Threat Status for Wednesday, December 24, 2025. Share this daily newsletter with your friends, who can sign up here. Send tips to National Security Correspondent Ben Wolfgang.
China and Russia accused the U.S. of violating international law, bullying and employing “cowboy-like conduct” with its military pressure campaign against Venezuela.
… The criticism from Chinese and Russian diplomats at an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council underscores the great power dynamics at play in the escalating U.S.-Venezuela standoff.
… Venezuela’s National Assembly approved a measure criminalizing U.S. seizures of Venezuelan oil tankers.
… The U.S. Supreme Court said President Trump overstepped his powers in trying to federalize and send the National Guard to Chicago.
… The U.S. and Ukraine reached a consensus on key issues aimed at ending the Ukraine-Russia war, but territorial disputes remain.
The USS Defiant, planned to be the first of the new Trump-class battleships, will be larger than any Navy surface combatant ship built since the end of World War II: about 880 feet long and about 35,000 tons. The cost could be between $10 billion and $15 billion.
And some analysts believe it may never actually be built, as a future administration could scrap the program entirely.
Washington Times Military Correspondent Mike Glenn takes us inside the backlash to the proposed Trump-class ships, which the Navy says are desperately needed. The president said he wants at least two of the self-described battleships to be constructed over the next 2 1/2 years and intends to add as many as 20 to the Navy’s inventory.
But retired Marine Corps Col. Mark Cancian, now a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote in an analysis that the plan badly misses the mark.
“It will take years to design, cost $9 billion each to build, and contravene the Navy’s new concept of operations, which envisions distributed firepower,” he wrote. “A future administration will cancel the program before the first ship hits the water.”
National Security Correspondent Bill Gertz has been tracking all the developments in the case of Linda Sun, a former aide to two governors who was charged with acting as an unregistered Chinese agent who received kickbacks for influencing New York’s state government.
Jurors this week failed to reach a verdict after more than a week of deliberations in a trial that also included money-laundering, bank fraud and tax evasion charges. Prosecutors are expected to move quickly to retry the case, which became one of the highest-profile incidents of a prominent American political figure allegedly carrying out a pro-China agenda inside the U.S.
The monthlong trial included evidence indicating that Ms. Sun, as an aide to former Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo and current Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul, used her position to support Chinese Communist Party policies, including blocking meetings between the governors and officials from Taiwan and removing language that criticized Beijing’s human rights abuses.
The Trump administration is focused heavily on Venezuela, which it says has become a narco-state. Thousands of miles away in Europe, is another country on a similar dangerous track?
Threat Status Special Correspondent Joseph Hammond examines whether Albania, a key NATO ally, is sliding deeper into organized-crime rule. Opposition leaders have warned that the country is on the brink of becoming Europe’s first true narco-state, and they’re pressing Mr. Trump to formally designate Albanian drug cartels as narco-terrorist organizations.
Experts warn that Albania has become a Balkan beachhead for drug cartels from Latin America and an essential center of the European marijuana trade. The worsening situation was thrust into the spotlight last month when Gilmando Dani, a leader in the Shullazi criminal network, was killed in a hail of gunfire in broad daylight at the country’s main airport.
Video showed a hit squad emerging from a parked vehicle to ambush the crime boss’s luxury sedan. The shooters calmly confirm their victim is dead after a burst of automatic weapons fire and then flee the scene.
There’s a belief in some quarters that China, if properly cultivated and cajoled, could help end the war in Ukraine, stabilize global markets or even address imbalances in global trade. But the U.S. and its allies must recognize that Beijing has a decades-long track record of breaking agreements and using newfound membership in groups such as the World Trade Organization for its own advantage — and no one else’s.
Threat Status contributor Miles Yu explains in a new op-ed in The Times why the world cannot afford to repeat the mistakes of the past and trust that China and its communist leaders will live up to their word in any number of international arenas.
“Communist China is not a state that occasionally breaks rules. It is a serial, deliberate and structural violator of international agreements,” writes Mr. Yu, director of the China Center at the Hudson Institute. “The cause is neither cultural misunderstanding nor diplomatic friction. It is communism itself. Across every major domain — trade, security, human rights and regional diplomacy — the pattern is unmistakable.”
As tensions with Communist China mount, never has the alliance between the U.S. and Japan been more important. Bates Gill, a senior fellow for Asian security at the National Bureau of Asian Research, writes that the moment is ripe for Washington and Tokyo to deepen an already vital partnership.
Mr. Gill writes in a Times op-ed that Japan, under the leadership of new Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, recognizes that deterrence, not dependence, is the key to maintaining regional stability and stopping Chinese military aggression before it starts. And the U.S. must stand with its ally in those aims, he writes.
“The stakes couldn’t be higher for either nation,” Mr. Gill writes. “The Indo-Pacific’s stability depends on its ability to deter coercion and uphold the principles of openness and free navigation. The United States has no greater ally in the region than Japan. As Beijing presses its territorial claims, the urgency for Tokyo and Washington to build on their historic partnership has never been greater.”
• Jan. 14 — A New Direction for Artificial Intelligence and Students: Findings from the Brookings Global Task Force on AI and Education, Brookings Institution
• Jan. 15 — 10 Conflicts to Watch in 2026, Chatham House
• Jan. 20 — The Future of Biosafety: Confronting Gain-of-Function Research, The Heritage Foundation
• Jan. 21 — Artificial General Intelligence: America’s Next National Security Frontier, Institute of World Politics
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