Threat Status for Wednesday, January 21, 2026. Share this daily newsletter with your friends, who can sign up here. Send tips to National Security Editor Guy Taylor.
South Korea’s president says North Korea is producing enough material to make 20 new nuclear weapons each year.
… House lawmakers are trying to add nearly $8.4 billion to the White House request for 2026 defense spending.
… President Trump said in Wednesday’s speech to the World Economic Forum that no nation can defend Greenland the way the U.S. can, but he ruled out using force to acquire the Arctic island.
… Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko is urging people to leave the city following Russian strikes that have left half the population without electricity, heat or water.
… Iranians living in exile in Germany are being targeted by the Islamic republic’s intelligence services.
… The Chinese Communist Party has expelled and accused a former top Chinese intelligence official of taking bribes and “severely contaminating the political environment” in Beijing.
… Syria’s military and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces agreed to a fragile truce after SDF guards abandoned a camp housing thousands of people linked to the Islamic State.
… And an analysis from the International Institute for Strategic Studies states Washington can’t override Greenlandic consent or Danish sovereignty without incurring lasting strategic costs.
The Kremlin is issuing sharp warnings against the prospect of U.S. military action in support of Iran’s protesters. However, Moscow’s influence in the region is at its lowest point since the collapse of the Soviet Union, according to an article by Threat Status Special Correspondent Joseph Hammond, who examines the consequences of Russia’s shift in recent years from Middle East allies to a resource-draining campaign against Ukraine.
Moscow’s pivot limits how aggressively Iranian leaders can respond to the potential U.S. threat. Tehran, for example, is unlikely to acquire more Russian air defense systems anytime soon. Iran’s current air defense systems, many originating in Russia, were largely destroyed in a series of Israeli-U.S. strikes in June.
On a broader front, Russia has “dramatically lost influence in the Middle East,” according to Maximilian Hess, a Russia expert and the founder of Ementena Advisory, an international financial risk assessment firm. He tells Mr. Hammond that “if the uprising in Iran continues, [Russian leader Vladimir] Putin is more likely to intervene in a manner aimed at causing jitters in the oil market than he is by intervening directly in support of the ayatollah’s regime.”
China has conducted aggressive cyberattacks on U.S. critical infrastructure, and the U.S. needs to step up efforts to block the planting of malicious software in control networks. U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Joshua M. Rudd, deputy commander of Indo-Pacific Command and Mr. Trump’s nominee to be director of the National Security Agency and head of U.S. Cyber Command, disclosed new details of the attacks in written testimony last week to the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Other adversaries also are threatening critical infrastructure, but those attacks do not pose the danger that Communist China does, Gen. Rudd wrote. Chinese cyberattack capabilities are well-resourced, highly skilled and integrated with Beijing’s national and military goals, he wrote. “Their clear intention,” he wrote, “is to challenge U.S. interests by penetrating our most critical systems, including our nation’s critical infrastructure systems.”
China has been linked by U.S. officials to large-scale cyberattacks against computer networks in the U.S. and overseas for at least two decades, with little or no response from the successive administrations, according to cybersecurity experts. Gen. Rudd wrote that to mitigate the dangers, the U.S. needs to speed up efforts to counter and neutralize strategic-level efforts by adversaries to “pre-position” malicious software and other cyber capabilities that will be used to attack critical infrastructure and civilian targets.
The House plans to vote later this week on a final package of fiscal 2026 spending bills that includes a nearly $8.4 billion increase in defense funding — above what the Trump administration asked for in its budget proposal, according to draft legislation released by the House Appropriations Committee.
A total of $838.7 billion would be an increase of slightly less than 1% over the enacted 2025 level for defense spending. The legislation would boost funds that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth could use at his discretion, allowing him to redirect up to $15 million that follows “reprogramming guidance” from Congress.
Washington Times Defense and National Security Correspondent John T. Seward reports that the legislation would reject the Pentagon’s request to retool the funding-and-budget process entirely and does not allow for the $25 million in increased research and development sought by the Army. It also requires Mr. Hegseth and the services under him to submit reports for all their budget reprogramming changes in June 2026, keeping with congressional requirements from past decades.
Iran, Venezuela and Ukraine “are very different countries, but most Iranians, Venezuelans and Ukrainians want the same thing: to not be ruled by tyrants,” writes Clifford D. May, founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and an opinion contributor to Threat Status.
“So far, Mr. Trump has been most successful in supporting the people of Venezuela,” writes Mr. May, who contends that “Mr. Trump’s strategy for negotiating an end to Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine has not been fruitful.
“As for Iran, Mr. Trump has urged protesters to ‘keep protesting’” and has “imposed 25% tariffs on nations continuing to do business with Iran’s rulers so long as they are slaughtering protesters,” Mr. May writes. He adds that Mr. Trump could take “additional steps — economic, cyber, kinetic — to weaken the regime, perhaps inhibit its brutality, empower the opposition and make clear that he has not been issuing idle threats against the mass murderers of defenseless Iranian civilians.”
Ukrainian casualties are estimated at 400,000 and civilian casualties rising, according to the United Nations, with the U.N. Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine reporting that as of late 2025, 14,383 civilians had been killed, 673 of them children, writes Joseph R. DeTrani, a former associate director of national intelligence.
“The laws of war are clear: Intentionally targeting civilians is prohibited,” writes Mr. DeTrani, also a Threat Status opinion contributor. “Civilians should never be the objective of an attack. Even more specifically, a combatant should avoid or reduce harm to civilian infrastructure.
“Mr. Putin is perpetrating a war crime,” he writes. “Mr. Putin’s strategy is to target civilians by increasing the intensity of bombings of Ukraine’s heating, water and electricity infrastructure. These are violations of the laws of war, and the [International Criminal Court] should immediately begin hearings on these actions.”
• Jan. 29 — The World, Rewired – A Geopolitical Outlook for 2026 and Beyond, Stimson Center
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