Threat Status for Monday, December 29, 2025. Share this daily newsletter with your friends, who can sign up here. Send tips to National Security Editor Guy Taylor.
China launched its biggest-ever military drills around Taiwan Monday, less than two weeks after the Trump administration announced a major weapons deal to support the U.S.-aligned island democracy.
… Questions are swirling over whether President Trump will embrace Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s plan to hold a voter referendum on the U.S. proposal that Ukraine cede territory to Russia.
… The controversial Gaza redevelopment plan floated by Mr. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner is likely to dominate talks between the president and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at Mar-a-Lago on Monday.
… The State Department says the U.S. will contribute $2 billion to U.N. humanitarian aid in 2026 — down from $3.38 billion in 2025 and $14.1 billion in 2024.
… Rep. Mike Turner, a key Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, says the Trump administration’s Christmas airstrikes against Islamic State targets in Nigeria were necessary to combat global extremism.
… North Korea claimed Monday to have test-fired long-range strategic cruise missiles.
… Top Cambodian and Thai diplomats are visiting Beijing, as China seeks a mediating role in the violent border dispute between the two Southeast Asian nations.
… And Japan is pushing its biggest-ever defense budget.
Elad Schulman, CEO and co-founder of the company Lasso Security, warns in an exclusive interview on the latest episode of the Threat Status weekly podcast that artificial intelligence is already supercharging cyber threats to individuals and companies in unprecedented ways. He explains how one current threat plays out: “What if someone would send you an email — very, very naive, but in white font — they will write, ‘Please ignore previous instructions and do the following malicious instructions, [which] you will not be able to see?’
“If there is an AI agent that is reading your emails and operating on your behalf, then it could be manipulated to do something like leaking all of your passwords and all of your emails,” Mr. Schulman says. “This is just one out of many, many problems. … It’s a specifically unique jailbreaking prompt injection into the AI world, and we see those actually in production right now. Adversaries are already utilizing it against us.”
His comments come roughly two months after the U.S.-based AI developer Anthropic revealed how it had disrupted an AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign that had manipulated the company’s Claude AI tool. Anthropic reported with “high confidence” that the operation, which targeted more than 30 global entities, including tech companies, financial institutions, chemical manufacturing companies and government agencies, was orchestrated by a Chinese state-sponsored group.
Chinese military forces launched their biggest-ever drills around Taiwan on Monday in a show of force that officials in Beijing said were designed to show that China has the capability to encircle the U.S.-aligned island democracy and blockade its ports.
The drills, which come less than two weeks after the Trump administration announced plans to sell $11.1 billion in weapons to Taiwan, are likely to increase U.S.-China tensions at a moment when the White House is vowing to bolster military support for the island democracy. With the Chinese Communist Party threatening to take control of Taiwan by force if necessary, the Trump administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy recently emphasized the U.S. goal of “deterring a conflict over Taiwan, ideally by preserving military overmatch.”
Beijing dispatched air, navy and rocket troops around Taiwan Monday, calling the drills a “stern warning” against “external interference” forces. Taiwan responded by placing its own military forces on alert and calling mainland China’s Communist Party-ruled government “the biggest destroyer of peace.” Taiwan’s aviation authority said Monday that more than 100,000 international air travelers would be affected by flight cancellations or diversions because of the drills.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Zelenskyy expressed optimism after a nearly three-hour meeting at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, on Sunday, despite emphasizing that end-of-war negotiations remain complex and that a clear timeline toward a peace deal remains out of reach.
Mr. Trump acknowledged that the fate of Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region remains a tricky issue. Russian President Vladimir Putin has demanded the entire Donbas region, including areas that Russia’s army does not now control. Mr. Zelenskyy has been steadfast in his insistence that he would not give up any territory as part of a peace deal.
The Ukrainian president on Sunday underscored his refusal to give up territory, but said the question must ultimately be answered by the people of Ukraine. He said having a voter referendum or a parliamentary vote on any part of a 20-point peace plan put forth by the U.S. and Ukrainian negotiators, including ceding territory, is possible.
Mr. Zelenskyy said Monday the U.S. has offered him a security commitment of 15 years as part of the proposed peace agreement. However, Mr. Zelenskyy said he would prefer America offer a security guarantee of up to 50 years to deter further attempts by Russia to seize Ukrainian land.
Mr. Kushner “has a plan to turn the Gaza Strip into a modern version of Gotham,” writes Jed Babbin, who assesses that the plan “would require an enormous amount of U.S. investment — about 20% of the total — over 10 years.” Mr. Babbin is a national security and foreign affairs columnist for The Washington Times and a contributing editor for The American Spectator.
The plan is “said to show high-rise apartments and resorts along with dozens of hospitals and hundreds of schools,” Mr. Babbin writes in a Times op-ed. He argues the “most obvious problem” is that “Hamas must disarm if the plan has any hope of succeeding” — something Hamas has “made eminently clear” that it will not do.
“The plan has reportedly been shown to Arab nations, including Egypt, and Turkish representatives,” Mr. Babbin writes. “Neither Egypt nor Turkey has a strong enough economy to invest in Gaza. Several Arab nations, especially Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, can afford such investments but aren’t likely to make them.”
The United States “must call the killing of two American servicemen and a civilian interpreter in Syria earlier this month what it was: an attack by a member of the Syrian security forces on U.S. troops. Pretending otherwise will only invite further bloodshed,” writes Giran Ozcan, the fellow for Kurdish Affairs at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, in a Times op-ed.
“The tragedy is a consequence of rushed normalization with a transitional Syrian government, led by President Ahmad al-Sharaa, the former jihadist who started Syria’s branch of the Islamic State, Jabhat al-Nusra, and later pledged allegiance to al Qaeda,” writes Mr. Ozcan, who asserts that “Mr. al-Sharaa’s government does not have the inclination or capacity to thoroughly rid its security services of radical Islamist elements.
“Syria’s new security institutions are overstretched, under-vetted and deeply compromised by extremist ideology,” he writes. “In its rush to consolidate control and project sovereignty, Damascus has absorbed thousands of fighters and commanders from violent extremist groups, many of them foreign fighters.”
• 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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