Threat Status for Monday, January 5, 2026. Share this daily newsletter with your friends, who can sign up here. Send tips to National Security Editor Guy Taylor.
U.S. officials built a replica in Kentucky of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s compound so Delta Force commandos could train for the brazen mission to capture him.
… Mr. Maduro, now held in a Brooklyn jail cell, was set to be arraigned Monday in federal court in Manhattan on charges of narco-terrorism conspiracy, cocaine importation conspiracy and possession of machine guns.
… A tense calm hangs over Venezuela amid uncertainty over the extent of influence President Trump and his advisers have over Maduro regime members now running Caracas.
… Russia and China swiftly condemned the U.S. operation, saying they’ll continue to support the Maduro regime.
… Russian missiles pounded energy infrastructure in Kharkiv Monday in one of the most intense daytime attacks on the Ukrainian grid in weeks.
… Denmark’s prime minister bristled and said Greenland is “not for sale,” after Mr. Trump spoke openly Sunday about bringing the island’s untapped mineral wealth under U.S. control as a strategic counterweight to Russia and China.
… Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that he is issuing a letter of censure to Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona over the lawmaker’s participation in a video that called on troops to resist unlawful orders.
… More than 30 people were killed over the weekend by gunmen in northern Nigeria, two weeks after U.S. forces hit Islamic State targets in the region.
… And South Korea’s president is in Beijing, walking a diplomatic tightrope with Chinese leader Xi Jinping after China’s major military drills around Taiwan.
On the same day, 36 years apart, the U.S. launched shocking and consequential military operations in Latin America aimed at securing American interests by removing unpopular authoritarian leaders. Washington Times Reporter Vaughn Cockayne examines how both operations — the arrest of Mr. Maduro on Saturday and the capture of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega on Jan. 3, 1990, have major differences that could threaten U.S. objectives in the region.
For Mr. Trump, the situation in Venezuela represented a once-in-a-generation opportunity to advance many core national interests simultaneously, in one place, with a single bold action. National Security Correspondent Ben Wolfgang breaks down how Saturday’s mission finally allowed Mr. Trump to claim victory over Mr. Maduro, who dealt the U.S. president a significant foreign policy embarrassment in 2019 by weathering a diplomatic pressure campaign in which Washington attempted to oust him by recognizing opposition figure Juan Guaido as the country’s rightful leader.
On the great power competition front, there is a more black-and-white narrative unfolding: Venezuela holds the world’s largest oil reserves and significant mineral deposits, including some of the rare earth elements needed to power cellphones, fighter jets and other key pieces of 21st-century technology. China dominates the global market of rare earth element processing, and both China and Russia have been cultivating deeper ties with Caracas in recent years. Russia is Venezuela’s largest arms dealer, and China has invested billions, with a focus on Venezuela’s vast resource deposits.
The secret training facility gave commandos from the Army’s 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta, better known as Delta Force, the opportunity to rehearse the mission repeatedly before Mr. Trump gave the order to capture the Venezuelan dictator.
The daring mission took root months ago with the insertion into Caracas of a team of CIA operatives and culminated in the early morning hours of Saturday with a surgical strike that involved hundreds of aircraft, ships and elite U.S. soldiers who stormed Mr. Maduro’s heavily guarded safe house to take him and his wife into custody.
U.S. forces plunged Venezuela’s capital city into darkness as the MH-47 Chinook and MH-60 Black Hawk helicopters from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment flew the commando force at treetop level. “The lights of Caracas were largely turned off, due to a certain expertise that we have,” Mr. Trump said over the weekend. Mr. Maduro was moving toward an armored safe room inside his compound when the Delta Force commandos burst into the room.
South Korean President Lee Jae-myung is on a multiday visit to the Chinese capital at a moment of heightened tensions between China and the U.S. following Beijing’s massive military drills that encircled Taiwan last week.
Chinese officials have been frustrated over Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s recent assertion that her country’s military could get involved if China were to take action against Taiwan, a U.S.-aligned island democracy.
The Taiwan issue was left out of Chinese state media reports on talks Monday between Mr. Lee and Mr. Xi. China’s official Xinhua news agency cited Mr. Xi as saying China and South Korea share close economic ties with industrial and supply chains deeply interwoven, and that the two countries should further align their development strategies and strengthen policy coordination, including on artificial intelligence development.
Times Asia Editor Andrew Salmon reports that Mr. Lee’s oft-stated desire to upgrade South Korea’s relations with China has garnered suspicions among U.S. conservatives. At a minimum, the Seoul-Beijing dynamics are complex. South Korea hosts about 28,000 U.S. troops, most of whom are based on the country’s China-facing Yellow Sea Coast.
“Despite this stunning victory for democracy, freedom, law and order, isolationists on both the right and left will condemn Mr. Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio for the administration’s courage,” Jeffrey Scott Shapiro writes. “They will argue that the U.S. is interfering in foreign affairs, that the president’s actions are unlawful and that the removal of a brutal dictator will cause more instability.
“These are the arguments of small minds,” writes Mr. Shapiro, a member of The Times editorial board. “Since Ronald Reagan, no president has made such a consequential move in holding communists accountable for their crimes.
“If the Chavista regime collapses in Venezuela and more democratic-minded leaders, such as opposition members Edmundo González Urrutia and Maria Corina Machado, can lead, then the people will have a democratic future,” he writes in an op-ed in The Times, noting that “Mr. Gonzales was internationally recognized as the victor of Venezuela’s 2024 presidential elections after Ms. Machado was barred from the election.”
Retired Brig. Gen. Ernest Audino writes in a Times op-ed that “nothing is more dangerous than a nuclear ayatollah. That’s why President Trump did something about it. He deserves credit, and humanity deserves the victory. Although American attention has now shifted elsewhere, Iran still holds cards to play.
“One of those cards is oil. The ayatollahs sit atop 12% of global oil reserves and export 91% of their oil output to China,” Mr. Audino writes. “Iranian oil accounts for 14% of China’s total oil imports. China recently imported another 4% of its oil from Iranian ally and Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, whose country holds 18% to 20% of global oil reserves.
“Until Mr. Trump started seizing ‘ghost’ tankers carrying Venezuelan crude last month, 80% of Venezuela’s output went to China,” Mr. Audino writes. “In other words, with Venezuelan oil now shut off, China’s dependency on Iranian oil can only increase.”
• 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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