Threat Status for Tuesday, January 6, 2026. Share this daily newsletter with your friends, who can sign up here. Send tips to National Security Editor Guy Taylor.
Republicans said they were satisfied by the two-hour classified briefing on Venezuela that Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe gave on Capitol Hill Monday night.
Democrats were skeptical, with Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s ranking member, saying Tuesday morning that the “briefing raised serious questions about the strategy around this action and what comes next.”
… One question is whether the communist regime in Cuba, which relies on Venezuelan oil and has long held influence in Caracas, will survive. Another is whether President Trump might authorize strikes on drug cartels in Mexico.
… The State Department is circulating a photo of Mr. Trump on X with the message “This is OUR Hemisphere.”
… The U.K.’s Guardian newspaper has a report examining what the Venezuela raid means for China’s designs on Taiwan.
… A top Iranian official is threatening no leniency for “rioters” who have taken to the streets for more than a week of protests in Tehran.
… Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona is vowing to fight Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s efforts to cut his rank and pay as a retired Navy officer.
Oil exports fund more than half of Venezuela’s annual federal budget, but the South American nation’s oil industry is outdated and dramatically underperforming. Analysts say it will take years and tens of billions of dollars in investments to bring the industry to a production level that truly undergirds the Trump administration’s goal of using Venezuelan oil to advance U.S. interests in the Western Hemisphere and beyond.
The administration has indicated its intention to open Venezuela’s vast oil fields to U.S. companies. Only one American company, Chevron, operates in Venezuela. But Washington could, over time, use leverage over Venezuelan oil to impact politics elsewhere in the region, such as in Cuba, which relies heavily on Venezuelan oil. China, meanwhile, is by far Venezuela’s largest customer, accounting for more than two-thirds of Venezuelan oil exports.
As an overall share of China’s oil imports, however, Venezuela is a small-time player, providing about 470,000 barrels per day, compared to the 2.2 million barrels a day China imports from Russia. That doesn’t mean there aren’t immediate effects on China’s geopolitical calculus, though. Rachel Ziemba, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, tells National Security Correspondent Ben Wolfgang that “what’s more important for China is what this symbolizes and signifies for broader Chinese investment in the Western Hemisphere.”
The prospect of the U.S. Space Force deploying humans into orbit for missions protecting critical satellite infrastructure is real, according to Bill Woolf, the president and founder of the Space Force Association. He says in an exclusive interview on the latest episode of the Threat Status weekly podcast that he anticipates “a lot of conversation” on the matter among the Trump administration, the commercial sector, the civil sector and the national security sector over the coming year.
Mr. Woolf went into depth on the Pentagon’s relationship with commercial satellites and the future of the Space Force’s budget during the interview, saying the force, which was established in 2019, is now “the most important service for the future.”
“People just don’t realize it yet,” Mr. Woolf said. “Other services are going to have to acknowledge that and probably start making some movement on how we allocate those resources. … We do know the threat is moving fast. There are potential adversaries out there that would just assume take out all of our space capabilities, and if we don’t move fast enough, we’re going to be outpaced by our potential adversaries.”
The leaders of France, Germany, Denmark, Italy, Spain, Poland and the United Kingdom said in a joint statement Tuesday that U.S. domination of Greenland would be unacceptable and that NATO should collectively be responsible for ensuring the autonomous island’s security.
The fate of the island is “for Denmark and Greenland, and them only, to decide,” reads the statement, which asserts that “NATO has made clear that the Arctic region is a priority and European Allies are stepping up.” The statement sets the stage for a potential clash with the Trump administration, which has made Greenland the target of its expansionist rhetoric with claims that the U.S. needs to control the island for security purposes.
Greenland, whose defense and foreign policy are largely governed by Denmark, is not an independent member of NATO. However, the Arctic island’s strategic location in the north Atlantic has made it a target for Europe, Russia, China and the U.S. Mr. Trump’s new special envoy to Greenland Jeff Landry has said his purpose in the role is to make Greenland “part of the U.S.,” and Mr. Trump told reporters Monday that he would address the issue of U.S. control over Greenland in the coming weeks.
Miles Yu argues that China sees Latin America as a “forward operating theater for intelligence, propaganda and influence operations meant to erode U.S. leadership.” The region, Mr. Yu writes, supplies Beijing with “resources, capital investment opportunities and terrain for infrastructure development that can bind states to China through debt, dependency and political leverage.”
Beijing’s methods are “explicit,” writes Mr. Yu, the director of the Hudson Institute’s China Center and a Threat Status contributor. “China uses capital to replace or sideline Western-led institutions such as the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank.
“It wages political and propaganda warfare by backing anti-U.S. rogue regimes, above all Cuba and Venezuela, turning them into ideological and operational outposts,” he writes in an op-ed in The Washington Times. “Cuba is a frontline base in a long-running intelligence war. For nearly three decades, China has used Cuba for eavesdropping and military training, with U.S. intelligence reportedly aware of Chinese operations there as early as 2001.”
Few bedfellows are as “cozy as Tehran and Caracas have been in the past few decades,” writes Times Deputy Commentary Editor Anath Hartmann, who asserts that “under Hugo Chavez and Mr. Maduro, Venezuela had become a terrorist breeding ground, giving shelter to extremist groups, including Hamas and Hezbollah, which operated unimpeded from the South American nation.
“Now that President Trump has cut the head off the murderous Maduro regime in Venezuela, he should follow it up with another promised move: supporting the people of Iran in their fight for freedom,” Ms. Hartmann writes in a Times op-ed. She goes on to suggest that while the “Trump administration has stated its support for the Iranian people in choosing their own leadership,” Mr. Trump might back exiled Iranian Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi to lead a replacement government in Tehran.
“The son of the last shah, who was overthrown during the Islamic Revolution in 1979, Mr. Pahlavi is eager to take the tiller,” Ms. Hartmann writes. “He has even prepared a 100-day transition plan in anticipation of the fall of the Islamic republic.”
• 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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