Threat Status for Monday, July 13, 2026. Share this daily newsletter with your friends, who can sign up here. Send tips to National Security Editor Guy Taylor.
President Trump said Monday he wants the U.S. to take control of the Strait of Hormuz, block Iranian ships and get paid by other wealthy nations for safeguarding commercial traffic through the waterway.
… The wave of U.S. military strikes against Iran on Sunday featured the use of “one-way attack sea drones for the first time,” according to U.S. Central Command.
… Violence from the Sinaloa Cartel’s fracturing has resulted in thousands of people “killed, disappeared or displaced,” according to the International Crisis Group.
… The Asia-Pacific Leadership Network has a fresh examination of how Russia-North Korea military cooperation is becoming “more institutionalized.”
… South Africa has removed more than 53,000 migrants through deportations and repatriations, according to Semafor, which separately reports that U.S. companies are racing to map precious metal deposits in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
… And U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz says “plots are ongoing” from Iranian “operatives here in the United States” who want to kill Mr. Trump.
U.S. Central Command said late Sunday that American forces used “precision munitions” to hit Iran’s military air-defense systems, coastal radar sites, missile and drone capabilities, and small boats in a fresh wave of strikes aimed at “degrad[ing] Iran’s ability to continue attacking international shipping flowing through the Strait of Hormuz.”
The strikes put a spike through the ailing U.S.-Iran ceasefire and pathway to major nuclear talks that the Trump administration had hailed just weeks ago. Iranian forces retaliated Monday morning by lashing out at American partners in the Persian Gulf region. Jordan, Kuwait and Bahrain reported incoming Iranian missiles that had to be intercepted.
Oil traffic through the Strait of Hormuz had increased significantly after the U.S. and Iran signed a memorandum of understanding last month. But the fresh wave of tit-for-tat violence in the oil-rich region is causing energy shocks. Brent crude prices rose roughly 6% on Monday to $77 per barrel.
U.S. allies gathered in the Philippines over the weekend and issued a fresh warning over China’s military muscle flexing and territorial claims in the South China Sea, asserting that Beijing’s actions are illegal based on a 2016 ruling by a tribunal established in The Hague under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.
“We reiterate our strong opposition to any destabilizing or unilateral actions including by force or coercion that threaten peace and stability in the region,” reads a joint statement signed by diplomats from more than a dozen Western and Asian nations.
China, which has built military facilities on man-made islands in the South China Sea, said Sunday that the 2016 Hague ruling was “null and void” and that Beijing “neither accepts nor recognizes it.” Regional tensions rose last month over China’s placement of some type of floating platform near the Scarborough Shoal, a resource-rich islet claimed by both China and the Philippines.
The battle for Kostiantynivka, a strategically located city deep in Eastern Ukraine, could be pivotal as the war churns violently through its fifth summer. When Moscow claimed the capture of Kostiantynivka last week, Russian generals presented the battle as settled. Ukrainian soldiers still fighting inside the city offered a different perspective.
Threat Status Special Ukraine Correspondent Guillaume Ptak examined the situation in a dispatch from Kyiv over the weekend, citing video footage that shows how Ukrainian service members remain at several locations in Kostiantynivka. The battle appears to have entered a murky stage, common along the Ukrainian front.
Russian assault groups are present inside parts of the city, while Ukrainian infantry and drone teams remain active elsewhere. Some streets are occupied, others are under constant observation from drones, and many cannot be used safely by either army. All the while, Russian President Vladimir Putin has publicly praised his troops and framed Kostiantynivka’s seizure as an important strategic achievement.
The Trump administration “should be lauded for trying to use commercial incentives” to bring our adversaries in Tehran, Pyongyang and Moscow to the negotiating table, writes Daniel N. Hoffman. “After all, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill rightly argued that it ‘was better to jaw-jaw than war-war.’
“Yet that approach — even if it demonstrated to domestic opponents of those regimes what a better future might hold as a proof of concept — has to this point led to a series of diplomatic dead ends,” writes Mr. Hoffman, a retired CIA Clandestine Services officer and regular opinion contributor to Threat Status.
“As long as these rogue dictatorships remain in power, there appears to be no better option than to revive President Reagan’s pragmatic national security strategy based on deterrence, containment and deep partnerships with our closest allies around the world,” he writes.
The 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah exacerbated a tenuous situation in Lebanon and when clashes erupted in the streets of Beirut in 2007 and again in 2008, “Qatar stepped into the breach,” writes Natalie Ecanow. “The 2008 Doha Agreement thwarted civil war, but by ceding political power to Hezbollah, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization.
“In the Gaza Strip, Qatar mediated between Israel and Hamas during the 2014 and 2021 conflicts. Twice, Doha produced temporary quiet,” she writes in an op-ed for The Washington Times. “However, Hamas remained in power and continued to rake in money from Qatar, enabling the terrorist group to amass offensive power ahead of its Oct. 7, 2023, massacre in Israel.
“Time and again, Doha has notched its wins by financing, normalizing or strengthening bad actors. Other times, its wins have simply proved temporary,” writes Ms. Ecanow, a senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “The same risks are surfacing with Iran.”
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