Mr. Trump will host Colombian President Gustavo Petro at the White House today and is expected to confront the Latin American leader about his country’s production and export of cocaine. The Trump administration’s aggressive crackdown on both the supply and demand of the illicit drugs — including the military’s targeting of alleged drugboats ferrying narcotics through the Caribbean to the U.S. — seems to have had a significant impact. Data shows that drug overdose deaths in the U.S. dropped by 21% through most of last year.

But Mr. Trump’s meeting with Mr. Petro is significant for reasons other than narcotics trafficking, though that is sure to be a major issue. The White House sit-down comes just a month after a U.S. Special Forces raid captured then-Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and brought him back to the U.S. to face federal narcoterrorism charges. That mission was a clear example of Mr. Trump’s view that the U.S. must exert strong control over its sphere of influence in the Western Hemisphere, including across Latin America.

Mr. Petro has been highly critical of the Maduro raid. One of the biggest questions heading into today’s meeting is whether Mr. Petro will publicly condemn the operation while he’s at the White House.

The Trump administration wants Latin American governments to push back on growing Chinese influence in the hemisphere. The Panamanian Supreme Court seems to have helped in that effort.

National Security Correspondent Bill Gertz has more details on the ruling by the Supreme Court of Panama that voids a pro-Chinese company’s contracts for running two port facilities at either end of the Panama Canal. It’s a major victory for the U.S. push to secure the waterway as a military transit route for any future conflict with China.

In the ruling, the court said the terms of the contract allowing Hong Kong-based conglomerate C.K. Hutchison Holdings to operate the ports of Balboa on the Pacific coast and Cristobal on the Atlantic end of the canal were unconstitutional. The company will be forced to end its operations at both facilities along the canal. A local subsidiary of the Danish logistics company A.P. Moller-Maersk is expected to temporarily run the facilities.

There are only two possibilities, according to House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Rep. Andrew Garbarino: Either the U.S. wasted $10 million in taxpayer money or the federal government is withholding information about the possible causes of Havana Syndrome.

On the latest episode of the Threat Status weekly podcast, Mr. Garbarino explains why his committee recently sent a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem seeking answers about the government’s reported purchase of a device linked to Havana Syndrome, the mysterious illnesses that have plagued American diplomats and service members serving abroad.

Mr. Garbarino and other lawmakers want to know why the Biden administration reportedly spent at least $10 million in an undercover operation to buy that device and what DHS and the Pentagon might have learned from their testing of it. CNN first reported on the development.

“The conclusion that came out of the Biden administration was … this is not caused by any sort of nefarious piece of equipment,” Mr. Garbarino told Threat Status. “They then spent at least $10 million to buy this piece of equipment that they said was the cause of, possibly, Havana Syndrome. So either they lied to us when they said ‘nothing to see here,’ or they wasted at least $10 million taxpayer dollars on a piece of equipment that wasn’t actually doing anything.”

Mr. Trump on Monday announced the creation of Project Vault, a first-of-its-kind mineral stockpile designed to reduce U.S. reliance on China for supplies of cobalt, lithium, gallium and other precious materials that major companies need. The project will get off the ground with $2 billion in private seed money, paired with a $10 billion loan from the Export-Import Bank.

Major companies, including Google, General Motors and Boeing, are expected to join the venture so they can obtain necessary minerals at reliable prices. GM CEO Mary Barra, among others, joined Mr. Trump at Monday’s announcement in the Oval Office.

China dominates the world in the production of critical minerals, including the processing of rare earth elements that help power fighter jets, electronics and other key pieces of 21st-century technology. Mr. Trump likened Project Vault to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve that protects the U.S. against shocks to oil prices and supply. In this instance, the reserve could protect the U.S. and its companies if the supply of critical minerals from China is cut off.

When it comes to China, there is a crucial difference between the terms “adversary” and “competitor.” Threat Status contributor Miles Yu argues the latter suggests that Beijing is competing with other global players — mainly the U.S. — in a free market and democratic rules-based system, adhering to rules agreed to by other nations and accepting that other nations can also benefit from economic competition.

“None of these assumptions survives contact with reality,” writes Mr. Yu, director of the China Center at the Hudson Institute and a Threat Status opinion contributor.

Mr. Yu lays out why he believes framing China as simply a competitor is both inaccurate and dangerous. China wants to “normalize authoritarian governance as an alternative to free society and democratic governance,” he writes in an op-ed in The Washington Times. In other words, it wants to tear down the U.S., not just outperform it in a 21st-century economic battle.

“You cannot compete with a regime that blocks your speech, harvests your openness, weaponizes your dependencies and seeks to make your system look obsolete,” Mr. Yu says. “This is not a race for a medal. It is a contest over whether free societies remain free.”

• Feb. 3 — International Religious Freedom Summit  

• Feb. 3 — Securing Critical Mineral Supply: A Government–Industry Dialogue, Center for Strategic & International Studies

• Feb. 4 — Reimagining Mediterranean Security with Greek Minister for National Defense Nikos Dendias, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

• Feb. 6 — How Moscow Manufactured the Myth of Putin’s Inevitable Victory, Atlantic Council

• Feb. 10 — Bluff or Death? How to Assess Nuclear ‘Threats,’ Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

• Feb. 10 — Assistant Secretary of Defense Michael Cadenazzi on Rebooting America’s Defense Industrial Base, Hudson Institute

• Feb. 11 — ‘The Doom Loop’ and the Future of the Global Order, Brookings Institution