Russia in Ukraine,” Mr. Kirk writes in an op-ed for The Times. “All that’s necessary is for China to support its protectorate, North Korea, with the oil it needs to power its economy, plus half its food, while North Korea pours thousands of troops and millions of artillery shells and other war materiel into Russia.
“The Russia-China entente comes through clearly from Europe to Northeast Asia,” he writes. “Together, they ensure not only North Korea’s survival but also a new level of relative prosperity for the elite in the capital of Pyongyang and a few other centers, notably the port of Wonsan on the southeast coast, where Kim Jong-un maintains his favorite palace and proudly watches over the construction of lavish tourist hotels along the area’s lovely sandy beaches.”
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