Iranian officials remained adamant Sunday that the Strait of Hormuz would remain closed, despite threats from Mr. Trump that U.S. forces could take out Iran’s electrical plants if the strategic waterway were not opened. U.S. strikes on Iranian power grid would mark a significant escalation in the war, now in its fourth week.

While Mr. Trump initially said such strikes would begin Monday, he walked the threat back in a social media post Monday morning, asserting that he would give Tehran another five days to reconsider opening the strait. The president also said U.S. and Iranian officials engaged over the weekend in “very good and productive” talks about ending hostilities in the Middle East.

On a separate front, there are indications that Iran’s attack on Qatar’s natural gas export facility last week has threatened to disrupt not just world energy markets but also global technology supply chains because the helium produced at the facility is crucial for a range of advanced industries. The Associated Press reports that helium, best known as the gas that makes party balloons float, is also a key input in chipmaking, space rockets and medical imaging.

Threat Status Correspondent Jacob Wirtschafter reports in a dispatch from Istanbul that all seven people aboard a Turkish military helicopter that went down in Qatari territorial waters Friday were confirmed Sunday to have been killed.

Among the dead were Maj. Sinan Tastekin of the Qatar-Turkey Joint Forces and two engineers from Aselsan, Turkey’s defense electronics firm. They had been working on Qatar’s air defense systems. The same morning, Mr. Trump gave Iran 48 hours to reopen the Strait of Hormuz or face strikes on its power plants.

Mr. Wirtschafter offers a deep dive on the situation, reporting that, together, the deaths and the ultimatum framed in a single morning a central question of the war’s fourth week: what Turkey’s military presence in Qatar actually means when the Gulf stops being a pressure point and becomes a battlefield.

Daniel Diermeier, the chancellor of Vanderbilt University, speaks in an exclusive interview on the latest episode of the Threat Status podcast about the crucial role academic institutions play in the U.S. national security ecosystem.

Vanderbilt established its Institute of National Security in 2024. Mr. Diermeier tells the podcast that whenever the country has faced periods of historic “technological innovation” — take, for instance, the development of nuclear weapons — there has been a requirement for “rethinking of national security doctrine in a pretty profound fashion.”

It follows that universities today are incubators of critical thinking “on projects that are going to be difficult to be developed purely in the private sector,” he says. “Universities have the technological capabilities in engineering and science departments in the STEM fields, but we also have the policy experience. … So an important part is to have this conversation between these two parts really happening … at an institution like a university.”

Mr. Hoffman writes in a column for The Washington Times that he “first heard the phrase ‘mowing the grass’ years ago in Tel Aviv during a meeting with Israeli intelligence officers.

“I was serving as director of the CIA’s Near East Division. The Israelis used the metaphor to describe their periodic attacks on Hamas and other terrorists in the Gaza Strip,” writes Mr. Hoffman, an opinion contributor to Threat Status.

“Unable to create the conditions for a permanent political solution, the Israeli government’s objective was to destroy the terrorists’ capacity to conduct attacks for a period of time, after which the Israel Defense Forces would need to return to ‘mow the grass’ again,” he writes. “Those periodic strikes on Gaza might be a microcosm of the massive damage the U.S. and Israel are inflicting on Iran.”

With U.S. support, Ukraine’s military has “grown into the largest in Europe,” according to Colby Barrett and Steven Moore, who write that “four years of unprecedented drone warfare” has forced Kyiv “to build a proven, layered, cost-effective system for stopping drones at scale.

“No NATO country has such a system,” Mr. Barrett and Mr. Moore write in an op-ed for The Times. “These layered systems can intercept up to 90% of incoming [Iranian-made Shahed drones] at a fraction of the cost of Western alternatives.

“When Iranian drones began striking across the Gulf, countries turned to Ukraine, not a U.S. defense contractor, for assistance,” write Mr. Barrett and Mr. Moore, respectively a former U.S. Marine Corps captain and founder of the Ukraine Freedom Project. “As President Volodymyr Zelenskyy noted, no Patriot battery, however well-supplied, can handle a high volume of Shaheds.”

• March 24 — Shaping the New Space Age, Atlantic Council

• March 24 — What are the Hidden Costs of the War with Iran? Center for Strategic & International Studies

• March 24 — Operation Epic Fury: Strategy, State of Play and Theories of Victory, Hudson Institute

• March 24 — International Cooperation for Resilient Subsea Cable Infrastructure, Center for Strategic & International Studies

• March 24 — The AI Inflection Point: How the U.S. and Taiwan Respond to AI’s Economic Security Challenges, Stimson Center

• March 24-26 — Global Force Symposium & Exposition, Association of the U.S. Army

• March 25 — Putin’s Russia Today: What Comes Next? Michael V. Hayden Center

• March 25 — Next Steps for U.S.-Japan Military Shipbuilding, Repair and Maintenance, Stimson Center