Threat Status for Friday, January 16, 2026. Share this daily newsletter with your friends, who can sign up here. Send tips to National Security Editor Guy Taylor.
Questions swirl around what the weekend will bring in Iran following the regime’s brutal crackdown that left more than 2,000 protesters dead.
… Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu joined the chorus of voices from the Arab world urging President Trump to hold off on U.S. military action in Iran.
…U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control has announced new sanctions targeting the top official in Iran’s Supreme Council for National Security.
… Threat Status goes inside the world of advanced tactical radars with Leonardo DRS in an exclusive video exploring technological advancements drawn from lessons in the Ukraine and Mideast wars.
… European troops continue to arrive in Greenland in a show of support for Denmark, as tension flares over Mr. Trump’s push for U.S. control over the Arctic island.
… The Pentagon says it will revamp Stars and Stripes and modernize the military newspaper.
… Renaming the Department of Defense as the Department of War could cost as much as $125 million, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
… And Defense and National Security Correspondent John T. Seward made an exclusive video on the floor of the Surface Navy Association’s 38th National Symposium this week, exploring how Mr. Trump’s “Golden Fleet” vision has left Navy officials and shipbuilders guessing.
Turkey is delivering increasingly pointed warnings to Washington amid the escalating violence in neighboring Iran: What the Trump administration may see as an opportunity, Ankara sees as the prelude to catastrophe. Washington Times Special Correspondent Jacob Wirtschafter notes in a dispatch from Istanbul how Turkey’s foreign minister has openly accused Israeli intelligence of orchestrating the unrest in Iran.
He also notes a recent statement by Omer Celik, the spokesman of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling party, that Turkish officials “never want chaos in our neighbor Iran.” It’s a warning that reflects hard lessons from Iraq and Syria, where U.S. interventions left Turkey absorbing millions of refugees and managing years of regional spillover.
Turkey’s caution is not rooted in affection for Iran’s Islamic republic. Ankara has repeatedly confronted Tehran over the past decade, supporting Azerbaijan when Iran threatened Baku in 2020 and fortifying the Iranian border and backing opposing sides in Syria’s civil war. But, despite Turkey’s rivalry with Tehran, analysts at the Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research (SETA), an Ankara-based think tank, say preserving Iran’s territorial integrity and internal stability remains a core Turkish interest.
U.S. authorities shed light on actions they’ve taken to seize two South African shipping containers that were carrying flight simulators destined for the Chinese military. The Justice Department said Thursday the simulators could have bolstered China’s attack capabilities against U.S. aircraft used for anti-submarine warfare and airborne warning and control.
The South African “mission crew trainers” contained American software and U.S. defense technical data that have been banned from transfer to China, the department said in a statement. The action was taken against the equipment built by the Test Flying Academy of South Africa, a company closely linked to China and sanctioned in the past by the U.S. government for recruiting Western pilots to train People’s Liberation Army airmen.
Announcement of the seizure comes as the militaries of China, Russia and Iran began a week of joint naval exercises in South African waters last week, highlighting the South African government’s increasing alignment with U.S. adversaries. The containers with the mobile training equipment arrived in Singapore in September 2024 en route to China but were seized by U.S. authorities before they could be transferred. The equipment arrived in the U.S. on Jan. 7.
Reverberations from the Jan. 3 capture and removal of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro are reshaping energy calculations around the globe, including pipeline politics in Canada and investment strategies in China. Beijing, specifically, had significant investments in Venezuela and is waiting to see the next move from the Trump administration and U.S. oil companies that the president has called on to revamp the ailing Venezuelan oil industry.
Times Special Correspondent Joseph Hammond examines the situation, noting how China has by some estimates spent at least $100 billion in Venezuela since the country nationalized its oil industry under socialist leader Hugo Chavez in 2007 and is owed as much as $20 billion by Venezuela. Beijing is unlikely to be compensated for that debt, with the White House calling the shots for Caracas.
Mr. Maduro’s capture has thrown a Trump-approved wrench into the gears of China’s Belt and Road Initiative projects not just in Venezuela but across South America as well. “Venezuela has been a money pit for China,” says Tim Samples, a professor at the University of Georgia and a Latin American energy expert. “China has overspent on Venezuela. The oil and influence China obtained probably could have been secured with less capital.”
China’s airborne drone carrier aircraft “could launch a swarm of drones in any attack on Taiwan or U.S. territory,” writes Jed Babbin, a national security and foreign affairs columnist for The Times, who says the Chinese “drones could be a mixture of stealthy and non-stealthy drones that could conduct reconnaissance, bombing or electronic interference missions.
“We need to match and then quickly surpass China’s capabilities,” Mr. Babbin writes. “Any large U.S. aircraft, say, a C-17, could be equipped to match China’s capability, but such an aircraft would have a radar signature equal to the size of a Pennsylvania Dutch barn. Smaller U.S. aircraft could carry drones, but neither the F-35 nor the F-22 could carry more than one or two drones in their concealed weapons bays.
“We need to develop an airborne drone carrier urgently. We have to go to the best thinkers in the Defense Department, the somewhat crazy geniuses at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, to find the means to make a large drone carrier aircraft that could be at least a bit stealthy,” he writes. “The guys and gals at DARPA are able to do that, and they must be tasked to do so.”
Regime change has “long been one of Washington’s preferred instruments of coercive diplomacy, a blunt tool promising decisive results, often at the expense of long-term stability,” according to Tanya Goudsouzian and Ibrahim Al-Marashi. They write in an op-ed for The Times that regime change has time and again “created the illusion of progress while planting the seeds of disorder.
“The U.S. removal of Nicolas Maduro is the latest instance in which short-term triumph is likely to collide with long-term consequences,” they write. “Images of Mr. Maduro being taken into U.S. custody sparked celebration, criticism and a familiar sense of deja vu. They recall past ‘turning points’: Saddam Hussein pulled from a hole, Manuel Noriega photographed under arrest, Salvador Allende clutching a weapon in his final hours.
“The implied message was simple then, as now: Remove the strongman, and the problem is solved,” write Ms. Goudsouzian and Mr. Al-Marashi, respectively a journalist who covers the Middle East and an associate professor of Middle East history at the American College of the Mediterranean and the Department of International Relations at Central European University. “History suggests otherwise.”
• Jan. 29 — The World, Rewired – A Geopolitical Outlook for 2026 and Beyond, Stimson Center
Thanks for reading Threat Status. Don’t forget to share it with your friends, who can sign up here. And listen to our weekly podcast available here or wherever you get your podcasts.
