Threat Status for Wednesday, September 9, 2026. Share this daily newsletter with your friends, who can sign up here. Send tips to National Security Editor Guy Taylor.
… Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is pushing for a meeting with President Trump to discuss Patriot missile interceptors and a new negotiating format with Moscow.
… Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Colombian Foreign Minister Omar Bula on Tuesday inked what the State Department is calling new U.S.-Colombia “arrangements” on critical minerals and civil nuclear cooperation.
… Mr. Rubio is touting increased security cooperation during a three-nation tour of Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, all of which are seen to have pro-Trump governments.
… Hungary was considered Moscow’s closest friend in NATO. Now it’s expelling Russian diplomats.
… Israel says it will close the British Consulate in East Jerusalem as punishment for British sanctions on Israeli settlements in the Palestinian West Bank.
… And the Trump administration’s escalating trade war with Canada found U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer accusing the country’s northern neighbor on Tuesday of engaging in “senseless retaliation against the United States.”
North Korea is denouncing weeklong joint U.S.-Japan-South Korea military drills that got underway Monday around the strategic island of Jeju. That island and a series of others in East Asia, as well as related choke points, are an increasing focus of tension, with military allies North Korea and China challenging the U.S. and its regional security partners.
Asia Editor Andrew Salmon reports that Jeju, 50 miles off the Korean Peninsula’s southwestern coast, is strategically located for the U.S. and its allies. It offers excellent basing for surveillance and power projection at the junction of the Yellow Sea, East China Sea and Sea of Japan. It is ideally positioned for forward defense of Taiwan, as well as for monitoring and interdicting any North Korean naval assets transiting from the east to the west of the peninsula, or vice versa.
While North Korea criticized the joint drills, a separate war of words is surging roughly 1,000 miles to the south between China and the Philippines, a U.S. treaty ally. The Associated Press reports that Beijing accused the Philippines on Wednesday of “stirring up trouble” after harsh words from Philippine Defense Minister Gilberto Teodoro Jr. over China’s increasingly aggressive pursuit of maritime claims in the South China Sea.
The price of Brent crude oil, the international benchmark, rose above $100 a barrel Wednesday, the first time since July, following attacks by Iran-backed Houthi militants on Saudi Arabia and a wave of U.S. strikes that American commanders in the Middle East said obliterated five Iranian oil tankers.
U.S. Central Command said Tuesday that American forces destroyed the Iranian tankers as retaliation for two ballistic missile attacks that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps launched in recent days against a U.S. aircraft carrier and guided-missile destroyer in the region. Sources tell Threat Status that China is a key provider of chemical precursors for Iranian missile production.
Following the retaliatory U.S. strikes, the IRGC launched more missiles, targeting American assets in Jordan for a second consecutive week. Jordan’s military said it shot down 18 ballistic missiles Tuesday. The surge in violence signals an escalation in the war that has been churning for more than six months.
Chinese artificial intelligence companies are engaged in “systematic extraction” of AI technology from U.S. companies, according to an 18-page joint cybersecurity advisory circulated Tuesday by the National Security Agency, the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
The industrial-scale theft is being carried out “likely with Chinese government awareness,” according to the advisory, which identified the involvement of Beijing-linked businesses DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun and Z.AI.
It’s a situation that threatens American technology leadership in the battle for AI supremacy. There are also geopolitical implications. The timing of the advisory comes roughly two weeks before Chinese President Xi Jinping is scheduled to visit the U.S. for meetings with Mr. Trump, who is seeking a detente in U.S.-China relations.
Ahead of the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, Clifford D. May writes that it “is no small achievement” that “Americans have not suffered another mass-casualty attack on the homeland directed from abroad.
“Yet al Qaeda lives,” Mr. May writes in his weekly column for The Washington Times. “Its richest wing is al-Shabab, based in Somalia and tactically allied with the Houthi rebels of Yemen, proxies of Iran, long designated by both Republican and Democratic administrations as the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism.
“Today, al Qaeda’s de facto leader is Saif al-Adel, a former Egyptian special forces officer last reported living in Tehran,” writes Mr. May, founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “As the conflict between Iran’s theocrats and the U.S. has escalated, he is rumored to have returned to Afghanistan, which President Biden handed back to the Taliban five years ago last month.”
Taiwan is investing “unprecedented amounts of money to help restore American chip fabrication capacity,” Peter V. Tozzi, a policy analyst at the Research Institute for Democracy, Society and Emerging Technology, a Taipei-based think tank, writes in an op-ed for The Times.
“But,” Mr. Tozzi writes, “Mr. Trump’s contentious claim that Taiwan ‘stole’ America’s chip industry and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s statement that the concentration of advanced chip production in Taiwan represents the ‘single greatest point of failure for the world economy’ position Taiwan as a competitor in semiconductor manufacturing, not a partner.
“By feeding into the ‘hollowing out’ narrative, the administration is arming Taiwan’s political opposition and other skeptics with rhetorical ammunition to resist deeper U.S.-Taiwan economic cooperation,” he writes. “It is also providing cannon fodder for China to undermine Taiwan’s trust in the U.S. through ongoing cognitive warfare campaigns. China began spreading the story in Taiwan’s information ecosystem as early as 2021.”
• Sept. 17 — A Conversation with Undersecretary of State Jacob Helberg on Securing America’s AI Supply Chain, American Enterprise Institute
• Sept. 22-23 — Nuclear Energy Policy Summit 2026, Atlantic Council
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.
